Love Over Scotland

This book has been optimized for viewing at a monitor setting of 1024 x 768 pixels.

Chapter title

a

praise for the

4 4 S C O T L A N D S T R E E T S E R I E S

“A characteristically sly and eccentric portrait of Edinburgh society.” — Entertainment Weekly

“[McCall Smith’s] sense of gentle but pointed humor is once again afoot.”

— The Seattle Times

“Soulful [and] sweet. . . . Will make you feel as though you live in Edinburgh, if only for a short while, and it’s a fine place to visit indeed. . . . Long live the folks on Scotland Street.”

— The Times-Picayune (New Orleans)

“It is McCall Smith’s particular genius to be able to look on the brighter side of life, and he’s seldom done so more enjoyably.”

— The Scotsman

“A lively new series.”

— The Washington Post

“Alexander McCall Smith is the most genial of writers and the most gentle of satirists. . . . [The] characters are great fun . . .

[and] McCall Smith treats all of them with affection.”

— Rocky Mountain News

b o o k s b y a l e x a n d e r m cc a l l s m i t h i n t h e n o . 1 l a d i e s ’ d e t e c t i v e a g e n cy s e r i e s The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency Tears of the Giraffe

Morality for Beautiful Girls

The Kalahari Typing School for Men The Full Cupboard of Life

In the Company of Cheerful Ladies Blue Shoes and Happiness

The Good Husband of Zebra Drive

i n t h e i s a b e l d a l h o u s i e s e r i e s The Sunday Philosophy Club

Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

The Right Attitude to Rain

The Careful Use of Compliments

i n t h e p o rt u g u e s e i r r e g u l a r v e r b s s e r i e s Portuguese Irregular Verbs

The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs

At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances i n t h e 44 s c o t l a n d s t r e e t s e r i e s 44 Scotland Street

Espresso Tales

Love Over Scotland

The Girl Who Married a Lion and Other Tales from Africa alexander mccall smith

L O V E O V E R S C O T L A N D

Alexander McCall Smith is the author of the international phenomenon The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, the Isabel Dalhousie series, the Portuguese Irregular Verbs series, and the 44 Scotland Street series. He is Professor Emeritus of medical law at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and has served on many national and international bodies concerned with bioethics. He was born in what is now known as Zimbabwe, and he was a law professor at the University of Botswana.

Visit his Web site at

www

.

.alexandermccallsmith.com

LOVE OVER

SCOTLAND

A L E X A N D E R M c C A L L S M I T H

Illustrations b y

I A I N M c I N TO S H

a n c h o r b o o k s

A Division of Random House, Inc.

New York

F I R S T A N C H O R B O O K S E D I T I O N , N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 7

Copyright © 2006 by Alexander McCall Smith Illustrations copyright © 2006 by Iain McIntosh All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in Great Britain by Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn, Ltd., Edinburgh, in 2006.

Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book is excerpted from a series that originally appeared in The Scotsman newspaper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McCall Smith, Alexander, 1948–.

Love over Scotland / Alexander McCall Smith. —

1st Anchor Books ed.

p. cm.

eISBN: 978-0-307-38759-2

1. Edinburgh (Scotland)—Fiction. 2. Apartment houses—

Fiction. I. Title.

PR6063.C326L68 2007

823'.914—dc22

2007022072

Author illustration © Iain McIntosh

w w w . a n c h o r b o o k s . c o m

v1.0

This book is for David and Joyce Robinson 44 Scotland Street: The Story So Far At the end of the second series of 44 Scotland Street we saw Domenica leaving for the Malacca Straits for the purposes of anthropological research. We saw Bruce safely departed for London. Now Pat is about to start her course in history of art at the University of Edinburgh. She moves out of Scotland Street to the South Side, but this does not mean that she breaks off all connections with the New Town.

Poor Matthew. Even with the recent substantial gift which his father has given him, he is still restless and unfulfilled.

Matthew, of course, would like to be fulfilled with Pat, but Pat does not wish to find fulfilment with Matthew.

In the second series, Angus Lordie got nowhere. He is missing Domenica, though, and hopes that the part which she played in his life will be taken by Antonia Collie, a friend whom Domenica has allowed to move into her flat in her absence. However, Antonia proves to be a somewhat difficult character.

We saw Bertie spending more time with his father, Stuart, who had managed to wring some concessions out of Irene, but some dawns, alas, are false. Irene does not change; to change her would be to deprive this story of the strong air of reality which has pervaded it thus far. For this is no fanciful picture of Edinburgh life, this is exactly as it is.

1. Pat Distracted on a Tedious Art Course Pat let her gaze move slowly round the room, over the figures seated at the table in the seminar room. There were ten of them; eleven if one counted Dr Fantouse himself, although he was exactly the sort of person one wouldn’t count. Dr Fantouse, reader in the history of art and author of The Discerning Gaze in the Quattrocento was a mild, rather mousy man, who for some reason invariably evoked the pity of students. It was not that they disliked him – he was too kind and courteous for that –

they just felt a vague, inexpressible regret that he existed, with his shabby jacket and his dull Paisley ties; no discernment there, one of them had said, with some satisfaction at the wit of the remark. And then there was the name, which sounded so like that marvellous, but under-used, Scots word which Pat’s father used to describe the overly flashy – fantoosh. Dr Fantouse was not fantoosh in any respect; but neither was . . . Pat’s gaze had gone all the way round the table, over all ten, skipping over Dr Fantouse quickly, as in sympathy, and now returned to the boy sitting opposite her.

He was called Wolf, she had discovered. At the first meeting of the class they had all introduced themselves round the table, at the suggestion of Dr Fantouse himself (“I’m Geoffrey Fantouse, as you may know; I’m the Quattrocento really, but I have a strong interest in aesthetics, which, I hardly need to remind you, is what we shall be discussing in this course”).

And then had come a succession of names: Ginny, Karen, Mark, Greg, Alice, and so on until, at the end, Wolf, looking down at the table in modesty, had said, “Wolf ”, and Pat had seen the barely disguised appreciative glances of Karen and Ginny.

Wolf. It was a very good name for a boy, thought Pat; ideal, 2

Pat Distracted on a Tedious Art Course in fact. Wolf was a name filled with promise. And this Wolf, sitting opposite her, fitted the name perfectly. He was tall, broad-shouldered, with a shock of golden hair and a broad smile. Boys like that could look – and be – vacuous – surfing types with a limited vocabulary and an off-putting empty-headedness. But not this Wolf. There was a lambent intelligence in his face, a light in the eyes that revealed the mind behind the appealing features.

Now, at the second meeting of the seminar group, Pat struggled to follow the debate which Dr Fantouse was trying to encourage. They had been invited to consider the contention of Joseph Beuys that the distinction between what is art in the products of our human activity and what is not art, is a perni-cious and pointless one. The discussion, which could have been so passionate, had never risen above the bland; there had been long silences, even after the name of Damien Hirst had been raised and Dr Fantouse, in an attempt to provoke controversy, had expressed doubts over the display of half a cow in formaldehyde. “I am not sure,” he had ventured, “whether an artist of another period, let us say Donatello, would have considered this art. Butchery, maybe, or even science, but perhaps not art.”

This remark had been greeted with silence. Then the thin-faced girl sitting next to Pat had spoken. “Can Damien Hirst actually draw?” she asked. “I mean, if you asked him to draw a house, would he be able to do so? Would it look like a house?”

They stared at her. “I don’t see what that . . .” began a young man.

“That raises an interesting issue of representation,” interrupted Dr Fantouse. “I’m not sure that the essence of art is its ability to represent. May I suggest, perhaps, that we turn to the ideas of Benedetto Croce and see whether he can throw any light on the subject. As you know, Croce believed in the existence of an aesthetic function built into, so to speak, the human mind. This function . . .”

Pat looked up at the ceiling. At the beginning of the new semester she had been filled with enthusiasm at the thought of Pat Distracted on a Tedious Art Course 3

what lay ahead. The idea of studying the history of art seemed to her to be immensely exciting – an eagerly anticipated intellectual adventure – but somehow the actual experience had failed so far to live up to her expectations. She had not foreseen these dry sessions with Dr Fantouse and the arid wastes of Croce; the long silences in the seminars; the absence of sparkle.

Of course there had been numerous adjustments in her life.

She had left the flat in Scotland Street, she had said goodbye to Bruce, who had gone to London, and she had also seen off her friend and neighbour, Domenica Macdonald, who had embarked on a train from Waverley Station on the first leg of her journey to the Straits of Malacca and her anthropological project. And she had moved, too, to the new flat in Spottiswoode Street, which she now shared with three other students, all female. Those were enough changes in any life, and the starting of the course had merely added to the stress.

“You’ll feel better soon,” her father had said when she had phoned him to complain of the blues that seemed to have descended on her. “Blues pass.” And then he had hesitated, and she had known that he had been on the verge of saying: “Of course you could come home,” but had refrained from doing so. For he knew, as well as she did, that she could not go home to the family house in the Grange, to her room, which was there exactly as she had left it, because that would be conceding defeat in the face of life before she had even embarked on it. So nothing more had been said.

And now, while Dr Fantouse said something more about Benedetto Croce – remarks that were met with complete silence by the group – Pat looked across the table to where Wolf was sitting and saw that he was looking at her.

They looked at one another for a few moments, and then Wolf, for his part, slowly raised a finger to his lips, and left it there for a few seconds, looking at her as he did so. Then he mouthed something which she could not make out exactly, of course, but which seemed to her to be this: Hey there, little Red Riding Hood!

2. A Picture in a Magazine

At the end of the seminar, when Dr Fantouse had shuffled off in what can only have been disappointment and defeat, back to the Quattrocento, the students snapped shut their notebooks, yawned, scratched their heads, and made their way out of the seminar room and into the corridor. Pat had deliberately avoided looking at Wolf, but she was aware of the fact that he was slow in leaving the seminar room, having dropped something on the floor, and was busy searching for it. There was a notice-board directly outside the door, and she stopped at this, looking at the untidy collection of posters which had been pinned up by a variety of student clubs and societies. None of these was of real interest to her. She did not wish to take up gliding and had only a passing interest in salsa classes. Nor was she interested in teaching at an American summer camp, for which no experience was necessary, although enthusiasm was helpful. But at least these notices gave her an excuse to wait until Wolf came out, which he did a few moments later.

She stood quite still, peering at the small print on the summer camp poster. There was something about an orientation weekend and insurance, and then a deposit would be necessary unless . . .

“Not a nice way to spend the summer,” a voice behind her said. “Hundreds of brats. No time off. Real torture.”

She turned round, affecting surprise. “Yes,” she said. “I wasn’t really thinking of doing it.”

“I had a friend who did it once,” said Wolf. “He ran away.

He actually physically ran away to New York after two weeks.”

He looked at his watch and then nodded in the direction of the door at the end of the corridor. “Are you hungry?”

Pat was not, but said that she was. “Ravenous.”

“We could go up to the Elephant House,” Wolf said, glancing at his watch. “We could have coffee and a sandwich.”

They walked through George Square and across the wide space in front of the McEwan Hall. In one corner, their skateboards at their feet, a group of teenage boys huddled against A Picture in a Magazine

5

the world, caps worn backwards, baggy, low-crotched trousers half-way down their flanks. Pat had wondered what these youths talked about and had concluded that they talked about nothing, because to talk was uncool. Perhaps Domenica could do field work outside the McEwan Hall – once she had finished with her Malacca Straits pirates – living with the skateboarders, in a little tent in the rhododendrons at the edge of the square, observing the socio-dynamics of the group, the leadership struggles, the badges of status. Would they accept her, she wondered?

Or would she be viewed with suspicion, as an unwanted visitor from the adult world, the world of speech?

She found out a little bit more about Wolf as they made their way to the Elephant House. As they crossed the road at Napier’s Health Food Shop, Wolf told her that his mother was an enthusiast of vitamins and homeopathic medicine. He had been fed on vitamins as a boy and had been taken to a homeopathic doctor, who gave him small doses of carefully-chosen poison.

The whole family took Echinacea against colds, regularly, although they still got them.

“It keeps her happy,” he said. “You know how mothers are.

And it’s cool by me if my mother’s unstressed. You know what I mean?”

Pat thought she did. “That’s cool,” she said.

And then he told her that he came from Aberdeen. His father, he said, was in the oil business. He had a company which supplied valves for off-shore wells. They sold valves all over the world, and his father was often away in places like Houston and Brunei.

He collected air miles which he gave to Wolf.

“I can go anywhere I want,” he said. “I could go to South America, if I wanted. Tomorrow. All on air miles.”

“I haven’t got any air miles,” said Pat.

“None at all?”

“No.”

Wolf shrugged. “No big deal,” he said. “You don’t really need them.”

“Do you think that Dr Fantouse has any air miles?” asked Pat suddenly.

6

A Picture in a Magazine

They both laughed. “Definitely not,” said Wolf. “Poor guy.

Bus miles maybe.”

Inside the Elephant House it was beginning to get busy, and they had to wait to be served. Wolf suggested that Pat should find a table while he ordered the coffee and the sandwiches.

Pat, waiting for Wolf, paged through a glossy magazine which she found in a rack on the wall. It was one of those magazines which everyone affected to despise, but which equally everyone rather enjoyed – page after page of pictures of celebrities, lounging by the side of swimming pools, leaving expensive restaurants, arriving at parties. The locales, and the clothes, were redolent of luxury, even if luxury that was in very poor taste; and the people looked rather like waxworks – propped up, prompted into positions of movement, but made of wax. This was due to the fact that the photographers caked them with make-up, somebody had explained to her. That’s why they looked so artificial.

She turned a page, and stopped. There had been a party, somebody’s twenty-first, at Gleneagles. Elegant girls in glittering dresses were draped about young men in formal kilt outfits, dinner jackets and florid silk bow-ties. And there was Wolf, standing beside a girl with red hair, a glass of champagne in his hand. Pat stared at the photograph. Surely it could not be him.

Nobody she knew was in Hi! magazine; this was another world.

But it must have been him, because there was the smile, and the hair, and that look in the eyes.

She looked up. Wolf was standing at the table, holding a tray.

He laid the tray down on the table, and glanced at the magazine.

“Is this you, Wolf?” Pat asked. “Look. I can’t believe that I know somebody in Hi! ”

Wolf glanced at the picture and frowned. “You don’t,” he said.

“That’s not me.”

Pat looked again at the picture then transferred her gaze up to Wolf. If it was not him, then it was his double.

Wolf took the magazine from her and tossed it to the other end of the table.

“I can’t bear those mags,” he said. “Full of nothing. Airheads.”

Co-incidence in Spottiswoode Street 7

He turned to her and smiled, showing his teeth, which were very white, and even, and which for some rather disturbing reason she wanted to touch.

3. Co-incidence in Spottiswoode Street

“Your name,” said Pat to Wolf, as they sat drinking coffee in the Elephant House. “Your name intrigues me. I don’t think I’ve met anybody called Wolf before.” She paused. Perhaps it was a sore point with him; people could be funny about their names, and perhaps Wolf was embarrassed about his. “Of course, there’s nothing wrong with . . .”

Wolf smiled. “Don’t worry,” he said. “People are often surprised when I tell them what I’m called. There’s a simple explanation. It’s not the name I was given at the beginning.

That’s . . .”

Pat waited for him to finish the sentence, but he had raised his mug of coffee to his mouth and was looking at her over the rim. His eyes, she saw, were bright, as if he was teasing her about something.

“You don’t have to tell me,” she said quietly.

He put down his mug. “But you do want to know, don’t you?”

Pat shrugged. “Only if you want to tell me.”

“All right,” said Wolf. “I started out as Wilfred.”

Pat felt a sudden urge to laugh, and almost did. There were more embarrassing names than that, of course – Cuthbert, for instance – but she could not see Wolf as Wilfred. There was no panache about Wilfred; none of the slight threat that went with Wolf.

“I couldn’t stand being called Wilfred,” Wolf went on. “And it was worse when it was shortened to Wilf. So I decided when I was about ten that I would be Wolfred, and my parents went along with that. So I was Wolfred from then on. That’s the name on my student card. At school they called me Wolf. You were Patricia, I suppose?”

8

Co-incidence in Spottiswoode Street

“Yes,” said Pat. “But I can’t remember ever being called that, except by the headmistress at school, who called everybody by their full names. But, look, there’s nothing all that wrong with Wilfred. There’s . . .”

Wolf interrupted her. “Let’s not talk about names,” he said.

He glanced at his sandwich. “I’m going to have to eat this quickly.

I have to go and see somebody.”

Pat felt a sudden stab of disappointment. She wanted to spend longer with him; just sitting there, in his company, made her forget that she had been feeling slightly dispirited. It was about being in the presence of beauty that seemed to charge the surrounding air; and Wolf, she had decided, was beautiful. They had been sitting in that seminar room, she reflected, talking about beauty – which is what she thought aesthetics was all about

– and beauty was there before their eyes; assured, content with the space it occupied, as beauty always was.

She picked up her sandwich and bit into it. She could not let him leave her sitting there – that was such an admission of social failure – to be left sitting at a table when somebody goes off. It was the sort of thing that would happen to Dr Fantouse; he was the type who must often be left at the table by others; poor man, with his Quattrocento and his green Paisley ties, left alone at the table while all his colleagues, the Renaissance and Victorian people, pushed back their chairs and got up.

At the door, Wolf said: “Which way are you going?” and Pat replied: “Across the Meadows.”

“That’s cool,” said Wolf. “I’ll walk with you. I’m heading that way too.”

They walked together, chatting comfortably as they did. They talked about the other members of the class, some of whom Wolf knew rather better than Pat did. Wolf was a member of the University Renaissance Singers and had been on a singing tour with one of the other young men. “He’s hopeless,” he said.

“All he wants to do, you know, is go to bars and get drunk. And he keeps going on and on about some girl called Jean he met in Glasgow. Apparently she’s got the most tremendous voice and is studying opera at the Academy there. He can’t stop talking Co-incidence in Spottiswoode Street 9

about her. You watch. He’ll probably bring her name up in the seminar: ‘Jean says that Benedetto Croce . . . ’”

There were other snippets of gossip, and then he enquired about what Pat had been doing the previous year. She told him about the job in the Gallery, which she still had on a part-time basis, and about Scotland Street too.

“It’s more interesting in the New Town,” he said. “Up in Marchmont everybody’s a student. There are no . . . well, no real people. The New Town’s different. Who did you share with?”

Pat wondered how one might describe Bruce. It was difficult to know where to start. “A boy,” she said. “Bruce Anderson. We weren’t . . . you know, there was nothing between us.” But there had been, she thought, blushing at the memory of her sudden infatuation. Was that nothing?

“Of course not,” said Wolf. “People you share with are a no-no. If things get difficult, then you have to move out. Or they have to.”

Pat agreed. “And I knew everybody else on the stair,” she said. “There was this woman called Domenica Macdonald. She lived opposite. And a couple called Irene and Stuart who had a little boy called Bertie. He played the saxophone and I used to hear ‘As Time Goes By’ drifting up through the walls. And two guys on the first floor.”

They had now crossed Melville Drive and, having walked up the brae past the towering stone edifice of Warrender Park Terrace, with its giddy attic windows breaking out of the steep slate roofs, they were at the beginning of Spottiswoode Street.

A few doorways along was Pat’s stair, with its communal door and list of names alongside the bell-pulls. She assumed that Wolf would be going on, perhaps to Thirlestane Road, where so many people seemed to live, but when she indicated that she had reached her destination, he stopped too, and smiled.

“But so have I,” he said.

Her heart gave a leap. Was there some other meaning to this?

Did he expect her to invite him upstairs? She would, of course. She did not want him to go. She wanted to be with him, to be beguiled.

10

At Domenica’s Flat

“I live here,” she said, hesitantly.

“What floor?”

“Second. Middle flat.”

Wolf swept back the hair that the wind had blown across his brow. “But that’s amazing,” he said, his eyes wide with surprise.

“So does my girlfriend, Tessie. You must be sharing with her.”

4. At Domenica’s Flat

Angus Lordie, portrait painter and occasional poet, walked slowly down Scotland Street, looking up at the windows. He liked to look into other people’s houses, if he could. It was not nosiness, of course; artists were allowed to look, he thought –

no artist could really be considered a voyeur. Looking was what an artist was trained to do, and if an artist did not look, then he would not see. The evening was the best time to inspect the domestic arrangements of others, as people often left their lights on and their curtains open, thus creating a stage for passers-by to see. And the New Town of Edinburgh provided rich theatre in that respect, especially along the more gracious Georgian streets where tall windows at ground floor allowed a fine view of drawing rooms and studies. Of course curtains could have been pulled across such windows, but often were not, and Angus Lordie was convinced that this was because those who lived within wanted people to see what they had, wanted them to see their grand pianos, their heavily-framed pictures, their clutters of chinoiserie. Heriot Row and Moray Place were good for this, although the decoration of most Moray Place flats was somewhat dull. But there was a particularly fine grand piano in a window in Ainslie Place and a Ferguson picture of a woman in a hat in Great Stuart Street.

As he walked down Scotland Street, Angus Lordie reflected on the melancholy nature of his errand. So many times I have walked this way, he thought, to call on my old friend, Domenica Macdonald, and now I make my way to her empty flat. But then

At Domenica’s Flat

11

he reminded himself: Domenica is not dead, and I must not think of her in that way. She has simply gone to the Malacca Straits, and that is not the same thing as being dead. And yet he wondered how long it would be before he saw her again. She had not said anything about when she would return, but had hinted that it could be as much as a year, perhaps even longer.

A year! He had wanted to say to her: “And what about me, Domenica? What am I to do in that year?”

Angus looked down at his dog, Cyril, and Cyril looked back up at him mournfully. Cyril was an intelligent dog – too intelligent for his own good, according to some – and he knew that this was a dull outing from the canine point of view. Cyril liked going for a walk up to Northumberland Street, where he could lift his leg against the railings at each doorway, and he also liked to go to the Cumberland Bar, where he was always given a small glass of beer and where there were people to look at. He was not so keen on Scotland Street, where he knew he would be tethered to a railing while Angus went upstairs. And there were cats in Scotland Street, too; outrageous cats who, understanding the restraint of his tethered lead, would saunter across the street with impunity, staring at him with that feline arrogance that no dog can stand.

12

At Domenica’s Flat

Angus reached the front doorway of No 44 and was about to press Domenica’s bell out of habit when he remembered that he had no need to do this, and that there was no point. He had the key to her flat up on the top landing and could let himself in. He sighed, and pushed open the outer door. Inside there was that familiar smell that he associated with her stairway: the chalky smell of the stone, the sweet smell of the nasturtiums that somebody on the first floor grew in a tub on the landing.

He made his way up the stair, pausing for a moment on one of the lower landings. Somebody was playing a musical instrument, a saxophone, he thought. He listened. Yes, it was unmistakable. ‘As Time Goes By’. Casablanca. And then he remembered that this was the home of that little boy, the one Domenica had told him about, the one with that ghastly pushy mother whom Cyril had bitten on the ankle in Dundas Street.

He smiled. She had made such a fuss about it and he had been obliged to wallop Cyril with a rolled up newspaper to show her that he was being punished. But it had been hard to suppress his laughter. That woman had insulted Cyril and he had bitten her: what could she expect? But dogs were always in the wrong when they bit somebody – it was part of the social contract between dogs and man. You can live with us, yes, but don’t bite us.

He continued up the stair and stood before Domenica’s doorway, slipping the key into the lock. There was mail to be picked up – a small pile of letters and some leaflets from local traders. He shuffled through these, tossing the leaflets into the bin and tucking the letters into the pocket of his jacket. He would place those in one of the large envelopes left him by Domenica and send them off to the address in the Malacca Straits. He was not sure whether her mail would ever reach her

– the address she had given him seemed somewhat unlikely –

but his duty was done once he posted them.

He walked through the hall and went into Domenica’s study.

She had left it scrupulously tidy and the surface of her desk was quite bare. They had spent so many hours there, with Domenica talking about all those things she liked to talk about, which was The Judgement of Neuroaesthetics

13

everything, he thought; everything. And now there was silence, and nobody to talk to.

“I come alone to this room,” he said quietly.

“This room in which you sat

And filled my world with images.

I would reply, but cannot speak,

I would cry, but cannot weep.”

He stopped himself, and looked at his watch. He would not allow himself to become maudlin. Domenica was just a friend –

that and no more – and he would not pine for her. I am not here to think about her, he said to himself. I am here to let her new tenant into the flat and to tell her about the hot water system. Life is not about thoughts of loss and separation; it is about hot water systems and remembering to put out the rubbish, and making siccar in all the other little ways in which we must make siccar.

5. The Judgement of Neuroaesthetics

“Now then,” said the woman on the doorstep of Domenica’s flat. “You must be Angus Lordie. Thank you for letting me in.

I hope I haven’t kept you waiting.”

“You have not,” said Angus, looking at the woman standing before him. “Not at all.” His portraitist’s eye, from ancient habit, noted the high cheek bones and the slightly retroussé nose; noted with approval, and with understanding too, as he knew that a feminine face such as this was subliminally irresistible to men.

Men liked women whose faces reminded them of babies – a heightened brow, a pert nose – these sent signals to men: protect me, I’m vulnerable. ‘Neuroaesthetics’ was the term he had seen for this new discipline; not that such a science could tell him anything that he did not already know as a painter and connoisseur of the human face. Regularity was good, but not too much regularity, which became tedious, almost nauseating.

Of course, there was far more that Angus was able to read into the physical appearance of Antonia Collie as she stood 14

The Judgement of Neuroaesthetics

before him. They had barely introduced themselves, and yet he was confident as to her social background, her interests, and her availability. The clothes spoke to the provenance: a skirt of cashmere printed in a discreetly Peruvian pattern (or, certainly, South American; and Peru was very popular); a white linen blouse (only those with time on their hands to iron could wear linen); and then a navy-blue jacket with a gold brooch in the form of a running hare. The navy-blue jacket indicated attachment to the existing order, or even to an order which no longer existed, while the brooch announced that this was a person who had lived in the country, or at least one who knew what the country was all about. Of course, the fact that this Antonia Collie was a close friend of Domenica’s would have told Angus Lordie all this, had he reflected on the fact that people’s close friends are usually in their own mould. Antonia would thus be a blue stocking, a woman of intellectual interests and marked views.

Angus smiled at the thought, relishing the prospect of a replacement for Domenica. It was all most convenient; his visits to Domenica, his enjoyment of her conversation – and her wine

– would now be replaced by the exact equivalent, provided by Antonia Collie. It was a very satisfactory prospect.

“Please let me take that for you,” he said, pointing to the small brown case beside her. “Is this all you have?”

“Sufficient unto the day,” said Antonia, stepping aside to allow Angus to pick up the suitcase. “I didn’t need to bring much of my own stuff. Domenica and I are the same size, you see. She said I could just wear her clothes if I liked. And drive her car too. She’s such a generous friend!”

Angus nodded. He did not show his surprise, but it seemed a very odd arrangement to him. Clothes were very personal and he could not imagine being happy in the knowledge that somebody else was wearing his clothes. He had once found himself wearing a pair of socks that he did not recognise and had been appalled at the thought that he had inadvertently taken his host’s pair of socks when he had stayed with friends in Kelso. What a dreadful thought! For the next few days he examined his toes carefully for signs of fungal infection; or would a normal wash The Judgement of Neuroaesthetics

15

effectively rid socks of lurking fungus? His host had been a perfectly respectable person – a lawyer, no less – but athlete’s foot was no respecter of professional position: it could strike even a WS. Of course, women were much more relaxed about these matters, he thought; they shared clothes quite willingly.

Perhaps this was because they did not find one another physically disgusting. Men, in general, found one another vaguely repulsive; women were different.

With these thoughts in mind, Angus carried Antonia’s small suitcase through to the study and laid it down near the fireplace.

Antonia had moved to the window and was peering down to the street.

“It’s a long time since I was in this flat,” she mused, craning her neck to look. “I seem to remember Domenica having a slightly better view than this. Still, no matter. I doubt if I shall spend my time gazing out of the window.”

She turned and looked at Angus. “Domenica often spoke of you,” she said. “She enjoyed the conversations the two of you had.”

“And I too,” Angus said. “She was . . .” He looked at her, and she saw the sadness in his expression.

“Let’s not use the past tense when speaking of her,” said Antonia cheerfully. “She’s not exactly dead yet, is she? She’s in the Malacca Straits. That, I would have thought, amounts to being amongst the quick.”

“Of course,” said Angus hurriedly, but added: “That does seem a long way away. And it’s going to be months and months before we see her again.”

Antonia shot him a glance. Was this man Domenica’s lover?

It was difficult to imagine Domenica with a lover, and she had never seen her with him. But people such as Domenica liked a certain amount of mystery in their personal lives, and he may have been something special to her. Curious, though, that she should choose a man like this, with his intrusive stare and those disconcerting gold teeth; to have a lover with gold teeth was decidedly exotic. And yet he was a handsome man, she thought, with that wavy hair and those eyes. Dark hair and blue eyes were a dangerous combination in a man.

16

Gurus as Father Substitutes

And Angus, returning her gaze, thought: she’s younger than Domenica by a good few years; younger than me, too. And she’s undoubtedly attractive. Does she have a husband? Presumably not, because a woman with a husband would not come to stay for six months in a friend’s flat and not bring the husband with her. A lover, then? No. She had that look, that indefinable yet unmistakable look, of one who was alone in this world. And if she were alone, then how long would that last, with that concise nose of hers that would break ilka heart, but no the moudie man’s? It was a play on a poem about the moudie and the moudie man, and it popped into his mind, just like that, as off-beat, poetic thoughts will break surface at the strangest moments, leaving us disturbed, puzzled, wondering. The mole’s little eyes would break every heart, but not the molecatcher’s.

6. Gurus as Father Substitutes

While Antonia went into the bedroom with her suitcase, Angus Lordie busied himself in the kitchen making coffee for the two of them. After coffee he would show her round the rest of the Gurus as Father Substitutes

17

flat; there was a trick with the central-heating controls that he would need to explain (the timer went backwards for some reason, which required some calculation in the setting) and he would have to tell her about the fuse-box, too, which had idio-syncrasies of its own.

They would have to have black coffee, as there was no milk in the fridge. A woman would have thought of stocking the fridge with essentials for an arriving tenant: a loaf of bread, a pint or two of milk, some butter. But men did not think of these things, and Angus had brought nothing. His own fridge was usually empty, so there was no reason why he should think of replenishing Domenica’s.

“Have you known Domenica for long?” he asked, as Antonia, returning from the bedroom, seated herself opposite him at the kitchen table.

“Twenty years,” she said abruptly. “Although I feel I’ve known her forever. Don’t you find that there are some friends who are like that? You feel that you’ve known them all your life.”

Angus nodded. “I feel that I’ve known Domenica forever too.

That’s why . . .” He stopped himself. He was about to explain that this was why he felt her absence so keenly, but that would sound self-pitying and there was nothing less attractive than self-pity.

Antonia continued. “I met her when I was a student,” she said. “I was twenty and she was . . . well, I suppose she must have been about forty then. She was my tutor in an anthropology course I took. It was not my main subject – that was Scottish history – but I found her fascinating. The professors thought her a bit of maverick. They forced her out in the end.”

“Very unfair,” said Angus. He could not imagine Domenica being forced out of anything, but perhaps when she was younger it might have been easier.

“Very stupid, more likely,” said Antonia. “The problem was that she was far brighter than those particular professors. She frightened them because she could talk about anything and everything and their own knowledge was limited to a narrow little corner of the world. That disturbed them. And universities 18

Gurus as Father Substitutes

are still full of people like that, you know. People of broad culture may find it rather difficult in them. Timid, bureaucratic places.

And very politically conformist.”

“I don’t know,” said Angus. “Surely some of them . . .”

“Of course,” said Antonia. “But, but . . . the trouble is that they’re so busy with their social engineering that they’ve lost all notion of what it is to be a liberal-minded institution.”

“I don’t know,” said Angus. “Surely things aren’t that bad . . .”

“Not that I’m one of these people who goes round muttering

‘ O tempora, O mores’,” went on Antonia. “Mind you, I don’t suppose many people in a university these days understand what that means.”

Angus laughed. He had always enjoyed Domenica’s wit and had been missing it already; but now it seemed that relief was in sight. Or, as Domenica might have it, relief was insight . . .

“Scottish history,” Angus said.

Antonia nodded. “Indeed. I studied under Gordon Donaldson and then under that very great man, John Macqueen. Such an interesting scholar, Macqueen, with his books on numerology and the like. You never knew what he would turn to next. And his son writes too – Hector Macqueen. He came up with some very intriguing things and then for some reason wrote a history of Heriot’s Cricket Club – a very strange book, but it must have been of interest to somebody. Can you imagine a cricketing history? Can you?”

“I suppose it has lists of who scored what,” said Angus. “And who went in first, and things like that.”

They were silent for a moment, both contemplating the full, arid implications of a cricketing history. Then Antonia broke the silence.

“I’ve never played cricket,” she said. “Yet there are ladies’

cricket teams. You hear about them from time to time. I can’t imagine what they’re like. But I suppose they enjoy themselves.

It’s the sort of thing that rather brisk women like to do. You know the sort.”

Angus did. He was enjoying the conversation greatly and had decided that he very much approved of Domenica’s new Gurus as Father Substitutes

19

tenant. He wondered whether he might invite her for dinner that night, or whether it would be considered a little forward at this early stage in their acquaintanceship. He hesitated for a moment; why should he not? She had said nothing to indicate that she was spoken for, and even if she was, there was nothing wrong in a neighbourly supper à deux. So he asked her, suggesting that she might care to take pot luck in his kitchen as this was her first day in the flat and she would not have had time to get in supplies.

Antonia hesitated, but only for a moment. “How tempting,”

she said quietly. “You really have been too kind to me. And I would love to accept, but I think that this evening I must work.

I really must.”

“Work?”

Antonia sighed. “My poor book, you know. I’m writing a book and it’s suffering from maternal deprivation. Bowlby syndrome, as they call it.”

“Bowlby?”

“A psychologist. He was something of a guru once. He took the view that bad behaviour results from inadequate maternal attention.”

Angus thought for a moment. I need a guru, he said to himself.

Would Antonia be his guru? He blushed at the unspoken thought. It would be wonderful to have a guru; it would be like having a social worker or a personal trainer, not that people who had either of these necessarily appreciated the advice they received.

“Of course it’s absurd, this search for gurus,” Antonia said.

“People who need gurus are really searching for something else altogether, don’t you think? Fundamentally insecure people.

Looking for father.”

Angus looked at her. He was beginning to dislike Antonia.

How strange, he thought, that our feelings can change so fast.

Like that. Just like that. And he thought of how the sky over Edinburgh could change in an instant, between summer and winter, as the backdrop can be shifted in a theatre, curtains lowered from the heavens in each case, changing everything.

7. Angus Goes Off Antonia, in a Big Way Angus Lordie was deep in thought as he walked home. At his side, Cyril, sensing his master’s abstraction, had briefly tugged at his lead at the point where Dundonald Street joined Drummond Place; he had hoped that Angus might be persuaded to call in at the Cumberland Bar, but his promptings had been ignored. Cyril understood; he knew that his life was an adjunct life, lived in the shadow of his master, and that canine views counted for nothing; yet it would have been good, he thought, to sit on the bar’s black-and-white chequered floor sipping from a bowl of Guinness and staring at the assorted ankles under the table. But this was not to be, and he was rapidly diverted from this agreeable fantasy to the real world of sounds and smells. It is a large room, the world of smells for a dog, and Drummond Place, though familiar territory, was rich in possibilities; each passer-by left a trail that spoke to where he had been and what he had been doing – a whole history might lie on the pavement, like song-lines across the Australian Outback, detectable only to those with the necessary nose. Other smells were like a palimpsest: odour laid upon odour, smells that could be peeled off to reveal the whiff below. Cyril quivered; a strange scent wafted from a doorway, a musty, inexplicable odour that reminded him of something that he had known somewhere before, in his previous life in Lochboisdale, a long time ago. He stopped, and tugged at his leash, but Angus ignored his concern, yanking him roughly to heel. Cyril had never bitten his master, not once, but there were times . . .

Angus was thinking about what Antonia had told him. He had steered the conversation swiftly away from gurus, and had asked her about her book. So many people in Edinburgh were writing a book – almost everyone, in fact – and Angus had ceased to be surprised when somebody mentioned an incipient literary project. So he had inquired politely about Antonia’s book. She had looked at him sharply, as if to assess whether he was worthy of being told, whether he was serious in his inquiries; one could not tell everyone about one’s book.

Angus Goes Off Antonia, in a Big Way 21

“It’s nothing very much,” she said, after some moments of hesitation. “Just a novel.”

He had waited for further explanation, but she had merely continued to stare at him. At last he said: “A novel.” And she had nodded.

“Well,” he said, “may I ask what sort of novel it is?”

“Historical,” she said. “Very early. It’s set in early Scotland.

Sixth century, actually.”

Angus had smiled. “You’re very wise to choose a period for which there is so little evidence,” he said. “You can’t go wrong if you write about a time that we don’t really know about. When people start to write about the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – or even the twenty-first, for that matter – they can get into awful trouble if they get it wrong. And they often get something wrong, don’t they?”

“Writers can make mistakes like anybody else,” said Antonia, rather peevishly. “We’re human, you know.” She looked at Angus, as if expecting a refutation, though none came. “For instance, was there not an American writer who described one of his characters on page one as unfortunately having only one arm? On page one hundred and forty the same character claps his hands together enthusiastically.”

Angus smiled. “So funny,” he said. “Although some people these days would think it wrong to laugh about something like that. Just as they don’t find anything amusing in the story of the man who went to Lourdes and experienced a miracle. The poor chap couldn’t walk, and the miracle was that he found new tyres on his wheelchair.”

Antonia stared at him. “I don’t find that funny, I’m afraid.”

She shook her head. “Not in the slightest. Anyway, if I may get back to the subject of what we know and what we don’t know.

We happen to have quite a lot of knowledge about early medieval Scotland. We have the records of various abbeys, and we can deduce a great deal from archeological evidence. We’re not totally in the dark.”

Angus looked thoughtful. “All right,” he said. “Answer me this: were there handkerchiefs in medieval Scotland?”

22

Angus Goes Off Antonia, in a Big Way Antonia frowned. “Handkerchiefs?”

“Yes,” said Angus. “Did people have handkerchiefs to blow their noses on?”

Antonia was silent. It had not occurred to her to think about handkerchiefs in medieval Scotland, as the occasion had simply not arisen. I’m not that sort of writer, she thought; I’m not the sort of writer who describes her characters blowing their noses.

But if I were, then what . . .

“I have not given the matter thought,” she said at last. “But I cannot imagine that there were handkerchiefs – textiles were far too expensive to waste on handkerchiefs. I suspect that people merely resorted to informal means of clearing their noses.”

“I read somewhere that they blew them on straw,” said Angus.

“Rather uncomfortable, I would have thought.”

“I imagine that it was,” said Antonia. “But I am writing mostly about the lives of the early saints. Noses and . . . and other protuberances have not really entered into the picture to any great degree.

“And anyway,” she went on, “you should not expect fiction to be realistic. People who think that the role of fiction is merely to report on reality suffer from a fundamental misunderstanding of what it is all about.”

Angus Lordie’s nostrils flared slightly, even if imperceptibly.

His conversations with Domenica had been conducted on a basis of equality, whereas Antonia’s remarks implied that he did not know what fiction was about. Well . . .

“You see,” went on Antonia, inspecting her nails as she spoke,

“the novel distils. It takes the human experience, looks at it, shakes it up a bit, and then comes up with a portrayal of what it sees as the essential issue. That’s the difference between pure description and art.”

Angus looked at her. His nostrils had started to twitch more noticeably now, and he made an effort to control this unwanted sign of his irritation. He had entertained, and now abandoned, the notion that he might get to know Antonia better and that she would be a substitute for Domenica; indeed, as the lonely-Money Management

23

hearts advertisements had it, perhaps there might have been

“something more”.

He imagined what he would say if he were reduced to advertising. “Artist, GSOH, wishes to meet congenial lady for conversation and perhaps something more. No historical novelists need apply.”

8. Money Management

Matthew was crossing Dundas Street to that side of the road where Big Lou kept her coffee bar, at basement level, in the transformed premises of an old book shop. The Morning After Coffee Bar was different from the mass-produced coffee bars that had mushroomed on every street almost everywhere, a development which presaged the flattening effects of globalisa-tion; the spreading, under a cheerful banner, of a sameness that threatened to weaken and destroy all sense of place. And while it would be possible, by walking into Stockbridge to get the authentic globalised experience, none of Big Lou’s customers would have dreamed of being that oxymoronic. One feature of the chain coffee shops was the absence of conversation between staff and customer, and indeed between customer and customer.

Nobody spoke in such places; the staff said nothing because they had nothing to say; the customers because they felt inhibited from talking in such standardised surroundings. There was something about plastic surroundings that subdued the spirits, that cudgelled one into silence.

Big Lou, of course, would speak to anybody who came into her coffee bar; indeed, she thought it would be rude not to do so. Conversation was a recognition of the other, the equivalent of the friendly greetings that people would give one another in the street, back in Arbroath. And people generally responded well to Big Lou’s remarks, unburdening themselves of the sort of things that people unburden themselves of in the hairdresser’s salon or indeed the dentist’s chair in those few precious moments 24

Money Management

before the dentist’s probing fingers make two-sided conversation impossible.

Matthew had something on his mind, and he hoped that nobody else would be in Big Lou’s to prevent him from speaking frankly to his friend. Or if there were anybody else there, then he hoped that it would be one of the regulars, as he would not mind any of them hearing what he had to say. Indeed, it would be interesting to have Angus Lordie’s perspective on things, even if he would have to discard it immediately. Matthew liked Angus, but found him so quirky in his view of the world that he could hardly imagine taking advice from him. But at least Angus Lordie was prepared to listen, and that was what Matthew needed now more than anything else.

Exactly two weeks earlier, Matthew’s situation had changed profoundly. He was still the owner of the Something Special Gallery; he was still the only son of the wealthy and recently engaged entrepreneur, Gordon; he was still a young man with a disappointing business record and a somewhat low-key personality; all of this was unchanged. But in another, important respect, the Matthew of today was different from the Matthew of a short time ago. This was the fact that he now had slightly over four million pounds to his name, the gift of his father at the instance of Janice, his father’s new, and badly misjudged fiancée.

His father’s official disclosure of the transfer of the funds had come in a letter from his lawyer, a man who had always, although in private, been somewhat scathing of Matthew (whom he regarded as being weak and ineffectual). Now the tone was changed, subtly but unambiguously. Would it be possible for Matthew to call in at the office, at any time that was convenient to him, so that the modalities of the transfer could be discussed? Modalities was an expensive word, a Charlotte Square word; not a word one would catch a lesser firm of lawyers bandying about. Indeed, some lawyers would be required to reach for their dictionaries in the face of such a term.

Matthew had made his appointment and had been warmly received. And it had taken only fifteen minutes for the real Money Management

25

agenda of the visit to be disclosed. It would be important to manage the funds that were coming his way in a prudent manner.

This meant that professional advice on the handling of the portfolio would be needed, and, as it happened, they had a very successful investment department which would be able to come up with proposals for a balanced portfolio at very modest rates.

Sitting back in his chair Matthew allowed himself a smile.

Let’s work it out, he thought. A management fee of one per cent of the capital at his disposal was, what, forty thousand pounds a year? That was a great deal to earn merely from watching money grow. But this, of course, was capitalism, and Matthew now found himself at the polite, discreet dinner-party end of the whole process. There were plenty of people in Edinburgh who were trained to sniff out money, rather like those friendly little beagles that one saw at the airports who were trained to sniff out drugs. These people, urbane to a man, knew when their services were required and circled helpfully. Then it was mentioned, discreetly, that of course there were others in your position, in need of just a little help. That was good psychology.

Those to whom good financial fortune comes are alone. Their money frightens them. They feel unsettled. To be told that there are others in exactly the same boat is reassuring.

So the lawyer said: “Of course, we have a number of clients who are pretty much in a similar position to yourself. They find . . . and I hope I don’t speak out of turn here, but they find that there are advantages in keeping everything under one roof.”

And here, unintentionally, he looked up at the ceiling, as if to emphasise that the roof under which they were sitting was quite capable of accommodating Matthew’s new-found wealth.

Matthew looked at the lawyer. He knew this man from the parties that his father occasionally gave. He knew his son too, a tall boy called Jamie, who had been at school with him and who had once hit him with a cricket bat, across the shoulders, and who had once said to the others – within Matthew’s hearing

– that the reason why Matthew was then afflicted by a particular rash of pimples was . . . It was so unfair. And now here was 26

The Warm Embrace of the Edinburgh Establishment the father of the same persecutor offering to handle his money.

“Thanks,” said Matthew. “But I propose to handle it myself.

I enjoy reading the financial press and I think I’m perfectly capable.”

The lawyer looked at Matthew. He thought: Jamie once used a rather uncomplimentary word to describe this young man.

How apt that epithet! Boys may be cruel to one another, but they were often very good judges of character.

9. The Warm Embrace of the Edinburgh Establishment Matthew had left the lawyer’s office feeling slightly light-headed.

He paused at the front door, and thought about what he had done; it would be easy to return, to go back to the man whom he had written off on the basis of his son’s unpleasant behaviour all those years ago. It would be easy to say to him that mature reflection – or at least such reflection as could be engaged in while walking down the stairs and through the entrance hall

– had led him to believe that it would be best, after all, to have the funds consigned to the colleague whom the lawyer had so unctuously mentioned. Presumably it would be easy to stop the transfer that he had asked for – the transfer from the firm’s client account to Matthew’s own account – and once that was done the serious business of putting four million pounds to work in the market could begin. But he did not do this. All his life, money had come from somebody else (his father) and had been doled out to him as one would give sweets to a child. Now he had the money at his own disposal, and he felt like an adult at last.

He walked along Queen Street, in the direction of Dundas Street and his gallery. This route took him past Stewart Christie, the outfitters, and that is where he paused, looking thoughtfully into the window. It was a shop that sold well-made clothes for men, not the expensive rubbish – as Matthew thought of it –

produced by Italians, but finely-tailored jackets made of Scottish The Warm Embrace of the Edinburgh Establishment 27

tweed; yellow-checked waistcoats for country wear; tight-fitting tartan trews for formal occasions.

On impulse, he went into the shop and began to examine a rack of ties. Many of them were striped, which would not suit him, as he would not like others to think that he was one of those people who was emotionally tied to an institution of some sort – an institution that gave you stripes by which to remember it. He picked out a spotted tie and set it aside without looking at the price. You don’t have to ask the price any more, he told himself. It doesn’t matter. You can afford anything you want.

The thought, which he had not entertained to any extent since his fortunes had changed, was an intoxicating one. What did it entail? If he went down to London, then he could walk into John Lobb’s shop in St James’s Street and have himself measured for a pair of bespoke shoes. Matthew had read about that recently in a lifestyle supplement, and had remembered the price.

Two thousand four hundred pounds that would cost, and that was without the shoe trees. Shoe trees made by John Lobb would cost an additional three hundred pounds.

Matthew reached for a box of lawn handkerchiefs. He would take that, as he did not have many handkerchiefs. And then he saw some socks, all wool with toes reinforced with a special fabric, described as revolutionary. Matthew pulled out three pairs of these and then a further two. One could never have enough socks, particularly in view of the tendency of socks to disappear in the laundry. No matter what precautions were taken, socks disappeared into a Bermuda Triangle for socks, a swirling vortex that swallowed one sock at a time, leaving its partner stranded.

He was now assisted by a solicitous young man who had appeared from the back of the shop. Together, they chose four shirts, an expensive cashmere sweater which cost one hundred and twenty pounds, a pair of crushed-strawberry corduroy trousers, and a covert coat in oatmeal drill.

“Very nice,” said the assistant. “You can wear that for shooting.”

Matthew frowned. He did not go shooting, but then it occurred to him that he could if he wanted to. I can do anything, 28

The Warm Embrace of the Edinburgh Establishment he thought, and smiled. He closed one eye and swung up an imaginary shotgun. “Bang,” he said.

“Quite,” said the assistant. “Bang.”

His purchases nestling in a copious carrier bag, Matthew left the outfitters and continued his walk along Queen Street. The spending of a large amount of money within a short space of time had been a strangely liberating experience. In a way which he found difficult to express, the whole process of shopping had made him feel better. The tie, the fine cashmere sweater, the covert coat – all of these had been added to him and had made him bigger. He felt more confident, more assured, and, critically, less vulnerable. Having money, he thought, means that the world cannot hurt you. You can lose things and just replace them. You can protect yourself against disappointment because you can get the best things available. Ordinary shoes might pinch; shoes made for you by John Lobb did not.

He reached Dundas Street and turned down the hill. There, at the end of the street, beyond the roofs of Canonmills, was Fife – a dark green hillside, clouds, a silver strip of sea. Passing Glass and Thompson, he decided to call in for a slice of quiche and a glass of melon juice. Big Lou’s was just a little way down the street, but Big Lou did not make quiche and there was no melon juice to be had there.

Matthew perched on a stool at one of the tables. There were a few other customers in at the time – a woman in a dark trouser suit, engrossed in a file of papers; a thin man paging through an old copy of a design magazine, an architect, as Matthew knew.

He picked up a copy of a newspaper and turned the pages at random. Split trust victims seek compensation, a headline read.

And then another: with-profits policies encounter painful shortfall. Matthew paused, his glass of melon juice half way to his lips.

Outside, he did not have to wait long for a taxi, and he was soon outside the lawyers’ offices again, and then, within minutes, inside, seated opposite the lawyer himself.

“Very wise,” said the lawyer. “Very wise to change your mind.”

And then he added: “You know, I seem to recollect that my boy Does He Wear Lederhosen?

29

Jamie – he’s quite different these days – was a bit tough on you when you were boys. Sorry about that, you know.”

Matthew nodded. “It’s fine,” he said. And he thought: yes, it is fine, isn’t it? You’re back. Back where you came from. The solid, cautious, Scottish mercantile class; among your own people. But for a moment, a brief moment, you had been about to do something yourself.

10. Does He Wear Lederhosen?

That had been a Monday. Now it was Tuesday, and that, under the new arrangement with Pat, was one of the days on which she came into the gallery for three hours to help Matthew. He had hoped to have had more of her time, as he had grown accustomed to her presence, as she sat at her desk, or stacked paintings in the storeroom, and without her the gallery seemed strangely empty. But Pat was now a student and had the require-ments of her course to consider – essays to write, pages of aesthetic theory and art history to plough through, although she skipped, she had to admit, rather than ploughed. With all these things to do, she was unable to get down to the gallery for more than nine hours a week, and these hours were divided between Tuesday, Thursday and Friday.

Of course, Matthew could have employed somebody full-time, had he wished to do so. Four million pounds is enough to finance a two-room gallery for which no rent had to be paid and which was not encumbered by any debt. But Matthew did not wish to have anybody else; he wanted Pat, because she knew the business, had a precociously good eye for art, and because

. . . well, if he were to admit it to himself, Matthew wanted to have what one might call a closer relationship with Pat.

On that Tuesday, Matthew left his flat in India Street dressed in the new clothes he had bought from Stewart Christie the previous day. He wore one of the expensive shirts, the spotted silk tie, the crushed-strawberry trousers and the cashmere 30

Does He Wear Lederhosen?

sweater. The sweater, which was an oatmeal colour (“distressed oatmeal” was the official description of the shade), went well with the trousers and the tie, which had a dark green background (the spots being light green). Over all this he donned the covert coat, then examined himself in the hall mirror and set off into the street.

By the time that Pat arrived in the gallery at ten o’clock, Matthew had dealt with the few letters that he had received that morning and had almost finished paging through a new auction catalogue. There were several paintings in this catalogue that he wanted to discuss with Pat – a Hornel study of a group of Japanese women making tea, a Blackadder of a bunch of peonies in a white vase, and a shockingly expensive Cadell portrait.

Matthew reflected that he could afford any of these – indeed, he could afford them all – but he knew that he would have to be careful. The market had its price, and it was foolish to allow a personal enthusiasm for a painting to encourage one to pay more than the real market figure. What one paid in such circumstances was the market as far as that particular sale was concerned, but not the broader market. The real market was more fickle, and it was all very well having an expensive Cadell on one’s walls, but what if nobody else wanted it? So he ticked the Blackadder and put a question mark next to the listing of the Cadell.

When Pat came in, he showed her the Cadell and she shook her head. “Not for us,” she said. “Remember who comes into this place. Our clients don’t have that sort of money.”

“But if we had that sort of painting,” Matthew objected, “then we’d get that sort of person. Word would get out.”

“Too risky,” said Pat. “Stick to the clients you have.”

Matthew smiled. “But we have the means, Pat,” he said. “We have money. Plenty of it.”

Pat said nothing. She had noticed the new distressed-oatmeal cashmere sweater and the covert coat hung over the back of his chair. Was Matthew dressing for her benefit? And if he was, then had his feelings for her revived – the feelings that she had been so concerned to discourage, even if gently? She glanced at Does He Wear Lederhosen?

31

Matthew, at the new shirt, the new tie, the crushed-strawberry trousers. These were all signs.

“Well,” she said airily. “We can think about it later on. You don’t have to reach any decisions just yet.” She paused. A few words would be sufficient. “Do you mind if I make a telephone call, Matthew? I have to ring my boyfriend.”

She saw his expression change. The human face was so transparent, she thought, so revealing of the feelings below; in this case, there was just a loss of light, so subtle that one would never be able to pinpoint how it occurred; but there was less light.

“So,” he said. “You have a romance on the go.”

Pat did not like to lie, but there were times when the only kind thing to do with men was to lie to them. If one did not lie to men, then they suffered all the more. And she was not sure that what she was telling was a lie anyway. She had met Wolf, and had taken to him. What she had felt on that first encounter and in the subsequent conversation in the Elephant House had everything to do with romance, she would have thought; certainly the physiological signs had been present – the feeling of lightness in the stomach, the slight racing of the heart, the prickling of the skin. So she would not be lying at all.

“Yes,” she said, looking down at the ground. It is easier to lie to the ground, in general.

Matthew fiddled with the edge of his desk. His knuckles, she saw, were white.

“What’s he called?” he asked.

She hesitated. It was none of Matthew’s business to know the names of her friends, but she could not tell him this.

“Wolf,” she said.

He stared at her for a moment. Then he laughed. “You’re not serious! Wolf? Is he German by any chance? Wears leder-hosen?”

Pat shut her eyes. She had been too gentle with him. How dare he talk of Wolf like that; gentle, kind Wolf. She paused.

She knew nothing about Wolf. She had no idea whether he was gentle and kind, and there was at least some evidence that he 32

The Bears of Sicily

was not – and had he not mouthed the predatory words: hey there, little Red Riding-Hood? What sort of boy said that? Only a wolf, she thought.

11. The Bears of Sicily

If there had been change on the top floor of 44 Scotland Street, with the departure of Domenica and the arrival of Antonia, then there had been change, too, elsewhere in the building.

On the top landing, opposite Domenica’s flat, was the flat which had been owned by Bruce Anderson, who had now left Edinburgh to live in London, in the hope that Chelsea or Fulham might provide that which he felt to be missing from his life in Edinburgh.

Pat had been his tenant, but had left when Bruce had placed the flat on the market and eventually sold it to a young architect turned property developer. On the floor below, Irene and Stuart Pollock had not moved, thus providing the continuity required if a building is to have a collective memory. That was one of the features which made those Edinburgh streets so special; in contrast with so many other cities, where people may come and go and leave no memory, the streets and houses of the Edinburgh New Town bore an oral history that might survive, thirty, forty, even fifty years. People remembered who lived where, what they did, and where they went. People wanted to belong. They wanted to be part of something that had a local feel, a local face.

Irene Pollock was the mother of that most talented of six-year-olds, Bertie Pollock, now of the Steiner School in Merchiston and sometime pupil (suspended) at the East New Town Advanced Nursery. Bertie was still in therapy with Dr Hugo Fairbairn, author of that seminal work on child analysis, Shattered to Pieces: Ego Dissolution in a Three-Year-Old Tyrant. He had been referred to Dr Fairbairn after he had set fire to his father’s copy of The Guardian, while his father was reading it. This act of fire-raising might have alerted one familiar with the literature on juvenile psychopathology to that well-known but still puzzling triangular syndrome in which The Bears of Sicily

33

an interest in setting fire to things is accompanied by a tendency to be cruel to animals and to suffer from late bed-wetting. The literature in forensic psychiatry contains several reports on this curious combination of behaviours and symptoms, and any well-informed child psychiatrist encountering a youthful fire-raiser would do well to inquire along these lines. Dr Fairbairn, however, ruled this out immediately. Unlike Frederick in the Struwelpeter, who so persecuted the good dog Tray, Bertie was not a cruel little boy. He was not unkind to animals, nor did he suffer from nocturnal enuresis, having been dry and out of nappies (and into dungarees) at the remarkably early age of eight months. His mother, indeed, had been so proud of his achievements in that department that she had contacted the newspapers to find out whether they were interested in interviewing her (and possibly having a few words with Bertie too) about this, and had been surprised, and hurt, by their indifference.

Bertie had accomplished a great deal since his early and distinguished toilet training. He had become reasonably fluent in Italian and a more than competent saxophonist. Both of these were skills which had been forced upon him by his mother, who, in the case of Italian lessons, had started these shortly after his third birthday.

While other children listened to tapes of nursery rhymes – almost all of which were, in Irene’s view, patriarchal nonsense – Bertie listened to the complete set of Buongiorno Italia! tapes, playing and replaying the recorded conversations these featured. By the age of four, he was quite capable of asking the way to the railway station in faultless Italian, or engaging in a conversation with an Italian waiter about the most typical dishes of the various Italian regions.

After this, he graduated to listening with perfect understanding to Buzzati’s story of the invasion of Sicily by bears, a vaguely sinister story which was later to surface in his concerns over the possibility of encountering bears in the streets of Edinburgh. Ma, Bertie, non ci sono orsi a Edimborgo! Irene had said to him (But, Bertie, there are no bears in Edinburgh!) To which Bertie had replied: Non ci sono orsi in Sicilia, Mama, ma ecco qui la storia di Buzzati in cui incontriamo orsi! (There are no bears in Sicily, Mother, but here is this story of Buzzati’s in which we meet bears!)

34

The Bears of Sicily

His progress in music was equally meteoric. At the age of four, he was playing the soprano recorder with some facility, and had made a start on rudimentary music theory. By five, he had embarked – or been embarked, perhaps – on the study of the saxophone, and on this instrument he made particularly rapid progress. He showed an early propensity for the playing of jazz, although Irene was slightly uneasy about this, as she was not convinced that jazz encouraged the same musical rigour as did classical music. Bertie’s rendition of ‘As Time Goes By’, although hardly jazz, was easy on the ear, and indeed had been much appreciated by Pat, whose bedroom in 44 Scotland Street lay immediately above the room in which Bertie practised.

But all this hot-housing produced precisely that reaction which any reasonable parent might have foreseen: Bertie rebelled, first by minor acts of non-cooperation (occasionally refusing to talk Italian) and then by major gestures (burning his father’s copy of The Guardian). Irene had responded by placing her trust in psychotherapy, but had gradually been persuaded to allow Bertie more freedom, and in particular, to do things with Quality Time with Irene

35

his father. This had improved the situation, but if leopards do not change their spots, neither does the Weltanschauung of people such as Irene change in the space of a few days. And pregnancy

– the condition in which she now found herself – had a strange effect: it led to renewed vigour in her desire to impose her views on others. This was probably a result of the loss of control she felt of her body and world: as the sheer brute fact of carrying another life within her resulted in a diminution of her sense of personal autonomy, so her need to assert herself in other respects grew.

This manifested itself in a variety of ways, but most remarkably in an increase in the number of altercations in which she became involved. There was the famous campaign against Nurse Forbes of the National Childbirth Trust, and then there was the terrible row over the Pollock car, which once again had gone missing. It was Bertie who had precipitated the row over the car when he made an apparently innocent observation. “Mummy,”

he said. “You know how you left our car at the top of Scotland Street, outside Mr Demarco’s house? Well, it’s not there any-more.”

12. Quality Time with Irene

“Nonsense!” expostulated Irene. “Of course it’s there.” She was replying to the question which Bertie had posed about the disappearance of the Pollock car. Of course the car was parked in Scotland Street – she herself had parked it there only two days earlier, when she had driven to Valvona and Crolla to stock up on sun-dried tomatoes and olives. She distinctly remembered parking it because she had almost run over one of the cats which sauntered about the street and which had narrowly escaped being crushed by the back wheels of Irene’s reversing Volvo. For a moment or two, she thought that she had actually crushed the cat, as she felt a slight bump, which proved to be nothing more than a folded up newspaper which somebody had dropped and 36

Quality Time with Irene

which had become a sodden mound in the gutter.

“You must have been looking in the wrong place, Bertie,” she said. “Maybe you were looking at the other side of the street.

Our car is on the left as you go up the hill. Did you look on the right?”

“No,” said Bertie. “I looked on the left. And it wasn’t there, Mummy. I promise you.”

Irene frowned. Bertie was a very observant little boy and would normally not make a mistake about this sort of thing.

But it was impossible that she had inadvertently parked the car somewhere else and forgotten about it. That was the sort of thing that Stuart was always doing; indeed, on one occasion he had parked the car in Glasgow and then returned to Edinburgh by train. That had been disastrous, as the car had sat across there for weeks, if not months. Perhaps Stuart had used the car since she had parked it. That would provide a rational explanation for its absence from the street, if it was absent; but then had Stuart driven the car over the past few days? He had not said anything about it, and he had hardly had the time to do much driving, as he and his colleagues were all working against a looming deadline on a report at his office in the Scottish Executive and he was not coming back home until after ten at night. It was unlikely, then, that such a simple explanation would be found.

“I tell you what, Bertie,” she said. “We’ll take a little walk and see whether the car is there or not. I need to take more exercise now that I’m pregnant.”

“Is it good for the baby?” asked Bertie, reaching out to lay a hand against his mother’s stomach.

“I’m sure it is,” said Irene. “Babies thrive if the maternal circulation is good. And a healthy mother means a healthy baby, Bertie!”

Bertie looked up at his mother. There was so much he wanted to say to her, but his conversations with her never seemed to go the way he wanted them to go. What he wanted to ask about was whether the arrival of the baby would change things for him.

Quality Time with Irene

37

He decided to try. “When the new baby arrives, Mummy,”

he began, “will things be different?”

Irene smiled. “Oh yes,” she said. “Oh yes, they will! Babies make a terrible noise, I’m afraid, Bertie – even well-behaved Edinburgh babies! So we must expect a few disturbed nights until the baby settles. But you shouldn’t hear him at your end of the corridor. I’m sure you won’t be woken up.”

Bertie thought for a moment. “But what I was wondering about was whether you’ll be very busy. Will you be very busy, Mummy?”

“Of course,” said Irene. “New babies are very demanding creatures. Even you were demanding, Bertie. You sometimes became quite niggly for some reason. I used to play you Mozart to calm you down. It always worked. You loved ‘ Soave sia il vento’, you know. You loved that. Così fan tutte, as you’ll recall.

You adored Mozart when you were a baby. And you still do, of course.”

“But if you’re busy,” said Bertie carefully, “then you might have less time for me, Mummy. Is that right? You’ll have less time for me?”

Irene thought quickly. Poor little boy! Of course he was threatened; of course he felt insecure. He must be dreading the day when the new baby arrives and takes all my attention away from him. Oh poor Bertie!

“Bertie, carissimo,” she said, leaning down to enfold him in her arms. “You mustn’t think that for one moment. Not for one moment! Mummy will spend just as much time with you as before. Even more. I promise you that. Look, I’m crossing my heart. That’s how serious I am. I really mean it. You will have just as much time with me as you do now.”

Bertie struggled to release himself from his mother’s embrace, but it proved impossible, and he became limp. Perhaps if I go all floppy and stop breathing she will think that she’s smothered me, he thought. Then she’ll let me go.

Irene did release him, but only to adjust her hair, which had fallen over her face. “So, no more worries about that, Bertie,”

she said, standing up.

38

An Average Scottish Face

Bertie nodded glumly. His real hope had been that the arrival of the new baby would so distract Irene that she would leave him, Bertie, alone. He wanted to spend less time with his mother, not more, and here she was telling him that the baby would make no difference. It was all very disappointing; a very bleak prospect indeed.

Irene went out of the room briefly to fetch her coat. Then they left the flat and began to walk up the street towards Drummond Place. It was a fine afternoon, with a gentle wind from the south-west. Although it was early autumn, the air was still warm, and there were still leaves on the trees in Drummond Place Gardens, even if many of them were now tinged with gold.

They reached the top of the road in complete silence.

“You see,” said Bertie. “No car.”

Irene shook her head. “I don’t know what to think,” she said.

“I do,” said Bertie. “It’s been stolen.”

13. An Average Scottish Face

When Stuart returned home that evening, Irene was in the sitting room with Bertie, playing a complicated card game of Bertie’s own invention, Running Dentist. The rules, which Bertie had explained at extreme length, and with great patience, seemed excessively complex to Irene and appeared to favour Bertie in an indefinable way, but the game was quick, and surprisingly enjoyable.

“Ah,” said Stuart, as he put down his briefcase. “Running Dentist! I take it that you’re winning, Bertie.”

“Mummy is doing her best,” said Bertie. “She’s really trying.”

Stuart glanced at Irene. He knew that she was a bad loser, and that it was hard for her when Bertie won a game, as he so often did.

“It’s a very difficult game to win,” observed Irene, “unless you happen to be the person who invented the rules.”

She laid her cards down on the table and looked up at Stuart.

An Average Scottish Face

39

She had been thinking for some time of what she might say to him about the car. Although it was not Stuart’s fault that the car had been stolen – she could hardly blame him for that – in some inexpressible way she felt that he was responsible for this situation. He had, after all, brought the car back from Glasgow after its long sojourn there, and had brought home the wrong car.

She had every right to feel aggrieved, she told herself.

“The car,” she said simply.

Stuart gave a start. She noticed his face cloud over; guilt, she thought. Guilt.

“What about it?” he said. He tried to sound unconcerned, but she could sense that he was worried.

“It’s been stolen,” chipped in Bertie. “Mummy left it at the top of the street, and it isn’t there now. We checked.”

“Yes,” said Irene. “Bertie’s probably right – it’s been stolen.”

Stuart shrugged. “These things happen. But there we are.”

He hesitated for a moment. “I’m not at all sure why anybody would want to steal a car like that, but I suppose an opportunistic thief . . .”

“Be that as it may,” interrupted Irene, “the fact of the matter is that this puts us in a very tricky position.” She paused. “I’m surprised that you don’t realise what it is.”

“I don’t see what the problem is,” Stuart countered. “The car is hardly worth anything. And we very rarely use it.”

Bertie looked at his father in dismay. He was proud of their car, in the way all small boys are of their family cars, and he could not understand why his father should be so dismissive of it.

Irene sighed. It was a pointed sigh, as sighs sometimes are, not one cast into the air to evaporate, but one calculated to descend, precisely and with great effect, on a target.

“The problem,” she said quietly, “is that the car had already been stolen. When you went through to Glasgow and found that the car was not where you had so carelessly left it – I shall pass over that, of course – your new friend, Fatty O’Whatever . . .”

“Lard O’Connor,” interjected Stuart. “He’s called Lard 40

An Average Scottish Face

O’Connor, and I wish you wouldn’t keep referring to him as Fatty.”

“That may be,” said Irene in a steely tone, “but the fact is that this Lard character then arranged for a similar car to be stolen to order. You brought back a stolen car – one masquerading under our Edinburgh number plates, but at heart a stolen Glasgow car! Now the stolen car has been stolen again.

And that means that we can hardly go to the police and report that our car has been re-stolen.”

“But we don’t have to tell them that we suspect it’s a stolen car,” he said. “As far as we’re concerned, that’s the car I left in Glasgow. The fact that it has only four gears rather than five is neither here nor there.”

Irene stared at him. “I can’t believe what I’m hearing,” she said. “I really can’t believe it . . .” She paused and threw a glance at Bertie. “Bertie, it’s time for you to go to your space and finish your Italian exercises.”

Bertie looked at his father, as if for confirmation of the order, but there was no support for him in that quarter and he picked up his playing cards and left.

“Now,” said Irene. “Now we can get down to brass tacks. I can’t believe that you openly encouraged deception in front of Bertie. Are you out of your mind, Stuart? Here I am, doing my utmost to bring Bertie up with the right set of values, and you go and torpedo the whole thing by suggesting that we lie to the police.”

Stuart hesitated. The first few faltering steps he had taken to assert himself – steps which followed his successful completion of an assertiveness training workshop at the office – had somewhat petered out. Now, faced with Irene’s accusations of delin-quent behaviour, he was silenced. Sensing this, Irene continued.

“We are, unfortunately, in a position where we can do nothing at all,” she said. “We can’t go to the police. We can’t claim the insurance. In fact, we have to forget that our car ever existed.”

Stuart blinked. Forget you ever had a car. It sounded like the sort of thing that gangsters said when they threatened one another. And yet here was his wife saying it to him – and he Distressed Oatmeal

41

had no answer. He turned away without saying anything to Irene and made his way into the bathroom. He took off his jacket.

He took off his tie. Then he filled the basin with tepid water and washed his face. He looked up, into the mirror, and muttered to himself: “Statistician, middle-ranking, married, one son, one mortgage.” He looked more closely at his face. “Average Scottish face,” he continued. “Small lines beginning to appear around the eyes.” He stopped, and thought. Who was having fun? Other people in the office were having fun. They went to bars and held parties. They went off on weekends to Paris and Amsterdam. He never went anywhere. They had girlfriends and boyfriends. The girlfriends and boyfriends went with them to Paris and Amsterdam. They all had fun there.

“It’s about time you had some fun yourself,” he murmured, almost mournfully. Then he brightened and said: “Well, it’s possible, isn’t it?”

14. Distressed Oatmeal

Matthew left Pat looking after the gallery while he went off to seek solace in coffee. Her disclosure of Wolf’s existence had not only surprised him; he had always assumed that Pat had no boyfriend and that she would be available when he eventually got round to making up his mind about her. But added to this surprise was a stronger feeling, one which made him feel raw inside. This was jealousy. How could Pat have somebody else?

And how could she spend time with this other person, this so-called Wolf (what a completely ridiculous name!), when she might spend time with him? He disliked Wolf, intensely, although he had not met him. He would be some awful braying type from somewhere in the south of England, the sort brought up to be completely self-confident, even arrogant. And the thought that Pat should waste herself on such a person was almost too much to bear.

When Matthew entered Big Lou’s coffee bar, Big Lou herself 42

Distressed Oatmeal

was standing in her accustomed position behind the stainless-steel service bar, reading a small book. It was evidently compelling reading, and she barely gave Matthew a glance as he came through the door. Matthew nodded to her and went to sit down in his usual place. Glumly, he opened the newspaper on the table in front of him and scanned the headlines. His state of distraction, though, was such that not even the headlines were taken in, let alone the reports.

Big Lou said something to him, which he missed. She looked at him sharply and repeated herself.

“I said that’s an orra jumper you’re wearing,” she said.

Matthew stared at her. He was vaguely familiar with the Scots word “orra”, but he thought it applied to tractormen, for some reason. An orra man was a farm worker, was he not? And why would Big Lou refer to his cashmere sweater in those terms?

He felt flustered and annoyed.

“What’s wrong with you this morning?” Big Lou went on.

“You’re looking awfie ill.”

“I’m not ill,” said Matthew curtly.

Big Lou seemed taken aback by the rebuff. “Of course by ill, I don’t mean ill in the way in which you mean it,” said Big Lou.

“In Arbroath, when we say that somebody’s ill-looking we just mean that they don’t look themselves. That’s all.”

“I don’t care what you say in Arbroath,” said Matthew. And immediately regretted his rudeness. Matthew was, by nature, a courteous person and it was unlike him to speak in such a manner.

Big Lou knew this and realised that something was amiss. But the way to deal with it, she thought, was not to barge in and ask him what was troubling him, but to allow him to bring it up in his own good time. So she said nothing, and busied herself with the preparation of his cappuccino.

Matthew sat in misery. I’m useless, he thought. Nobody likes me. I have no friends. I have no girlfriend. And who would want to go out with me? Name one person who has ever expressed an interest. Name just one. He thought. No names came to mind.

He looked down at the sleeves of his distressed-oatmeal cash-Distressed Oatmeal

43

mere sweater and then at the legs of his crushed-strawberry trousers. Perhaps Big Lou was right. Perhaps the sweater was really no more than an orra jumper, whatever that meant. And as for his trousers, who wore crushed strawberry these days?

Matthew was not sure what the answer to that question was.

Somebody wore them, obviously, but perhaps he was not that sort of person. Perhaps he had just succeeded in making himself look ridiculous.

He sipped at the coffee Big Lou had now brought him, and she, back behind the bar, had returned to her book. She sneaked a glance at Matthew. I should not have said that, she thought.

Heaven knows what he spent on that jumper. And as for those trousers . . . Poor Matthew! There was not a nasty bone in his body, which was more than one could say about most men, Big Lou thought, but somehow Matthew just seemed to miss it.

Matthew drained the last dregs of coffee from his cup. He wanted another cup, but he felt so miserable that he could hardly bring himself to speak to Lou. Sensing this, Big Lou quietly prepared another cappuccino and brought it over to him. She sat down next to him.

“Matthew,” she said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude to you.”

Matthew looked up from the table. “And I didn’t mean to be rude to you either, Lou,” he said.

“You’re unhappy?” Big Lou’s voice was gentle. “I can tell.”

Those who have known unhappiness, as Big Lou had, knew its face, knew its ways.

Matthew nodded.

“That girl?” asked Big Lou.

Matthew said nothing, but he did not need to speak. Big Lou could tell.

“I always liked her,” said Big Lou. “And I can understand why you feel the way you do. She’s very bonny.”

“And we get on very well together,” mumbled Matthew. “I thought that maybe . . . But now she’s gone and got herself a boyfriend. Some student type.”

Big Lou reached out and took his hand. “I was in love for 44

No Flowers Please

years with somebody who had somebody else,” she said. “I know what it’s like.”

“It’s such a strange feeling,” mused Matthew. “Have you noticed, Lou, how it feels when you know that somebody doesn’t like you? I’m not talking about love or anything like that – just somebody you know makes it clear that they don’t like you. And you know that you’ve done nothing to deserve this. You’ve done them no wrong. They just don’t like you. It’s an odd feeling, isn’t it?”

Big Lou looked up at the ceiling. Matthew was right. It was an odd feeling. One felt somehow that it was unfair that the other felt that way. But it was more than that. The unmerited dislike of another made one think less of oneself. We are enlarged by the love of others; we are diminished by their dislike.

“I’m sure that Pat likes you,” said Big Lou. “And perhaps she would like you even more if she knew how you felt about her.

Have you ever told her that?”

“Of course not,” said Matthew. Big Lou should have known better than to ask that question. This was Edinburgh, after all.

One did not go about the place declaring oneself like some lovesick Californian.

15. No Flowers Please

It may be that Big Lou would have urged Matthew to reveal his feelings to Pat – that would have been in keeping with her general tendency to speak directly – but if that is what she had been on the verge of doing, she was prevented from saying anything by the arrival of Eddie. Big Lou was now engaged to Eddie, the chef who had returned from Mobile, Alabama, with the intention of persuading Big Lou to marry him. She had readily agreed, as she loved Eddie, for all his inconsiderate treatment of her in the past, and an engagement notice had duly appeared in the personal columns of both The Scotsman, for the information of the general public, and The Courier, for the infor-No Flowers Please

45

mation of those who lived in Arbroath. The wording of this notice had been unfortunate, as Eddie had chosen it without consulting Big Lou. Both families are relieved to announce, it read, the engagement of Miss Lou Brown to Mr Edward McDougall. No flowers please.

When she had seen the notice, Big Lou’s hand had shot to her mouth in a gesture of shock. She was aghast, and she had telephoned Eddie immediately, her fingers shaking as she dialled his number. Before he answered, though, she replaced the handset in its cradle. Eddie was not good with words, and he had probably not realised how ridiculous the notice sounded.

And very few people read such notices, in Edinburgh at least; it was different, of course, in Arbroath, where the personal columns were scoured for social detail by virtually everybody.

Matthew, of course, had read it and had hooted with laughter.

Relieved? Were they serious? And as for the no flowers please, perhaps that was a typographical migration from the neighbouring deaths column. Even so, it made for a wonderful engagement notice. Poor Big Lou! She deserved something better, Matthew thought; something better than this rather greasy chef.

And now here was Eddie coming in for his morning coffee, his lanky hair hanging about his collar, which was none too clean as far as Matthew could make out. Eddie nodded in the direction of Matthew before he crossed the floor to speak to Lou.

“Well,” he announced proudly, “it’s mine.”

Big Lou looked at him uncomprehendingly and then burst into a broad smile. “The restaurant?”

“Aye,” said Eddie. “As from the end of the month. A year’s lease – and quite a bit cheaper than I had thought. They were keen to get me to take it. They lowered the price.”

Matthew raised an eyebrow. When people were keen to sell things and get other people to take things, there was usually a reason. Eddie might think that he had found a bargain, but there could be a serious snag lurking in the small print.

“Where is this place, Eddie?” Matthew asked.

“Stockbridge,” said Eddie. “Very close to Henderson Row.”

Matthew nodded. Stockbridge was a popular place for cafés 46

No Flowers Please

and restaurants. But why had the owners been so keen to get Eddie to take the lease? “That’s a good place to be,” he said.

“Was it a restaurant before?”

It was, Eddie said. He had spoken to the owner, who was retiring and going back to Sicily. He had been there for five years, he said, and was reluctant to leave.

“Have you looked at the books?” asked Matthew.

Eddie hesitated. “Books?”

Matthew glanced at Big Lou, who had picked up a cloth and had started to wipe the top of the bar, somewhat thoughtfully, Matthew felt.

“The accounts,” said Matthew quietly. “They show how a business has been doing. You know, profit and loss.”

Eddie turned to Big Lou, as if for support. She put down her cloth. “Eddie knows about restaurants, Matthew,” she said. “He kens fine.”

“But you should take a look at the books,” Matthew insisted.

“Before you put your money into anything, Eddie, you should ask to see the books. Just in case.”

Big Lou turned round and slid the coffee drawer out of the large Italian coffee machine. Noisily, she banged the tray on the side of a bin to loosen the used grounds. “It’s not Eddie’s money,” she said quietly. “It’s mine. I’m subbing Eddie on this one.”

Matthew glanced at Eddie, who was smiling encouragingly at Big Lou. “Well, you should look at the books, Lou,” he said.

“It’s basic . . .”

“Basic nothing,” said Big Lou firmly. “The real question is whether you know what you’re doing. It’s the same as farming.

You can’t teach somebody to be a farmer. You either know how to farm or you don’t. You understand restaurants, don’t you, Eddie?”

Eddie nodded gravely. “I do, Lou, doll.”

Big Lou looked at Matthew. “See, Matthew?”

Matthew was not one to be defeated so easily. He winced when Eddie called Big Lou “doll”. It was so condescending, so demeaning. And Big Lou was not doll-like; she was a large-How To Let Down the Opposite Sex Gently 47

boned woman, larger than Matthew, larger than Eddie himself, in fact. To call her “doll” was a travesty of the truth. And the thought that Eddie was going to take her money for his ill-advised restaurant venture was unbearable. Matthew knew that Big Lou had been exploited all her life. She had told him about how she had looked after that uncle in Arbroath and how she had worked all the hours of creation in that nursing home in Aberdeen. There had been no joy, no light in her life – only drudgery and service to others. And now here was Eddie about to take her money.

Matthew was on the point of saying something, but Eddie now addressed Big Lou. “And here’s another thing,” he said.

“I’ve negotiated with the waitresses. They’re going to stay on and work for me. Braw wee lassies.”

Big Lou paused. Then she picked up a spoon and began to ladle coffee into the small metal container. “Oh yes?” She sounded nonchalant, as if inquiring about a minor detail. But it was not minor. “What age are they?”

Eddie looked down at the ground. “One’s seventeen,” he said.

“Nice girl, called Annie.”

Big Lou’s tone was level. “Oh yes. And the other?”

“She’s sixteen, I think,” said Eddie.

Matthew watched Big Lou’s expression carefully. He knew, as did Lou, that Matthew’s bride in Mobile, Alabama – the one who had run away from him – had been sixteen. He would do anything to protect Big Lou from disappointment and sorrow.

But there was a certain measure of these things from which we cannot be protected, no matter what the hopes and intentions of our friends may be.

16. How To Let Down the Opposite Sex Gently While Matthew was at Big Lou’s, Pat remained in the gallery.

She regretted misleading Matthew about Wolf. It had been a lie, no matter how she might try to clothe it in the garb of 48

How To Let Down the Opposite Sex Gently kindness. There was something shoddy about lying, even if the motive for lying was concern for the feelings of another. She had wanted to protect Matthew from the disappointment of rebuff, but there was something else which had prompted her to lie, something else not so altruistic. Pat wanted to spare herself the embarrassment of telling Mathew that she did not want a deeper involvement with him. That was nothing to do with Matthew’s susceptibilities; that was to do with her own feelings.

She watched Matthew cross the road to Big Lou’s coffee bar.

He had been so chirpy in his new distressed-oatmeal sweater, and now he walked with his head down, staring at the ground in front of him. He looked disconsolate, and no doubt was. And yet, did she really owe Matthew anything? One could not pretend to have feelings that one did not really have. That, surely, was unkinder still: lying about an imaginary boyfriend might be considered cruel, but a precautionary let-down was surely less hurtful than a let-down after one has been allowed to cherish hopes.

Friendship, thought Pat, was for the most part straightforward, but the moment that friendship was complicated by sex, then its course became beset by dangers. One did not have to see every member of the opposite sex in a sexual light; quite the opposite, in fact: she had plenty of friends of the opposite sex with whom her relationship was entirely platonic. Such friendships, which rather surprised people of her father’s generation, were relaxed enough to allow sharing of tents on holiday or sleeping in the same room – on the sofa or the floor – without any suggestion of intimacy. That used not to be possible other than in exceptional conditions. She had heard from an aunt about the ethos of the Scottish mountaineering clubs in the past, when a form of purity allowed mixed bathing in Highland rivers without any suggestion of anything else. And she had read, too, that in Cambridge young men used to bathe in the river, naked, even when women passed sedately by in punts. Perhaps there was something about rivers that promoted this sense of purity; she was not sure.

How To Let Down the Opposite Sex Gently 49

But none of this helped her in her current predicament.

She felt the opposite of pure; she felt dirtied by her lie to Matthew and now, as she saw him, walking back across the road, she resolved to tell him that Wolf was only a friend, and that there was no boyfriend. And then she would go on to the delicate issue of her feelings for him. She would tell him that while she valued him as a friend . . . No, that really was too clichéd. She simply could not bring herself to tell Matthew she did not think of him “in that way”; nobody wanted not to be thought of “in that way”; men, in particular, would prefer not to be thought of at all. And yet it was true that she did not think of Matthew “in that way”. Matthew was safe; he provided comfortable, unthreatening company, like the company of an old school-friend one had not seen for many years.

Wolf was different. From the moment she had seen him, in that tutorial in which poor Dr Fantouse wittered on about Benedetto Croce, she had thought of Wolf “in that way”. And he, looking at her across the table, had clearly reciprocated the perspective. He had that gaze which some people have of 50

How To Let Down the Opposite Sex Gently mentally undressing the person at whom they are looking, but Pat had not resented this. Rather, she had enjoyed it. And she had enjoyed, too, the short time she had spent with him in the Elephant House and walking across the Meadows until that moment of surprise that had occurred in Spottiswoode Street, when she had discovered that Wolf was heading for her flat, too, where his girlfriend, Tessie, lived.

They had gone upstairs together to the door of the flat on the third floor. Pat reached into her pocket for her key and let them both in.

“She may not be in,” said Wolf. “I didn’t tell her I was coming.”

“That’s her room,” said Pat, pointing to a closed door off the hall.

Wolf smiled. “I know that,” he said.

Of course he would, thought Pat, and looked sheepish. And at that moment, as Wolf knocked at the door, his back to her, she felt an intense, visceral jealousy. It hit somewhere inside her, in her stomach perhaps, with the force of a blow. For a few seconds she stood stock still, shocked by the emotion, rendered incapable of movement. But then, as the door opened slightly and she saw Tessie, half-framed within, she found it within herself to turn away and walk into her own room. There, she took a deep breath and closed her eyes. The force of the emotion had surprised her; it had been as if, on a dusty road to Damascus, she had been hurled to the ground. And the realisation that came to her this forcefully was that she had found in this boy, this Wolf, with his fair hair and his wide grin, one who touched her soul in the most profound way. Without him she was incomplete. Without him she . . .

But such thoughts were absurd. She had known him for a very short time. They had talked to one another for – what was it? – an hour or two at the most. She knew nothing about him other than that his mother had been an enthusiast for herbal remedies, that his father sold valves in the oil industry and had accumulated a vast number of air-miles, and that he had a girlfriend called Tessie. And that last piece of knowledge was the Anguish

51

most difficult of all to confront. Wolf was not available. He was taken. And by one of her flatmates too! That horrid, horrid girl, Tessie, who even now, no doubt, was in Wolf’s arms, her fingers running through his hair. “Spottiswoode!” wailed Pat, as if the word had curative power, a verbal scapegoat for her misery, her sense of utter loss. Its effect was mildly cathartic.

“Spottiswoode!” she wailed again.

There was a knock at the door, hesitant, tentative.

“Pat?” came a voice. “Are you all right?”

It was Wolf.

17. Anguish

“Why were you shouting out ‘Spottiswoode’?” asked Wolf, as he opened the door of Pat’s room.

Pat looked at him with what she hoped was a blank expression.

“Spottiswoode?” she said.

Wolf nodded, allowing a fringe of hair to fall briefly across his brow. This was soon tossed back. “I heard you out in the hall. You shouted out ‘Spottiswoode’. Twice.”

Pat clenched her teeth. Rapidly she rehearsed a number of possibilities. She could deny it, of course, and suggest that he had experienced an auditory hallucination. She was, after all, a psychiatrist’s daughter and she had heard her father talk about auditory hallucinations. He had treated a patient, she recalled, who complained that the roses in his garden recited Burns to him. That had seemed so strange to her at the time, but here she was shouting out Spottiswoode in her distress.

No, she would not resort to denial; that would only convince him that there was something odd about her, and he would be put off. That would be the worst possible outcome.

“Spottiswoode?” she said. “Did I?”

Wolf nodded again. “Yes,” he said. “Spottiswoode. Very loudly. Spottiswoode.”

52

Anguish

Pat laughed, airily (she hoped). “Oh, Spottiswoode! Of course.”

Wolf smiled. “Well?”

“Well, why not?” said Pat. She looked about the room and made a gesture with her hands. “I was just thinking – here I am in Spottiswoode Street at last. You know, I’ve always wanted to live in Spottiswoode Street, and now I do. I was just so happy, I shouted out Spottiswoode, I suppose.”

Her explanation tailed off. She saw his eyes widen slightly, and with a sinking heart she realised that this meant that he did not believe her. Desperate now, she thought, I must do something to change the subject in a radical way.

She looked at her watch. “Look at the time!” she muttered.

“I’m sorry, I’m going to have to have a bath.”

She turned round and began to unbutton her top. Wolf did nothing. Turning her head slightly, she saw him staring at her, a bemused expression on his face. She stopped the unbuttoning.

“So you don’t have to have a bath after all?” said Wolf.

“No,” she said lamely. “I forgot. I don’t.”

Wolf smiled at her, his teeth white against his lips. “Oh well,”

he said. “I’d better be going. So long.”

“So long.”

He closed the door, and Pat sat down on her bed. She felt confused and raw; unhappy too. And in her unhappiness, as ever, she retrieved her mobile from her bag and pressed the button which would connect her immediately with her father.

He answered, as he always did, in the calm tones that she had always found so reassuring. He inquired where she was and asked her how she was settling in, and then there was a brief silence before she spoke again.

“Can you tell me something, Dad?” she asked. “Why do we utter words that don’t mean anything?”

Dr MacGregor laughed. “Perhaps you should ask a politician that. They’re the experts in the uttering of the meaningless.”

“No, I don’t mean that. I’m talking about when you murmur a word to yourself. A name perhaps. The name of a place.” She did not say the name of a street, of course.

Anguish

53

There was a moment’s silence at the other end. Dr MacGregor realised that this was not theoretical inquiry; doctors were never asked theoretical questions. They were asked questions about things that were happening to real people, usually to the questioner.

“Why?” he asked gently. “Have you found yourself doing this?”

“Yes,” said Pat. “I suppose I have.”

“It’s nothing too worrying,” said Dr MacGregor. “It’s usually an expression of agony. Something worries you, something haunts you, and you give verbal expression to your anguish. And what you say may have nothing to do with what you feel. It may be the name of somebody you know, it may be a totally meaningless word.”

“Such as . . . such as Spottiswoode?”

“Yes. Spottiswoode would do.” Dr MacGregor paused. So that was what his daughter had uttered. Well, Spottiswoode was as good as anything. “You’re unhappy about something, aren’t you? That’s why you gave a cry of anguish. It’s a perfectly normal response, you know. Lots of people do it. They don’t admit it, but they do it. People don’t admit things, you see, Pat.”

“They don’t?”

“No, they don’t. And that’s very sad, isn’t it? We’re all weak, human creatures, with all those foibles and troubles which make us human, and we all – or most of us – feel that we have to be strong and brave and in command of ourselves. But we can’t be.

The people with the strong, brave exteriors are just as weak and vulnerable as the rest of us. And of course they never admit to their childish practices, their moments of weakness or absurdity, and then the rest of us think that’s how it should be. But it isn’t, Pat. It isn’t.

“And here is another thing, Pat. When you find yourself doing something like this – something which appears to have no meaning – remember that it might just be plain old superstitious behaviour. A lot of the things we do are superstitious. And although we don’t know it, we do them because we think that our actions will protect us from things getting even worse.”

54

Fibs

Pat was intrigued. For the time being, she had forgotten about her misery and about Spottiswoode and its attendant embarrassments. It was so like her father to understand so completely.

And it was so like him, too, to make it that much easier.

“Of course,” went on Dr MacGregor, “this will all be about a boy, won’t it?”

She drew in her breath. He always knew; he always knew.

“Yes, it is.”

“In that case,” he said, “your options are very clear, you know.

You find out whether it’s going to work out, or you forget him.

If he’s unattainable, or not interested in you, then you simply have to forget him. Forget he exists. Tell yourself that he’s really nothing to you.”

Their conversation continued for a few minutes after that.

Then Pat went to the window and looked out. Wolf is nothing to me, she said to herself. Wolf is nothing to me.

She heard a noise outside the closed door, and she spun round.

The thought occurred to her that she had said – actually articulated the words Wolf is nothing to me – rather than merely thinking them. She could not be sure. And if that was Wolf outside, then he would have heard her.

But it was not Wolf. It was Tessie.

18. Fibs

Irene had taken Stuart to task for suggesting in front of Bertie that they should report the theft of their car without mentioning their suspicions that the car was already a stolen car, passed on by the Glasgow businessman, Lard O’Connor. Her squeamish-ness, though, did not preclude her from reporting the matter herself; she had been shocked by the idea that Bertie might hear of the planned concealment rather than that Stuart should propose such a thing in the first place.

“It’s not really a deception,” she said to Stuart, once Bertie was out of earshot. “All we are doing is reporting the theft of Fibs

55

a car which has a certain number plate. It makes no difference that the car in question is not the original vehicle which had that number. That’s all there is to it.”

Stuart was not sure that it was so simple. In his view, the difference between their positions was that while Irene was happy to employ half-truths, he was happy to achieve the same end by simple misstatement. The end result was the same – as far as he could see. But he felt disinclined to argue the point with Irene, who inevitably won any such debate between them. So he agreed with her that she should make the report to the police, and should do so at the Gayfield Square Police Station, which was only ten minutes’ walk from Scotland Street, at the very eastern edge of the New Town.

Bertie was very keen to accompany his mother. He had never been in a police station, he pointed out, and this was the only chance he would have.

“Anyway, I can help you, Mummy,” he said. “I can provide corroboration of what you say.”

Irene glanced at her son. She was aware that Bertie had a wide vocabulary, but she had not heard him refer to “corroboration” before. It was very interesting; one day she would have to attempt to measure the extent of his vocabulary. She had seen a kit which enabled one to do just that: one asked the meaning of certain words and then extrapolated from the results.

Extrapolation, she thought. Would Bertie know what extrapolation meant?

She decided to indulge Bertie. “Very well, Bertie,” she said.

“You can come to the police station with me. I don’t think that there’s much to be seen there, quite frankly. Police stations are rather boring places, I understand.”

Bertie looked puzzled. “Then why do people like to read about them, if they’re so boring?”

Irene laughed. “I suppose that’s because the people who write about them – people like that Ian Rankin – have no idea what a real police station is like!”

“So they just make it up?” asked Bertie. “Does Mr Rankin just make everything up?”

56

Fibs

“He has a very active imagination,” said Irene. “He makes Edinburgh sound very exciting, with all those bodies and so on.

But that’s not at all what real life’s like. Real life is what we do, Bertie. Real life is you and me. Valvona and Crolla. That sort of thing.”

Bertie thought for a moment. “Poor Mr Rankin,” he said after a while. “It’s sad that he has to make things up. Do you think he’s unhappy, Mummy? Do you think that having to tell so many fibs makes him unhappy?”

Irene reached down and patted Bertie on the head. It was a gesture which Bertie particularly disliked, and he dodged to avoid her hand. “Dear Bertie,” she said. “Don’t you worry about Ian Rankin! He’ll be fine. I don’t think he knows that he’s making things up, I really don’t. I think he probably believes it’s all true.”

She paused. “But anyway, Bertie, let’s not concern ourselves too much about all that. If we’re going to Gayfield Square, then we should leave now. And then, afterwards, we can go and buy sun-dried tomatoes at Valvona and Crolla. Would you like that?”

Bertie said that he would, and a few minutes later they were making their way up Scotland Street to the Drummond Place corner. Irene walked slowly, while Bertie skipped ahead of her.

Every so often he would turn round and run back to join his mother, before detaching himself from her again. She noticed that when he skipped, he kept his gaze carefully on the pavement in front of him. And his gait, too, was controlled, as if he was taking care to avoid putting his feet . . . It was that old business with the bears and the lines again, she thought, with irritation. It really was most vexing that Bertie, who appeared to know what corroboration was, who was able to speak Italian with such fluency, and who could reel off all the main scales, major and minor, should believe that if he put his foot on a line in the pavement, bears would materialise and eat him. She had no idea where he got such notions from. She had never encouraged magical thinking in her son; she had always pointed out that darkness was just the absence of light, not cover for all sorts of ghosts and bogles; she had never encouraged any of that nonsense, and yet here he was being irra-tional. Of course, he got it from other children; she was sure of Leerie, Leerie, Licht the Lamps

57

that. There was even now a whole world of childish belief – lore and language – that survived the most determined rationalistic attempts to tame it. And those belief structures still seemed able to lay a claim to the juvenile mind, sending it off down ridiculous avenues of fantasy.

She called out to Bertie, who had skipped ahead and was just about to turn the corner. Hearing his mother’s voice, Bertie stopped, turned round, and then began to run back to her.

“I want to talk to you, Bertie,” said Irene. “We can talk as we walk along.”

Bertie looked crestfallen. He had planned to keep some distance between himself and his mother, in case anybody should think that he belonged to her. Now this would be impossible.

He sighed. What did she want to talk about? She would ask him questions, he was sure of that, and she would give him a lecture about bears. He would listen, of course, but if she was going to try to get him to tread on any lines, then the answer would be no. Bertie knew what happened if you trod on lines. Of course he understood that there was no question of bears; bears were just a metaphor for disaster, that’s all they were. But try to explain that to an adult – just try.

19. Leerie, Leerie, Licht the Lamps Irene looked down at Bertie as they walked slowly round the north-eastern sweep of Drummond Place.

“I’d like to ask you a few questions, if you don’t mind, Bertie,”

she said. “You know how Mummy is, don’t you, with her intellectual curiosity? Silly Mummy! But Mummy does like to know what’s going on in her little boy’s head, that’s all.”

“I don’t mind,” Bertie muttered, crossing his fingers as he spoke. It was well known that if you crossed your fingers, you could lie with impunity. Would his mother cross her fingers in the police station? he wondered. Perhaps he would suggest it to her closer to the time.

58

Leerie, Leerie, Licht the Lamps

“I’ve been wondering where you get your ideas from,” Irene began. “I know that you get a lot of things from Daddy or from me.” (Mostly me, she thought. Thank heavens.) “And you learn a lot from your teacher at the Steiner School, of course. But you must also pick up some things from the other children. You do, don’t you?”

Bertie shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe,” he said. He thought of the other children he knew: Tofu, Hiawatha, Olive.

He was not sure if he learned much from any of them. Tofu knew virtually nothing, as far as Bertie could ascertain.

Hiawatha hardly ever said anything, and anyway he spoke with a curious accent that very few people could understand. And as for Olive, she was always imparting information to others, but it was almost always quite wrong. Bertie had been shocked to discover that Olive thought Glasgow was in Ireland. And she held this view although she had actually been there –

“Well, it seemed like it was in Ireland,” she had said in her own defence. And then she had said that a tiger was a cross between a lion and a zebra and had stuck to this position even after Bertie had pointed out that lions ate zebras and would therefore never get to know one another well enough to have Leerie, Leerie, Licht the Lamps

59

offspring. Olive had simply stared at him and said: “What’s that got to do with it?” And so they had left the subject where it stood.

“Perhaps you’ll tell me some of the things you pick up from other children,” coaxed Irene. “Do you know any counting rhymes, for example?”

“Counting rhymes?” asked Bertie.

“Yes,” said Irene. “Here’s one that I remember. Shall I tell it to you?”

“If you must,” muttered Bertie.

“Very well,” said Irene. “Here we go: Bake a pudding, bake a pie,

Send it up to Lord Mackay,

Lord Mackay’s not at home,

Send it to the man o’ the moon.

The man o’ the moon’s making shoes,

Tippence a pair,

Eery, ary, biscuit, Mary,

Pim, pam, pot.”

Bertie looked at his mother. Then he looked away again. In his astonishment, he had almost trodden on a line. He would have to be more careful in future.

“So,” said Irene jauntily. “Do you know anything like that?”

Bertie stopped and looked up at his mother. “I know some rhymes, Mummy. Is that what you want to know?”

“Yes,” said Irene. “You tell them to me, Bertie, and I’ll tell you if I knew them when I was a little girl. A lot of these things are very old, you know.”

“Postie, postie, number nine,” said Bertie suddenly. “Tore his breeks on a railway line!”

“Well!” exclaimed Irene. “Poor postie! I don’t believe I know that one, Bertie. How interesting!”

“Leerie, leerie, licht the lamps,” continued Bertie. “Lang legs and crookit shanks.”

“My goodness!” said Irene. “That’s remarkable. I suspect that’s a very old one. The leerie was the lamplighter, Bertie. We don’t have lamplighters any more, and yet there you are still 60

Leerie, Leerie, Licht the Lamps

using that rhyme in the playground. Isn’t that interesting, Bertie?

It shows the persistence of these things.”

Bertie nodded. “Here’s another one, Mummy,” he said.

“There was an old man called Michael Finigin He grew whiskers on his chinigin

The wind came up and blew them inigin Poor old Michael Finigin, begin igin.”

Irene clapped her hands in delight. “Oh yes, Bertie! I remember that. And there’s more!

There was an old man called Michael Finigin Climbed a tree and hurt his shin igin Tore off several yards of skin igin

Poor old Michael Finigin, begin igin.”

Bertie frowned. “Poor Michael Finigin,” he said. “Nothing went right for him, did it, Mummy?”

“No,” said Irene. “A lot of these things are very cruel, Bertie?

People laugh at cruelty, don’t they? We think that we don’t, but we do. Just listen to the jokes that people tell one another.

They’re all about misfortune of one sort or another. And people seem to find misfortune funny.”

“And it wasn’t funny for Michael Finigin,” observed Bertie.

“No,” said Irene. “There are lots of people for whom it’s not funny. Not funny at all.”

They had now reached the end of London Street and were not far from the East New Town Nursery School, where Bertie had once been enrolled. Irene had said nothing about the nursery school on this trip, hoping that Bertie had forgotten all about the trauma of his earlier suspension. But she noticed now that he was looking nervously in the direction of the school, and she feared that painful memories were rising in his mind.

“You used to go to nursery school there, Bertie,” she said. “A long time ago. But we don’t have to think about that any more.

We’ve moved on.”

Bertie looked down the road that led to the nursery school.

He had been happy there, and he could never understand why they had suspended him. That woman, Miss MacFadzean, had encouraged them to express themselves, and that was all he had Truth and Truth-Telling in Gayfield Square 61

been doing. It was really rather unfair. He looked at his mother, and reached for her hand. Poor Mummy! he thought. She has such strange ideas in her head, but she really means well, in a funny sort of way. And here she was getting excited about a few peculiar old rhymes that he had seen in Iona and Peter Opie’s book The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren. Bertie had found a copy in the house and had read it from cover to cover.

There was so much in it. It was a pity all of that had been forgotten – such a pity! Perhaps he would try to teach some of them to Olive, and she could pass them on to the other girls.

There was no point trying to teach Tofu any folklore – no point at all.

20. Truth and Truth-Telling in Gayfield Square At Gayfield Square Police Station, Irene and Bertie were greeted by a policeman, who smiled warmly at Bertie. “Lost your bicycle, son?” the policeman asked. Bertie looked at the policeman blankly. “I don’t have a bicycle,” he said. “I wish I had a bicycle, but I don’t. Mummy won’t let me . . .”

“The officer is just being playful, Bertie,” Irene interrupted.

“It’s his idea of a joke, you see.”

The policeman looked at Irene sharply. “And what can we do for you, Madam?” he asked coldly.

“I’ve come to report the theft of a car,” said Irene.

“I see,” said the policeman. “And are we sure it’s been stolen?

It hasn’t been towed, has it?”

Irene gave a start. Towed? It had not occurred to her that the car might have been legitimately removed. What sort of line was there on the road at that point? Was it residents’ parking?

It was residents’ parking, surely . . .

“I don’t think it will have been towed,” she said. “It was parked in Scotland Street, where we always park it. Now it’s gone.”

The policeman nodded. “The most surprising cars get towed, you know. You’d be astonished at how many people come in 62

Truth and Truth-Telling in Gayfield Square here to report their car stolen and all the time it’s down at the vehicle pound.”

Irene gave the policeman the number of their car and he went away briefly to feed the details into a computer. While he was gone, Bertie looked around the room with interest. There were several notices pinned on a board and he sidled over to these and peered up at them. There was a notice about the depth of tread required on a car tyre and one about the closing of a road.

And then there was a Wanted poster, complete with the photograph of the wanted person. Bertie peered at the photograph.

It was very interesting. Surely not . . .

“Mummy,” he whispered. “Come over here and look at this.

Look at this Wanted poster.”

“Not now, Bertie,” said Irene. “We must deal with our car first.”

“But I recognise the person in that photograph,” Bertie persisted. “Look, Mummy! Look at the person in the photograph.”

“Oh really, Bertie,” said Irene, the exasperation rising in her voice. “I don’t see what . . .” She stopped. Slowly she leant forward and studied the picture. “My goodness . . .” she began.

“You see,” said Bertie. “It is him, isn’t it?”

Irene stood up again and pulled Bertie away from the notice board. “Hush, Bertie,” she said. “We haven’t come here to look at Wanted posters. We’re here to find our poor car . . .”

“But,” said Bertie. “But the notice says that anybody who recognises . . .”

The policeman was now returning to the front desk.

“Your car has not been towed,” he said. “So if you’d like to tell me when you last saw it and where it was when you last saw it.”

“We’ve just see that pho . . .” Bertie began, but was interrupted by Irene.

“Now then,” she said loudly. “When did we last see the car, Bertie? Can you put on your little thinking cap? When did Mummy park the car up at the top of Scotland Street?”

Bertie scratched his head. “Last week, I think. Yes, Mummy, Truth and Truth-Telling in Gayfield Square 63

it was last week. Daddy was out drinking, remember, and you . . .”

“Last week,” interrupted Irene. “Yes, last week. And, Bertie, Daddy does not go out drinking, as you put it. Daddy had gone to meet somebody from the office and it just so happened it was in the Cumberland Bar. It was a working meeting.” She smiled at the policeman. “Honestly! Out of the mouths of babes . . .”

The policeman looked at Bertie and winked. “So it was last week some time?”

“Yes,” said Irene. “I think it was Tuesday. Yes, it was Tuesday.”

“So it was stolen some time after Tuesday but before the day on which you found it to be missing, which was . . .”

“Yesterday,” said Bertie. “I took Mummy up the street to show her that it wasn’t there. She was very cross. She said a rude word.”

“Bertie!” exclaimed Irene. “I did not say a rude word. You’re making it up.”

“But you did, Mummy,” said Bertie. “You said . . .”

“No need,” said the policeman. “None of us is perfect. Let’s proceed. I shall need to take all your details at this stage. Then we’ll enter the particulars of the car on the national stolen-cars register. And we shall make inquiries.”

“It might have been stolen before,” said Bertie suddenly.

Irene spun round sharply and glared at him. Then she turned back to the policeman. “He has a very vivid imagination,” she explained. “You know how children are. They construct these vivid imaginative worlds. Melanie Klein . . .”

The policeman looked at Bertie. “You said it was already stolen?” he asked. “Who stole it? This Melanie Klein? Your Dad?”

“No,” said Bertie. “Daddy would never steal a car. He works for the Scottish Executive.”

“So,” the policeman continued. “Who stole it then?”

“Oh really!” Irene interrupted. “This is completely pointless.

It was just a bit of childish fantasy. You were making things up, weren’t you, Bertie?”

Bertie shook his head. “I think it might have been that friend 64

Missing Domenica

of Mr O’Connor’s. You remember, Mummy, I told you about him. Gerry. He might have . . .”

“I think we’ve had quite enough of this,” said Irene, reaching out for Bertie’s hand. Turning to the policeman, she explained that they had to do some shopping and that if there was anything further that the police needed to know they could telephone her.

Then, pushing Bertie before her, she hurried towards the exit.

“But what about that poster?” Bertie said, as they made their way out.

“Later, Bertie,” said Irene. “We’ll talk about that later.”

Outside now, and heading up the square in the direction of Valvona and Crolla, Irene pointedly refrained from meeting Bertie’s gaze. The little boy, head down, was a picture of dejec-tion.

“I’m sorry, Mummy,” he said after a while. “Did I say something wrong?”

Irene pursed her lips. “There are times when it’s best to leave things to grown-ups, Bertie,” she said. “That was one of them.”

“But I was just telling the truth,” protested Bertie. “Do grown-ups not tell the truth?”

“They do,” said Irene crossly. “They certainly do. It’s just that grown-ups know how to handle the truth. You’ll learn that in due course, Bertie. You’ll learn.”

Bertie said nothing. He was thinking of the poster and the photograph on it. Who would have guessed?

21. Missing Domenica

Angus Lordie knew immediately that the letter came from Domenica. When he picked it up, there it was – a brightly-coloured Malaysian stamp portraying local flora, and beneath it the address, written out in Domenica’s characteristic script. She had learned that script at St Leonard’s School, St Andrews, all those years ago, at the feet of the redoubtable Miss Powell, a teacher who, so Domenica had once informed Angus, believed Missing Domenica

65

that clarity of expression in handwriting and speech was the greatest of goods which an education could confer. “It does not matter, girls,” she had said, “if you do not have the most profound thoughts to convey – and I suspect that you don’t – as long as you convey them clearly.” Miss Powell, Domenica explained, had been a teacher of great antiquity, and had died in office, in the staff room, with much dignity. They had found her with an open exercise book on her lap with two words written, in her own handwriting, on an otherwise unsullied page – “the end”.

Or so the story went – schoolgirls, put together, were notoriously prone to fancy and indeed to the exchange of wild rumour.

The letter Angus now extracted from the small bundle of mail.

The brown envelopes and the unsolicited advertisements which the Post Office saw fit to inflict on him, he tossed to one side; the advertisements would be recycled and would no doubt be made into fresh advertisements, endlessly perhaps, while the brown envelopes would be opened after breakfast. Angus was not one to put off the opening of mail, a habit which he had heard was extremely common. Sometimes it took the form of leaving the letter unopened for a day or so – something which was in the range of normality – but the condition could become more serious and could lead to mail remaining unopened for weeks, even months. A friend of his had suffered from this and had sought the help of a clinical psychologist, who had revealed to him that the letters represented an emotional claim – one emotional claim too many – and he was simply denying this to protect himself.

But this did not afflict Angus, who slit Domenica’s envelope open with relish and read it while seated at his kitchen table, a cup of coffee in front of him, the morning sun streaming in through his window. It was a delicious feeling, this anticipation of word from Domenica, and he thought for a moment that he would paint such a scene, a small, carefully-worked canvas in the style of . . . well, let us not be too modest about our abilities, Vermeer. Yes, that would be entirely appropriate. A small tribute to Vermeer: the reading of a letter in an Edinburgh kitchen, with all that stillness and quiet which Vermeer could put into his paintings, and which Angus Lordie could, too.

66

Missing Domenica

The letter began with the usual salutation. Then: “You will see from the postmark – and the stamp – that I have reached my destination safely. When I embarked on that questionable ship I confess that I began to doubt my decision to make the journey by sea, but I must say that I do not regret it for a moment. Air travel is completely artificial. One enters a gleaming metal tube and subjects oneself to the experience of being carried through the sky while breathing the recycled air of several hundred other people. And then they have the effrontery to suggest that one should settle back and ‘enjoy the flight’! Of course, these airline people speak a different language altogether, a sort of debased mid-Atlantic English which is full of circumlocutions and cliché.

The word ‘now’, such an honest, workmanlike word, has been replaced by ‘at this time’, as in ‘please fasten your seat belts at this time’, or ‘we are commencing (anglice starting) our descent at this time’. Why can’t they say ‘now’?

“Well, as you know, I refrained from all that and took a passage on a merchant ship, a large Norwegian container vessel of no discernible character. They had twenty passengers – a motley crew – and indeed they had a motley crew too. But we were able to read and play bridge with the Captain (a most eccentric bidder, I might add), and there was a simply immense deck to walk about for exercise.

“It got hotter and hotter, of course, and several of the other passengers became very morose and low. I was comfortable enough; my cabin windows opened and the ship’s movement made for a pleasant breeze. I lay about a lot, reading suitable books. I must confess, Angus, that I reread Somerset Maugham because it seemed to be just the thing in such circumstances.

You know, Maugham really could write, unlike some novelists today, who go in for pretentiousness in a very big way. Maugham told marvellous stories, in the way in which nineteenth-century writers told stories. No artifice. No play with words. Just stories.

I read Rain several times on board, because it’s all about a voyage, as you know. What a story! And The Painted Veil too, because it’s so refreshing to see a male writer having a go at a truly nasty woman; male writers don’t dare do that these days, Angus. You

Missing Domenica

67

wouldn’t get a modern Flaubert punishing Madame Bovary as the real Flaubert did. Oh no. By the way, did you know that Flaubert wrote terribly slowly? He managed five words an hour, which meant that on a good day he wrote about thirty words.

Now they were good words, of course, but even so . . .”

Angus put down the letter and rose to his feet. He looked out of the window. It was as if Domenica was in the room with him.

He could hear her voice. Her laughter. She was there, and not there at the same time. He did not want the letter to end, and so he decided to go for a brief walk and return to savour the rest of the letter. This would give him something to look forward to.

He whistled for Cyril, who appeared from the other end of the flat, one ear cocked inquisitively.

“Do you miss Domenica too?” Angus asked as he attached the lead to Cyril’s collar.

Cyril was silent. As a dog, he missed everything – intensely.

He missed Lochboisdale. He missed favourite, remembered bones. He missed the tooth he had lost when he had bitten that other dog’s tail. Everything – Cyril missed everything.

22. An M.A. (Cantab.)

Angus returned from his walk round Drummond Place. There were people about, and one or two greeted him, but he barely noticed them, so absorbed was he in thoughts of Domenica’s letter. He began to compose his response mentally – he would tell her about Antonia and how he had let her in and how he had decided that she . . . no, he would not do that. He should remember that Antonia was, after all, Domenica’s friend. I must make more of an effort in that direction, he told himself. I shall persist. I shall give her the chance to prove that she is as charming and good company as Domenica herself. At the very least, I shall be civil; I shall do the neighbourly thing and invite her in for a drink some evening, although perhaps it might be wise to dilute her. And not just to dilute her with alcohol, which has the power to transform difficult company into good, but dilute her with other guests, perhaps Matthew and that engaging girl, Pat – if they would come.

Now entering his kitchen, into which the slanting rays of sun still shone, Angus made himself another cup of coffee and sat down to read the rest of Domenica’s letter.

“We eventually arrived in Malacca. I must confess that I had made no arrangements to speak of and had to find myself a hotel more or less on the spot. This proved to be remarkably easy and I was soon ensconced in a rather charming old building with a wide veranda and a garden full of frangipani trees. The hotel called itself the São Pedro and was run by a charming Malaccan Portuguese and his Indonesian-Dutch wife. They made me extremely comfortable, but were much alarmed when I disclosed that I proposed to find a pirate community in which to do anthropological observation. They felt, for some reason, that I had some kind of death-wish (the very thought!) and were completely unpersuaded by my attempts to reassure them. I told them that anthropologists were accustomed to putting themselves in dangerous situations. Look at the number of people who did their field work in New Guinea amongst people who still resorted to occasional head-hunting. Look at the people An M.A. (Cantab.)

69

who did their research in the mountains of Corsica, which are pretty dangerous at the best of times. Very few anthropologists opt for the soft life when it comes to their field work. In fact, I know only two – one went to the Vatican to study the domestic economy of a male-dominated society, and the other went to Monaco to study sense of place and permanence amongst tax exiles. Both of these were rather condescended to by their peers later on – they were treated as if they had not really earned their spurs, so to speak, as anthropologists. There were sniffy remarks about doing one’s research in a meadow rather than a field –

that sort of thing. Not really funny, but very barbed.

“But do you think that my hosts would be reassured by any of this? They would not. Eventually, they shrugged their shoulders and said that if called upon they would be happy to identify my remains and have them shipped back to Scotland. I thanked them for this; the offer was genuinely meant.

“Of course, I had to find somebody who would give me the necessary introductions. The Royal Institute of Anthropology had given me the name of somebody who was in the business of arranging academic exchanges for students, and they said that this person had been very helpful to another anthropologist who had studied minority-group relations in several of the Malaysian states. He was called Edward Hong, and I eventually found his office near a row of old godowns by the river. It was in a charming old Chinese house, with red roof and pillars which had been painted light blue. On the front door there was a sign which announced that this was the office of the World Scholar Cultural Exchange, of which the proprietor and director was Edward Hong, M.A. (Cantab.).

“I do like to meet an M.A. (Cantab.) in a place like Malacca

– it’s so reassuring! Of course, one does come across one or two of them who might not be the real thing, but they are usually utterly charming and tremendously Anglophile (and remember, Angus, before you say anything: Anglophilia includes Scots in its generous embrace). Do you remember, by the way, that charming habit of putting letters behind one’s name, even if one failed the degree in question? Did you ever meet a B.A. (Calcutta) 70

An M.A. (Cantab.)

(Failed)? Or were they apocryphal? I certainly remember speaking to somebody who had seen a plate outside a dental surgery in the Yemen which said: Bachelor of Dental Surgery (Failed). I suppose that if one’s toothache were severe enough, one might just take the risk.

“Edward Hong was very urbane. He was an impressive-looking man with a pencil moustache and elegant patent-leather shoes. He appeared terribly pleased to see me and summoned a maid to produce a tray of tea, which we drank out of Royal Doulton cups.

“‘I do so miss good old John’s,’ he said, referring, I assumed, to St John’s College, Cambridge. ‘I had such a well-placed room in Second Court, and from time to time I took tea with the Master and his wife in the Lodge. He had a strong interest in Chinese ceramics, and I used to help him read the reign marks on the base of vases. We also used to discuss Waley’s transla-tions of Tang poetry. We discussed those for hours. Hours.’

“I listened to this talk about St John’s and Cambridge for almost half an hour. At one point, he asked me if the Church clock continued to stand at ten to three, and I replied that there was, as far as I knew, honey still for tea. He was delighted with that, and at the end of our conversation I think that he would have done anything for me. So that was when I asked him whether it would be possible to arrange an introduction to some contemporary pirates.

“He hesitated for only the briefest of moments before he smiled and said that this could certainly be arranged. It would take a day or two, he said, and in the meantime would I care to meet his daughter, Mary, who was studying piano and French?

‘She loves Chopin,’ he said, ‘and I love listening to her playing.

I can listen to Chopin for hours – hours and hours.’”

23. The Charms of Neo-Melanesian Pidgin

“I had rather a lot of Chopin that morning, I must confess,”

wrote Domenica. “The Mazurka in C sharp minor, the Nocturne in E major, and so on, all interpreted sympathetically by Mary Hong, daughter of Edward Hong, M.A. (Cantab.). By lunchtime I was obliged to look discreetly at my watch and claim that, owing to jet lag, I needed to get back to the hotel for an afternoon nap.

“We parted the greatest of friends. If I came back for a mid-morning tea a couple of days later, Edward Hong said, he would make sure that there would be a pirate contact for me to meet.

‘He might be a little on the rough side,’ he said. ‘But we can have some Chopin afterwards to make up for it.’

“I returned to the hotel and spent an afternoon writing up my diary. I haven’t done such a thing for years, but I have the feeling that my experiences here in Malacca are going to be somewhat unusual and should be recorded. I did a little pen and ink sketch of Edward Hong in the margins and one of his daughter playing Chopin. I was quite pleased with these, although you would regard them as mere amateur scratchings, Angus. Yes, you would, although you would be far too polite to say as much.

“I spent the next two days wandering around Malacca. It’s a delightful place, a bit like Leith, in fact, but with totally different people and buildings, and climate, too, I suppose. I spent very pleasant hours reading in a chair in the garden of the hotel, under a very shady tree that looked remarkably like those Sea Grape trees you see in places such as Jamaica, but no doubt something quite different. I read about the history of this place

– very colourful – and about all the different groups of people who have made their home here. This had implications for my study of the pirates. Because of the dearth of information on the subject, I had no idea whether they would be Malay, Chinese or Indian in their origin, and this had implications not only for how I would approach the study, but also for how we could communicate.

72

The Charms of Neo-Melanesian Pidgin

“I had envisaged that I might need an interpreter, but then it occurred to me that because of the . . . how shall I put it?

. . . delicate nature of the research it could be difficult to find a local person who would be prepared to live amongst the pirates themselves. For this reason, I might need to speak to them directly.

“I telephoned Edward Hong about this. He said that the pirate bands were of mixed ethnicity and that I should expect to encounter all the main groups to be found in Malacca.

“‘It’s rather like the French Foreign Legion,’ he explained.

‘People join up if they want to get away. But what makes them different from the Legion is that they bring their wives and children with them. And as for languages, well, I would suggest that since you don’t have any of the local Chinese dialects – and no Tamil, or Malay? No? Well, I’d use a pidgin of some sort.’

“As it happens, I know all about pidgin – I learned Tok Pisin in New Guinea and I became quite interested in the subject. It’s amazing how far one can get with pidgin, Angus. And pidgin languages are so colourful! Wonderful creations! I suspect they’ll be speaking pidgin down in Essex before too long – they’re certainly heading in that direction.

“As you know, pidgins are a real mixture of this, that and the next thing. You get a bit of English, a bit of German, a bit of Dutch – everything. And the grammar is simple in the extreme. Do you know that when Prince Charles went to address the Papua New Guinea legislative assembly – where the official language is a pidgin – they introduced him formally as ‘Nambawan pikinini bilong Mrs Kwin’? Isn’t that marvellous? And it was quite accurate, of course. The word “bilong”

does an awful lot of work in pidgin. And here’s another little gem. In Neo-Melanesian pidgin, if I wanted to say: Why did you wreck that machine? I would say: Olsem onem yu buggerupim onefelo masin? You’ll notice that the verb has an obvious etymology.

“My mind was set at rest by the thought that I would be able to speak directly to the people in the pirate band – not that I imagined I would be speaking too much to the pirates them-The Charms of Neo-Melanesian Pidgin 73

selves. I imagined that I would be talking to their wives – or, I suppose pirates have partners these days rather than wives – and discussing social arrangements and the like. It’s always very interesting to find out how decisions are made in these alternative communities. Often, you know, the power structure is fairly clearly delineated. Remember Lord of the Flies, Angus?

Remember how the right to speak was determined by possession of the conch? Well, I rather suspected that I should find similar symbols of authority amongst my pirates.

“I was really rather excited by the whole prospect. And so, when I went in due course to Edward Hong’s to meet my contact, I was filled with anticipation. Edward’s manservant greeted me at the door and ushered me upstairs and into the room in which we had listened to the Chopin on my previous visit. My face fell, I’m afraid. Edward was by himself.

“‘I’ve made inquiries,’ he said. ‘I’ve found somebody who’s prepared to take you to them. But he wouldn’t answer some of my questions, and frankly I’m not sure if I trust him. But don’t worry; he’s obtained the pirate chief’s agreement to let you live with them for a few months in exchange for money. He asked for one thousand US dollars, and I beat him down to sixty. He’ll take you there tomorrow.’

“I was very grateful, and thanked him profusely.

“‘No need to thank me,’ he said. ‘The pleasure is all mine.

But now, how about a bit of Chopin? Yes? Mary will be only too happy to oblige.’ He leant forward and winked at me.

‘Onefelo Chopin make nambawan good musik bilong piano!’ he said, and laughed, most collusively. Such a charming man. (Note: Edward Hong should not have said ‘piano’ but ‘bigfela bokis tut bilong em sam i blak, sam i waet – taem yu kilim emi singaot’, which means: big box with some black, some white teeth – when you hit it, it cries out.)”

24. Pat Gets to Know Tessie a Bit Better When Pat found Tessie standing outside her door, she was unsure whether she had heard her agonised muttering about how Wolf meant nothing to her. The other girl, however, gave nothing away: Tessie was impassive.

“Oh, hello,” said Pat. “It’s you.”

Tessie nodded. “Yes. I thought I might drop in and offer to make you a cup of coffee. We haven’t had the chance to chat very much since you moved in. In fact, we haven’t really seen one another at all.”

Pat looked over Tessie’s shoulder, into the hall. “But your boyfriend,” she began. “I thought that your boyfriend was here.”

“He was,” said Tessie. “But he had to go. He just popped in to ask me something.”

Pat relaxed. It appeared that Tessie had not heard her muttering and had no idea of how she felt about Wolf. If she felt that way about Wolf; she was by no means sure about that yet, although all the signs had been there – the quickening of the pulse, that warm, butterfly-like feeling in the stomach, the slight dizziness. And then there had been that strange desire to touch his teeth; that was very peculiar and surely meant that something was happening between them.

She thought for a moment. She could not let this happen; she would have to stop it. There was no point in falling in love with somebody else’s boyfriend, particularly a flatmate’s boyfriend. And yet, and yet . . . people fell in love with those who belonged to others. It happened all the time in fiction, and presumably in real life, too. And even if it often led to tears and disaster, sometimes, at least, it worked.

She looked at Tessie. The other girl was shorter than Pat –

appreciably shorter – and had rather fat calves, thought Pat. She looked at her hair. It was rather mousy-coloured, and was not, in Pat’s view, in very good condition. Split ends probably. As for her face, well, that was pretty enough – in an odd, irregular sort of way. There was something strange about her nose, which had the slightly angled look of a nose that had been broken. Men Pat Gets to Know Tessie a Bit Better 75

were generally improved by broken noses, which added character to the masculine face, but a broken nose could be more difficult for a woman.

They looked at one another for several seconds, each lost in an assessment of the other. At length, Pat broke the silence.

“That’s kind of you,” she said. “I must meet the others, too.

You shared with one of them last year, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” said Tessie, as they made their way through to the kitchen. “I was at school with Donna – I’ve known her for yonks and yonks. But I didn’t know Jackie at all. She’s new – like you.

She only arrived yesterday. She’s in her third year of medicine, I think. At least, I saw her with a stethoscope sticking out of her pocket.”

They went into the kitchen, which was the largest room in the flat – and had the finest view, too, over the green and the rooftops towards Arthur’s Seat in the distance. The original floor of large flagstones had been preserved here, and this added to the charm of the room. There was also an old Belfast sink, with high arched taps, and a wooden draining board.

“This kitchen’s a bit of a museum,” said Tessie. “But there’s always enough hot water to do the washing-up. You will wash up, won’t you, after you’ve done any cooking?” she added, looking over her shoulder at Pat.

Pat slightly resented this question, and there was a tetchiness in her voice when she replied. “Of course I will,” she said. “I always do.”

If Tessie picked up the irritation in Pat’s voice, she did not reveal this. She looked at Pat over her shoulder as she filled the kettle. “That’s just one of the rules about sharing a flat with other people,” she said. “Naturally, there are others.”

Pat stared at her. “But naturally.”

“Noise, for example,” went on Tessie. “Some people think that if they close their door, then other people can’t hear them playing their music. They’re wrong. Noise travels through wood quite easily. It also travels through stone walls.”

“I know,” said Pat. “In Scotland Street there was a saxophone that . . .”

76

Pat Gets to Know Tessie a Bit Better

“And then there’s the telephone,” said Tessie, cutting short the rest of Pat’s sentence. “Some people are dishonest when it comes to the telephone. They use it and they don’t write their calls down in the book. And then when the bill comes they say that it should just be split equally four ways or whatever it is. I hate that sort of thing.”

Pat felt her irritation grow. This was unambiguously a lecture on how to behave, and she resented Tessie’s assumption that she needed to be told these things. “I have shared before,” she said.

“I had quite a difficult flatmate, in fact, a boy . . .”

“And that’s another thing,” said Tessie. “Boys. If anybody has a boyfriend, then the rule is that the boy is off limits to others.

That’s the rule.”

For a few moments there was complete silence. Pat looked at the floor. She tried to look at Tessie, but the sight of the other girl’s eyes glaring at her from either side of the broken nose was too disconcerting. What on earth did Wolf see in her?

she wondered. Did he not mind those fat calves? Was he indifferent to the broken nose – and the split ends? She decided to speak.

“Of course that could be a problem, couldn’t it?”

Matthew’s Friends

77

Tessie gave a start. “A problem? Why?”

Pat took a deep breath. She thought that she might as well continue. She hadn’t started this, after all. “Well,” she said, “what if the boy in question fell for somebody else – and that somebody happened to live in the flat? What if the boy in question suddenly went off his girlfriend because . . . well, because he decided that she had fat calves or something silly like that –

what then? Why should the other girl turn him down if she felt the same way as he did?”

Tessie reached for the kettle and began to pour the hot water into the coffee pot. “There’s a very good reason why the other girl shouldn’t allow that to happen,” she said quietly. “And that is because the first girl would kill her if she did. She could kill her, you know. Really kill her.”

25. Matthew’s Friends

Matthew had not planned to go to the Cumberland Bar that evening, but when six o’clock came round, he realised that he had nothing else to do. He could go back to the flat in India Street and make a meal for himself, but what could he do after that? The crowd, as Matthew called his group of friends, had not met for at least two weeks. One member of the crowd was on holiday, another was on a course in Manchester, and one had recently become engaged to a woman who not only was not a member of the crowd but who had little time for it. It had never entered Matthew’s head that the crowd would disintegrate, but that was precisely what it appeared to be doing.

Matthew had other friends, of course, but he had rather neglected them over the last year or so. There was Ben, with whom he had been at the Academy. Matthew saw him from time to time, but now found his company somewhat tiresome, as Ben had become an enthusiastic jogger and spent most of his spare time running. He had finished in fifty-second place in the 78

Matthew’s Friends

previous year’s Edinburgh Marathon and was now talking about competing in the next New York Marathon.

He had met Ben for a meal at Henderson’s Salad Table, and the conversation had largely been about calories, energy levels and the benefits of Arnica cream for soft-tissue injuries.

“I’ve got a really interesting story to tell you,” Ben said over their meal of mixed pastas and roasted red peppers. “I was running about two weeks ago – or was it three? Hang on, it was three because it was the week before I was due to do the Peebles Half-Marathon with Ted and the others. Anyway, I was doing a circular route up Colinton Road, past Redford Barracks, and then down into Colinton Village. You know how, if you turn right after the bridge, there’s a path that goes down and follows the Water of Leith? There’s an old Victorian railway tunnel there that you run through – they’ve lit it now; it used to be pitch dark and you just used to hope that you didn’t run into a group of neds or anything like that!

“Anyway, I ran through there and then over the bridge that goes over the Lanark Road and then turned and ran along the canal. You know the aqueduct? Well, that’s where it happened.

The path along the side of the bridge has setts or whatever, and I should have walked, but I didn’t and I twisted my ankle. I swear that I felt nothing right then – nothing at all. You know how you can tear things without feeling them? Except your Achilles’ tendon. If you tear that, you feel it all right. Cuts you down. Just like that.

“I didn’t feel it, and I carried on running, but I knew by the time that I reached the Polwarth section of the canal that there was something wrong. You know that place where the Canal Society has its boathouse and there’s that guy who wears the kilt who looks after all the boats? You know the place? That’s where I found that I had to slow right down and then walk.

“I said to myself : ‘First thing you do when you get home is rub Arnica cream into it.’ And I did. I put a lot on – really rubbed it in. You can also get it in homeopathic solution but, I’m sorry, I’ve never been convinced by homeopathic remedies.

If you look at the dilution, how can such minute quantities have Matthew’s Friends

79

an effect? Right, so I rubbed it in, and you know what, Matthew?

The very next day, I was running again. No trouble. And I didn’t feel a single thing.

“And the next day I ran out to Auchendinny and back, and did it in a really good time. That’s quite a run, as you know. No trouble with that ankle. That’s Arnica for you.”

There had been a silence after that. Matthew had looked at his pasta and at the ceiling, and tried to remember what it was that he saw in Ben all those years ago. He had liked him. They had been friends, and now this thing – this running – had come between them.

There was another close friend from the Academy, Paul, whom he used to see and whom he now avoided. He had married young – they were both twenty-two at the time – and now had two young children. This friend now spoke only of issues relating to babies: of nappies, unguent creams, and feeding matters.

“Here’s a tip for you, Matthew,” Paul had said to him the last time he had seen him. “When you put a baby over your shoulder to wind it, make sure you put a cloth underneath it, just where its mouth is. No, I really mean it. It’s important. I found that out the hard way when I was about to go to work when little Hamish was about four months old. He’d just had his feed and I put him over my shoulder and started to pat his little back.

The wind came up very satisfactorily, but what I didn’t realise was that half the feed came up too and went all the way down the back of my suit jacket! I didn’t notice it and went off to the office. I went to a meeting – it was quite an important one –

and I was standing next to one of our clients and I could see him sniffing and puckering his nose. And then one of the secre-taries came and whispered in my ear and the penny dropped.

So just you remember that, Matthew!

“And here’s another thing. When you travel with a baby, make sure that you’ve got a good, strong bag to put the dirty disposables in. We went off to see some relatives of Ann’s who live at St Andrews. Stuffy bunch. We had to change the kids on the way there and we put the disposables in the same bag that we had put the flowers for Ann’s aunt. Now, you can imagine what 80

Matthew Meets an Architect

happened when we took the flowers out of the bag and thrust them into her hand! Yes. So that’s another bit of advice for you.

You don’t mind my giving you this advice, do you, Matthew? I know that you’re not at that stage yet, but it’ll come before too long and you’ll thank me. I’m sure you will.”

26. Matthew Meets an Architect

Depressed at the thought of his shortage of friends – or “viable friends”, as he put it – Matthew made his way that evening into the Cumberland Bar. He looked about him: there were one or two people he recognised, but nobody he knew well enough to go and join. So he bought himself a drink and sat at a table on his own. Sad, he thought; how sad. Here I am sitting in a bar, by myself, drinking; a situation in which I never imagined I would find myself. What lies beyond this? Drinking by myself in the flat? Of course, people drank by themselves; there was nothing essentially wrong in that – a glass of wine at one’s solitary table in the company of The Scotsman crossword or a book.

There were worse things than that. It was hardly problem-drinking.

He looked at his watch. He would sit there for perhaps half an hour, and if nobody he knew had come in by then he would go out and buy himself a pizza and take it back to India Street and eat it in the flat. India Street was not the sort of place where people sat and ate pizzas by themselves; it was dinner-party territory. Now, that was an idea! He would plan a dinner party and invite a group of brilliant guests. The wit at the table would be coruscating; the exchange of ideas vital and exciting.

There would be elegant women and clever men, and people would go off into the night buoyed by the stimulation of the evening . . .

But then he thought: where would I get the guests? Do I actually know any brilliant and witty people? He thought of his friends: none of the crowd by any stretch of the imagination Matthew Meets an Architect

81

could be described as brilliant company, and the crowd was breaking up now anyway. Then there was Ben, who would only talk about running – he had heard that Ben actually went to dinner parties in his running kit so that he could run there and run home again afterwards. There was Paul, who would only talk about babies, and who would only accept an invitation if it included the babies. So that ruled both of them out. Would Pat come? He would like it if she did, but now that she had that ridiculously-named boyfriend of hers, Wolf, she would probably not want to come without him, and Matthew could not face the prospect of entertaining that Wolf. What would one serve him?

Raw venison? Wolves liked venison.

He sighed, and looked at his watch again. Ten minutes had passed. If he bought another half pint of lager, then that would last him until the thirty minutes was up and it was time to go and order the pizza. Thirty minutes of loneliness in a place of society, he thought; thirty minutes to himself while everyone else in the bar was with somebody. A sudden, vaguely shameful thought struck him. Nobody else in this bar has four million pounds – nor even one million pounds – and yet I am alone. It was an absurd, self-pitying thought, a thought which implied that money brought social success, brought happiness, which it patently does not; and yet he thought it.

He stood up and went to the bar, suddenly wondering whether his distressed-oatmeal cashmere sweater was right. Nobody else in the bar was in distressed oatmeal; in fact nobody else was in cashmere. Yet should it matter? Teenagers worried about whether their clothes were the same as everybody else’s; when you were safely into your twenties, that was not so important.

You could wear what you like . . . Or could you? Could you get your colours entirely wrong and wear a colour that nobody else would wear? The colour of failure?

When Matthew reached the bar, the barman was waiting for him. Matthew saw the man’s glance move quickly to the distressed-oatmeal sweater and then slide back again, discreetly, professionally. Or had he imagined it? Barmen saw everything; it was all the same to them. He ordered another half pint of 82

Matthew Meets an Architect

lager and then, half turning, he saw a young woman standing beside him. They looked at one another almost inadvertently and one of them – and it was Matthew – had to say something, or at least smile.

“It’s quiet,” he said. “I don’t know where everybody is.”

“Wherever they are,” she replied, “it’s not here.”

Matthew laughed. “Actually, this place gets quite busy. I don’t know . . .”

“Oh, people go home sometimes,” she said, “if they’re really stuck.”

Matthew gestured towards the barman. “Could I get you a drink?”

He had expected a rebuff, but it did not come. Instead, there was ready acceptance, and after the barman had served him again they went together to the table which Matthew had occupied.

She introduced herself, smiling at Matthew in a way which immediately lifted Matthew’s depression. She likes me, he thought. I can see it in her eyes.

Her name, she revealed, was Leonie Marshall and she was an architect, barely qualified, but still an architect. Matthew listened carefully. The accent was difficult to place. “Australian?” he asked.

She nodded. “Melbourne – originally. Until I was ten. Then we moved to Canada, to Saskatoon, and I lived there until I was eighteen. Then, when my parents went to live in Japan, I went back to Melbourne to uni, did my architectural degree there, and my office years, and then came and did my diploma year at Newcastle.” She paused and took a breath while Matthew, watching her, mentally compared their lives: Australia, Canada, Japan, England, Scotland (her); Scotland (him).

“I finished in Newcastle,” she continued, “and had to decide what to do next. I could go back to boring old Melbourne, or I could get a job somewhere over here. There was a vacancy in a practice here in Edinburgh – a firm called Icarus Associates –

and I applied and got it. So here I am.” She took a sip of her drink and looked at Matthew. “What about you?”

Matthew stared at the table. Small rings of liquid had formed Leonie Talks

83

where the glasses had stood. He moved a beer mat sideways and mopped one up. Then, in the other, he traced a pattern with a finger.

“I run a gallery,” he said. “I try to sell pictures. It’s in Dundas Street, near . . .” He stopped.

“Yes?”

“Would you like to come and have a pizza in my flat?”

“Yes.”

27. Leonie Talks

They walked back towards India Street along Cumberland Street. “I really like this street,” said Leonie. “You see the windows? Look at those ones over there. Astragals. Perfect proportions. And the buildings themselves are not too big. A comfortable size.”

Matthew had not paid much attention to Cumberland Street, but now, through Leonie’s eyes, he did. “This street is not as impressive as the next one up,” he said. “Great King Street has great big houses. It’s much higher.”

“Social distinctions revealed in architecture,” said Leonie.

“Big houses – big people. More modest houses – more modest people.”

“Have you seen Moray Place?” asked Matthew. “It’s just round the corner from me.”

Leonie nodded. “Yes, I know it. One of the people from Icarus took me round and gave me the architectural tour of the New Town. We had a look at Moray Place.”

“And what did you think?” asked Matthew.

“Well, I wondered who lived there,” she said. “That’s what I thought.”

“Very grand people,” said Matthew. “The very grandest people in town.”

She made a gesture of acceptance. “I suppose that’s no surprise,” she said. “It’s very classical. Grand people gravitate to 84

Leonie Talks

the classical. I suppose one wouldn’t find any funky people there?”

Matthew thought for a moment. Were there any funky people in Moray Place? He thought not. He was not at all sure whether there were any funky people in Edinburgh at all. Some towns were distinctly funky – San Francisco was an example – but Edinburgh was not one of them, he thought. He answered Leonie’s question with a shake of the head.

“I thought not,” she said. “Mind you, Edinburgh has its groovy side. There are some quite groovy places.”

“Groovy?” asked Matthew.

“Yes,” said Leonie. “I was in quite a groovy street the other day. I forget what it was called. But it was definitely groovy. The doors were all painted different colours and there was this strange old shop that sold the most amazing old clothes.”

“Stockbridge,” said Matthew. “It must have been in Stockbridge. St Stephen’s Street, probably.”

“I can’t remember,” said Leonie. “But it was just like one or two streets we have in Melbourne. In fact, there’s a street there that has the same sort of old clothes shops. Vintage clothing, they call it. They sell all sorts of things. Old military uniforms.

Flapper dresses. Sweaters just like yours . . .”

It slipped out. She had not thought about what she was saying, and the remark slipped out. And she knew immediately what she had done, and regretted it. For his part, Matthew was assailed by the remark. It came from the side, struck him, and lodged.

His distressed-oatmeal cashmere sweater, which he had paid so much for at Stewart Christie in Queen Street . . .

She reached out and took his arm. “I’m sorry,” she blurted out. “I didn’t mean to say that.”

He tried to smile. “My sweater? This thing? It’s just an old . . .”

“I really didn’t mean it. I promise you. Look . . . there’s nothing wrong with it. There really isn’t. I like beige.”

Matthew bridled slightly. “Beige? It’s not beige. It’s distressed oatmeal.”

She thought: porridge. It’s a porridge-coloured sweater. They Leonie Talks

85

must like porridge-coloured clothes in Scotland, and I’ve gone and hurt this really gentle, nice man with my stupid Australian tactlessness.

“I really didn’t mean . . .”

They had now reached the end of Cumberland Street and Matthew, who wanted to change the subject, pointed out St Vincent’s Church and the beginning of St Stephen’s Street. “And up on the corner there was where Madame Doubtfire had her shop,” he said. “She was a real person whose name was used by Anne Fine in her book. My father knew the original Madame Doubtfire. She was an old lady who kept a large number of cats and claimed that she ‘had danced before the Tsar’. That’s what she told everybody. Danced before the Tsar.”

“Who’s the Tsar?” asked Leonie.

Matthew hesitated. Was it possible that there were people who did not know who the Tsar was? He was about to explain, when Leonie said, “Oh him! The president of Russia.”

He burst out laughing, and immediately regretted it. The laughter had slipped out, as had her remark about his sweater.

It just slipped out, as the best laughter will always do, in spon-taneity, uncontrollable. He recovered himself quickly and looked grave. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to laugh. It’s just that the Tsar was not exactly a president.”

Leonie did not seem offended. “I never learned much history,”

she explained. “I was always drawing in history lessons. I drew houses – all the time.”

“And so you became an architect.”

“Yes.” She looked at him, and smiled. “What about you? I bet you knew that you were artistic when you were a little boy.

Did you draw things too?”

Matthew felt flattered. Am I artistic? I suppose I am. I own a gallery. I can talk about art. “Yes,” he said solemnly, “I knew.

I always knew.”

They continued their conversation easily. There was no further talk about sweaters or tsars. They moved on to the subject of where Leonie lived. She explained how she had a studio flat in a converted bonded warehouse in Leith. “It’s very fashionable to 86

The Boy in the Tree

live in a bonded warehouse,” she said. “It’s the same as living in a loft in New York. All the really fashionable people live in lofts in New York. Bonded warehouses and lofts provide very flexible space. You can put in moveable room dividers. Tent walls. Living curtains.”

“What’s a living curtain?” Matthew asked.

“It’s a curtain you live behind,” answered Leonie. “Curtains are replacing walls. Take your flat, for example. Do you really need your walls?”

Matthew thought that he did, but he decided it sounded rather stuffy, rather conventional, to say that one needed walls. People who lived in Moray Place were welcome to walls – they clearly needed them. India Street was far less psychologically dependent on walls.

“No,” he said. “I’d like to get rid of some of my walls.”

“Great,” said Leonie. “When we get to your place, I’ll take a look around. I can do some sketches. We can work out what walls can come out.”

Matthew said nothing, but Leonie continued. “The thing about walls is that they hide things. Society is much more open now. Everything’s more open. The old culture of walls is finished.”

Matthew frowned. “But what about . . . what about bathrooms?”

“Open plan,” said Leonie, adding: “these days.”

28. The Boy in the Tree

Antonia Collie had settled into Domenica’s flat rather more quickly than she had imagined would be the case. Antonia did not consider herself a city person; she had been born and brought up in St Andrews, the daughter of a professor of anatomy, and apart from her student years in Edinburgh had lived the rest of her life in the country or in small towns. She had always felt vaguely uncomfortable in large cities; in a metropolis it felt to The Boy in the Tree

87

her as if something unsettling was always on the point of happening, but never quite happened. She had spent two weeks in London once, researching in the British Library, and had felt confused and threatened by the crowds of people on the street (“All going somewhere,” she had complained. “Nobody actually staying where they are.”)

Antonia had married young. Her attractive looks and her amusing tongue had caught the attention of the son of a pros-perous East Perthshire farmer, a man who was regarded by his father as a hopeless prospect, by virtue of his complete lack of interest in crops and cattle, but who had, nonetheless, a talent for dealing in stocks and bonds by telephone. This young man, Harry Collie, found in Antonia an easy companion. They set up home in a converted mill at the edge of his father’s sprawling farm, and enjoyed the country life that such people might lead.

This was an existence dominated by a social round that both of them came to regard as ultimately rather pointless, although diverting enough at the time.

Harry encouraged Antonia to pursue her interest in history.

She enrolled for a Ph.D. at Edinburgh, and spent a great deal of time travelling to and from the National Library of Scotland and the Scottish Records Office. She found herself drawn ever deeper into the mysteries of medieval Scotland, and completing and submitting her doctoral thesis was, as she described it, like having, at last, a baby, which one then promptly gives away. Its publication by the Tuckwell Press was a matter of pride not only to her father, the now retired professor of anatomy, who had taken to writing monographs on silkworms, but also to her husband, who liked the idea that intellectual distinction might shine from a corner of Perthshire generally only associated with the cultivation of soft fruit.

Antonia and Harry had two children, a son and a daughter, Murdo and Antonia, known in the family as Little Antonia.

When the children were ten and eight respectively, Harry started to see a woman in Perth who owned and ran a dress shop.

Antonia became aware of this, and thought that his dalliance with this woman, whom she called the Dress Shop Assistant, 88

The Boy in the Tree

would pass once he saw through what she imagined to be the other woman’s intellectual vacuity. She was wrong. Although he was not by nature fickle in his affections, what developed between Harry and the Dress Shop Assistant was a deep mutual dependence which neither was capable of defeating. Antonia suggested that Harry should move into Perth, but he refused.

His family had lived on that bit of land for several hundred years, and it was all he knew. So Antonia decided that she would move back to St Andrews, taking Murdo and Little Antonia with her, and would live in a corner of her father’s house.

Then disaster struck. When she explained to Murdo and Little Antonia that they would be coming to live with her in St Andrews, they refused to go. Murdo, in particular, had a deep affection for the farm, and said that he would simply run straight back if taken to St Andrews. Little Antonia wept copious tears and said that she would not touch a morsel of food until the decision had been rescinded. She was as good as her word. She simply stopped eating, and in admiration for his sister’s act of defiance, Murdo climbed a tree in the garden of the house and refused to come down.

“But if you stay here, then you’ll be staying just with Daddy,”

shouted Antonia into the foliage.

“Exactly,” came a disembodied voice from above. “That’s what we want to do.”

Antonia left him where he was. Those who climbed trees usually came down from them after a short while, although in the back of her mind she remembered Calvino’s novel The Baron in the Trees, a favourite book of hers. Calvino’s hero, the twelve-year-old Baron Cosimo Piavosco di Rondo, takes to the trees after a row at the dinner table over the eating of snails. He never comes down, and thereafter leads a full life in the treetops, covering considerable distances by moving from tree to tree; impossible, of course, but a very affecting story nonetheless.

Murdo could hardly remain where he was for very long. Cosimo lived in a more forested age; Murdo had only the one tree, with sky on every side.

She returned to call him down an hour later. He was still On the Machair

89

there, though uncommunicative, and an hour after that she returned with the eighteen-year-old son of the stockman. “I’ll get him down for you,” muttered this young man, and he promptly scaled the tree, worked his way out onto the bough on which Murdo sat, and grabbed at the young boy’s shirt.

In his attempt to avoid capture, Murdo hung for a moment on the branch and then fell, crashing through lower branches on his descent. Antonia screamed and ran forward to attempt to catch him. She could not, of course, and the boy fell heavily on a grass-covered mound of earth at the base of the tree, winded and unable to cry, but otherwise unharmed. For the next five days, he refused to talk, and turned his face away from Antonia whenever she addressed him.

She had little alternative. The children stayed on the farm with their father and the Dress Shop Assistant. Antonia went to live in St Andrews, which made it possible for her to see the children regularly and also to look after her father. It was an arrangement that seemed to make everybody content, and Antonia, rather to her surprise, found that she was inordinately happy. Even the formal ending of the marriage was amicable, and she had the satisfaction of knowing that it was not her fault. In this state of blessedness, she began to write her novel.

29. On the Machair

The idea of spending several months in Edinburgh appealed to Antonia. Novels – and other works of the imagination – are sometimes best written in unfamiliar surroundings, where the mind can wander without being brought back to earth by the constant interruptions of one’s normal life. In Domenica’s flat in Scotland Street, separated from St Andrews by the green waters of the Firth of Forth, she felt quite free of distraction.

She knew one or two people in Edinburgh, it was true, but she had not told them that she was there and there was no reason 90

On the Machair

why they should find out. If she walked up Scotland Street, if she wandered about Dundas Street, which was about as far as she intended to go, nobody would know who she was nor have any reason to speculate. Of course there was Angus Lordie, who had let her into the flat. She was not sure about him: she had not encouraged him, but one never knew with men. They could become interested without receiving any invitation, and some of them were very slow to take the hint. Really, men were most tedious, she thought, and a life without them was so much simpler.

When Harry had first gone off with the Dress Shop Assistant she had missed him painfully; but that feeling of loss had faded remarkably quickly and had been replaced by a feeling of freedom.

She felt somehow lighter – it was as if Harry had been a burden who had been lifted off her. And what was there to miss? His physical presence? Certainly not! His conversation? Hardly. And anyway, if one were to miss the sound of his voice, there was always Radio Four, with its comfortable chattiness. How many lonely women the length and breadth of Britain found Radio Four a very satisfactory substitute for a man? And Radio Four could so easily be turned off, just like that, whereas men . . .

Antonia’s novel was set in that period which interested her most, the sixth century. This was a time when missionaries from the Celtic Church made their perilous journeys into the glens and straths of Scotland, brave Irishmen who lived in windswept settlements on the edge of Scottish islands and who shone the light of their teaching into the darkness. It was a moment of civilisation, she thought; it was as simple as that – a moment of civilisation.

Now, at the desk in Domenica’s study, Domenica’s papers pushed to the side, she sat before a sheet of lined paper, pen in hand, and closed her eyes. She was on the machair of a Hebridean island. The flowers of early summer grew amidst the grass, and there, to either side of her (the island was a narrow one), were waves coming in upon the shore; glassy walls of water which seemed higher than the land, toppling and crashing upon the rocks . . .

On the Machair

91

“Here, in this place,” thought St Moluag, “I am under the sea. I am under the water just as surely as that Irish brother who lived under the river in a holy place, who could, miraculously, breathe and live under water as ordinary men live upon the land.” He turned his head to the north. Another man, a man whom he recognised, was walking down the strand towards him, his crook in his hand.

Antonia wrote: “Oh dear,” thought St Moluag. “Oh dear.

Here comes St Columcille. And I’ve never really liked him.”

She lifted her pen from the paper and looked at the sentence she had written. Was there something vaguely ridiculous about it? Would early saints have thought about one another in this way? Would they have harboured animosities? Of course they would. The point about the early saints – and possibly about all saints – is that they were human in their ways. They felt un-charitable thoughts in the same way as anybody else did. They had their moments of pettiness and their jealousies. Had not St Moluag and St Columcille been particularly at odds over who reached Lismore first? And had this not led to St Moluag cutting off his little finger and throwing it onto the land before St 92

On the Machair

Columcille could reach the shore? By virtue of the fact that his flesh had touched the land first, then it was his – or so the story went. These tales were often apocryphal, but there must have been some ill-feeling for the legend to take root and persist as it had.

Of course, part of the problem, thought Antonia, was that it was necessary to express the thoughts of the saints in English.

If one were to put their thoughts into p-Celtic, or whatever it was they spoke (and Moluag was a sort of Pict, she thought, who probably spoke p-Celtic), then it would not sound so patently ridiculous. He would not have said “Oh dear,” for instance, nor would he have said “I’ve never really liked him.”

No, that was not the problem. It was the mundane nature of the thought; it was the fact that the thought was one which an ordinary person would have entertained, and not a saint. So she scored out the line she had penned and wrote instead:

“The tall man, his hodden skirts flapping about his legs in the wind from the sea, stood on the sand. Another man came towards him, a man familiar to him, a man with whom there had been strong words exchanged. And he reached out to this man, the wind about them, and he gave him his crook, his staff which he had brought with him from Whithorn. And the other man gave him his staff in exchange, and they embraced and then walked off together, and the tall man thought: We must not fight in these times of darkness; for if we fight, then the darkness comes into our hearts.”

Antonia rose from her desk. She walked over to the window of Domenica’s study and looked out. Above the grey slated roofs, the clouds moved high across the sky, clouds from the west, from those airy islands, from the world which she had just been trying to evoke. Somewhere out there was machair, and wild flowers, and the same darkness of the spirit against which those brave, now largely forgotten men had battled. Their enemy had been very real. And ours? she thought.

30. Schadenfreude

When Stuart returned from work that evening, his one thought was to finish the crossword which he had unwisely started in an idle moment at the office. Stuart was a skilled crossword solver, having cut his teeth on The Scotsman before progressing to the heady realms of the puzzles with which the Sunday newspapers tormented their readers. These crosswords relied on additional gimmicks to add a higher level of complexity. All the words might begin with a particular letter, for example, or, when lined up in reverse sequence might make up a perfect Shakespearian sonnet; there was nothing so simple as an ordinary clue. He conquers all, a nubile tram: Tamburlaine, of course, but far too simple for this sort of puzzle.