44 Scotland Street

“Of course not,” said Bruce, taking off his jacket and flinging it down on a chair. “Make yourself at home. Don’t mind me.

Make yourself at home.”

For a moment Pat thought that he was going to take his clothes off, as he had moved away and was now undoing buttons; but he only stripped to the waist, moving towards the cupboard, from which he extracted a clean, folded shirt. And his undressing happened so quickly, before she had time to get to her feet and leave the room. It was all very casually done, but was it intended as some sort of show?

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She glanced at him, quickly, so that he should not see her look, and she noticed the smooth, tanned skin, almost olive, and the ripple of muscles. He was utterly confident, utterly physically at home in the space he occupied, as is any creature of beauty. For a moment she thought of Leonardo’s David, and she remembered the shock that she had felt when, on a school trip to Florence, they had wandered into the gallery in which David stood and had hardly dared look, but had looked nonetheless. “Remember, girls,” a teacher had said. “Remember that this is art.”

What, she had wondered, was that intended to mean? That young men in real life would not be like this, so noble, so marbly, so composed? Or that art might license the feminine gaze upon the male but that in real life one should not be so bold? She recalled this as Bruce crossed shirtless to the window and stood there, looking out on to the street. For a few moments he did nothing, then he unfolded the clean shirt and slipped into it.

She felt a pang of disappointment at this act; she wanted this display, crude as it was, to continue.

“I’m going out,” he said, almost as an aside. “Otherwise I would have offered to cook a meal tonight. But I’m going out.”

He turned to face her, and smiled at her in a way which struck her, surprisingly, as pitying. Was this pity because she had done such a silly, school-girlish thing as look at his room and lie on his bed? Or pity for the fact that he was going to disappoint her and go out?

“I’ve met a rather interesting girl,” he said. “She’s American.

I’m taking her out to dinner.”

Pat said nothing.

“She’s called Sally,” Bruce went on, looking in the mirror beside his wardrobe and stroking his chin. “Should I shave for Sally? What do you think?”

“It’s up to you,” said Pat.

“Some girls like a bit of designer stubble,” Bruce said casually, peering again into the mirror. “What do you think?”

Pat got up and walked towards the door. “I can take it or leave it,” she said, struggling to keep her voice even.

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Bruce tore himself away from the mirror and watched her leave the room. “Sorry,” he muttered, just loud enough for her to hear. “If I didn’t have to go out . . .”

She left the room, shaken by what had happened and by her reaction to it. She did not know what to do, and went aimlessly into the kitchen and switched on a light. She would eat something, perhaps, or put on the kettle – anything to occupy herself for a few moments and take her mind off the encounter she had just had. Everything, it seemed to her, had changed. She had left the flat that morning as a different person; as a person who was in command of herself, and come back a person in thrall. It was profoundly unsettling, just as it was completely unexpected. And it was unwanted too.

She was aware of Bruce in the background, of the opening of the bathroom door and its closing, of the sound of footsteps on the stripped pine floorboards, of the sound of a radio which he had switched on. She felt restless and confused. It was a good thing that he was going out, as this would stop her thinking of him; no, it was a bad thing, as she wanted him to be there.

But I do not want him, she told herself; I do not want this. I do not.

On impulse, she left the kitchen and walked into the hall and opened the cupboard to retrieve the ironing board. She had some clothes to iron. It was a task that she never enjoyed, but it was domestic and mindless and it would take her mind off him.

She flicked the switch inside the cupboard. There was the ironing board and there, of course, would be the painting, the Peploe? that she was looking after. But it was not, of course, and she gasped at the discovery.

“Something wrong?”

He was standing immediately behind her, and she was aware of the freshly-applied hair gel.

“There was something I was looking after.” Her voice faltered.

“A painting . . .”

Bruce laughed. “Oh that. Well, I’m very sorry, I got rid of that. I didn’t know it was yours. I thought . . .”

The Turning to Dust of Human Beauty 189

She turned to him aghast. Now he became defensive. “Don’t look at me like that,” he said. “If you leave things lying about in that cupboard they’re fair game. Rules of the flat. Always have been.”

69. The Turning to Dust of Human Beauty Domenica opened the door of her flat to a neighbour clearly in distress. Wordlessly, she ushered Pat in.

“I feel that I don’t even have to ask you,” she said as she led Pat into her study. “It’s him, isn’t it? Bruce.”

Pat nodded. She had fought back her tears while Bruce explained to her what had happened to the painting, but now they came, a cathartic flood. He had been unapologetic. “How was I to know?” he asked. “There are all sorts of things in there.”

“Can you get it back? You must know who has it.”

Bruce shrugged. “Some old couple won it. Ramsey something or other, and his gas-bag wife. I don’t know anything about them.

Sorry.”

Pat felt outraged. “You could ask,” she shouted. “That’s the least you could do.”

Bruce drew back, shaking a finger at her. “Temper! Temper!”

He had done this to her before, after the incident with the hair gel, and the effect had been the same: the provoking of a seething anger. But she had said nothing more; she felt too weak, too raw to do anything, but the exchange had ended with a weak promise from Bruce to ask Todd for the Dunbarton telephone number. A few minutes later she had heard the front door close as he left the flat, and she sat in her room, her head in her hands. How was she to tell Matthew, as she would have to do?

It occurred to her that she might lose the job at the gallery, and while she would be able to find something else, there was the ignominy of dismissal.

190

The Turning to Dust of Human Beauty Telling Domenica helped.

“It’s not the end of the world,” she said, when Pat had finished.

“You should be able to get it back. After all, these people who won it have no right to keep it. It was not Bruce’s to give in the first place, and that means that they can’t acquire any right to it.

It’s that simple.”

This had encouraged Pat, although doubts remained. “Are you absolutely sure about that?”

“Of course,” said Domenica. “Bruce effectively stole it from you. It’s stolen property. And stolen property is stolen property.”

Pat wiped at her eyes. “I feel so stupid,” she said. “Coming in here and burdening you with all this.”

Domenica reached out and laid a hand on her forearm. “You shouldn’t feel that. I’m very happy to help. And anyway, we all feel weak and sniffly from time to time.” She paused. “Of course, there is something else, isn’t there?”

Pat looked at her. Domenica could tell, she knew, but she was not at all sure if she wanted to speak about that.

Domenica smiled. “He’s got under your skin, hasn’t he?”

Pat did not answer. She stared down at the floor. She was thinking of her anger, her irritation with Bruce, but then the image came back to her of him standing there before the window, his shirt off. She looked up. Domenica was watching her.

“I thought that it might happen,” said Domenica. “I thought that it might happen in spite of everything. If one puts two people together and one of them is a young man like that, well . . .”

“I don’t like him,” said Pat. “You should hear what he says.”

“Oh, I know what Bruce is like,” said Domenica. “Remember that I’ve been his neighbour for some time. I know perfectly well what he’s like.”

“Well, why has this . . . why has this happened?”

Domenica sighed. “It’s happened for a very simple reason,”

she said. “It’s a matter of human reaction to the beautiful. It’s a matter of aesthetics.”

“I feel this way about Bruce because he’s . . .” It was difficult for her to say it, but the word was there in the air between them.

“Precisely,” said Domenica. “And that’s nothing new, is it?

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That’s how people react to beauty, in a person or an object. We become intoxicated with it. We want to be with it. We want to possess it. And when that happens, we shouldn’t be the least bit surprised, although we often are.

“It’s an age-old issue,” she went on. “Our reaction to the beautiful occurs in the face of every single one of our intellectual pretensions. We may be very well aware that the call of beauty is a siren-call, but that doesn’t stop it from arresting us, seizing us, rendering us helpless. A soul-beguiling face will make anybody stop in their tracks, in spite of themselves.”

Pat listened in silence. Domenica was right, of course. Had Bruce not looked the way he looked, then she would have been either indifferent to him or actively hostile. He had done enough to earn her distaste, if not her enmity, with his condescension and his assumptions, and if it had not been for this aesthetic reaction, as Domenica called it, he would have been unable to affect her in this way. But the reality was that he had, and even now she cherished that moment of bizarre shared intimacy in his room, when he had removed his shirt and she had looked upon him.

“So,” said Domenica briskly. “Do you want my advice? Or my sympathy? Which is it to be?”

Pat thought for a moment. She had not expected these alternatives. She had expected, at the most, that Domenica would listen sympathetically and make a few general remarks, instead of which she had provided what seemed to be a complete diagnosis and was now offering something more.

“Your advice, I suppose.” She realised sounded grudging, which was not her intention, but her tone seemed not to disconcert Domenica.

“Well,” said Domenica. “It would seem to me that you have a clear choice. You can move out of the flat straightaway and endeavour never to see him again. That would be clean and quick, and, I suspect, rather painful. Or you can continue to live there and allow yourself to feel what you feel, but do it on your own terms.”

“And what would that mean – on my own terms?”

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Domenica laughed. “Enjoy it,” she said. “Let yourself feel whatever it is that you feel, but just remember that at the end of the day he’s not for you and that you will have to get rid of him. And there’s another way in which this would be highly satisfactory.”

“Which is?”

“You might have the additional satisfaction of teaching him a lesson. He’s played with the affections of numerous young women

– that’s the type of boy he is. Teach him a lesson. Help him to moral maturity.”

“But what if I still feel something for him?”

“You won’t,” said Domenica. “Believe me, there’s nothing more brittle than human beauty. Encounter it. Savour it, by all means.

Then watch how it turns to dust.”

Pat sat quite still, watched by Domenica. “Anyway,” said Domenica, rising to her feet. “I’m about to go off to listen to a lecture at the Portrait Gallery. I suggest that you come with me.

It’ll take you out of yourself for a couple of hours, and there are drinks afterwards to which I’m sure you can come. How about it?”

Pat thought for a moment. She did not want to go back to the flat, which was cold and empty. So she said yes, and they went out together, out into Scotland Street and the night.

70. An Evening with Bruce

Bruce did not feel apologetic about the scene which had developed over the missing painting; he felt annoyed. There was no reason for him to reproach himself, he thought, because he had had every reason to assume that the painting had been abandoned.

It was valueless, anyway. Pat had screamed something about it being by Peploe, whoever he was, but Bruce doubted that unless, of course, this Peploe person was somebody’s uncle. He could tell when a painting was worth something, and that painting was definitely not worth the cost of the frame, which must have been An Evening with Bruce

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pretty little anyway. What a fuss over nothing! You could get a painting like that any day of the week from one of those charity shops – useless pictures of the Trossachs or St Andrews or places like that. Completely useless. If she was so upset about it, then he might, just might, pick up something from one of those shops and give it to her to make up for it. But why should he? He had done no wrong, and her reaction was typical of a woman. They make the most ghastly fuss over little things; he had seen it all before and he had no time for it.

And what made it worse, he thought, was that that silly, half-hysterical girl was falling for him; her lying on his bed just confirmed the suspicions he had been entertaining for some time. Having had a great deal of experience of these things, Bruce could tell when somebody was falling for him. It was the way they looked at you; that slightly unfocused look. It was something to do with body chemistry, he imagined. The effect of pheromones made women’s eyes go all watery. It was curious, but he had seen it so many times when women looked at him.

Bruce had decided that she would get no encouragement from him. Being mixed up with her would make his life too complicated.

She would be possessive, he expected, and would cramp his style.

It would be difficult, for example, to bring other girls back to the flat as she would always be there, thinking that she had a prior claim on him. No, he would have to play this very carefully.

He might give Pat the occasional thrill, of course, as he had done when he had removed his shirt. She had been watching him

– he had felt her gaze – and there was no doubt about her interest. But that would be about as far as it would go. She could look, but she would not be allowed to touch.

Now, this newly-acquired girl, Sally, was a different proposition altogether. Bruce had met her in the Cumberland Bar when she had been brought there by friends of his, and he had become immediately interested in her. He had known at once that she was his type: a tall, willowy girl, with a good eye for casual elegance in clothes. She had attracted his attention right away and he had sidled up to her and asked for an introduction. She 194

An Evening with Bruce

had looked him up and down appraisingly and had smiled at him, which was no more than he expected, of course.

“Yo!” Bruce said.

“Ya!” came the reply, and with these short, potent words the compact had been sealed. They had talked enthusiastically. Sally was American, and in Edinburgh for a year – “long enough,” thought Bruce – and was studying for a master’s degree in economics.

“Cool!” Bruce said, and she had nodded.

“Yeah,” she said. “Cool.”

At the end of the evening they had agreed to meet the following evening, and now Bruce stood in the Cumberland Bar awaiting her arrival. There were one or two people he recognised in the bar, but he did not feel like talking to them.

He had put the row with Pat out of his mind, and he was now thinking about something rather more important – his job. He was becoming bored with surveying, and was particularly disenchanted with Raeburn Todd, his boss, and the firm of Macaulay Holmes Richardson Black. This feeling had been building up and had been brought to a head by his experiences at the Conservative Ball. That had been a particularly depressing occasion from Bruce’s point of view, as it had given him a vision of what might become of him if he did not make a change. Todd was the warning incarnate, thought Bruce: that is how I shall talk and behave if I remain where I am. I shall become exactly like Todd, with a wife exactly like Sasha, and a house in the Braids. No, that would not do: there must be an alternative.

But the identification of the rut was one thing; the finding of a way out was quite another. Bruce had thought of other possibilities, only to reject them. Many of his friends were accountants or lawyers – the Cumberland Bar was full of them.

But it would take too long now for him to qualify for either of these professions, and the accountancy examinations were notoriously stressful. So those two options at least were firmly ruled out. What else was there? Finance was a possibility, but that was ruthlessly competitive and dominated by people with a background in mathematics. Bruce acknowledged that he was not very good with numbers, and so he would need to go for

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something where he could use his social skills. He looked about the bar, and at that moment the idea occurred. The wine trade.

He knew a few people in wine, and they struck him as being very much his type. If they could do it, then there was no reason why he should not make a go of it. Bruce Anderson, MW, he muttered under his breath. Specialist in Bordeaux and California.

He caught a glimpse of himself in a mirror behind the bar and he smiled. MW – Master of Wines. It would be considerably more impressive than being a surveyor.

He was still smiling when Sally came into the bar.

“You’re looking great,” he said.

“You too.”

“Gracias.” He would normally have said merci to a compliment of this sort, but he remembered that she was American and that Americans tended to speak Spanish rather than French.

He bought her a drink – a glass of Margaret River Chardonnay

– and they chatted easily, perched on stools at the bar. Half an hour later, Bruce looked at his watch.

“Do you feel like eating?”

Sally looked him up and down. “I could eat you up,” she said.

Bruce laughed. “Cool.”

71. At the Scottish National Portrait Gallery While Bruce and Sally were engaged in culinary self-appraisal in the Cumberland Bar, Domenica and Pat were making their way up the stairs at the National Portrait Gallery in Queen Street.

“Such an edifying building,” observed Domenica. “A wonderful mixture of Gothic and Italianate. There are two galleries I really love – this one and the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Do you know New York?”

Pat did not. “In which case,” Domenica continued, “you should go there as soon as you get the chance. Such an exhilarating place. And the Metropolitan Museum is such a wonderful box of delights. It has all those marvellous collections donated by wealthy New Yorkers who spend all their lives acquiring things and then give them away.”

“Perhaps they feel guilty,” suggested Pat.

Domenica did not agree. “The very rich don’t do guilt,” she said, adding, “as one might say today. President Bush said that he didn’t do nuances. Isn’t that wonderful! The verb ‘do’ does so much these days. Even I’m beginning to do ‘do’.”

They reached the top of the stairs and made their way into the hall where rows of chairs had been set up for the lecture.

There was already a fair crowd, and they had to find seats at the back. Domenica waved to one or two people whom she recognised and then turned to address Pat, her voice lowered.

“Now this is interesting,” she said. “This is a very interesting audience. There are some people here who are just itching to have their portraits painted. They come to everything that the gallery organises. They sit through every lecture, without fail.

They give large donations. All for the sake of immortality in oils.

And the sad thing is – it never works. Poor dears. They just aren’t of sufficient public interest. Fascinating to themselves and their friends, but not of sufficient public interest.”

Domenica smiled wickedly. “There was a very embarrassing incident some years ago. Somebody – and I really can’t name him – had a portrait of himself painted and offered it to the gallery. This put them in a terrible spot. The painting could just At the Scottish National Portrait Gallery 197

have been lost, so to speak, which would have been a solution of sorts, I suppose, but galleries can’t just lose paintings – that’s not what they’re meant to do. So they were obliged to say that he just wasn’t of sufficient public interest. So sad, because he really thought he was of great public interest.

“Then there are people who are of some interest, but not quite enough, or at least not quite enough while they’re still alive. It will be fine when they’re dead, but the gallery can hardly tell them that the best thing to do is to die. That would be rude. It’s rather like the way we treat our poets. We’re tremendously nice to them after they’re dead. Mind you, some poets are rather awkward when they’re still alive. MacDiarmid could be a little troublesome after a bottle of Glenfiddich. He became much safer post-mortem.”

“I can tell you the most remarkable story about MacDiarmid,”

Domenica continued. “And I saw this all happen myself – I saw the whole thing. You know the Signet Library, near St Giles?

Yes? Well, I was working there one day, years ago. They had let me use it to have a look at some rather interesting early anthro-pological works they had. I was tucked away in a corner, completely absorbed in my books, and I didn’t notice that they had set out tables for a dinner. And then suddenly people started coming in, all men, all dressed in evening dress. And I thought that I might just stay where I was – nobody could see me – and find out what they were up to. You know how men are – they have these all-male societies as part of their bonding rituals. Tragic, really, but there we are. Poor dears. Anyway, it transpired that a terribly important guest was coming to this one, none other than the Duke of Edinburgh himself. Frightfully smart in his evening dress. And there, too, was MacDiarmid, all crabbit and cantankerous in his kilt and enjoying his whisky. I was watching all this from my corner, feeling a bit like an anthropologist observing a ritual, which I suppose I was.

A little later on, the Duke stood up to make a speech and I’m sorry to say that MacDiarmid started to barrack him. He was republican, you see. And what happened? Well, a very well-built judge, Lord somebody, lifted the poet up and carried 198

At the Scottish National Portrait Gallery him out of the room. So amusing. The poet’s legs were kicking about nineteen to the dozen, but to no avail. And I watched the whole thing and concluded that it was some sort of metaphor. But I’ve never worked out what it was a metaphor for!”

“Is that true?” asked Pat.

Domenica looked severe. “My dear,” she said, “I never make things up. But, shh, here comes our lecturer, the excellent James Holloway. We must listen to him. He’s very good.”

Pat had been distracted by Domenica’s monologue and James Holloway was several minutes into his lecture before she began to concentrate on what he was saying. But as Domenica had predicted, it was interesting, and the time passed quickly. There was enthusiastic applause and then the audience withdrew to another room where glasses of wine and snacks were being offered.

Domenica seemed in her element. Acknowledging greetings from several people, she drew Pat over to a place near a window where a sallow, rather ascetic-looking man was standing on his own.

“Angus,” she said. “This young lady is my neighbour, which makes her a neighbour, or almost, of yours.” She turned to Pat.

“And this, my dear, is Angus Lordie, who lives in Drummond Place, just round the corner from us. You may have seen him walking his dog in the Drummond Place Gardens. Frightful dog you’ve got, Angus. Frightfully smelly.”

Angus looked at Pat and smiled warmly. “Domenica here is jealous, you see. She’d like me to take her for a walk in the Drummond Place Gardens, but I take Cyril, my dog, instead.

Much better company.”

Pat stared at Angus, fascinated. He had three gold teeth, she noticed, one of which was an incisor. She had never seen this before.

Domenica noticed the direction of her gaze. “Yes,” she said loudly. “Extraordinary, isn’t it? And do you know, that dog of his has a gold tooth too!”

“Why not?” laughed Angus.

72. Angus Lordie’s Difficult Task

After a few minutes of coruscating conversation with Angus Lordie, Domenica was distracted by another guest. This left Pat standing with Angus Lordie, who looked at her with frank interest.

“You must forgive me for being so direct,” he said, “but I really feel that I have to ask you exactly who you are and what you do. It’s so much quicker if one asks these things right at the beginning, rather than finding them out with a whole series of indirect questions. Don’t you agree?”

Pat did agree. She had observed how people asked each other questions which might elicit desired information but which were ostensibly about something else. What was the point of asking somebody whether they had been busy recently when what one wanted to know was exactly what they did? And yet, now that she had been asked this herself, how should she answer? It seemed so lame, so self-indulgent, to say that one was on one’s second gap year. And to say that one worked in a gallery was almost the same thing as saying outright that one was still on the parental pay-roll.

But then there was a case for truthfulness – one might always tell the truth if in an absolute corner, Bruce had once remarked.

“I work in a gallery,” she said with as much firmness as she could manage, “and I’m on my second gap year.”

She noticed that Angus Lordie did not seem surprised by either of these answers.

“How very interesting,” he said. “I’m a portrait painter myself.

And I’ve done my time in galleries too.”

Pat found herself listening to him very carefully. His voice was rich and plummy, deeper than that which one might have expected from an ascetic-looking man. It had, too, a quality which she found fascinating – a tone of sincerity, as if every word uttered was felt at some deep level.

She asked him about his work. Did he paint just portraits, or did he do other things too?

“Just portraits,” he said, the gold teeth flashing as he spoke.

“I suspect that I’ve forgotten how to paint mere things. So it’s just portraits. I’ll do anybody.”

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Angus Lordie’s Difficult Task

“How do you choose?” she asked.

Angus Lordie smiled. “I don’t choose,” he replied. “That’s not the way it works. They choose me. People who want their children painted, or their wives or husbands, or chairmen for that matter. And I sit there and do my best to make my subjects look impressive or even vaguely presentable. I try to discern the sitter’s character, and then see if I can get that down on canvas.”

“Who do you like doing best?” Pat enquired.

Angus Lordie took a sip of his wine before he answered.

“I can tell you who I don’t particularly like doing,” he said.

“Politicians. They’re so tremendously pushy and self-important for the most part. With some exceptions, of course. I’d like to do John Swinney, because he strikes me as a nice enough man.

And David Steel too. I like him. But nobody has asked me to do either of these yet. Mind you, why don’t you ask me who I like doing absolutely least of all?”

“Well?” said Pat. “Who is that?”

“Moderators of the obscure Wee Free churches,” said Angus Lordie, shuddering slightly as he spoke. “They are not my favourite subjects. Oh no!”

“Why?” asked Pat. “What’s wrong with them?”

Angus Lordie cast his eyes up to the ceiling. “Those particular churches take a very, how shall we put it? – a very restricted view of the world. Religion can be full of joy and affirmation, but these characters . . .” He shuddered. “There used to be a wonderful Afrikaans word to describe the position of rigid ideologues in the Dutch Reformed Church – verkrampte. It’s such an expressive term. Rather like crabbit in Scots. All of these words are tailor-made for some of these Wee Free types. Dark suits.

Frowns. Disapproval.”

“But why do you paint them, then?” asked Pat.

“Well, I don’t make a habit of painting them,” answered Angus Lordie. “I’ve just finished painting my first one now. I’d love to paint a resolved Buddhist face or a flashy Catholic monsignor with a taste for the pleasures of the table, but no. These people – the Portrait Gallery people – are having an exhibition later in the year of portraits of religious figures. It’s called Figures of Angus Lordie’s Difficult Task

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Faith, or something like that. And I’ve drawn the short straw. I’ve got the Wee Free Reformed Presbyterian Church (Discontinued).”

Pat laughed. “What a name!”

“Yes,” said Angus Lordie. “These Free Presbyterians are always having rows and schisms. Well, this Discontinued bunch is quite different from the mainstream Free Presbyterians, who are very nice people – nothing to do with them, or with any of the other well-known ones. But they’ve got a couple of hundred members, which isn’t too bad even if it’s the Church Universal.”

Pat smiled. She was enjoying this conversation; there was something appealing about Angus Lordie, something vaguely anarchic. He was fun.

“So I was asked,” continued Angus Lordie, “to paint a portrait of a Reverend Hector MacNichol, who happens to be the Moderator of this particular bunch of Free Presbyterian types.

I agreed, of course, and he came down to my studio for the first sitting. And that’s when I found out that he more or less expressed, in the flesh, the theology of his particular church, which takes a pretty dim view of anything which might be regarded as vaguely fun or enjoyable. There he was, a tiny, crabbit-looking, man – minuscule, in fact – who gazed on the world with a very disapproving stare. He noticed an open bottle of whisky in my studio and he muttered something which I didn’t quite catch, but which was probably about sin and alcohol, or maybe about Sunday ferries, for all I know.”

“It can’t have been easy to paint him,” said Pat.

Angus Lordie agreed. “It certainly was not. I sat him there in the studio and he said to me in a very severe, very West Highland voice: ‘Mr Lordie, I must make clear that I shall under no circumstances tolerate any work being done on this portrait on a Sunday. Do you understand that?’

“I was astonished, but I made a great effort to keep my professional detachment. I’m sorry to say that the whole thing was destined – or pre-destined, as a Free Presbyterian might say

– to go badly wrong.”

“And did it?” asked Pat.

“Spectacularly,” said Angus Lordie.

73. A Dissident Free Presbyterian Fatwa Looking at his new twenty-year-old friend, Angus Lordie, member of the Royal Scottish Academy and past president of the Scottish Arts Club, reflected on how agreeable it was to have a young woman to talk to in a room of his coevals. He liked young women, and counted himself lucky to live in a city populated with so many highly delectable examples of that species, even if none of them ever bothered to talk to him.

“My dear,” he said to Pat, touching her gently on the wrist,

“you are so kind, so considerate, to listen to the conversation of an academician of my years – barely fifty, I might add.”

“I’m interested in this story,” said Pat. “This Moderator person sounds awful. And you had to paint him!”

“Indeed I did,” said Angus Lordie. “But, do you know, as I began the task it seemed to me as if I had become possessed. It was almost as if I had been taken over by an entirely foreign energy. I had absolutely no difficulty in beginning. I saw the portrait in my mind’s eye, even before I began.

“I had set up a large canvas, you’ll understand – I normally paint portraits on a generous scale. But now, as I looked at this tiny, crabbit man, sitting there in his clerical black suit and staring at me with a sort of threatening disapproval, I found that I sketched in a tiny portrait, three inches square, right in the middle of the big canvas. This just seemed to be the right thing to do. He was a small-minded man, in my view, and it seemed utterly appropriate to do a small portrait of him.

“We had several sittings. I didn’t let him see what I was doing, you’ll understand, and so he had no idea of the picture which was emerging in the middle of the canvas – a picture which set out to express all the sheer malice and narrowness of the man.

I thought it was very accurate. I had boiled down his spirit and it came to a tiny half-teaspoon of brimstone.”

Pat listened in fascination. She could imagine what might have happened next; the Reverend MacNichol would see the picture

– which is exactly what happened, as Angus Lordie explained.

“It was during the third sitting,” said Angus Lordie. “I went A Dissident Free Presbyterian Fatwa 203

out of the studio to answer the telephone, and while I was out MacNichol took it upon himself to get up and have a peek at progress so far. When I came back into the studio he was standing there, purple with rage, wagging a finger at me. ‘How dare you insult a man of the cloth,’ he yelled at me. ‘You wicked, wicked man!’

“I tried to pacify him, but he would have none of it. He fetched his hat – a black Homburg which was far too big for a tiny man like that – shoved it down over his ears, and marched out of the studio. But as he left, he turned to face me and said: ‘You will be sorry, Mr Lordie! You will find out what it is to incur the wrath of the Discontinued Brethren!’ Then he left, and I sat down, somewhat shocked, and considered my position.

“What had happened, I was later told, was that he had pronounced some sort of Free Presbyterian fatwa on me. I was shocked. What exactly will they try to do to me? Put me to the sword? Burn me out of my studio? I have absolutely no idea what the implications are, as this happened only a few days ago.”

Pat was silent. Many people find it hard to know what to say to one who has just had a fatwa pronounced on him, and Pat was one of these. Words somehow seem inadequate in such circumstances, and any further enquiry tactless. It might help to ask: “Is it a temporary fatwa, or a permanent one?” But Pat just shook her head in disbelief – not at the story, of course –

but at the mentality of those who would pronounce a fatwa on another.

Angus Lordie sighed. “Still,” he said. “One must not complain. Portraiture has its risks, and I suppose a dissident Free Presbyterian fatwa is one of them. Not that one would expect to encounter such a thing every day . . . But, to more cheerful subjects. Would you like to visit my studio some time? I’m just round the corner from Scotland Street, on the same side of the square as Sydney used to be – Sydney Goodsir Smith, of course.

And Nigel McIsaac too. Nigel was a very fine artist – lovely, light-filled pictures – and I still see Mary McIsaac in the square from time to time.”

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A Dissident Free Presbyterian Fatwa He looked over towards the other side of the room where a young man was circulating with a bottle of wine, refreshing glasses.

“I’m so bad at catching the eyes of young men at parties,” he said airily. “Such a limitation! Perhaps you could do it for me?”

Pat looked across the room and immediately attracted the attention of the waiter, who came over to them and refilled Angus Lordie’s glass. Pat, who was generally abstemious, asked for only half a glass.

Angus Lordie looked again at Pat. His gaze was intense, Pat felt, and it was almost as if he were appraising her. But she did not feel threatened in any way – why? Because he was an artist looking at a potential subject, rather than a middle-aged roué looking at a girl?

“Yes,” he said, resuming the interrupted conversation.

“Sydney was one of the lights of this city, one of our great makars. Would it be rude of me to say that I assume that you’ve not read any of his work? No? Well, there’s a treat for you. He was a great man – a great man. He loved his drink, you know, as all our poets have done. If the Scottish Arts Council had any imagination, it would have a system of whisky grants for poets, rather like the Civil List pension that Grieve got. Each poet would receive a couple of bottles a month – once they had produced a decent work between covers. What a gesture that would be!

“Sydney sometimes had these sessions that would last all night and into the morning. Conversation. Friendship. Wonderful ideas bouncing about. Beautiful invented words. And, do you know, he had this terribly funny toast that he would give from time to time. He’d raise his glass and say: ‘ Death to the French! ’

Wonderfully funny.”

Pat frowned. “But why would he say that?”

Angus Lordie looked at her in astonishment. “But, my dear, he didn’t mean it! Good heavens! Do you think any of us here –” and with a gesture he embraced the entire room and GRIEVE: Christopher Murray Grieve, better known as the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid.

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the northern part of the city from Queen Street onwards, “Do you think any of us here actually mean anything we say? My dear!”

“I do,” said Pat.

“You mean everything you say?”Angus Lordie exclaimed. “My dear, how innocent you are!” He paused. Then: “Would you mind posing for me – in my studio? Would you mind?”

74. A Man’s Dressing-gown

Domenica and Pat left the reception at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery shortly before nine. Pat was hungry but she nevertheless turned down Domenica’s invitation to join her in her flat for a mushroom omelette. She liked her neighbour, and enjoyed her company, but she knew that if she accepted then she would not get to bed before eleven at least, as Domenica liked to talk. Her conversation ranged widely and it was entertaining enough, but Pat felt emotionally exhausted and she wanted nothing more than to take to her bed with a sandwich, a glass of milk, and a telephone. She had not spoken to her father for some time and she felt that a chat with him would help, as it always did.

She said goodbye to Domenica on the landing.

“I hope you’re feeling better,” said the older woman. “And remember what I said. Whatever you do, don’t let him upset you. Just don’t.”

Pat smiled at her. “I won’t,” she assured her. “I promise you.”

“Good,” said Domenica, and leaned forward and planted a kiss on Pat’s cheek. Her lips felt dry against her skin and there was a faint odour of expensive perfume. For a moment Pat stood still; she had not expected this intimacy – if it was an intimacy.

Everybody kissed one another these days; kisses meant nothing.

Then the moment of uncertainty passed, and she thanked Domenica for the evening. “You’ve been so kind to me,” she said.

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“I haven’t,” said Domenica, turning her key in the door. “I’ve been a neighbour, that’s all. And you’re a sweet girl.”

Domenica’s door closed behind her and Pat went into her own flat. The hall was in darkness as she entered and she reached to switch on a light. Then she stopped; light was emanating from under Bruce’s door. So he’s back, she thought. He can’t have had much of an evening.

The thought pleased her. She wanted him to be there – as in a sense that meant that he was with her. And that was what she wanted; she wanted it against all the promptings of the rational part of her being.

She stood still for a moment, in the darkness of the hall, debating with herself what to do. She and Bruce had parted on awkward terms that evening. She had been angered by his failure to apologise for giving away her painting, and she had stormed out of the kitchen. Now she felt that she wanted to make it up with him; she should tell him that she was not holding it against him and that all she wanted was for him to give her the telephone number of the people who had won the picture.

Getting it back from them might not be easy, and Bruce’s support might be needed in that, but in the meantime she could do all that was necessary.

She decided to knock on his door and speak to him. Perhaps he would suggest that they have coffee together or that . . . What do I really want? she asked herself.

She now stood before his door and knocked gently. There was silence inside, and then, hesitantly, Bruce’s voice called out.

“Pat?”

There was something in the tone, in the way he answered, that made her realise immediately that he was not alone in the room. And the realisation filled her with embarrassment, that she had disturbed them, and with intense, searing jealousy.

Horrified, she moved away from Bruce’s door and ran over the hall to her own room, slamming the door behind her. She thought she heard Bruce’s door open, but she was not sure, and she wanted to shut out all sound from that quarter. She threw herself down on the bed, her hands over her eyes.

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She lay there for over half an hour, doing nothing, her eyes closed. She felt as if she was paralysed by misery, and that even the effort of lifting the telephone and keying in her parents’

number would be too much. But somehow she managed that, and heard her father answer at the other end.

“Are you all right?”

She took a moment to answer; then, “Yes. I’m all right. I suppose.”

“You don’t sound very convinced.”

She made an effort to sound more cheerful. “I’ve lost something at work – something that was entrusted to me.”

“Tell him,” said her father simply. He had the ability to diagnose problems even before they were explained. “Tell your boss about it. Own up.”

“I was going to do that,” she said. “But that doesn’t make it any easier.”

Her father paused before answering. “There is nothing – and I mean nothing – that doesn’t look less serious if confessed, or shared. Try it. Tell your boss tomorrow what has happened.

Tell the truth, and you’ll see how the world carries on. Just try it.”

She spoke to her father for a few minutes longer before ringing off. She felt slightly better just for having spoken to him, and now she got off the bed and walked towards the door. She did not want to go out of her room but she would have to cross the hall to get to the bathroom. She could not bear the thought of seeing Bruce – not just now – but she thought that he would be unlikely to come out.

She crossed the hall to the bathroom. The light still showed under Bruce’s door – At least they aren’t in there together in the dark, she thought – but no sound came from the room. And what does that mean? she asked herself.

Inside the bathroom, she stood in front of the mirror and brushed her teeth. Then she washed her face, splashing it with cold water afterwards.

“Hallo.”

She spun round. A tall young woman, with streaky blonde 208

News of a Loss

hair, was standing in the door. She was wearing Bruce’s dressing gown and her hair was dishevelled.

Pat stared at the young woman.

“What do you want?” she asked. She did not intend to sound as brutally rude, but that was how the question emerged.

The other girl was taken aback, but recovered quickly.

“Nothing,” she said. “At least, nothing from you.”

She turned on her heel and disappeared and Pat stared into the mirror. At least she had seen her face, and this would enable her to answer the question which every jealous person wishes to have answered. Is she/he more attractive than I am?

And the answer in this case, she thought, was yes. And there was something else – another respect in which she was outclassed; another respect in which she could not compete. She could never wear a man’s dressing gown like that, with such complete shamelessness.

75. News of a Loss

There was every temptation to put off the moment when she would confess to Matthew that the Peploe? was no longer in her possession, but Pat resisted this firmly and successfully. When Matthew came into the gallery the following morning – twenty minutes after Pat had arrived – he barely had time to hang up his coat before she made her confession.

Matthew listened carefully. He did not interrupt her, nor did his expression reveal any emotion. When Pat had finished, she looked down at the ground, almost afraid to look back up at him, but then she did and she saw that the anger she had expected simply was not there.

“It’s not your fault,” Matthew said evenly. “You couldn’t have imagined that he would do such an inconsiderate thing.” He paused, and shook his head in puzzlement. “Why on earth did News of a Loss

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he assume that the painting belonged to nobody? Somebody had to have put it there.”

“He assumes a lot,” said Pat. “He’s a little on the arrogant side.” As she spoke, she wondered where Bruce would be now, and what he would be doing. She had never wondered that before, but now she did.

“I think I’ve met him,” said Matthew. “He goes to the Cumberland, doesn’t he? Tall, with hair like this . . .”

Pat nodded. Bruce was tall, and his hair did go like that; and why should it make her catch her breath just to think of him?

Matthew sat down at his desk and looked at Pat. “We’ll get it back,” he said. “As you’ve just said, it still belongs to us, doesn’t it?”

“That’s what my neighbour pointed out,” said Pat. “I hope she’s right.”

“I’m sure she’s right,” said Matthew. “So all we need to do is to find out who these people are – the people who won it – and ask them to give it back.”

Pat waited for Matthew to say something more, to censure her, perhaps, but he did not. Instead he spoke about some paintings which somebody had brought in for sale the previous day and which they were planning to take a look at that morning. Neither of them thought that there would be anything worth very much, but they were looking forward to spending a few hours searching for the names of artists in the books and relating them, if possible, to the paintings before them. Some names, of course, would simply not occur; would have faded into complete obscurity.

“Why do people insist on painting?” asked Matthew as they stared at a late nineteenth-century study of an Arab dhow.

“It’s their response to the world,” muttered Pat, peering at the signature below the dhow. “People try to capture something of what they see. It’s like taking a photograph. Why do people take photographs?”

Matthew had an immediate answer. “Because they can’t look at what’s before them and think about it for more than two seconds. It’s a sign of distraction. They see, photograph, and move on. They don’t really look.”

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Pat looked at him, and noticed the way that the hairs lay flat against the skin of his wrist, and the way that one of his eyebrows was slightly shorter than the other, as if it had been shaved off.

And she noticed, too, his eyes, which she had never really looked at before, and the way the irises were flecked with gray. And Matthew, for his part, suddenly noticed that Pat had small ears, and that one of them had two piercings. For a few moments neither spoke, as each felt sympathy for the other, as the same conclusion – quite remarkably – occurred to each: here is a person, another, who is so important to himself, to herself, and so weak, and ordinary, and human as we all are.

They worked quietly together, looking carefully at the paintings, before Matthew stood up, stretched, and announced:

“Nothing here. Nothing.”

And Pat had to agree. “I can’t imagine that we could sell any of these for more than . . . forty, fifty pounds.”

“Exactly,” said Matthew. “Let’s say thank you, but no.” He glanced at his watch. It was early for coffee, but he felt that he wanted to get out of the gallery, which suddenly seemed oppressive to him. That feeling would pass if he could get out and see his friends in Big Lou’s coffee bar.

With Matthew across the road at Big Lou’s, Pat picked up the telephone and dialled the office number that Bruce had given her when he had reluctantly agreed to find out how to contact the Ramsey Dunbartons. She listened anxiously as the telephone rang at the other end and when Bruce answered, with a gruff

“Anderson”, she almost put down the receiver. But she mastered her feelings, and asked him whether he had obtained the necessary information from Todd.

“I have,” said Bruce. “And here’s the number.” He paused. “I don’t know whether they’ll be terribly pleased.”

“Why not?” asked Pat. “Surely they’ll understand that there’s been a mistake.”

“Yes,” said Bruce quickly. “Your mistake.”

Pat ignored this. “We’ll see,” she said.

Bruce laughed. “Right, we’ll see. Now, is there anything else you wanted to say?”

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Pat was on the verge of saying that there was not, but then, for reasons which she could not understand, and before she could stop herself, she said: “That girl – that girl, Sally – do you like her?”

There was a silence at the other end of the line, and Pat felt herself tense with embarrassment. It was a ridiculous question, which she had no right to ask, and Bruce would have been quite entitled to tell her to mind her own business. But he did not, and replied quite brightly: “What do you think?”

“Do you mean what do I think of her?” It was a question that she could have answered with a remark about how she wore his dressing gown and the flaunting that this entailed, but she said instead: “Or what do I think you feel?”

“Yes,” said Bruce. “What do you think I feel?”

“You hate her,” said Pat. “You can’t stand her.”

Bruce whistled down the line. “Very wrong, Patsy girl. Very wrong. I want to marry her.”

76. Remembrance of Things Past

Neither Ronnie nor Pete had arrived at Big Lou’s when Matthew came in that morning. As Matthew approached the counter, Big Lou, who had been tidying the fridge, looked up and greeted him warmly. There was nobody else in the coffee bar – indeed Matthew was the first customer that morning – and she was pleased to have somebody to talk to.

She prepared Matthew’s coffee and brought it over, sitting down next to him in the booth.

“Those other two are late,” she said. “Not that I mind. They never have anything interesting to say – unlike you.”

“And I just have bad news today,” said Matthew, rather gloomily. “My Peploe?”

“Not a Peploe?” asked Big Lou. “Somebody’s looked at it?’

“It may be a Peploe,” said Matthew. “But whatever it is, it’s gone.”

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Big Lou drew in her breath. It did not take her long to work out that Pete must have heard the discussion about it going to the flat in Scotland Street, and must have stolen it from there.

She was sure that he was in league with that man, the man whom he described as John, but whom he then denied knowing. Well, she for one was not fooled by that.

“I’ll wring his neck when he comes in,” said Big Lou. “He’s your man. Pete’s taken it – or he’s mixed up in it.”

“It’s not him,” said Matthew. “It’s somebody from the South Edinburgh Conservative Association.”

Big Lou was trying to work out the meaning of this puzzling remark when Matthew explained about the tombola.

“That’s not too bad,” she said. “At least you know where it is

– and you’re still the owner.”

Matthew nodded. Everybody seemed confident about the recovery of the painting, and perhaps they were right. It was a stroke of good fortune that it had fallen into the hands of the Conservative Party, as they would always behave with honour and integrity. He wondered what would have happened if the painting had ended up at a Scottish Socialist Party function. They would have cut it up into little squares and shared it round all those present. The thought made him smile.

“Do you think that great art only comes into existence when there is surplus wealth?” he asked Big Lou.

Big Lou frowned. “You have to have time to create art,” she said. “If you’re busy surviving, then art probably doesn’t get much of a look in. Look at Proust.”

“Proust?”

“Yes,” explained Big Lou. “Marcel Proust wrote an awfully long novel. Twelve volumes, wasn’t it? Or there are twelve volumes in the set I have down in Canonmills. If Proust actually had to work – to earn his living – then he would not have had the time to write A la recherche du temps perdu. Nor, come to think of it, would he have had any of those people to write about if they had been obliged to do any real work.”

Matthew raised an eyebrow. He had never read Proust, although he knew one quote which he had been able to use from time to Remembrance of Things Past

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time. Proust, he had read, had said that steamships insult the dignity of distance, and Matthew had occasionally mentioned this to others, and had enjoyed their discomfort. He had said it to his father once, when he had been taking a close interest in one of his son’s failed business ventures – the travel agency, that was –

and that had stopped him in his tracks. Proust was useful that way.

“Should I read Proust, Lou?” he asked.

“Aye,” she replied. “If you’ve got the time. I’m on volume five now, and I like it. Combray reminds me of Arbroath.”

Matthew nodded. What was Proust about? He decided to ask Lou, as it was not the sort of question one could raise in the presence of Ronnie and Pete.

“A lot of things,” said Big Lou. “Not much actually happens in Proust, or rather it takes a long time to happen. Marcel writes a lot about things that remind him of something else. That’s what happened when he ate those little Madeleine cakes and the taste brought back to him the memory of Combray.”

Matthew sipped at his coffee. Did that remind him of anything?

He closed his eyes, and took another sip. Yes! Yes! He was transported back to a period of greater happiness, when he was twelve and was visiting his grandfather in Morningside. They had a house behind the Royal Edinburgh, a large house with a garden, the house now long since demolished and the garden built over with flats with ridiculous, inappropriate names like Squire’s Manor (built by an English builder who had no idea that squires and manors did not exist in Scotland). But it was not the flats that he thought of, but that house, that great, rambling Victorian house with its turrets and shutters and high ceilings.

His grandfather had sat with him in the morning room, which looked out over the lawn, and which smelled of nasturtiums and coffee and damp India paper of the books that lay out there on his reading trolley. And Matthew had listened, while the old man tried to talk. He had been badly affected by a stroke, and many of his words had gone from him, but he had managed to whisper to the boy, in a painfully slow fashion, each word punctuated by long silences, “Never trust anybody from Glasgow.”

And Matthew had looked at the old man, and smiled in disbelief,

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and asked why should one not trust anybody from Glasgow. His question had brought a puzzled look to his grandfather’s brow, and this was followed by a further search for words.

“I can’t remember,” the old man had said eventually, disappointed at the loss of precious knowledge. “I can’t.”

And then Matthew had sipped at the coffee which his grandfather had given him – coffee which was stone cold, but strong

– and which tasted just like the coffee which Big Lou now served him.

“I’ve had a Proustian moment,” Matthew said, bringing himself back to reality.

“That happens all the time,” said Big Lou. “We all have Proustian moments, but don’t really know about it until we read Proust.”

77. Into Deep Morningside

Pat sat at her desk in the gallery, numbed by the effect of Bruce’s words. He hardly knew that girl, she thought. He had met her the day before the dressing-gown incident, which said something about the speed with which she had allowed the relationship to progress. What a tart!

And what exactly did he see in her, she wondered. She was Into Deep Morningside

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undoubtedly attractive, but there were numerous girls just as attractive, if not more so. Bruce would only have to go into the Cumberland Bar and stand there for twenty minutes or so and he would be mobbed, yes mobbed, by girls who would be only too anxious to develop a closer acquaintance with him. So surely the mere factor of physical attractiveness would not be enough to make Bruce talk about marriage.

Was it something to do with her being American? Some people were impressed with that, because they felt that the Americans were somehow special, a race apart. That used to be how the British regarded themselves when they bestrode the world; perhaps it was not surprising that Americans should have a similar conceit of themselves now that they were the great imperial power – a special race, touched with greatness. And there would be people like Bruce who might share this self-evaluation and think that it would be something privileged, something special, to be associated with an American.

She thought of all this, her despair growing with each moment. I hate him, she said to herself. He’s nothing to me.

But then she thought of him again and she felt a physical lurch in the pit of her stomach. I want to be with him. I want him.

I’m ill, she thought. Something has happened to my mind.

This is what it must be like to be affected by one of those illnesses which her psychiatrist father had told her about.

“People who are brewing a psychotic illness often have some degree of insight,” he had said to her. “They know that something strange is happening to them, even if the delusions are powerful and entirely credible once they are experienced.”

Perhaps this was what was happening to her; she had been overcome with a powerful delusional belief that Bruce was desirable, and even if she knew that this was a destructive belief, she still felt it – it still exercised its power over her. So may an addict feel when confronted with the substance of his addiction: well aware that the drug will harm him but unable to do anything about it. And so may an addict deprived feel when he realises that what he craves is not available to him; the emptiness, the panic that she now felt.

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Matthew, when he returned, was a welcome distraction from this discomfort.

“I’ve telephoned Mr Dunbarton,” said Pat.

Matthew looked at her with anticipation. “And?”

“He was very good about it,” she said.

Ramsey Dunbarton appeared to have been pleased to receive her call, having initially assumed that she was from Party Headquarters, and that she was enquiring about the success of the event.

“It was a very satisfactory evening,” he had said. “Nice of you to ask. The turnout was modest, perhaps, but that didn’t appear to dampen spirits. And we had some of the younger members there too. A charming fellow with . . . with hair, and that Todd girl, the one who was studying over in Glasgow but who’s now back in Edinburgh.

“My wife bumped into her, actually, a few times at the Colinton tennis courts. You know the ones just off the Colinton Road, just after that Mercedes garage. No, hold on, is it a bit before? – I find that bit of Colinton Road a bit confusing. I suppose it depends on whether you’re coming from the direction of town or from the other direction, you know, the road which goes up to Redford and to Merchiston Castle School.

“Funny that you should mention Merchiston. I was there, you know, a good time ago. We had a great time, although, my goodness, it was fairly Spartan in those days, I can tell you.

A bit like a prison camp, but that didn’t bother us boys. I see nothing wrong with communal showers, and some boys actually liked them. Why not? Things are very different now – much more comfortable, and a very good school altogether. But I hope that the boys don’t go too soft.

“My godson, Charlie Maclean, went there, along with his two brothers. Charlie had a splendid time and right at the end he went to a cadet camp in Iceland. There was a bit of a row there, and the master who was in charge of the cadets, who was some sort of captain or major, got into a terrible stramash with the boys.

Anyway, the long and the short of it was that there was a mutiny, led by Charlie. This master said: ‘Maclean, you’re expelled!’

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Whereupon Charlie said: ‘But I’ve just left school anyway. You can’t expel me!’ Whereupon this character shouted: ‘Then you’re forbidden to join the Old Merchistonian Association!’ What a hoot!”

It was at this point that Pat interrupted him, and explained what she was calling about. Ramsey Dunbarton listened, and then laughed.

“I would have been delighted to return it to you,” he said.

“Unfortunately, we’ve already given it away. I’m so sorry. It went down to a charity shop this morning. Betty knows the people who run it and they’re always looking for things like that. But you could go and see them, no doubt, and get it back. They’re the ones in Morningside Road. They’re not all that far down from the Churchhill Theatre. Do you know where that is? I used to take part in Gilbert and Sullivan there. The Gondoliers. Do you know The Gondoliers? I was the Duke of Plaza-Toro once. I was frightfully lucky to get the role as there was a very good baritone that year who was after it. Then I met the director outside the Edinburgh Bookshop and . . .”

78. Steps with Soul

At roughly the same time that Matthew returned to the gallery from his morning coffee, Domenica Macdonald was edging her custard-coloured Mercedes-Benz into a parking place at the foot of Scotland Street. She was observed by three pairs of eyes

– those of the taxi drivers who sat in their cabs at the bottom of the street and ate their early lunch before setting off for their next call. One of the taxi drivers knew her, as he had occasionally exchanged a few words with her in the street, and he smiled as he remembered a witty remark that Domenica had so casually and cleverly made, something about pigeons and local councillors; terribly funny, as he recalled it, although he could not remember the punchline, nor indeed how the story began. What 218

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would it be like to be married to a clever woman like that, he wondered. Could he take her to the taxi-drivers’ ball at the Royal Scot Hotel on the Glasgow Road? Hardly. The men talked about golf at the taxi-drivers’ ball, and the women inevitably talked about the pros and cons of self-catering accommodation in Tenerife. This woman would not want to talk about things like that – he could tell. There were those who had something to say about Tenerife, and those who did not.

Domenica brought the car to a halt and switched off the ignition. She had been for a drive around Holyrood Park

– exercise for the car, as she called it – and had been thinking as she drove. What, she had been wondering, would Edinburgh be like if it were not so beautiful? If Edinburgh looked, for instance

– well, one had to say it, like Glasgow? Would it be inhabited by the people who currently lived there – that is, by people of taste (there was no other expression for it – it just had to be said) – or would it be inhabited by the sort of people who lived in Glasgow

– that is by people who . . .? She stopped herself. No, this was not the sort of thought that one should allow oneself. Those sorts of attitudes – of condescension towards Glasgow – were decid-edly dated. When she was younger it had been perfectly acceptable for people to think that way about Glasgow – to turn up their metaphorical noses at it – but now it seemed that nobody thought like that any more. Edinburgh was different from Glasgow, it was true, but it was no longer considered helpful to remark on the differences to any great extent, even if here and there were to be heard faint echoes, very faint, of the old attitudes. Her aunt, for example, who was Edinburgh through-and-through, had even possessed a map which she had drawn as a schoolgirl in which Glasgow simply did not feature. It was not there. Dundee was marked, as was Aberdeen, but where Glasgow was there was simply a void. And the map had been marked by the geography teacher, who had placed a large red tick on the side, and had written underneath: A very fine map indeed. Well done.

Why, she asked herself, was Edinburgh so beautiful? The question had come to her as she rounded the corner on the high road, round the crumbling volcanic side of Arthur’s Seat, and saw Steps with Soul

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the Old Town spread out beneath her – the dome of the Old College with its torch-carrying Golden Boy; the domestic jumble of Old Town roofs, the spires of the various spiky kirks – such beauty, illuminated at that very moment by shafts of light from breaks in the cloud. This was beauty of the order encountered in Siena or Florence, beauty that caused a soaring of the spirit, a gasp of the soul.

It was a privilege to be a citizen of such a place, thought Domenica. The beauty of the New Town had been created by those who believed in the physical embodiment, in stone and glass and slate, of order, of reason, and this had found expression in architectural regularity. And yet surely it was more than a matter of mere proportion; for the regular features of the male film star, the broad forehead, the neatly-nicked chin, the equal eyebrows, are actually rather repulsive – or so at least Domenica thought. Those regularly-featured Hollywood males made her feel slightly nauseous; and the same could be said for their female equivalents, hardly intellectuals they. These people had regular features but were actually ugly because they tended to be so completely vacuous. Regularity without some metaphysical value behind it, some beauty of soul or character, was more disappointing – and indeed repulsive – than the honestly hap-hazard, the humanly messy. It was more disappointing because it promised something that was not there: it should engage the soul, but did not. It was shallow and meretricious. So Mother Teresa of Calcutta, with her weepy eyes and her lined face, was infinitely more beautiful than . . .? Than the current icons of feminine beauty? Than that woman who called herself Madonna (whoever she was)? Of course Mother Teresa was more beautiful – infinitely so. Only a culture with a thoroughly upside-down sense of values could think otherwise. And that, mused Domenica ruefully, is precisely the sort of culture we have become.

Now that girl, Pat, her new neighbour whom she was getting to know rather better; she had harmonious features, a reasonably pretty face one might say, but was far more beautiful than girls who might appear to be more attractive. That was because Pat had character, had a depth of moral personality that ostensibly more 220

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glamorous girls almost always lacked. And Bruce? Domenica herself had described him as beautiful in her recent conversation with Pat, but was that strictly true? Did Bruce have anything of substance behind his Greek-god features? That was difficult to say. He was not vacuous; he was irritating. So at least there was something there.

Domenica stepped out of her car and began to make her way along the pavement to the door of No. 44. The subject of beauty would be shelved for the time being, she decided, as she now had to think about lunch. There was some mozzarella in the fridge, and that would go rather nicely with tomatoes. But did she have any basil? Probably not, but then basil was not essential. There were some who lived entirely without basil, she reflected; some who had never heard of it; and smiled at the thought, absurd though it was, like a line from the pen of Barbara Pym.

She opened the front door and began to climb up the stone steps.

They were well-trodden steps, and the stone had been worn away in the middle so that the treads were uneven. This did not matter, of course, because these steps, although irregular, were still beautiful. And why were they beautiful? Because they had character. Steps with soul. Barbara Pym again. She would have to be careful.

79. A Meeting on the Stair

On her way up the stairs, Domenica found herself directly outside Stuart and Irene’s flat when the door was opened by Irene, who was on the point of leaving the flat with Bertie. Both women were taken aback, although there was no real reason for surprise.

Doors opened onto the stair, which people used regularly, and it was inevitable that these doors should sometimes be opened at precisely the time that others were passing by. But for some reason it seemed to happen rather rarely, and Domenica was now offered a glimpse into a flat which she had never before seen.

Irene had never invited her in because she disliked her, and she had similarly omitted to include Irene and her husband in any A Meeting on the Stair

221

of her sherry parties. What contact there had been between them had been in the street outside, or sometimes at the bottom of the stair – brief, civil exchanges, but concealing only-guessed-at depths of mutual antipathy.

For a moment both women stood there in silence, mouths slightly open, Irene just inside the flat, with Bertie at her side, and Domenica directly outside, one foot on the coir doormat which resided just outside the door.

Domenica broke the silence. “Well,” she said, “it’s certainly a good morning to be going out. I’ve just been round Holyrood Park and the city looked gorgeous.” As she spoke she took the opportunity to glance beyond Irene and Bertie into the flat. She noticed a bowl of papyrus grass on a hall table – curious, she thought – and a large framed poster of a Léger painting on the wall behind. Even more curious. Why Léger?

Her composure recovered, Irene noticed Domenica’s glance and shifted slightly to obscure her view. What a cheek, she thought. It was typical of this woman’s arrogance, that she should imagine that she had the right to stare into her hallway. And what would she be doing? Making a socio-economic judgment, probably, which is what these Edinburgh-types simply couldn’t resist doing. And how dare she go on about her car, her gross, flashy, fuel-guzzling, piece of German machinery!

“I take it you walked,” said Irene quickly. “One wouldn’t drive in Holyrood Park these days, would one?”

This was an opening salvo, but from such opening shots might spring a full-scale war. “Oh no,” Domenica said airily. “I drove.

In my Mercedes. It was lovely. You’ve seen my nice big car, Bertie?

The custard-coloured one? Would you like a ride in it one day?”

Bertie’s eyes lit up. “Oh yes please, Mrs Macdonald,” he said.

This brought a sharp intake of breath from Irene. “I’m sorry Bertie,” she said. “We can’t go for a ride in any and every car.”

She lowered her voice to a whisper, but one still quite audible to Domenica. “And, anyway, she’s not Mrs Macdonald. She’s Miss Macdonald.”

Domenica smiled, even if somewhat icily. “Actually, it’s perfectly all right for Bertie to call me Mrs Macdonald. I don’t mind in the 222

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slightest. I was married you know, some time ago. Strictly speaking, though, I should be called Mrs Varghese. I went back to my maiden name, although I am not, if I may make this clear, a maiden.”

Irene affected polite interest. “Mrs Varghese? What an exotic name!”

“Yes,” said Domenica. “Perhaps I should use it again. You won’t know India, of course, but it comes from the South, from Kerala.” She turned to Bertie. “And why aren’t we in nursery school today, Bertie? Is it a holiday?”

“I’m suspended,” said Bertie. “I’m not allowed to go back.”

Domenica raised an eyebrow. She looked at Irene, who was frowning down on Bertie and about to say something.

“Suspended?” said Domenica quickly, before Irene had the time to speak. This was delicious. Dear little Mozartino suspended!

“For doing something naughty?”

“Yes,” said Bertie. “I wrote on the walls.”

“Oh dear,” said Domenica. “I’m sorry to hear that. But I’m sure that you’re sorry for what you did.”

Irene, who now looked agitated, was again about to say something, but Bertie spoke before she had the chance to start.

“And now I’m going to psychotherapy. That’s where we’re going right now. We’re going to see Dr Fairbairn again. He makes me talk about my dreams. He asks me all sorts of questions.”

“Therapy!” exclaimed Domenica.

“That’s enough, Bertie,” snapped Irene. Then, turning to Domenica, she said: “It’s nothing really. There was a bit of difficulty with a rather limited teacher at the nursery school.

Unimaginative really. And now we’re giving Bertie a bit of self-enhancement time.”

“Psychotherapy,” said Bertie, gazing down at the floor. “I set fire to Daddy’s Guardian. ” He paused, and looked up at Domenica. “While he was reading it.”

“The Guardian!” exclaimed Domenica. “How many times have I wanted to do that myself! Do you think I need psychotherapy too?”

“We really must get on,” said Irene, pushing Bertie through the door. “You must excuse us, Domenica. We have to walk to Male Uncertainty, Existential Doubts, New Men etc 223

Bertie’s appointment.” She paused, before adding pointedly: “We don’t use our car in town, you see.”

“I think our car’s been lost,” said Bertie. “Daddy parked it somewhere when he was drunk and forgot where he put it.”

“Bertie!” said Irene, reaching out to seize his arm. “You must not say things like that! You naughty, naughty boy!” She turned to face Domenica. “I’m sorry. He’s confabulating. I don’t know what’s got into him. Stuart would never drive under the influence.

Bertie’s imagining things.”

“Well, where is it then?” asked Bertie. “Where’s our car, Mummy? You tell me where it is.”

Domenica looked at Irene politely, as if waiting for an answer.

“Our car is parked,” said Irene. “It is parked in a safe place somewhere. We do not need to use it very much as we happen to have a sense of responsibility towards the environment. Some people . . . some people may choose to act otherwise, but we do not. That’s all there is to it.”

“Of course if you have lost it,” said Domenica, “it’ll probably be down in the car pound. That’s where they take irresponsible cars.”

“Our car is not irresponsible,” said Irene. “It is a small car.”

“Easy to lose, I suppose,” said Domenica.

“It is not lost!” said Irene, chiselling out each word. “Now come, Bertie, we mustn’t keep Dr Fairbairn waiting.”

“I don’t care,” said Bertie, as he was hustled past Domenica, but still within her hearing. “You’re the one who wants to see him, Mummy. You’re the one who likes to sit and talk to him. I can tell. You really like him, don’t you? You like him more than Daddy. Is that right, Mummy? Is that what you think?”

80. Male Uncertainty, Existential Doubts, New Men etc

Matthew called the taxi while Pat wrote out a notice saying that the gallery would be closed for an hour.

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“It won’t take us much longer than that,” said Matthew. “We’ll nip up to Morningside Road, buy the painting back, and be back down here in no time.”

“Buy it?” asked Pat. “Isn’t it still ours?”

Matthew gazed up at the ceiling. “It may be ours technically.

But it may be simpler just to pay whatever they’re asking. It can’t be very much.”

Pat was doubtful. It might not be as simple as Matthew imagined. She had heard that charity shops were more astute than one might think, and the days when one might find a bargain, an misidentified antique or a rare first edition, were over. “Sometimes these places send anything interesting off for valuation,”

she pointed out. “They do that with books, for example. Anything that looks as if it might be worth something is looked at – just in case. First editions, you see. Some of these first editions can be pretty valuable, and these charity shop people know it.”

Matthew smiled. “Not these Morningside ladies,” he said.

“That place will be staffed by Morningside ladies. You’ll see.

They won’t know the first thing about art.”

Like you, thought Pat, but did not say it. And she was not so sure about Morningside ladies, who tended, in her experience, to be rather sharper than people might give them credit for. Peploe was exactly the sort of painter of whom such ladies might be expected to have heard – Peploe and Cadell. These ladies might not like Hockney – “He paints some very unsuitable subjects,” they might say – but they would like Peploe: “Such nice hills. And those lovely rich tones of the flowers. So very red.” – and Cadell:

“Such lovely hats they wore then! Just look at those feathers!”

Faced with a Peploe? it was perfectly possible that they might have set the painting aside for valuation, and if they had done that it would be impossible to get it back from them. They would have to contact a lawyer, perhaps, and take the matter to court. That would take a long time and she wondered whether Matthew would have the stomach for it. Even if he did, then at the end of the day if the painting turned out not to be a Peploe, they would have wasted a lot of time and money on something quite valueless. Not that Matthew had much to do with his time, of course. His day, Male Uncertainty, Existential Doubts, New Men etc 225

as far as she could make out, consisted of drinking coffee, reading the newspaper, and doing one or two tiny little tasks that could easily be fitted into ten minutes if he really exerted himself.

What was it like to be Matthew? This rather interested Pat, who often wondered what it would be like to be somebody else, even if she was not entirely sure what it was like to be herself.

That, of course, is something that one is not sure about at twenty, largely because one is not yet sure who one is. Being Matthew must be, well, it must be rather dull. He did not appear to believe in anything with any degree of passion; he did not appear to have any real ambitions; there was no sense of disappointment or loss – it was all rather even.

Matthew did not seem to have a particular girlfriend either.

His evenings, as far as she could ascertain, were spent with a group of friends that she once glimpsed in the Cumberland Bar.

There were two young women – slightly older than Pat – and three young men. Matthew called them “the crowd” and they seemed to do everything together. The crowd went to dinner; it went to see the occasional film; it sometimes went to a party in Glasgow over the weekend (“One of the crowd comes from Glasgow,” Matthew had explained). And that, as far as Pat could work out, was Matthew’s life.

The taxi arrived and they set off for Morningside Road.

“Holy Corner,” said Matthew, as they traversed the famous crossroads with its four churches.

“Yes,” said Pat. “Holy Corner.” She did not add anything, as it was difficult to see what else one could say.

Then they passed the Churchhill Theatre, scene of Ramsey Dunbarton’s triumph all those years ago as the Duke of Plaza-Toro in The Gondoliers.

“The Churchhill Theatre,” observed Matthew.

Pat did not say anything. There was no point in contradicting the obvious, and equally little point in confirming it. Of course if one did not know that this was the Churchhill Theatre, one might express surprise, or interest. But Pat knew.

The taxi crested the hill, and there, dropping down below them was Morningside Road. At the end of the road, beyond the 226

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well-set houses, the Pentland Hills could be seen, half wreathed in low cloud. It was a reminder that the city had a hinterland – a landscape of soft hills and fertile fields, of old mining villages, of lochs and burns. She looked away, and saw Matthew staring down at his hands. It occurred to her then that he was nervous.

“You mustn’t worry,” she said. “We’ll get your painting back.”

He looked at her, and smiled weakly. “I’m such a failure,” he said. “I really am. Everything I touch goes wrong. And now there’s this. The one painting of any interest in the gallery, and it ends up in a charity shop in Morningside! I’m just thinking what my old man would say. He’d split his sides laughing.”

Pat reached out and took his hand. “You’re not a failure,” she said. “You’re kind, you’re considerate, you’re . . . .”

The taxi driver was watching. He had heard what Matthew had said and now he witnessed Pat’s attempt to comfort him. This was not unusual, in his experience. Men were in a mess these days – virtually all of them. Women had destabilised them; made them uncertain about themselves; undermined their confidence.

And then, when the men fell to pieces, the women tried to put them together again. But it was too late. The damage was done.

The taxi driver sighed. None of this applied to him. He went to his golf club two or three times a week. He was safe there.

No women there; a refuge. I am certainly not a new man, he thought – unlike that wimp in the back there. Good God! Look at him! What a wimp!

81. Morningside Ladies

“See,” whispered Matthew as they stood outside the charity shop.

“There they are. Morningside ladies.”

Pat peered in through the large plate-glass window. There were three ladies in the shop – one standing behind the counter, one adjusting a rack of clothing and one stacking a pile of books on a shelf.

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227

She glanced at the contents of the window. A wally dug, deprived of its mirror-image partner, and lonely; an Indian brass candlestick in the shape of a rearing cobra; several pieces of mock-Wemyss chinaware; an Oor Wullie annual for 1972; and then a painting, but not the Peploe?. Yet the subject of this painting was uncannily similar to that of the painting they sought – a view of a shore and hills behind it. Pat nudged Matthew, who was peering through the window into the depths of the shop.

“Look at that.” She pointed to the painting.

“Not ours,” said Matthew gloomily.

“I know, but it looks so like it,” said Pat.

“Everybody paints Mull from Iona,” said Matthew. “There are hundreds of those paintings. Virtually every house in Edinburgh has one.”

“And in Mull?” asked Pat.

“They have pictures of Edinburgh,” replied Matthew. “It’s rather touching.”

They stood for a few moments more outside the shop before Matthew indicated that they should go in. As he pushed open the door, a bell rang in the back of the shop and the three women turned round and looked at them. The woman who had been stacking the books abandoned her task and came over to them.

“Are you looking for anything in particular?” she asked pleasantly. “We’ve just received a new consignment of clothing and there are some rather nice things in it. We could let you have first look if you like.”

Pat glanced at the clothes on the rack. Who could possibly wear that? she thought as her eye was caught by a brown suede fringed jacket. And Matthew, looking in the same direction, noticed a loud red tie and shuddered involuntarily.

The woman intercepted their glances. “Of course they’re not to everybody’s taste,” she said quickly. “But students and people like that often find something they like.”

Pat was quick to reassure her. “Of course they will,” she said.

“I have a friend who gets all her clothes from shops like these.

She swears by them.”

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Morningside Ladies

The woman nodded. “And it all goes to a good cause. Every penny we make in this shop is put to good use.”

Matthew cleared his throat. “We’re looking for a painting,”

he began. “We wondered . . .”

“Oh we have several paintings at the moment,” said the woman keenly. “We can certainly find you a painting.”

“Actually, it’s a very specific painting,” said Matthew. “You see, it’s a rather complicated story. A painting that belongs to me was inadvertently given to the South Edinburgh Conservative Association. Then unfortunately . . .”

The woman frowned. “But how can one give a painting to the Conservatives inadvertently?” she interrupted. “Surely one either knows that one is giving a painting to the Conservatives, or one doesn’t.”

Matthew laughed. “Of course. But you see in this case the painting was given by somebody who had no right to give it. He effectively stole the painting – stole it inadvertently, that is.”

The woman pursed her lips. She cast a glance at Pat, as if to seek confirmation from her that there was something strange about the young man with whom she had entered the shop.

Pat responded to the cue. “What my friend means to say is that somebody took the painting, thinking it belonged to nobody, and gave it as a prize at the Conservative Ball at the Braid Hills Hotel.”

The mention of the Braid Hills Hotel seemed to reassure the woman. This was a familiar landmark in the world map of Morningside ladies; like a shibboleth uttered at the beginning of some obscure social test, the name of the Braid Hills Hotel signalled respectability, shared ground.

“The Braid Hills Hotel?” the woman repeated. “I see. Well, that’s quite all right. But how do we come into it?”

Pat explained about the prize and the conversation that she had had with Ramsey Dunbarton. At the mention of this name, the woman smiled. Now all was clear.

“Of course,” she exclaimed. “Ramsey himself came in this morning. Such a nice man! He was once the Duke of Plaza-Toro, you know, in The Gondoliers. And . . .”

“And?” prompted Matthew.

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229

“And he was in several other musicals. For quite some time . . .”

Pat stopped her. “Did he bring in a painting?”

The woman smiled. “Yes he did and . . .” she paused, looking hesitantly at Matthew. “And we sold it almost immediately. I put it in the window and a few minutes later somebody came in and bought it. I served him myself. He came right in and said:

“That painting in the window – how much is it?” So I told him and he paid straightaway and took the painting off. I’m terribly sorry about that – I really am. I had no reason to know, you see, that it was your painting. I assumed that Ramsey Dunbarton had every right to have it sold. But of course nemo dat quod non habet. Perhaps if you speak to him about it, perhaps . . .”

Pat glanced at Matthew, who had groaned quietly. “You wouldn’t know who bought it, would you?” It was unlikely, of course, but she could ask. The purchaser might have written a cheque, and they could get the name from that. Or he might have said something which would enable them to identify him.

It was just possible.

The woman frowned. “I don’t actually know him,” she said.

“But I had a feeling that I knew him, if you know what I mean.

I’d seen him somewhere before.”

“In the shop?” asked Pat. “Would anybody else here know who he was?”

The woman turned to her colleague, who was standing at the cash desk, adding a column of figures.

“Priscilla? That painting we sold this morning to that rather good-looking man. The one who hadn’t quite shaved yet. You know the one.”

Priscilla looked up from her task. She was a woman in late middle-age, wearing a tweedy jacket and a double string of pearls. There was an air of vagueness about her, an air of being slightly lost. When she spoke, the vowels were pure Morningside, flattened so that I became ayh, my became may.

“Oh my!” said Priscilla. “The name’s on the tip of my tongue!

That nice man who writes about Mr Rebus. That one. But what is his name? My memory is like a sieve these days!”

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On the Way to Mr Rankin’s

Matthew gave a start. “Ian Rankin?” he said.

“That’s his name,” said Priscilla. “I don’t read his books personally – they’re a bit noir for me – but I suppose those stronger than I read them. Still, de gustibus non disputandum est, as one must remind oneself, and believe me, I do! How could one possibly survive these days without repeating that particular adage all the time? You tell me – you just tell me!”

82. On the Way to Mr Rankin’s

Ian Rankin! This revelation took Matthew and Pat by surprise, but at least they now knew where the painting had gone and whom they would have to approach in order to get it back. Once the name had been established, the third woman in the shop was able to tell them where Ian Rankin lived – not far away – and they prepared to leave. But Pat hesitated.

“That painting,” she enquired, pointing at the window display.

“Would you mind if I looked at it?”

Priscilla went forward to extract the painting from its position in the window and passed it to Pat. “It’s been there for rather a long time,” she said, fingering her pearl necklace as she spoke.

“It was brought in with a whole lot of things from a house in Craiglea Drive. Somebody cleared out their attic and brought the stuff in to us. I rather like it, don’t you? That must be Mull, mustn’t it? Or is it Iona? It’s so hard to tell.”

Pat held the painting out in front of her and gazed at it.

It was in a rather ornate gilded frame, although this was chipped in several places and had a large chunk of wood missing from the bottom right-hand corner. The colours were strong, and there was something decisive and rather skilful about the composition. She looked for a signature – there was nothing – and there was nothing, too, on the back of the frame.

“How much are you asking for this?”

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231

Priscilla smiled at her. “Not very much. Ten pounds? Would that be about right? Could you manage that? We could maybe make it a tiny bit cheaper, but not much.”

Pat reached into the pocket of her jeans and extracted a twenty pound note, which she handed over to Priscilla.

“Oh!” said the older woman. “Twenty pounds. Will we be able to change twenty pounds? I don’t know. What’s in the float, Dotty?”

“It doesn’t matter about the change,” said Pat quickly. “Treat it as a donation.”

“Bless you, you kind girl,” said Priscilla, beaming with approbation. “Here, let me wrap it up for you. And think what pleasure you’ll have in looking at that. Will you hang it in your bedroom?” She paused, and glanced at Matthew. Were they . . .?

One never knew these days.

They took the wrapped-up painting and left the shop.

“What on earth possessed you to buy that?” Matthew asked, as they left. “That’s the sort of thing we throw out all the time.

One wants to get rid of things like that, not buy them.”

Pat said nothing. She was satisfied with her purchase, and could imagine where she would hang it in her room in the flat. There was something peaceful about the painting – something resolved

– which strongly appealed to her. It may be another amateur daubing, but it was comfortable, and quiet, and she liked it.

They crossed the road at Churchill and made their way by a back route towards the address they had been given.

“What are we going to say to him?” asked Matthew. “And what do you think he’ll say to us?”

“We’ll tell him exactly what happened,” said Pat. “Just as we told those people. And then we’ll ask him if he’ll give it back to us.”

“And he’ll say no,” said Matthew despondently. “The reason why he bought it in the first place is that he must have realised that it’s a Peploe?. Somebody like him wouldn’t just pop into a charity shop and buy any old painting. He’s way too cool for that.”

“But why do you think he knows anything about art?” asked Pat. “Isn’t music more his thing? Doesn’t he go on about hi-fi and rock music?”

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On the Way to Mr Rankin’s

Matthew shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s just that I’ve got that bad feeling again. This whole thing keeps giving me bad feelings.

Maybe we should just forget about it.”

“You can’t,” said Pat. “That’s forty thousand pounds worth of painting. Or it could be. Can you afford to turn up your nose at forty thousand pounds?”

“Yes,” said Matthew. “I don’t actually have to make a profit in the gallery, you know. I’ve never had to make a profit in my life.

My old man’s loaded.”

Pat was silent as she thought about this. She had been aware that Matthew did not have to operate according to the laws of real economics, but he had never been this frank about it.

Matthew stopped walking and fixed Pat with a stare. Again she noticed the flecks in his eyes.

“Are you surprised by that?” he said. “Do you think the less of me because I’ve got money?”

Pat shook her head. “No, why should I? Plenty of people have money in this town. It’s neither here nor there. Money just is.”

Matthew laughed. “No, it isn’t. Money changes everything. I know what people think about me. I know they think I’m useless and I would never have got anywhere, anywhere at all, if it weren’t for the fact that my father can buy me a job. That’s what he’s done, you know. He’s bought me every job I’ve had. I’ve never got a job, not one single job, on merit. How’s that for failure?”

Pat reached out to touch him on the shoulder, but he recoiled, and looked down. She felt acutely uncomfortable. Self-pity, as her father had explained to her, is the most unattractive of states, and it was true.

“All right,” she said. “You’re a failure. If that’s the way you feel about yourself.” She paused. Her candour had made him look up in surprise. Had her words hurt him? She thought that perhaps they had, but that might do some good.

They began to walk again, turning down a narrow street that would bring them out onto Colinton Road. A cat ran ahead of them, having appeared from beneath a parked car, and then shot off into a garden.

“Tell me something,” said Matthew. “Are you in love with But of Course

233

that boy you share with? That Bruce? Are you in love with him?”

Pat made an effort to conceal her surprise. “Why do you ask?”

she said, her voice neutral. It had nothing to do with him, and she did not need to answer the question.

“Because if you aren’t in love with him, then I wondered if . . .”

Matthew stopped. They had reached the edge of Colinton Road and his voice was drowned by the sound of a passing car.

Pat thought quickly. “Yes,” she said. “I’m in love with him.”

It was a truthful answer, and, in the circumstances, an expedient one too.

83. But of Course

He was sitting in a whirlpool tub in the walled garden, wisps of steam rising from the water around him. A paperback book was perched on the edge of the tub, a red bookmark protruding from its middle.

“I find this a good place to think,” he said. “And you feel great afterwards.”

Matthew smiled nervously. “I hope you don’t mind us disturbing you like this,” he said. “We could come back later if you like.”

Ian Rankin shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. This is fine. As long as you don’t mind me staying in here.”

There was a silence for a few moments. Then Pat spoke. “You bought a painting this morning.”

A look of surprise came over Ian Rankin’s face. “So I did.”

He paused. “Now, let me guess. Let me guess. You’ve heard all about it and you want to buy it off me? You’re dealers, right?”

“Well we are,” said Matthew. “In a way. But . . .”

Ian Rankin splashed idly at the water with an outstretched hand. “It’s not for sale, I’m afraid. I rather like it. Sorry.”

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But of Course

as he had imagined. Ian Rankin had recognised the painting for what it was and was holding onto his bargain. And who could blame him for that?

Pat took a step forward and leaned over the edge of the tub.

“Mr Rankin, there’s a story behind the painting. It’s my fault that it ended up in that shop. I was looking after it and my flatmate took it by mistake and gave it as a raffle prize and then . . .”

Ian Rankin stopped her. “So it’s still yours?”

“Mine,” said Matthew. “I have a gallery. She was looking after it for me.”

“What’s so special about it?” Ian Rankin asked. “Is it by somebody well known?”

Matthew looked at Pat. For a moment she thought he was going to say something, but he did not. So the decision is mine, she thought. Do I have to tell him what I think, or can I remain silent?

She closed her eyes; the sound of the whirlpool was quite loud now, and there was a seagull mewing somewhere. A child shouted out somewhere in a neighbouring garden. And for a moment, incon-sequentially, surprisingly, she thought of Bruce. He was smiling at her, enjoying her discomfort. Lie, he said. Don’t be a fool. Lie.

“I think that it may be by Samuel Peploe,” she said. “It looks very like his work. We haven’t taken a proper opinion yet, but that’s what we think.”

The corner of Matthew’s mouth turned down. She’s just destroyed our chances of getting it back, he thought. That’s it.

Ian Rankin raised an eyebrow. “Peploe?”

“Yes,” said Pat.

“In which case,” said Ian Rankin, “it’s worth a bob or two.

What would you say? It’s quite small, and so . . . forty thousand?

If it were bigger, then . . . eighty?”

“Exactly,” said Pat.

Ian Rankin looked at Matthew. “Would you agree with that?”

“I would,” said Matthew, adding glumly, “Not that I know much about it.”

“But you’re the dealer?”

“Yes,” said Matthew. “But there are dealers and dealers. I’m one of the latter.”

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“I’m just going to have to think about this for a moment,”

said Ian Rankin. “Give me a moment.”

And with that he took a deep breath and disappeared under the surface of the water. There were bubbles all about his head and the water seemed to take on a new turbulence.

Pat looked at Matthew. “I had to tell him,” she said. “I couldn’t lie. I just couldn’t.”

“I know,” said Matthew. “I wouldn’t have wanted you to lie.”

He wanted to say something else, but did not. He wanted to tell her that this was exactly what he liked about her, even admired

– her self-evident honesty. And he wanted to add that he felt strongly for her, that he had come to appreciate her company, her presence, but he could not, because she was in love with somebody else – just as he had feared – and he did not expect, anyway, that she would want to hear this from him.

Ian Rankin seemed to be under the water for some time, but at last his head emerged, dark hair plastered over his forehead, the keen, intelligent eyes seeming brighter than before.

“It’s in the kitchen,” he said. “But of course you can have it back. Go inside and I’ll join you in a moment. I’ll get it for you.”

Matthew began to thank him, but he brushed the thanks aside, as if embarrassed, and they made their way into the house.

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“I didn’t think he’d do that,” Matthew whispered. “Not after you said what it could be worth.”

“He’s a good man,” said Pat. “You can tell.”

Matthew knew that she was right. But it interested him nonetheless that a good man could write about the sort of things that he wrote about – murders, distress, human suffering: all the dark pathology of the human mind. What lay behind that? And if one thought of his readers – who were they? The previous year, on a trip to Rome, he had been waiting for a plane back to Edinburgh and had been queuing behind a group of young men.

He had observed their clothing, their hair cuts, their demeanour, and had concluded – quite rightly as their conversation later revealed – that they were priests in training. They had about them that air that priests have – the otherworldliness, the fastidiousness of the celibate. Matthew judged from their accents that they were English, the vowels of somewhere north – Manchester perhaps.

“Will you go straight home?” asked one.

“Yes,” his friend replied. “Straight home. Back to ordinary parish liturgy.”

The other looked at the book he was holding. “Is that any good?”

“Ian Rankin. Very. I read everything he writes. I like a murder.”

And then they had passed on to something else – a snippet of gossip about the English College and a monsignor. And Matthew had thought: Why would a priest like to read about murder?

Because good is dull, and evil more exciting? But was it? Perhaps the reason the good like to contemplate the deeds of the bad is that the good realise how easy it is to behave as the bad behave; so easy, so much a matter of chance, of fate, of what the philosophers call moral luck. But of course.

84. An Invitation

Immensely relieved at the recovery of the Peploe?, Matthew and Pat returned to the gallery in a taxi, the painting safely tucked An Invitation

237

away in a large plastic bag provided by Ian Rankin. Matthew’s earlier mood of self-pity had lifted: there were no further references to failure and Pat noticed that there was a jauntiness in the way he went up the gallery steps to unlock the door.

Perhaps the recovery of a possible forty thousand pounds meant more to Matthew than he was prepared to admit, even if the identity of the painting was still far from being established. In fact all they knew – as Pat reminded herself – was that she thought that it might be a Peploe, and who was she to express a view on such a matter? Her pass in Higher Art – admittedly with an A – hardly qualified her to make such pronouncements, and she was concerned at having raised everybody’s hopes prematurely.

“It’s probably worthless,” she had said to Matthew in the taxi.

“I don’t think Ian Rankin really believed that it was worth anything. That’s probably why he let us have it back.”

Matthew was not convinced. “He gave it back because he thought it was the right thing to do. I could tell that he thought it was a Peploe too. I’m pretty sure you’re right.”

“And what are we going to do with it now?” asked Pat. “I’m not sure if I should take it back to the flat again.”

Matthew laughed. “That’s all right. I’ll take it back to my place.

Or even to the old man’s place. He’s got a safe.” He paused.

“Shall we have a celebration? What are you doing this evening?”

Pat considered this for a moment. She had no plans for that evening, and there was every reason to celebrate, but she was not sure how Matthew would interpret an acceptance of his invitation. There had been a purpose behind his asking about her feelings for Bruce – she was convinced of that – and she did not want to encourage him. If he was falling for her, then that would be messy. He was her employer; he was some years her senior – almost thirty, was he not? – and there were was another major reason why it would not work. She felt nothing for him, or, rather, not very much. He was decent, he was kind; but there was no attraction beyond that. He would be perfect for somebody who wanted a reliable, undemanding boyfriend, for somebody in the crowd. Surely there must be a girl there who 238

An Invitation

would love Matthew to take an interest in her? They could go to the Dominion Cinema together and sit in the more expensive seats and then, on the way out, look at the kitchenware in the kitchenware shop on the corner of Morningside Road. Pat had seen young couples doing that – standing in front of that window and gazing at the stainless steel cafetières and the Le Creuset saucepans. What would it be like to stand there with somebody else – a man – and look at the pots and pans that seemed to be such potent symbols of future domestic bliss? What would it be like to stand there with Bruce . . .?

With Bruce? She stopped herself. The thought had come into her mind unbidden, as delicious, tempting thoughts do. Bruce would be wearing his Aitken and Niven rugby sweater and his olive green mock-moleskin trousers, and he would have his hand against the small of her back, and they would be thinking of their kitchen . . . No! No!

“Well?” said Matthew. “Are you doing anything tonight? I thought we could go to the Cumberland for a drink to celebrate.

It’ll be on me.”

Pat brought herself back from fantasy to reality. It would be churlish to refuse Matthew, and an outing to the Cumberland Bar would hardly be compromising. Plenty of people dropped in at the Cumberland with their workmates and nothing was read into the situation. It was not as if he was proposing an intimate diner à deux in the Café St Honoré.

“And then we could and have dinner in the Café St Honoré,”

Matthew said. “That is, if you’ve got nothing else on.”

He looked at her, and she saw the anxiety in his eyes. But she could not accept; she could not.

“Let’s just go for a drink,” she said. “I have to . . .” What lie could she come up with to put him off? Or could she tell the truth?

“I want to see Bruce later on,” she said. And as she spoke she realised that she had told the truth. She did want to see Bruce; she wanted to be with him again; it was physical, like a nagging pain in the pit of her stomach. And it alarmed her, for what he wanted was not what she wanted.

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239

Matthew lowered his eyes. He’s disappointed, she thought; and it would have been so easy for me to have dinner with him and make him happy, and now I have disappointed him.

“What about your crowd?” she asked brightly. “Will they be there?”

Matthew shrugged. “They may be. Maybe not. One’s going off to London for a few days this week – he may already have gone. And another has a heavy cold. So if the crowd turns up there won’t be many of them.”

He looked at her again, and she wondered what he was thinking. She had not lied to him, and so she could look back at him, meeting his gaze with all the satisfaction of one who has told the truth. She did want to see Bruce.

“Why are you so keen on him?” Matthew asked. “I thought

– from something you said some time ago – that he got on your nerves. Isn’t he vain? Didn’t you say something about that?”

“Yes,” said Pat. “Yes, he’s vain.”

Matthew looked impatient, as if there was something that was not being explained to him clearly enough. “How can you like him if he’s vain?” he asked. “Doesn’t that turn you off?”

Pat smiled. “It should,” she said. “Yes, it should. But it doesn’t, you know.”

“Very peculiar,” said Matthew. “Very peculiar.”

Pat said nothing. She did not disagree.

Sexual attraction, thought Matthew. The dark, anarchic force.

More powerful than anything else. Always there. Working away, but not for me.

85. In the Cumberland Bar

Carrying the discreetly-wrapped Peploe? under his arm, Matthew escorted Pat to the Cumberland Bar for their celebratory drink. Any disappointment he had felt at the turning down of his invitation to dinner was, if still felt, well concealed. Matthew 240

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was used to being turned down by women, and had come to expect it. He was not sure why he should be so unlucky, but had a suspicion that it was something to do with his eyes. He knew that they had strange grey flecks in them and he feared that there was something about that which disturbed women – some primeval signal that warned them off men with grey-flecked eyes.

He had noticed women looking into his eyes and then frowning; indeed, he had seen Pat do that when they had had that conversation on the way to their encounter with Ian Rankin.

It was very unfair. There was Pat, who was attractive in every sense, throwing herself away on that vain flatmate of hers, who presumably had an insufferable conceit of himself. And there he was, Matthew, who only wanted to give Pat some fun and take her to dinner at the Café St Honoré and spoil her. Bruce would treat her badly – that was obvious – and she would be horribly upset. He would treat her well and maybe, just maybe, there would be some future in it for both of them. There would be no future with Bruce.

He almost wanted to tell her, to warn her, but it would seem odd to speak like that, like an older brother, or even a parent.

And so he was silent, at least on that subject, and she spoke no more of it either.

The Cumberland Bar, when they reached it, was already filling with early-evening drinkers.

“Busy,” said Matthew, scanning the heads for signs of the crowd. None of them was there, which rather pleased him. He wanted to be with Pat, and the presence of members of the crowd could distract her attention.

They found a couple of seats together and Matthew went to the bar to buy Pat the glass of Chardonnay she had requested.

Then, glasses in hand, he made his way back to their table and sat down beside her.

“Do you know many of these people?” asked Pat, looking at the crush of figures that was forming around the bar.

“A few,” said Matthew, raising his glass of Guinness in a toast.

“Here’s to you. Thanks for getting the picture back.”

“To Ian Rankin,” Pat replied. “What a nice man.”

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241

“A real softie,” said Matthew.

Pat was not sure what to make of this. Did Matthew consider him a softie because he had given the painting back? That was nothing to do with being a softie. That was to do with principles.

For a few moments she felt irritated. Who was Matthew to call anybody a softie, when he so obviously was the softie? No, Ian Rankin was no softie, what with his designer stubble and the black tee-shirts.

She decided not to say anything about this. “And now what?”

she said. “What do we do about that painting? Shouldn’t we get an opinion on it now?”

Matthew agreed with her. He was not sure, though, who they would get to do this. That would require some thought because he did not like the idea of being humiliated by some condescending art expert. He had already secretly imagined the scene in which the expert, looking down his nose, would sneer at him. “Peploe? You must be joking! What on earth makes you think this is a Peploe?”

She was waiting for Matthew’s reply when she looked up to see a familiar figure coming towards her. For a moment she had difficulty placing him, but then she remembered: Angus Lordie, the man she had talked to at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery after the lecture. He had come into the bar, looked around him, and seen her at the table. She noticed, too, that it was not just him, but his dog as well – a black collie with a lop-sided ear and sharp eyes.

Angus Lordie had entered the Cumberland Bar in low spirits, but seeing Pat he broke into a wide smile.

“My dear!” he exclaimed, as he approached their table. “Such a perfect setting for you! Even a bar in the St Germain could do no more justice than this simple establishment! And at your side, your young gallant . . .”

“This is Matthew,” said Pat quickly. “I work with him at his gallery.”

Angus Lordie nodded in Matthew’s direction and extended a hand. “I would normally not shake hands with a dealer, sir,” he said with a smile. “But in your case, I am happy to do so. Angus Lordie.”

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Matthew rose from his seat and shook the outstretched hand.

Pat noticed that he did not seem to be very enthusiastic, and for a moment she felt pity for him. Their private celebration, it would seem, was over.

“And now,” said Angus Lordie, handing his dog’s lead to Pat,

“if you wouldn’t mind holding Cyril for a moment, I’ll go and get myself a drink.”

Pat took the end of the lead and tugged gently to bring Cyril towards the table. The dog looked at her for a moment and then, to her astonishment, gave her a wink. Then he took a few steps forward and sat down next to her chair, turning to look up at her as he did so. Again he winked, and then bared his teeth in what looked like a smile. Pat noticed the glint of the gold tooth which Domenica had mentioned at the reception.

Pat leant over towards Matthew. “This is a very strange dog,”

she said. “Do you see his gold tooth?’

Matthew looked down into his Guinness. “I had hoped that we would be able to have a celebration. Just you and me. Now it looks as if . . .”

Pat reached out and touched him gently on the forearm. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t ask him to join us.”

“Well, now we’re stuck,” said Matthew sulkily. “And that dog smells.”

Pat sniffed. There was a slight smell, she had to admit, but it was not entirely unpleasant – rather like strong mushrooms.

Angus Lordie returned now, a glass of whisky in one hand and a half-pint glass of darkish beer in the other. He put the whisky down on the table and then set the glass of beer on the floor next to the dog.

“Cyril drinks,” he explained. “It’s his only bad habit. That, and chasing after lady dogs, which is more of a call of nature than a bad habit. Here we are, Cyril – make it last.”

Pat and Matthew watched in astonishment as Cyril took a few sips of beer and then looked up and gave Pat a further wink.

“Your dog keeps winking at me,” said Pat.

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“Yes,” said Angus Lordie, pulling a chair across from a neighbouring table. “Mind if I join you? Thanks so much. Yes, Cyril has an eye for the ladies, don’t you, Cyril?”

86. On the Subject of Dogs

“On the subject of dogs,” said Angus Lordie, taking a sip of his whisky, “I’ve just discovered the most marvellous book. I came across it quite by chance – The Difficulty of Being a Dog. It’s by a French writer, Roger Grenier, who was a publisher apparently. He knew everybody – Camus, Sartre, Yourcenar – all of them, and he had a wonderful dog called Ulysse. The French title was Les Larmes d’Ulysse, The Tears of Ulysses, which was rather better, in my view, than the one they used in English. But there we are. You don’t know it, by any chance?”

Pat shook her head. Was it all that difficult to be a dog? Dogs had a rather pleasant existence, as far as she could make out.

There were miserable dogs, of course: dogs owned by cruel and irresponsible people or dogs who were never taken for walks, but most dogs seemed contented enough, and often seemed rather happier than the humans attached to them.

“It’s a remarkable book,” Angus Lordie continued, glancing down at Cyril, who was inserting his long pink tongue into the glass to get to the dregs of his beer. “It’s full of extraordinary snippets of information. For example, did you know that Descartes thought of dogs as machines? Outrageous. Wouldn’t you agree, Cyril?”

Cyril looked up from his beer glass and stared at Angus Lordie for a few moments. Then he returned to his drink.

“You think that he looked at me because he heard his name,”

mused Angus Lordie. “But then it’s always possible that he looked at me because he heard the name Descartes.”

“Descartes?” said Pat, raising her voice.

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Cyril looked up and winked at her.

“There you are,” said Angus Lordie. “Cyril has good taste.

He has a low opinion of Descartes because of his views of animal-machines, and he has a correspondingly high view of Voltaire, who sided with the dogs against Descartes, and also, I might add, of Kant, who disposed of Descartes’ argument like that – pouf!

– in a footnote. Kant said that dogs think in categories, and therefore aren’t machines.” He paused, and looked down at Cyril who looked back up at him, his gold tooth exposed. “Of course it’s typical of the Germans that they should argue in terms of categories of thought, whereas Bentham said that dogs weren’t machines because they were capable of suffering in the same way in which we do. The English are much more down to earth, you know.”

Pat cast a glance at Matthew, who had a glazed expression.

She was not sure what to do. It would not be easy to get rid of Angus Lordie, and yet she could understand how Matthew must feel. He could not compete with the older man, with his easy garrulousness and his tirade of facts about dogs.

She tried to include Matthew in the conversation. “Do you have a dog, Matthew?”

Matthew shook his head. “No dog,’ he muttered.

“No dog?” asked Angus Lordie brightly. “No dog? Poor chap.

I couldn’t live without a dog. I’ve had Cyril here ever since I rescued him from some crofters in Lochboisdale. I happened to be in the pub there and I heard two crofters talking about a dog who was no good with sheep. They were going to put him down the following day, as there was no point in keeping him.

I overheard this, and I offered to take him off their hands. They agreed, and the next day was the beginning of Cyril’s life with me. He’s never looked back.”

Pat wondered about his gold tooth, and asked Angus Lordie how this came about.

“He bit another dog in the tail,” came the explanation. “And his tooth broke off. So I took him to my own dentist, who’s a drinking pal of mine. He was a bit unsure about treating a dog, but eventually agreed and put it in. Not on the National Health, On the Subject of Dogs

245

of course; I paid seventy quid to cover the cost of the gold and what-not. We had to do it at night, when there were no other patients around, as people might have objected to seeing a dog in the dental chair that they had to use. People are funny that way. There’s Cyril paying his full seventy quid and some would say that he would have no right to treatment. Amazing. But people aren’t entirely rational about these things.”

Matthew suddenly rose to his feet. “I’m sorry,” he said, looking at Pat but not at Angus Lordie. “I’m sorry, but I have to go.”

Angus Lordie looked at his watch. “How late is it? My goodness, the evening’s young. Can’t you stay?’

Matthew ignored his question. Still addressing himself to Pat, he told her that she could have the following morning off, if she wished. “We haven’t really been able to celebrate,’ he went on.

“So take the morning off.”

“Please don’t go yet,” she said, glancing sideways at Angus Lordie as she spoke.

Matthew shook his head. “No. Sorry. I have to be on my way.”

He turned on his heels, and although he nodded cursorily at Angus Lordie, it was clearly not a warm farewell.

“Sorry about that,” said Angus Lordie, lifting his glass of whisky. “I hope that I haven’t broken up your party.”

Pat said nothing – she was watching Matthew leave the bar, sidling past the group of raucous drinkers who were effectively blocking the door. Her sympathy for Matthew had grown during the short time they had been in the bar. He was not like Angus Lordie, who had confidence, who had style. There was something vulnerable about Matthew, something soft and indecisive.

He was the sort of person who would go through life never really knowing what he wanted to do. In that respect he was typical of many of the young men she had met in Edinburgh. That type grew up in comfortable homes with all the opportunities, but they lacked strength of character. Was that because they had never had to battle for anything? That must be it. And yet, thought Pat, have I had to fight for anything? Am I not just the same as them? The thought discomforted her and she left 246

The Onion Memory

it there, at the back of her mind – one of those doubts which could be profoundly disturbing if it were allowed to come to the fore.

Reaching the door, Matthew turned back and looked in her direction. She caught his eye, and smiled at him, and he did return the smile as he disappeared through the doorway into the night. Pat stared at the doorway and was still staring when Bruce came in, together with Sally, laughing at some private joke. She had her arms about his shoulders and was whispering into his ear.

87. The Onion Memory

“Know them?” asked Angus Lordie, noticing the direction of Pat’s stare.

For a moment Pat said nothing, and she watched Bruce and Sally squeeze past the knot of people at the doorway and go over to the bar. This manoeuvre brought them closer to the table at which she was sitting with Angus Lordie, and so she averted her gaze. She did not want Bruce to see her, and any meeting with that American girl would be awkward – after the incident with the dressing gown.

“Do I know them?” she muttered, and then, turning back to face Angus Lordie, she replied: “Yes, I do. He’s my flatmate. He’s called Bruce Anderson.”

“Terrific name,” said Angus Lordie. “You might play rugby for Scotland with a name like that. Cyril’s name – Cyril Lordie

– would be useless for rugby, wouldn’t it? The selectors would choke on it and pass you by! You just can’t play rugby if you’re called Cyril, and that’s all there is to it. It’s got nothing to do with being a dog.”

Pat said nothing to this. Of course Bruce’s name was wonderful: Bruce – a strong, virile, confident name. Bruce and Pat. Pat and Bruce. Yes. But then cruel reality intruded: Bruce and Sally.

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Pat looked at Angus, who smiled at her. His conversation was extraordinary. Many of the things he said seemed to come from nowhere, and seemed so eccentric; it appeared that he looked at things from an entirely different angle, which was fun, and exhilarating. He was the opposite of boring, the opposite of poor Matthew. And that, she thought, was why Matthew had felt obliged to leave. This man made him feel dull, which Matthew was, of course.

Angus Lordie was looking towards the bar, where Bruce and Sally were standing, Bruce in the process of ordering drinks.

“That girl,” he said. “His girlfriend, I take it? You know her?”

Pat cast a glance at Bruce and Sally, and then looked quickly away. “Not very well,” she said. “In fact, I’ve only met her once.

She’s American.”

“American? Interesting.” Angus Lordie paused. “What do you think she sees in him?”

He waited for Pat to answer, and when she did not, he answered his own question. “He’s very good-looking, isn’t he?

With that hair of his. He’s got something on it, hasn’t he? Yes.

Well, I suppose that if I looked like that I’d have American girls hanging on my arm too.”

Pat looked at Angus Lordie. Did he really still think like that

– at the age of fifty, or whatever he was? It was sad to think that he still wanted to be in the company of girls like Sally because that would doom him to a life of yearning after people who inevitably would be interested in younger men and not in him.

Mind you, he was good-looking himself, and if one did not know his real age he could pass for rather younger – forty perhaps.

She suddenly stopped herself. It had occurred to her that Angus Lordie might actually be interested in her. He had smiled when he had seen her, and had made his way straight to their table. Did this mean that he . . . that he had designs on her, as her mother would put it? In her mother’s view of the world, men had designs, and it was the responsibility of women to detect these designs and, in most cases, to thwart them. It was different, of course, if designs were honourable; in that case, they ceased to be designs sensu stricto.

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Angus Lordie had stopped looking at Bruce and Sally. He sighed. “I knew an American girl once,” he said. “A lovely girl.

It was rather a long time ago, when I lived up in Perthshire. I had left the Art College and had moved into an old mill house in our glen – yes, we had half a glen in those days – my father, I may as well tell you, was one of those Perthshire pocket lairds

– and there I was, twenty whatever, thinking that the London galleries would come knocking at my door at any moment. I lived la vie bohème, Perthshire version, but in great comfort actually. I used to get up at eleven and paint until three or so. Then I’d go for a walk and have people round for dinner in the evening. Life was pretty good.

“Then this American girl turned up. She was staying with some people in Comrie, wandering around Europe in general and had ended up there. She used to come over and see me and we would sit and talk for hours at the kitchen table. I made her mugs of tea in some wonderful old Sutherlandware mugs I had, beautiful things. And the air outside smelled of coconut from the broom in blossom and there were those long evenings when the light went on forever. And, I tell you, I could have conquered the world, conquered the world . . .”

He broke off, looking up to the ceiling. His glass of whisky, half empty now, was in his hand. Pat was silent, and indeed it was as if the whole bar was silent, although it was not.

After a moment, Angus Lordie looked at Pat. She noticed that his eyes were watery, as if he were on the verge of tears.

“It is the onion memory that makes me cry,” he said quietly.

“Do you know that line?”

Pat replied gently. “No. But it’s a lovely image. The onion memory.”

“Yes,” said Angus Lordie. “It is, isn’t it? I think it comes from a poem by Craig Raine. A fine poet. He talks about a love that was not to last, and thinking about it makes him cry. Such a good thing to do, you know – to cry. But forgive me, I shouldn’t talk like this. You have everything before you. There’s no reason for you to feel sad.”

Pat hesitated. There was something about Angus Lordie that

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invited confidence; there was an intimacy in his manner that made one want to speak about things which mattered.

“I do feel a bit sad,” she said, toying with her glass as she spoke. “I feel sad because that boy over there, Bruce . . . he’s with another girl, and . . .”

Angus Lordie reached out and patted her on the arm. “My dear, you need say no more. I understand.” He glanced over at Bruce and Sally. “This must be very painful for you.”

“It is.”

“Of course it is.” He picked up his glass and downed the last of his whisky. “Let us leave this place. Let us leave this place and visit our dear friend, Domenica Macdonald. She is most hospitable and she is always, always, very good at driving away regrets of every sort. Cyril can wait outside, tied to a railing. He loves Scotland Street. It’s the smells, I think. So much smellier than Drummond Place.”

88. Big Lou Receives a Phone Call

As Angus Lordie was proposing to Pat that they leave the comfortable purlieus provided by the Cumberland Bar, Big Lou, coffee bar proprietrix and auto-didact, was standing in her flat in Canonmills, looking out of the window. She normally ate early, but that evening she had not felt hungry and was only now beginning to think of dinner. She had been reading, as she usually did when she returned from work, and was still immersed in Proust.

The bulk of Big Lou’s library consisted of the volumes which she had acquired when she had purchased the second-hand bookstore out of which she had made her coffee bar. There were books, however, which she bought herself from the dealers in whose shops she had taken to browsing on Saturday afternoons, when the coffee bar was closed. There were several shops in the West Port which she now frequented, although the increasing number of rowdy and vulgar bars in the vicinity was beginning to distress her. Lothian Road, not far away, was now an open sewer as far as Big Lou was concerned – innocent enough during the day, but at night the haunt of bands of drunken young men and girls in impossibly short skirts and absurd high heels. And at the entrance to each of these bars stood threatening men with thick necks, shaved heads, and radio mikes clipped onto their ears. There had been nothing like that in Arbroath, and very little of it in Aberdeen. Mind you, she thought, Aberdeen is too cold to hang about on street corners. And those girls with their very short skirts would freeze quickly enough if they tried to wear them on Union Street in the winter. Was climate the reason why Scotland had always been so respectable?

Big Lou was beginning to have doubts about Proust. She was proud of her edition, which was the Scott-Moncrieff translation, published in a pleasing format in the early Fifties (Big Lou liked books which felt good). She was now on volume six, and was reading about the Duchesse de Guermantes and her decision to travel to the Norwegian fjords at the height of the social season.

Proust said that this had an effect on people which was similar Big Lou Receives a Phone Call

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to the discovery, after reading Kant, that above the world of necessity there was a world of freedom. Was this not a slight exaggeration? Big Lou asked herself. But with whatever levity Proust invoked images of determinism, Big Lou herself took the subject seriously enough. She had several books on the subject in her collection, and after reading them – not with a great deal of enjoyment – she had come out in favour of free will. She was particularly persuaded by the argument that even if we cannot be shown to be free, we have to behave as if freedom of the will existed, because otherwise social life would be impossible. And that meant, in her view, that determinism was false, because it did not fit the facts of human life.

There was no good in having a theory that bore no relation to reality as it was understood and acted upon by people. That is what she thought about determinism. But then she asked herself about God, and became confused. If it were the case that people thought that they needed a concept of God in order to get by in life, then would that mean that only those theories of reality which had a place for God would be defensible? This, she thought, was doubtful. Unless, of course, one made a sharp distinction between social theories – which need not be provable, but which must at least work for the purposes we require of them – and other theories, which can be true and correct but which we do not need to be able to apply to day-to-day life. That was it, she thought.

The problem was that some people preached social philosophies that paid no attention to reality. Some French philosophers had a tendency to do this, Big Lou had noted: they did not care in the slightest if their theories could have disastrous consequences

– because they considered themselves to be above such consequences. It was perfectly possible to portray scientific knowledge as socially determined – and therefore not true in any real sense

– when one was safe on the ground in Paris; but would you ask the same question in a jet aircraft at thirty-five thousand feet, when that same knowledge underpinned the very engineering that was keeping one up in the air? By the same token, French philosophers had been able to admire Mao and his works because 252

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they did not have to live in China at the time. And they knew, too, that what they preached would never be put into effect.

Big Lou stood before her window and remembered the young man who had come into her coffee shop wearing a tee-shirt with a picture of Castro on it. She had served him his coffee and then pointed at the picture.

“Do you really admire people who put others in prison for speaking their mind?” she had asked. “Would you wear that shirt if you lived under him?”

The young man had looked at her and smiled. “You’re so naïve,” he had said, and taken his coffee to his table. And then, to follow this remark, he had turned to her and said: “Have you ever heard of false consciousness?”

“Aye,” said Big Lou. “I have.”

But the young man had laughed and turned to the reading of a magazine he had brought with him. Of course she had thought later of the things that she might have said to him, but she had remained silent and had merely gone to the door and locked it, discreetly. Ten minutes or so later, the young man had got up to leave – he was the only customer at the time – and had tried the handle of the door. When he realised it was locked, he had turned to her and demanded that she let him out, which she had done.

He had looked indignant, as she had taken her time to walk to the door and unlock it. So might the jailer in a prison swagger to his task. And as she opened the door for him she said: “You’re a university student, aren’t you? I’ve never been that, you know.

But don’t you think that I’ve just been able to teach you a lesson about freedom?”

She smiled at the memory – it had been a moment of gentle victory – and was smiling still when her telephone rang. She walked across the room to answer it and heard the voice of the man from Aberdeen, her chef, the man whose letter she kept in that special drawer, and whose voice she had not thought she would hear again.

“I’m in Edinburgh, Lou,” he said. “Can I take you out for dinner? Are you free?”

She thought of determinism. Of course she was free.

89. Big Lou Goes to Dinner

Eddie was the name of Big Lou’s friend from Aberdeen. He was waiting for her, as he promised he would be, in Sandy Bell’s Bar in Forrest Road. He was a tall man in his early forties, with dark, lank hair and an aquiline nose. She saw him immediately she entered the bar, and he smiled at her and nodded. For Big Lou this was a moment of great significance, as it always is when we see one whom we loved a long time ago, and might love still; it had been years, and she had thought of him often – if not each waking day, then almost every day; and now here he was, unchanged, it seemed, and standing there smiling at her as if they were friends who had not seen one another for a mere week or so.

She made her way over towards him, squeezing past a group of young men who were listening earnestly to something being said by one of their number. And in the far corner, sitting at a table, a fiddler worked his bow through a tune that could just be heard above the hubbub of conversation. The notes were jagged and quick, and she remembered that they had sat in a similar pub one evening in Aberdeen when a Shetland fiddler had been playing, and her heart gave a lurch and she wondered whether he would remember that too. Men did not remember these things; or they had their own memories.

When she reached him he put his glass down on the bar and leaned forward to kiss her lightly on the brow.

“Well,” he said. “It’s been a long time, hasn’t it, Lou?”

She nodded. She would not cry, she had determined, but there were tears to be fought back. Discreetly, unseen by Eddie, Big Lou bit her lip.

“Aye, it’s been a good long time. And now . . .”

“And now here we are,” said Eddie.

She said nothing and glanced at the bartender, who was hovering. Eddie ordered her a drink – “I remember that you like Pernod, Lou. Pernod! Yes, I remember that well.”

“I don’t drink it very much any more,” she said. “But thanks, Eddie.”

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They looked at one another. She noticed that he had put on a bit of weight, but not much, and that there were a few grey hairs above his ears. His hair looked a bit neater, too, but that was because he had been in America, and people worried more about their grooming there.

“How are you doing, Eddie?” she asked. “Are you still in Galveston? In Texas, or wherever it is?”

He smiled, somewhat awkwardly, and looked down at his feet.

“I meant to write to you again, Lou, and tell you. I’m not the best letter-writer, you know. You did get my letter, didn’t you?”

Big Lou reached for the glass which the bartender was offering. “Yes, I got your letter, Eddie.” If he knew, she thought; if he knew how many times I have read that letter, and how I have preserved it, a token, for there were no other tokens.

“I stayed in Galveston for a few years,” said Eddie. “Then I moved to Mobile, Alabama. Great place. That’s where I am now.

You’d like it, you know.”

Big Lou listened carefully. He had said that she would not like Galveston, that she should not join him out there. Now he was saying that she would like Mobile. Did this mean that he wanted her to go back there with him; that he wanted her again? And why would he assume that she would be available? But of course he would know that; of course he would.

He asked her what she was doing, and she explained. He said that she would be good at running a coffee bar – he had always thought that she should be in the catering industry, he said – and she thanked him for that. And was he still cooking? He was, but not for oil men.

“I’m a real chef now,” he said. “Cooking in the oil industry is just industrial. Big helpings for these big guys. Lots of carbo-hydrates. No finesse.”

She imagined him again in his kitchen whites, with the cap that he liked to wear, which hid his greasy hair. She had given him a special shampoo once, which claimed that it would end greasy hair, but either it had not worked or he had stopped using it.

They finished their drink and then went over the road to the Café Sardi. He had booked a table there, and asked her whether Poetry of the Tang Dynasty

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she knew it. She did not, but she liked it when she went in. She liked restaurants with pictures on the walls and there was something about Italian restaurants which was always welcoming.

They sat at a table near the wall. He looked at the menu and told her about some of the dishes that he cooked now. Americans had a sweet tooth, he said, and so he was obliged to sprinkle icing sugar on things which would be savoury in Scotland.

“Is it very different over there?” asked Big Lou. “Would I like it, do you think?”

He fiddled with the edge of the tablecloth. ‘It’s very different in some ways,” he said. “You have to look after yourself. If you’re down, you’re down. Nobody’s going to come and pick you up.

But if you want to work, then it’s a great place to be.”

“Maybe I should come and see you,” said Big Lou. She spoke tentatively, because he had not invited her yet, in spite of his saying that she would like Mobile. What a strange name, she thought: Mobile, and he pronounced it Mobeel, which must be the right way to say it. Eddie was good on these details; he had always been like that.

“There’s something I should tell you, Lou,” said Eddie. “I’m married now. I married a girl I met there. We run a restaurant together.”

Big Lou said nothing. She started to speak, but said nothing.

She looked down at the cutlery, at her side plate, at the single flower in the tiny vase, at the way the candle flame flickered in the draught.

90. Poetry of the Tang Dynasty

There are, said Auden (and Tolstoy), different types of unhappiness. For Big Lou, the revelation that Eddie had married a woman in Mobile, Alabama, made her unhappy. She had never had very much, and losing what little she had was at least a suffering to which she was fairly accustomed (Auden’s phrase 256

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about the poor). For Pat, who had been loved a great deal, and knew it, the sight of Bruce in the Cumberland Bar, his attention entirely given over to his American girlfriend, provided a new sort of unhappiness. This was the unhappiness of knowing that you simply cannot have what you want to have – an unhappiness which is a bitter discovery for the young. The young rarely believe that they will not be able to get what they want, because there is always an open future. I may not be beautiful today, but I shall be beautiful tomorrow. I may not have much money today, but that will all change. Not so.

As he escorted Pat out of the Cumberland Bar, Angus Lordie was aware that she was feeling miserable. One with less psychological insight than he might have attempted to cheer her up with distracting remarks, or with observations on the fact that there were plenty of other young men. But he knew what it was to love without hope, and knew that the only way to deal with that bleak state was to look one’s unhappiness in the face.

And it was important, he thought, to understand that the last thing that the unhappy wish to be reminded of is the greater unhappiness of others. Telling a person with toothache that there are others with greater toothache than their own was no help at all.

So he said to Pat, as they left the Cumberland “Yes, it’s very uncomfortable, isn’t it? You want him and he doesn’t want you

– because he’s got another girl. Oh yes. Very unfortunate. And, of course, even if he didn’t have her, he might not want you anyway.”

Pat did not consider this helpful and was about to tell him that she did not want to talk about it. But he continued. “I can understand what you see in him, you know. I can understand the attraction of male beauty. I’m an artist, and I know what beauty is all about. That beautiful young man has worked a spell on you.

That’s what beauty does. We see it and it puts a spell on us. It’s most extraordinary. We want to merge ourselves with it. We want to possess it. We want to be it. You want to be that young man, you know. That’s what you want.”

Pat listened in astonishment as they made their way round Poetry of the Tang Dynasty

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Drummond Place towards the top of Scotland Street. As they walked past the house of the late Sydney Goodsir Smith, makar, Angus Lordie looked up at the empty windows and gave a salute.

“I like to acknowledge Sydney’s shade,” he said. “Guidnicht, then, for the nou, Li Po/ In the Blythefu Hills of Tien-Mu. ” He turned to Pat. “Those lovely lines are by Sydney, God rest his great rambunctious soul. He wrote a lovely poem, addressed to the Chinese poet, Li Po, about an evening’s goings-on in an Edinburgh bar, a cheerie howf, peopled by a crousi companie o’

philosophers and tinks. What a marvellous picture! And all this going on while the world in its daith-dance/ skudder and spun/ in the haar and wind o space and time.”

He stopped and looked down at his dog. “Do you think this is awful nonsense, Cyril? Will you tell Pat that I don’t always go on like this, but that sometimes . . . well sometimes it just seems the right thing to do. Will you tell her that, Cyril?”

Cyril stared at his master and then turned to look up at Pat.

He winked.

“There,” said Angus Lordie. “Cyril would have got on very well with Sydney. And he does like to hear about the Chinese poets too, although he knows that the Chinese eat dogs – a practice of which Cyril scarcely approves, tolerant though he is of most other human foibles. A dog has to draw a line.”

“Do you enjoy Chinese poetry, Pat? No. I suppose that you’ve never had the pleasure. You should try it, you know. The Arthur Waley translations. These Chinese poets wrote wonderful pieces about the pleasure of sitting on the shore of their rivers and waiting for boats to arrive. Nothing much else happens in Chinese poetry, but then does one want much to happen in poetry? I rather think not.”

They turned down Scotland Street, walking slowly in order to allow Cyril to sniff at every kerbstone and lamp-post.

“It’s really rather easy to write eighth-century Chinese poetry,”

said Angus Lordie. “In English, of course. It requires little effort, I find.”

“Make one up now,” said Pat. “Go on. If you say it’s so easy.”

Angus Lordie stopped again. “Certainly. Well now, let us think.”

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He paused. Then turning to face Pat, he addressed her gravely: I look across this street of stone, This street which takes a country’s name, To the house with lights, where a gentle companion Prepares her jug of wine, brings to mind The hours that we have spent together In that quiet room; each stair that lies Between ourselves and her, will raise the heart a little, Will tidy the unhappiness from your courtyard, Will make you smile again. My unhappy friend; I tell you so; I tell you this is true.

He finished speaking, and bowed slightly to Pat. “My Chinese poem,” he said. “Not as good, perhaps, as that which might have been written by Li Po, if he were with us, which he is not, but capable perhaps of preparing you for an evening with Domenica and myself and conversation about things that really matter. And if, incidentally, this is balm for your undoubted unhappiness, then I shall consider myself to have done no more than any neighbour should do. N’est-ce-pas, Cyril ?”

91. God Looks Down on Belgium

“And where,” asked Domenica Macdonald, as she opened her door to them, “is your malodorous dog?”

Angus Lordie seemed not to be taken aback by what struck Pat as a less than warm welcome. But Pat’s concern proved to be misplaced. The relationship between her neighbour, Domenica, and her newly-acquired friend, Angus Lordie, was an easy one, and the banter they exchanged was good-natured. In the course of the evening, Angus Lordie was to describe Domenica – to her face – as a “frightful blue-stocking”, and in return she informed him that he was a “well-known failure”, a “roué” and

“a painter of dubious talent”.

“If you are referring to Cyril,” said Angus Lordie, “he is outside, tied to a railing, enjoying the smells of this odiferous street. He misses such smells in Drummond Place, with its rather better air. He is quite happy.”

Domenica ushered them into her study. “I really am rather pleased that you came to see me,” she said, as she took a half-full bottle of Macallan out of a cupboard. “I’ve been worrying about this fatwa of yours, Angus. Have those dissident Free Presbyterians shown their hand yet?”

Pat remembered the talk about the dissenting Free Presbyterian fatwa imposed upon Angus Lordie as a result of his uncomplimentary portrait of their Moderator. Angus Lordie had not mentioned anything more about it, and certainly his demeanour was not that of one labouring under a fatwa.

“Oh that,” said Angus Lordie, accepting the generous glass of whisky which Domenica had poured for him. “Yes, they’ve done one or two things to signal their displeasure, but I think that the whole thing will probably blow over.”

“And what precisely have they done?” asked Domenica.

“A group of them came and sang Gaelic psalms outside my door,” he replied. “You know those awful dirges that they go in for? Well, we had a bit of that. I went out and thanked them 260

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afterwards and they looked a bit disconcerted. They mumbled something about how I would hear from them again, but they didn’t seem to have much heart for it.”

“It’s so difficult to sustain a fatwa,” said Domenica. “One has to be so enthusiastic. I’m not sure if I could find the moral energy myself.”

“Cyril howled when he heard the Gaelic psalms,” said Angus Lordie. “And they thought that he was joining in. He sounded so like them! Quite uncanny! Of course he does come from Lochboisdale and he’s probably heard Gaelic psalms before.

Perhaps it made him feel homesick.”

“Oh well,” said Domenica. “These things all add to the gaiety of nations. That’s the nice thing about life in Scotland. It’s hardly dull. I’m immensely relieved that I don’t live in a dull country.”

“Such as?” asked Pat. Her gap year had taken her to Australia and then, briefly on to New Zealand. New Zealand was perhaps somewhat quiet while Australia had proved to be far from dull; at least for her.

“Oh, Belgium,” said Domenica. “Belgium is extremely dull.”

Angus Lordie nodded his head in agreement. “I’ve never quite seen the reason for Belgium,” he said. “But I certainly agree with you about its dullness. Remember that party game in which people are invited to name one famous Belgian (other than anybody called Leopold) – that’s pretty revealing, isn’t it?”

“I have a list of famous Belgians somewhere,” said Domenica rather absently. “But I think I’ve mislaid it.”

“It’ll turn up,” said Angus Lordie, taking a sip of his whisky.

“These things do. Did I tell you, by the way, that I composed a hymn about Belgium? The Church of Scotland has been revising its hymnary and was asking for more modern contributions. I composed one of which I was really rather proud. I called it God looks down on Belgium.”

“And the words?” asked Domenica.

Angus Lordie cleared his throat. “The first verse goes as follows,” he began:

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God’s never heard of Belgium,

But loves it just the same,

For God is kind

And doesn’t mind –

He’s not impressed with fame.

After he had finished, he folded his hands and looked at Domenica. Pat felt uncertain. Was this serious? She had enjoyed the Chinese poem which he had declaimed to her in Scotland Street, but this hymn seemed . . . well, he couldn’t possibly mean it.

Domenica looked at Angus Lordie and raised an eyebrow.

“Did the Church of Scotland use it?” she asked.

“Inexplicably, no,” said Angus Lordie. “I had a very polite letter back, but I fear that they feel that it’s not suitable. I suppose it’s something to do with comity within Europe. We have to pretend to take Belgium seriously.”

“We live in such a humourless age,” Domenica remarked. “It used to be possible to laugh. It used to be possible to enjoy oneself with fantasies – such as your ridiculous hymn – sorry, Angus

– but now? Well, now there are all sorts of censors and killjoys. Earnest, ignorant people who lecture us on what we can think and say. And do you know, we’ve lain down and submitted to the whole process. It’s been the most remarkable display of passivity. With the result that when we encounter anybody who thinks independently, or who doesn’t echo the received wisdoms of the day, we’re astonished.”

“In such a way is freedom of thought lost,” said Angus Lordie, who had been listening very attentively to Domenica. “By small cuts. By small acts of disapproval. By a thousand discouragements of spirit.”

They were all silent for a moment as they reflected on what had been said. Domenica and Angus Lordie appeared to be in agreement, but Pat was not so sure. What was the point about being rude about Belgium? Surely we had made moral progress in recognising the sensitivities of others and in discouraging disparaging comments? What if a Belgian were to hear the words of that hymn? Would a Belgian not be gratuitously offended?

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And surely one should never criticise people for things that they cannot help – such as being Belgian?

Pat was thinking this when she became aware that the eyes of the other two were on her.

“You must understand something, my dear,” Domenica said to her. “Angus is not to be taken seriously.”

Angus Lordie nodded. “Absolutely right,” he said. “But listen, Domenica, I’m feeling bored and I want some excitement. I was wondering whether you would care to show Pat here and me the tunnel. I get a distinct feeling this is a night for exploration – of every sort.”

Domenica glanced at Pat. It was a glance that was rich in moral warning.

92. In Scotland Street Tunnel

Pat had heard that Scotland Street – the street itself – was built over a Victorian railway tunnel. Bruce had pointed out to her that the basements on either side of the street went appreciably lower than was normal for the New Town – that was because the street was supported by the roof of the tunnel.

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“I know quite a lot about these things,” he said. “Just ask me if there’s anything you want to know.”

Now, accompanied by Domenica and Angus Lordie, she stood outside a low door in the space outside the lowest basement floor of their block. Above them, arched like broad flying buttresses, were the stone steps that led to their front door and to the door of the upper basement. Cyril, who had been retrieved by Angus Lordie from his station at the railings, was eagerly sniffing at the door.

“I thought this was a coal cellar,” said Pat.

“Indeed it is,” said Domenica, pushing the door open with her foot. “But it is something over and above that – something which only I and one or two other long-term residents know about.”

She shone the beam of her flashlight into the dark space behind the door.

“It still smells of coal,” she said. “As you will notice. But that door at the back there gives access to the tunnel. And if you follow me, we can go inside and take a walk.”

Domenica stepped forward decisively. Angus Lordie indicated to Pat that she should follow her and that he and Cyril would bring up the rear. “Cyril is utterly without fear,” he said,

“which unfortunately suggests that he has little imagination.

The brave are usually somewhat unimaginative, don’t you find?”

There was no time to discuss this intriguing proposition, as Domenica was now inside the tunnel and the light from her torch was playing against the opposite wall. Crouching, as the cellar door was not high enough to walk through unbent, Pat made her way into the tunnel, feeling immediately the cooler air on her skin, smelling the slightly musty odour, not unlike the smell of a garden shed that has been left unopened for some time.

She looked up. Domenica was directing the torchlight towards the roof of the tunnel. There, growing from the blackened masonry, were clusters of small stalactites, white against the dark background, like colonies of fungi. The 264

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tunnel was high – over twenty feet, Pat thought – and it was broad too, to allow for a footpath on either side of the track.

Domenica shone the torch up the tunnel, in the direction of Drummond Place. “We should start walking,” she said. “And watch your feet as you go. This is fairly steep. The gradient is actually one in twenty-seven. And the distance in this tunnel, by the way, is measured in chains.”

“You are immensely well-informed, as ever,” said Angus Lordie. “Where did you pick up this arcane knowledge?”

“From the organist at St Giles,” replied Domenica. “My friend, Peter Backhouse. He knows everything there is to be known about railways, and he knows all about the old lines of Edinburgh.

He can tell you all about Bach and Pachelbel and so on, but he also knows all about track gradients and signalling systems and the Edinburgh, Leith and Granton Railway Company.

Remarkable, isn’t it? I’m always impressed by people who know a lot about trains.”

“I’ve always thought that the Church of Scotland was a bit unsound on railways,” said Angus Lordie. “Did you ever hear Professor Torrance talk about trains when he was moderator?

You did not. And now that we have a female moderator, well, I’m afraid there’s likely to be little improvement. Women tend not to be interested in trains in quite the same way that men are.

Or at least some men. I have no interest in trains myself, of course.”

“That’s because there is a large part of the female in your psyche,” said Domenica. “You’re in touch with your feminine side. You’re a new man, Angus.”

For a few moments they walked on in silence. It did not seem to Pat that Angus Lordie was a new man at all; in fact, it seemed to her that he was quite the opposite. And Cyril was certainly not a new dog – not with his liking for beer, his reputed chasing after lady dogs, and his tendency to wink. None of these was the attribute of a new dog.

“Where does this tunnel lead?” asked Pat suddenly. She did not usually feel claustrophobic, but now she began to feel a slight In Scotland Street Tunnel

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unease as she realised that they were getting some distance from the cellar door which had admitted them. They only had one torch with them – what would happen if that torch failed?

Would they have to feel their way along the side of the tunnel until they found the opening? And what if there were places where the floor had collapsed, which they would not see in the darkness?

Domenica answered her question. “It goes all the way up to Waverley Station,” she said. “It ends opposite platforms 1 and 19. It’s bricked up there, I’m afraid, and so we shall have to come back by the same route.”

Pat reflected on this and then asked where the trains went.

“Down to Granton,” said Domenica. “Peter Backhouse showed me a map once which made it very clear. The trains set off from Canal Street Station in the centre of the city and went down the tunnel purely by the force of gravity. Coming up the other way, they were pulled by a rope system, which was powered by a stationary engine. When they came out at Scotland Street Station they made their way down to Granton. You could get a ferry there to take you over to Fife. There was no Forth Bridge in those days, you see.”

Cyril barked suddenly, and Domenica swung the beam of the torch round to illuminate him.

“He’s seen something,” said Angus Lordie. “Look at the way his nose is quivering. What have you picked up, boy – what have you sniffed?”

Cyril growled. “He’s never wrong, you know,” said Angus Lordie. “He’s found something. Shine the beam in the direction he’s looking in, Domenica.”

Domenica moved the beam of the torch to the side. They were all silent as the light moved and then there came a gasp from Domenica. She was the first to see it – the first to understand what they were looking at. And then the others realised too, and they looked at Domenica, on whose face a small part of the light of the torch was falling. And they waited for guidance – for an explanation.

93. A Further Tunnel – and a Brief Conversation About Aesthetics

Domenica broke the silence that followed Cyril’s extraordinary discovery. And it was Cyril’s discovery, as everybody later agreed

– one for which he should be given all due credit. Had he not barked to alert them to the change in the smell of the air, then they would have walked right past the largely-concealed mouth of the side-tunnel. But Cyril, detecting a new whiff, gave them warning, and when Domenica turned her torch in the right direction, they had seen the much smaller tunnel sloping off to the west.

“Peter Backhouse said nothing about this,” muttered Domenica, as she took a step towards the mouth of the smaller tunnel.

“It has no doubt been forgotten about,” said Angus Lordie, reaching out to twist off a piece of the board that had been used to block the entrance. The wood came away in his hand, and immediately another piece fell off the now-crumbling barrier.

“I suspect that this is a service tunnel of some sort,” said Domenica, directing the beam up the very much narrower passage.

“Shall we?” said Angus Lordie. “Would it be safe to walk up a little? Heaven knows what we might find.”

The idea of fresh exploration seemed attractive to Domenica and Angus Lordie – and immensely so to Cyril, who was straining on his lead to enter this territory of uncharted smells.

Pat was not so enthusiastic. It was one thing to walk down a well-known tunnel, and quite another to explore a tunnel which nobody appeared to know about. Again she worried about the possible failure of the torch. It would have been bad enough having to navigate down the central tunnel in complete darkness, but if they entered what might well be a warren of service tunnels, then they might be lost indefinitely, wandering around beneath the streets of Edinburgh until hunger and fatigue claimed them and they failed. There would be no prospect of rescue, then, as nobody knew that they had ventured into the Scotland Street tunnel in the first place. Their disappearance would thus be a A Further Tunnel – and a Brief Conversation About Aesthetics 267

complete mystery, rather like the disappearance of that party of Australian schoolgirls who were swallowed up by the earth at Hanging Rock. That had not been a successful picnic, on the whole.

“Do you think this is safe?” she asked. Her voice in the darkness sounded very weak, and she wondered whether anybody had heard her. But Domenica had, and she reached out and grasped her arm.

“Don’t worry. This won’t go very far. And if it were going to cave in, it would have done so a long time ago.”

“Quite right,” added Angus Lordie. “Safe as houses.”

They made their way down the side-tunnel, walking more slowly, as there was less room, and they could barely fit two abreast. The tunnel was not quite straight, and from time to time it veered slightly to the left or right, but its general direction was westwards.

Pat shivered. The air was cooler now, and she began to regret not having fetched a jersey or a coat from the flat before they began their expedition. But she had been unwilling to go into her flat in case she should disturb Bruce and Sally, and so she had come lightly dressed. Of course there was no reason to believe that Bruce and Sally would be there: they were probably still in the Cumberland Bar, for all she knew, or having dinner together, over a candle-lit table. Would they be talking about her? she wondered. Of course they would not – there was no reason for them to be interested in her. Bruce tolerated her –

that was all – and Sally disliked her. So she was nothing to them, and they would have no reason even to think about her, let alone discuss her.

She was aware of Angus Lordie walking beside her, while Domenica was a few steps ahead, the light from her torch bobbing up and down as she walked.

“What an adventure!” Angus Lordie whispered. “Did you imagine that we would find ourselves taking a subterranean promenade together?”

“No,” she said. “I did not.”

He sighed. “I am conscious, of course, that there are many 268 A Further Tunnel – and a Brief Conversation About Aesthetics others with whom you would prefer to take such a walk. That young man in the bar, for example.” He paused for a moment.

“Don’t throw your heart away, my dear. I recognise the signs so well. An impossible passion. Don’t waste your time on him.”

She was going to remain silent, but her answer slipped out, almost without her willing it.

“It’s not so easy,” she said. “I’d like to stop, but I find that I can’t. You can’t stop yourself feeling something for somebody else. You just can’t.”

“Oh yes, you can,” said Angus Lordie, his voice raised slightly.

“You can stop yourself from loving somebody perfectly well. You simply change the way you look at them. People do it all the time.”

Domenica now joined in. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But you can’t really expect to have a confidential conversation in a tunnel. I have heard every word you’ve whispered, and I feel that I must agree with Angus. Of course you can change the way you feel about something or somebody. But it requires an effort of the will – a conscious decision to recognise what you have missed.”

“Precisely,” said Angus. “And this is exactly what the Professor of Aesthetics at Harvard did. She decided that she found palm trees beautiful – before that she thought them an unattractive sort of tree. Then she discovered that she liked the way that their fronds made striped light. And after that, palm trees were beautiful.”

This conversation on aesthetic theory might have continued, and indeed Angus Lordie was mentally marshalling arguments in favour of his position – and that of the Professor of Aesthetics at New York – when Domenica suddenly drew to a halt.

“Are we reaching the end?’ asked Pat. It was difficult to see what lay ahead, as the beam of the torch was, as she had feared, becoming rather weaker. But it seemed as if there was a blockage of some sort there.

“I think we are,” said Domenica. “Look, it seems to go fairly sharply upwards.”

They moved forward cautiously, Domenica playing the beam of the torch up towards the ceiling of the tunnel. Suddenly, and without warning, she flicked the switch of the torch and the beam An Interesting Discovery

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of light disappeared. They were not in total darkness, though –

weak rays of yellow light came from above them, emanating from what appeared to be cracks in the roof above them. There was not a great deal of light, but it was sufficient for them to see one another’s faces, and to see the few chunks of fallen masonry that littered the tunnel floor around them.

Pat saw Domenica beckon them to her, and she and Angus Lordie drew near.

“We’re under a room,” said Domenica, pointing upwards.

They had been stooping as they walked, and now, by standing straight, their heads almost touched the roof.

“There’s something happening up there,” whispered Domenica.

“Let’s take a look. But do keep your voices down and, Angus, whatever you do, don’t let that dog of yours bark.”

“But where are we?” whispered Pat. They had walked some distance – perhaps the equivalent of two blocks on Princes Street

– but it was difficult to calculate distance in the darkness. They may have done many more chains than that.

“By my calculation,” said Domenica, sotto voce, “we are more or less directly underneath the New Club!”

94. An Interesting Discovery

Moving carefully, so as not to make any sound, Domenica, Angus Lordie and Pat took up positions directly under the cracks in the ceiling. It was not easy to see what was going on above, but by the careful placing of an eye to a crack – a manoeuvre which involved pushing the side of one’s face against the rough masonry, and suppressing the urge to sneeze that inevitably followed – they were able to see up into the room above.

It was not a perfect view. It is, in general, easier to look down rather than to look up (a proposition which may be applied to a range of human activities, including literature and journalism).

The view from Parnassus gives one a greater sense of power, 270

An Interesting Discovery

one might assume, than the view of Parnassus from the plains below. But even from their disadvantaged and uncomfortable position, the sight which greeted their eyes was one which amply repaid the effort.

The cracks in the ceiling were cracks in the floor of a large room. They were directly below an impressive table, which was probably why they had been undiscovered. And around this table were seated some twenty people – forty sets of legs, male and female – forty shoes with accompanying ankles. And that was about all they could see, such were the limitations of their vantage point.

Pat stared at the shoes. Most of them were men’s shoes, but there were women’s shoes here and there, including a pair that was very close to her eye. She stared at the shoes: they were made of expensive leather, and had fashionable, finely honed square-tip toes. As she stared, one of the feet lifted slightly and the shoe came down on the edge of the crack through which Pat was looking. Had she wished to do so, she could have poked the tip of her little finger through the crack and touched the shoe.

But she did not.

She looked at some of the other legs and saw that one set of ankles, placed up at the top of the table, was clad in a pair of extremely bright red socks. The shoes involved were fine ones

– black brogues with a high shine on the toe-caps, influential shoes – which made the colour of the socks seem all the more surprising. Pat lowered her head for a moment and tapped Domenica on the shoulder.

“Did you see those red socks?” she whispered. “Up at the end of the table.”

Domenica pressed her face to the crack and looked again.

Then she turned back to Pat. Her expression was excited; as if she had made a great discovery.

“I know who that is!” she whispered. “There’s only one person who wears socks like that.”

Pat thought that she had heard the name, or seen it in the papers, but was not sure.

“He was chairman of a whisky company, I think,” said An Interesting Discovery

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Domenica. “Highland Distillers. Then he’s on the board of the Bank of Scotland, and he’s chairman of the National Galleries of Scotland. He’s a very nice man. I’ve met him several times.

Those feet over there must be his – I’m sure of it. And it looks as if he’s in the chair!”

“And can you recognise anybody else?” asked Pat.

“I can,” whispered Angus Lordie. “Take a look at those feet halfway along on the far side. Look at the shoes.”

They all peered through the cracks to examine the shoes that had been pointed out to them. They looked ordinary enough though, and Pat and Domenica were wondering what special features had enabled Angus Lordie to identify them when there came a sound from above, a coughing, and then the sound of a gavel being struck on the surface of the table.

“I call the meeting to order,” a voice announced.

“I was right,” whispered Domenica. “I was right! I know that voice. I know it!”

“The secretary of the New Club,” she said. “That’s him!”

“Chairman,” said the voice, “would you like me to read the minutes of the last meeting?”

“No,” said another voice, from the end of the table. “I think we’ve all read them. Any matters arising?”

There was a silence. “How are things progressing with the . . . with you know what.”

“What?” asked another voice.

“You know,” someone replied. “That delicate business.”

“Oh that!” somebody said. “I had a word with the person in question and it’s all sorted out.”

“But what if it gets out?” asked a woman’s voice. “What if The Scotsman gets to hear of this?”

“They won’t get to hear of it,” said the first voice. “And anyway, it’s just a social matter. Nobody else’s business.”

“Good,” said a woman. “You’ve handled it all very well.”

“Just as you handle everything,” said somebody.

“Thank you. But I think it’s a committee thing. I think we can all take a bit of credit for that.”

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There was silence for a moment. Pat looked at Domenica, who smiled at her. Her expression was triumphant.

“I knew it!” said Domenica quietly. “I knew it all along!”

“Now,” said a more authoritative voice. “Now, I think we should get on with things and look at the draft mission statement. I’m not sure whether we should have a mission statement – or at least not a public one. But I suppose it would be useful to have one just for ourselves, so that we can remind ourselves of what we’re about. What does everybody else think?”

Some of the feet moved. Ankles were crossed, and then uncrossed.

“I think we should have one,” said somebody halfway down the table. As long as it can sum up our essential ethos. That would be useful.”

“And how would we sum that up?” asked a low, rather indistinct voice.

“Essentially we exist in order to . . .” said a voice which was too quiet to be heard properly, “. . . namely by ourselves.”

There were murmers of assent, and then, to the horror of those below, Cyril, who had been standing patiently beside Angus Lordie, uttered a loud bark.

For a moment all was confusion. Angus Lordie bent down to stifle Cyril, who responded by giving a loud yelp of protest. Pat drew away from the crack through which she had been staring, to bang her head rather sharply against Domenica’s forehead which was similarly moving away from the crack. But order soon re-established itself and the three of them moved quickly away from their secret vantage point.

“Time to go!” said Domenica. “Most disappointing, but I think it would be diplomatic to leave.”

They walked back down the new tunnel and soon emerged in the main railway tunnel. Then, the light of the torch getting feebler by the minute, although Domenica assured them there was enough power to see them back to Scotland Street, they began the journey home.

“Do you know what that was?’ Domenica asked. “Do you two realise what we witnessed?”

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“A meeting,” said Pat.

“Yes,” agreed Domenica. “But that was a very special meeting.

That, you see, was the Annual General Meeting of the Edinburgh Establishment!”

95. Mr Guy Peploe Makes an Appearance The next day Pat decided not to tell Matthew about her extraordinary experiences. She had thought that he would be particularly interested in their unexpected witnessing of the Annual General Meeting of the Edinburgh Establishment, as this was a story that any Edinburgh person might be expected to hear with particular relish. The Establishment could be seen in public, of course, at certain events, or on the golf course at Muirfield, but very few people would have imagined that it went so far as to convene an annual general meeting. Nor would most people know who the chairman of the Edinburgh Establishment was, and Pat had been looking forward to breaking that news to Matthew. But when she saw him, with his deflated look and his sense of defeat, she could hardly bring herself to reveal to him just how much excitement there had been the previous evening.

If he asked her, she would say that she had done nothing very 274

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much, for that, she suspected, was what Matthew himself would have done.

The gallery was curiously busy that morning – or at least for the first part of the morning. Several sales were made, including that of a large and particularly fine McCosh study of ornamental fowls. This was, at least, a painting upon which Matthew could expound with knowledge and enthusiasm. He knew Ted McCosh, and was able to explain the trouble he took to mix his own paints and prepare his painting surfaces in exactly the way in which the seventeenth-century Dutch masters would have done, and the client, a large-bellied man from Angus, a ruddy-faced countryman who would have comfortably fitted in a Rowlandson etching, was delighted with his purchase. Could more such paintings be obtained? They could: Ted painted fowl industriously in his studio in Carrington. How contented the ornamental poultry looked in their sylvan setting. Indeed they did.

The sale of the McCosh lifted Matthew’s spirits, with the result that he suggested that both he and Pat should go for coffee that morning. They could leave a note to the effect that anybody who needed them could find them in Big Lou’s coffee shop.

Pat was relieved by the invitation. She was concerned that Matthew might be feeling resentful of her, and she was not sure whether she could manage to work with a disappointed suitor.

But there was none of this as they crossed the street to the coffee bar and picked their way down Big Lou’s hazardous steps, scene of a minor fall all those years ago by Hugh MacDiarmid on his way to what was then a bookshop.

Big Lou welcomed them from behind her counter. There were one or two customers there already, but no sign of Ronnie or Pete.

“The boys seem to be going somewhere else,” said Big Lou, shrugging her shoulders. “Pete owes me fifty pounds, so I think that’s the last I’ll see of them.”

“You shouldn’t lend money,” said Matthew. “You can see that they’re a bad risk.”

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275

“You might not say that if you wanted to borrow off me,” said Lou simply.

They sat down in one of the booths. Matthew stretched out, and smiled.

“Maybe we’re turning the corner,” he said. “Maybe the art market’s picking up.”

Pat smiled. She wanted Matthew to be a success, but she doubted whether it would be as the owner of a gallery. Perhaps there was some other business for which he would show a real aptitude. Perhaps he could . . . perhaps he could be a consultant. There were plenty of people who advertised themselves as consultants, but were rather vague about what exactly it was that one might consult them about. These people offered advice, and people appeared to pay for this advice, although the basis on which the advice was offered sometimes seemed a little bit questionable. There was a boy from Pat’s year at school who was already a consultant at the age of twenty. She had seen him featured in the style section of a newspaper as a “successful consultant”. But how could he advise anybody on anything, when he had not had the time to do anything himself?

Poor Matthew – sitting there with his cappuccino and his label-less shirt, looking pleased with himself because they had sold a few paintings – it would be good, Pat thought, to be able to help him find somebody, a girlfriend who would appreciate him; but how dull it would be for her, how dreary to wait for something to happen, when nothing ever would.

It was while Pat was thinking this, and Matthew was staring dreamily at the froth on the top of his cappuccino, that they heard Big Lou greet another customer.

“Mr Peploe,” she said loudly.

At the mention of the name, Matthew sat up and looked round at the newcomer. He saw a dark-haired man somewhere in his mid-thirties, with a strong face and with eyes that seemed to be amused by something.

Big Lou caught Matthew’s eye. “This is Guy Peploe,” she 276

Mr Peploe Sees Something Interesting said, reaching for a cup from her counter. “Yes! This is Mr Peploe himself!”

Matthew looked confused. “Peploe?” he said weakly.

Big Lou laughed. “I met Mr Peploe a few days ago. He’s from the Scottish Gallery over the road. He said that they usually have their own coffee in the gallery, but that he would pop in and try mine. So here he is!”

“I see,” said Matthew. He looked at Pat for reassurance. This was dangerous.

“And I told him about your painting,” went on Big Lou. “And he said that of course he would look at it for you. He said you shouldn’t be shy. He’s always looking at paintings for people. And if it’s a Peploe, he’ll know. He’s Samuel Peploe’s grandson, you see.”

“Oh,” said Matthew weakly. “I haven’t got it with me. Sorry.”

“But you brought it in this morning,” said Pat. “I saw it. I’ll go and fetch it.”

Guy Peploe smiled politely. “I’d be very happy to take a look,”

he said. “I’m very interested.”

It was difficult for Matthew to do anything but agree. So Pat went back across the road to fetch the Peploe?, leaving Matthew sitting awkwardly under the gaze of Guy Peploe, who seemed to be quietly summing him up.

“I think I was at school with you,” mused Guy Peploe. “You were much younger than I was, but I think I remember you.”

“No,” said Matthew. “Somebody else.”

96. Mr Peploe Sees Something Interesting Pat came back with the Peploe? under her arm. On entering Big Lou’s coffee bar, she saw that Guy Peploe was now sitting opposite Matthew, engaged in conversation. She slipped into the booth opposite Guy Peploe and placed the wrapped painting on the table.

Matthew glanced at her, almost reproachfully. “I don’t think Mr Peploe Sees Something Interesting 277

that it’s a real Peploe,” he said. “I’ve never thought that, actually.

It’s Pat who said it was.”

Pat felt irritated that he should seek to cover his embarrassment by blaming her, but she said nothing.

Guy Peploe was staring at the wrapping. “We’ll see,” he said.

“I take the view that the best way of authenticating a painting is to look at it. Wouldn’t you agree? It’s rather difficult to say anything unless you’ve got the painting in front of you.”

Matthew laughed nervously. “Yes, I find it very difficult when people phone me up and describe a painting that they have. They expect me to be able to value it over the phone.”

“People are funny,” said Guy Peploe. “But you can never turn down an opportunity to look at something. You never know. You remember that Cadell that turned up in a charity shop a few years ago. Remember that?”

“Yes,” said Matthew, who did not remember.

“So perhaps we should take a look at this one,” said Guy Peploe patiently. “Shall I unwrap it?”

Matthew reached for the painting. “I’ll do it,” he said.

He pulled off the sealing tape and slowly unfolded the wrapping paper. Pat watched him, noticing the slight trembling of his hands. It was, for her, a moment of intense human pity.

We are all vulnerable and afraid, she thought – in our different ways.

Matthew removed the last of the wrapping paper and silently handed the picture over to Guy Peploe. Then he glanced at Pat, and lowered his eyes. At the counter, Big Lou stood quite still, her cloth in her hand, her gaze fixed on the Peploe? and Peploe.

Guy Peploe looked at the painting. He held it away from himself for a few moments, narrowing his eyes. Then he turned it round and looked at the back of the canvas. Then he laid it down on the table.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m a Peploe – this isn’t.”

Matthew and Pat had both been holding their breath; now they exhaled together, and it seemed to Pat as if Matthew would continue to lose air until he deflated completely, leaving just 278

Mr Peploe Sees Something Interesting his skin, like an empty balloon. Instinctively she reached out for his hand, which, when she found it, was clammy to the touch.

“It doesn’t matter,” she whispered. “You never really thought it was. It’s all my fault for raising your hopes.”

Guy Peploe looked at Matthew. “Yes,” he said. “I can well see how you could have thought it was by Peploe. You must have a good eye.”

This kind remark may have been meant, or it may not; Pat could not tell. She thought it likely that he was just being kind, and certainly it was a generous thing to say. It would have been easy for him to have dismissed their hopes out of hand, and thus belittled Matthew; but he had not done that. Instead, he had been courteous.

Guy Peploe now picked up the painting and touched it gently with his forefinger. “The paint’s all wrong, I’m afraid,” he said.

“My grandfather painted on absorbent surfaces. This meant that the linseed oil was drained out of the paint and as a result the surface has a lovely, scratchy texture to it. He worked on board, you know. He bought pieces of wood which he would then put in the top of his paint box and work on right there. Sometimes there are grains of sand in the paint because he would be painting on the beach.

“And then there’s the subject. This is Mull, of course, but it’s not quite the right angle for Peploe’s work. My grandfather used to go up to the northern part of Iona and paint Mull from there. There were one or two beaches that he liked in particular. All the paintings he did of Mull from Iona are from that perspective.” He paused, squinting at the painting before him. “Now that over there is definitely Ben More, but it’s Ben More from a rather strange angle. I’m not sure if this view is real at all. It’s almost as if somebody has taken bits of Mull and stuck them together. I’m sorry, but that’s what it seems like to me.”

“But what about the signature?” asked Pat. “That SP in the corner there.”

Guy Peploe smiled. “Signatures can be misleading. Some

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artists never signed their work and yet signatures appear on them later on. That doesn’t mean that the picture in question is a forgery – it’s just that somebody has added a signature.”

“Why would they do that?” asked Matthew.

“Because they think that the painting’s genuine,” explained Guy Peploe. “And it may well be genuine. But then they think that the best way of shoring up their claim that it’s by the artist in question is to add a signature – just to add an extra bit of certainty!”

“And did Peploe sign?” asked Pat.

“Yes,” said Guy Peploe. “He signed works that he was particularly pleased with. He did not use SP, as far as I know.”

As he spoke, Guy Peploe suddenly leaned forward and examined the painting closely. “You know, there’s something rather interesting here,” he muttered. “Yes, look. I’m pretty sure that this is an overpainting. I think that there’s another painting underneath.” He held the painting up so that the light fell upon it from a different angle. “Yes, look at that. Look just above Ben More there. Can you see the shape of . . . yes, the shape of an umbrella?”

They looked, and yes, at a certain angle, there appeared to be the shape of an umbrella. But what would an umbrella be doing above Ben More? The West did indeed get a lot of rain –

but not that much.

97. More about Bertie

Irene and Bertie always arrived punctually for Bertie’s session of psychotherapy with Dr Fairbairn, and the famous analyst, author of that seminal study on Wee Fraser, was always ready for them.

They saw him jointly, which Dr Fairbairn explained was the best way of dealing with an issue in which two parties were involved.

“I could ask you about Bertie, and Bertie about you,” he said.

“And in each case I would get a very different story, quite sincerely put. But if I speak to both of you at the same time, then we shall get closer to the truth.” For a moment he looked doubtful, and added: “That is, if there is such a thing as the truth.”

This last comment puzzled Bertie. Of course there was such a thing as the truth, and it seemed inexplicable that an adult, particularly an adult like Dr Fairbairn, should doubt its existence. There were fibs and then there was the truth. Could Dr Fairbairn not tell the difference between the two? Was Dr Fairbairn perhaps a fibber?

“I fully understand,” said Irene. She was pleased that Dr Fairbairn had invited her to sit in on the therapy sessions, as she enjoyed listening to the sound of his voice, and she delighted in his subtle, perceptive questioning. His manner was suggestive, she had decided; not suggestive in any pejorative sense, but suggestive in the sense that he could elicit responses that revealed something important.

That morning, as Dr Fairbairn ushered them into his consulting room, she noticed that there was a new copy of the International Bulletin of Dynamic Psychoanalysis lying on the top of his desk. The sight thrilled her, and she tried, by craning her neck, to make out the titles listed on the cover. Mother as Stalin, she read, A New Analysis. That looked interesting, even if the title was slightly opaque. It must have been all about the need that boys are said to feel to get away from the influence of their mothers. Yes, she supposed that this was true: there were boys who needed to get away from their mothers, but that was certainly not Bertie’s problem. She had a perfectly good relationship with More about Bertie

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Bertie, as Dr Fairbairn was no doubt in the process of discovering. Bertie’s problem was . . . well, she was not sure what Bertie’s problem was. Again, this was something that Dr Fairbairn would illuminate over the weeks and months to come. It was, no doubt, his anxieties over the good breast and what she had always referred to as Bertie’s additional part. Boys tended to be anxious about their additional parts, which was strange, as she would have imagined an additional part was something to which one might reasonably be quite indifferent, in the same way one was indifferent to other appendices, such as one’s appendix.