Love Over Scotland

“My friend,” said Leonie quietly. “My friend, Babs.”

Matthew was perplexed. “Your friend from Melbourne? Is she still staying with you?”

Leonie laughed. “No, not her. She’s gone off to Denmark.

Babs is my friend here. You know. My friend.”

Matthew saw her bemused expression and realised that he had not been very perceptive. Mind you, how was one to tell?

After all, she had accepted his invitation when they had met in the Cumberland Bar; she should have told him, or given him some indication, rather than relying on him to pick up the signals which were, anyway, non-existent as far as he could make out.

He made a quick recovery. That, at least, sorted that out. It would indeed remain a simple friendship. “Of course. That’s fine. The three of us. Now where shall we go? What sort of place do you like?”

“I’m easy,” said Leonie. “But Babs is wild about Italian. Do you think we could . . . ?”

“Of course. Italian.”

Leonie seemed pleased. “Babs lived in Italy for a year, you see. She worked in Milan. She’s a designer. Milan’s the place for designers.”

Matthew nodded. He had not thought that anyone called Babs would be artistic. Babs was a name full of old-fashioned brisk-Beside the Canal 189

ness. What would somebody called Babs do? Perhaps work with horses.

Leonie looked thoughtful. “How about . . . Well, why don’t you invite that girl through there? What’s her name again?”

“You mean Pat?”

“Yes. Pat. Let’s invite her too. You said that she had had a bit of trouble. An Italian restaurant would cheer her up.”

Matthew looked out of the kitchen towards Pat’s room. Her door was closed. “I’m not sure,” he began. “She may not . . .”

“Just ask her,” Leonie interrupted. “She may be keen to come.”

Matthew felt that something odd was going on. A simple invitation to dinner, extended to Leonie, had been expanded to include her friend, Babs, and now was about to embrace Pat as well. Why was Leonie keen for Pat, whom she had barely met, to be included? Perhaps she was just being friendly, in the way in which Australians often are. Besides, they were, he remembered, inclusive people.

61. Beside the Canal

Cyril trotted along the canal, his head held high into the wind, his tail swinging jauntily behind him. On that section of the towpath, between the aqueduct and the turn-off for Colinton Village, there was nobody about, and the only sign of life was a family of eider ducks moving in and out of the reeds. Cyril stopped briefly to inspect the ducks, giving a low, warning bark.

It would have been a fine thing to eat a duck, he thought; to sink his teeth into those soft breast-feathers and shake the annoying bird out of its complacency. But there was no time for that now. Scores like that could be settled once he had found Angus again, for that is what he yearned for, with all his heart.

He had to find Angus.

After a few minutes, the path narrowed and now he felt hard stone beneath his feet. He slowed down and advanced cautiously.

190 Beside the Canal

There were railings to his left, like the railings he knew in Drummond Place, but through these he could make out an emptiness, a falling away, a current of cool air; and on the air there was the smell of water, different from the smell of the canal, a fresher, sharper smell. He stood still for a moment, his nose twitching. This was something he recognised, something he remembered from a past which now survived only in scraps of memory. This was a smell that he had encountered on the Hebridean island where he had started his life, the scent of running water, of burns that had flowed through peat. And the river carried other things on it, which were familiar; traces of sheep, of lanolin from their wool, and the acrid odour of rats that had scurried over stones.

He continued on his journey. The river had not helped; it had been too powerful, too evocative, and the distant smells that had been drawing him on were even fainter now. But they still lay somewhere ahead of him, layered into a hundred other smells, and he knew that this was the direction in which he should go.

A short distance further along, Cyril came upon a group of boys. There were three of them standing by the edge of the canal, under the shelter of a footbridge, fishing rods extended out over the water, the lines dropping optimistically into the unruffled surface. Cyril liked boys for several reasons. He liked the way they smelled, which was always a little bit off, like a bone that had been left out on the grass for a day or two. Then he liked them because they were always prepared to play with dogs.

The boys looked at Cyril.

“Here’s a dug,” said Eck, a small boy with a slightly pointed head.

“What’s he doing?” asked Eck’s older brother, Jimmy. “Is he running away, do you think?”

“No,” said Bob. “There are some dugs just wander aboot.

They dinnae belong to anybody. They’re just dugs.”

“I’ve always wanted a dug,” said Eck. “But my dad says I cannae have one until I’m sixteen.”

“You’ll never be sixteen,” said Bob. “You’re too wee. And that Beside the Canal 191

pointy heid of yours too. All the lassies will have a good laugh, so they will.”

The boys looked at Cyril, who sat down and wagged his tail encouragingly. He half-expected them to throw something for him, but they seemed unwilling to do this, and after a few minutes he decided that it was time to move on. He took a step forward, licked one of the boys on the hand, and continued with his journey.

There were more people now. A runner, panting with effort, came towards him and Cyril moved obediently to the side to let him past. Then a woman walking a small dog that cowered as Cyril approached. Cyril ignored the other dog; he had picked up that scent again, slightly stronger now, even if still distant.

He began to move more quickly, ignoring the distractions that now crowded in upon him. He paid no attention to a practice scull that shot past him, the two rowers pulling at the oars in well-rehearsed harmony. He paid no attention to the swan that hissed at him from the water’s edge, its eyes and beak turned towards him in hostility.

There was a bridge, and traffic. Cyril stuck to the path that led under the bridge. He saw trees up ahead, great towering trees in autumnal colours, and behind them the sky that Cyril saw as just another place, a blue place that was always there, far away, never reached.

He turned his nose into the wind. It was stronger now, the smell that he had been following. It was somewhere close, he thought, and he slowed to walking pace.

A long boat, the restaurant boat Zazou, was tied up at the edge of the canal, opposite the boating shed. Cyril saw the ramp that came down from the deck. He sniffed. There was a strong odour of food, of meat; and there was that familiar smell, the one that he had smelled in Valvona & Crolla that day – when was it? He had no idea whether it was a long time ago, for dogs have no sense of past time, but he had smelled it in that place.

The smell of sun-dried tomatoes.

He began to make his way up the ramp onto the boat, stopping at the top, on the edge of the deck. Below him was the 192 Humiliation for Tofu

entry into a cabin in which there were tables and chairs. A group of four people sat at one of these tables. There was food before them, and glasses, and they were talking and laughing. Cyril jumped down and landed in front of the open door. As he did so, the people at the table stopped talking and turned to stare at him.

“Would you believe it?” said a man at the far side of the table.

“That dog’s got a gold tooth.”

“You’re right,” said a woman beside him. “What an extraordinary sight.”

A second man, who was sitting closest to the door, leaned forward to peer at Cyril.

“A gold tooth, did you say?” He stretched out a hand towards Cyril and clicked his fingers. “Come closer, boy.”

Cyril advanced slowly into the galley. As he did so, the man who had called him leaned further forward and patted his head gently.

“I know who you are,” he said quietly. “I’ve seen you in the Cumberland Bar, haven’t I? You’re Cyril, aren’t you? Angus Lordie’s dog. That’s who you are.”

62. Humiliation for Tofu

In Bertie’s classroom at the Steiner School, the talk was almost entirely of the forthcoming production of The Sound of Music.

Miss Harmony’s casting decisions had not won universal approval; indeed, no choice of hers could possibly have secured that, given the fact that each of the girls wished to play the part of Maria and a good number of the boys had their heart set on being Captain von Trapp. The decision that Skye should be Maria at least forestalled an outcome that, by common consent, would have been disastrous – the casting of Olive in the principal role. Bertie’s nomination as Captain von Trapp was, by contrast, approved of by the girls, who were generally relieved that the part had not gone to Tofu; among the girls, only Olive Humiliation for Tofu 193

was hostile to this choice. Although she admired Bertie and considered herself to be his girlfriend (in spite of Bertie’s vigorous denials of any such understanding), it was a bitter pill to swallow to see Bertie so favoured and herself relegated to a yet undisclosed minor role – possibly in the chorus of nuns. A better outcome, of course, would have been for her to be Liesl, the teenage girl who had a dalliance with Rolf, the telegram-delivery boy. That was a role she could have played with conviction and flair, but it had, for some inexplicable reason, been given to Pansy of all people. No boy, whether or not he delivered telegrams, would ever think of falling for Pansy, thought Olive. This was another example, in her view, of Miss Harmony’s bad judgment. It was a good thing, she reflected, that Miss Harmony had become a teacher rather than a film director. Her career as a director would have been an utter failure, Olive imagined, and full of miscastings.

The one respect in which Olive felt that Miss Harmony had made a wise choice was the casting of Larch as a Nazi. That suited his personality very well, she thought, and she openly said as much.

“I’m glad that Larch is playing a Nazi,” said Olive loudly.

“He’ll do that so well.”

Miss Harmony looked at her severely. “Now, Olive, what do you mean by that, may I ask?”

The other children were silent. All eyes were now on Olive.

“Well,” she said, “that’s what he’s like, isn’t he? He’s always threatening to hit people. And we all hate him. Even he knows that.”

Miss Harmony pursed her lips. “Olive,” she said, “Larch is a boy. Boys have different needs from girls. They sometimes need to assert themselves. We must be patient. Larch will learn in the fullness of time to control his aggressive urges, won’t you Larch?”

Larch did not hear the question. He was wondering when the first opportunity to hit Olive would arise.

“He needs to get in touch with his feminine side,” said Pansy suddenly. “My mother says that this helps boys.”

194 Humiliation for Tofu

Miss Harmony nodded her agreement. Larch was indeed a problem, but for the moment there were further decisions to be made. The role of the Mother Superior, a comparatively important part, had to be allocated, and this, she feared, would provide further cause for disappointment.

“Lakshmi,” she said suddenly, “you shall be the Mother Superior. I’m sure that you will do that very well.”

“No, she won’t,” said Olive. “Lakshmi is a Hindu, Miss Harmony. The Mother Superior is a Roman Catholic.”

Miss Harmony sighed. “The fact that dear Lakshmi is a Hindu is neither here nor there, Olive,” she said. “The whole point of acting is that you pretend to be something you’re not. That’s what acting is all about.”

Olive was not to be so easily defeated. “But why are you getting girls to play the girls, and boys to play the boys? Why don’t you make Larch or Tofu be nuns?”

Miss Harmony looked at Tofu. It was very tempting. Making him a nun would certainly help him to get in touch with his feminine side. What a good idea. “Thank you, Olive,” she said quietly.

“That’s a most constructive suggestion. We do have rather a lot Humiliation for Tofu 195

of nuns, of course, but there certainly are one or two other roles that might be suitable for Tofu. There’s Baroness Schroeder. You may remember, children, that Captain von Trapp was engaged to a baroness when he first met Maria. Normally, when you are engaged to somebody that means you’re going to marry that person. But an engagement also gives you time to change your mind if you need to. So it sometimes happens that an engaged person meets somebody more suitable and decides to marry him or her. That’s what happened to Captain von Trapp. He realised that he preferred Maria to the Baroness and so he married Maria in the end. It was destined to be, boys and girls.”

Miss Harmony stopped. It was very romantic, she thought.

She herself would love to meet somebody like Captain von Trapp, who would sweep her off her feet and marry her. But were there any such men in Edinburgh? Or, indeed, in Salzburg?

Somehow she thought not.

She looked at the children. “So we need a Baroness Schroeder.”

There was silence before she continued. Then: “And Tofu, dear, I think you could perhaps play that role.”

This was a bombshell, and its target, without doubt, was Tofu.

“You see, boys and girls,” Miss Harmony went on, “there’s a long tradition of male actors playing female roles. In Shakespeare’s day, you know, all the parts were played by men and boys. So it’s nothing at all unusual for Tofu to be playing the Baroness Schroeder. I’m sure he will do it very well, won’t you, Tofu?”

Tofu opened his mouth to speak, but no words came.

“Good,” said Miss Harmony, breezily. “So that’s settled then.

Now, boys and girls, we must get on with some other work. We shall start rehearsing the play tomorrow. There’s no need to get costumes organised just yet. We’ll start with a read-through.”

Bertie felt acutely uncomfortable. He was not at all sure about being Captain von Trapp and he had his doubts about the read-through. Did Miss Harmony expect them actually to read their parts? Olive, he knew, was unable to read yet, as were Larch and Hiawatha. That was a problem. And then there was the question of Tofu’s playing the Baroness Schroeder. Somehow, 196 Irene Spoils Things

he found it difficult to see that. It was true, perhaps, that some boys had their feminine side, but he did not think that Tofu was one of them.

63. Irene Spoils Things

When Irene heard that Bertie had been cast as Captain von Trapp, her initial scorn at the choice of the play was replaced by enthusiasm. She had always thought that Bertie had acting ability, and this pleased her, as did any sign of talent in her son

– and there were many such signs, and always had been. She herself had little time for actors and actresses, whom she regarded as brittle personalities with a tendency to both narcissism and egoism, and she would certainly not want Bertie to think of a stage career. But it was, she felt, only right that his talent in this direction should have been spotted and that he should have been given such a major part.

“I am very happy indeed, Bertie,” she said as they walked down Scotland Street on the way back from school. “Not only did you do so well at that audition for the orchestra, but now here you are being given the lead role in the school play! Truly, your little cup doth run over, Bertie!”

Bertie looked at his mother. Everything she said, it seemed to him, was opaque or just wrong. He had told her that he did not want to be in the Edinburgh Teenage Orchestra, and for a very good reason, too. Bertie was six and everyone else would be at least thirteen. Why could his mother not understand that this would be a source of acute embarrassment for him? Why did she want him to do so many things, when all he wanted to do was to be allowed to play with other boys? And now here she was assuming that he was pleased to be Captain von Trapp in The Sound of Music, when all that this would do would be to bring down upon his head the undying hostility of Tofu, who believed the role to be his by right.

Irene Spoils Things 197

“Of course,” went on Irene, “The Sound of Music is not the play I would personally choose, but there we are, the choice is made, and we must support Miss Harmony, mustn’t we, Bertie?

And, as it happens, Miss Harmony has made a very good choice in giving you the lead role. As long as you don’t actually believe in anything in the play, that will be fine.”

Bertie frowned. He was not sure of his mother’s point. Miss Harmony had told the class that The Sound of Music was based on a real story; that there had been a Captain von Trapp and a Maria and all the rest. Now here was his mother saying that none of it should be believed. It was all very puzzling.

“I thought it was a true story, Mummy,” said Bertie. “Miss Harmony said that the von Trapp family lived in America after they escaped from Austria. She said that they used to give concerts . . .”

“Oh yes,” said Irene dismissively. “That’s certainly so. But what I mean when I say that you shouldn’t believe in it is that you should be able to see that the story is utterly meretricious, Bertie. The Sound of Music is all about patriarchy and the subservient role of women. It’s a ghastly bit of romanticism.

That’s all that Mummy meant.”

Bertie looked down at the pavement. He was not sure what meretricious meant, but it did not sound good. Melanie Klein, he assumed, would not have approved of The Sound of Music.

“I see that you’re puzzled, Bertie,” said Irene. “So let me explain. Captain von Trapp is an old-fashioned autocrat. That’s a new word for you, Bertie! He was very strict with his family.

He blew a whistle and made them line up in order of height.”

“But maybe that was because he had been a sailor,” interrupted Bertie. “Sailors love whistles. Daddy told me that. He says that Mr O’Brian . . .”

Irene raised an admonitory finger. “We can leave Patrick O’Brian out of this,” she said. “I know that Daddy likes to read his books. Silly Daddy. Patrick O’Brian appeals to men because he makes them think that they can escape from their responsibilities by going to sea. That is what the Navy is all about. And Mr O’Brian told a lot of fibs about himself, you know, Bertie.

198 Irene Spoils Things

He told everybody that he was born in Ireland, whereas he wasn’t.

He was an Englishman. Then he said that he went off to sea as a sixteen-year-old or whatever age it was, and sailed a boat with a friend. Such nonsense, Bertie! And it’s significant – isn’t it? –

that he then wrote all those novels about that ridiculous Jack Aubrey sailing off with Dr Maturin, or whatever he was called.

Writers just play out their fantasies in their books. They are often very unstable, tricky people, Bertie. Writers are usually very bad at real life and feel that they have to create imaginary lives to make up for it. And that was a bad case of it.”

Bertie stared at his mother. She spoils things, he thought. All she ever does is spoil things.

Irene stared back at Bertie. It was important that he should understand, she thought. There was no reason why a bright child like Bertie should not understand that all was not necessarily as it seemed. It was also important that he should be able to see male posturing for what it was.

“Men often do that sort of thing,” she continued. “You won’t have heard of him, Bertie, but there was another case in which a writer pretended to be somebody else. There was a man called Grey Owl, who lived in Canada. He pretended to be a North American Indian and he wrote all sorts of books about living in the forests. And he wore Red Indian outfits, too – feathers and the like. He must have looked so ridiculous, silly man! He wrote all these books which were about the customs of the Ojibwe Indians and the like, but all the time he was really an Englishman called Archie Belaney, or something like that!” She paused. “But this is taking us rather far away from The Sound of Music, Bertie.”

Bertie was silent. He had not started this conversation, and it was not his fault that they were now talking about Grey Owl.

He sounded rather a nice man to Bertie. And why should he not dress up in feathers and live in the forests if that was what he wanted to do? It was typical of his mother to try to spoil Grey Owl’s fun.

64. Lederhosen

The conversation between Bertie and his mother on the subject of The Sound of Music had taken place as they walked down Scotland Street on their way home from school. The earlier part of the day had been unusually warm for autumn – indeed, the entire month had been more like late summer, with clear, sunny days that could be distinguished from June or July only by their diminishing length. Now, however, as they made their way up the stair that led to their second-floor flat at 44 Scotland Street, they both felt the chill that had crept into the afternoon.

“We must get your Shetland sweater out,” said Irene, as she extracted her key from her pocket. “It’s lovely and warm, and now that the weather is beginning to turn . . .” She stopped. The subject of clothing had made her think of possible costumes for the play. Maria, of course, had made the children wear clothes made out of curtain material, and that meant it would be simple enough for the mothers of the children playing those parts to run something up. Mind you, she thought, some of them probably already have clothes made out of curtains . . . She smiled.

There was one of the mothers – who was it? Merlin’s mother, was it not? – who wore the most peculiar clothing herself. She had a shapeless, tent-like dress made out of macramé that she had clearly run up herself, and yet she was so proud of it! She had no idea how ridiculous she looked, thought Irene, and of course that strange son of hers insisted on wearing a rainbow-coloured coat that his mother had obviously made out of . . .

where on Earth had she got the material? It looked like one of those flags that they flew outside gay bars. Perhaps the silly woman had seized upon it at a gay jumble sale somewhere. What an idea! That boy, Merlin, must be so embarrassed by his mother, thought Irene. Some mothers, she reflected, are very insensitive.

She turned to Bertie as they entered the flat. “Bertie,” she said, “we must fix up a costume for you for the play. Did Miss Harmony say what you should wear?”

Bertie stood quite still. The whole business of the play was enough of a minefield without his mother getting further 200 Lederhosen

involved. He would have to avert this, he thought.

He started to explain. “We aren’t using costumes at the moment, Mummy,” he said. “Miss Harmony says that we are just going to read through the play. I don’t think you need bother about a costume.”

“But I must,” said Irene. “They always expect the mummies to make costumes. So I’ll make you one, Bertie.”

Bertie sighed. But then it occurred to him that Captain von Trapp probably wore a rather smart naval uniform. He would like to have such a uniform, with brass buttons down the front and one of those caps with an anchor on it.

“That’s a good idea, Mummy,” he said. “Why not start making it now, so that it’s ready for when I need to take it to school?”

Irene was receptive to the suggestion. “Would you like me to do that?” she asked. “Well, why not? Daddy’s not coming back until a bit later, so we have plenty of time. Now then, let me think. Yes, I know what I’ll do.”

“A Captain’s outfit,” said Bertie brightly. “Is that what you’re thinking of?”

“Oh no,” said Irene. “None of that. You know that I’m none too keen on uniforms. I think that it should be something Austrian. Yes, Captain von Trapp should wear something quin-tessentially Austrian.”

Bertie was quiet. He was trying to remember what he had seen in a book he had which showed national dress of the world.

What did the Austrians wear?

Irene answered Bertie’s unspoken question. “Lederhosen, Bertie! That’s what Captain von Trapp would wear.”

Bertie’s voice was small. “Lederhosen, Mummy?”

“Yes,” said Irene. “Lederhosen, Bertie, are worn by people in southern Germany and in Austria. They’re trousers that go up the front like this – a bit like dungarees, come to think of it –

but they have short legs so that your knees show. And they’re made of leather, of course. That’s why they’re called Lederhosen.”

Bertie said nothing. His only hope, he thought, of averting this humiliation was an absence of leather. But again it was as Lederhosen 201

if Irene had anticipated his thoughts. “Leather is a problem, of course,” she said. “I have no idea where one would buy it, and it would probably be terribly expensive.”

“Oh dear,” said Bertie quickly. “But thank you, anyway, Mummy.”

“However,” said Irene. “Mummy has had an idea. Yet another one. You know that old chair which Daddy has? The one I’ve been meaning to get re-covered one of these days? The one where he sits and reads the paper?”

Bertie knew the old leather chair, but did not have the time to say so, as the doorbell sounded. Muttering something about not expecting anybody, Irene crossed the hallway and opened the door. A heavily-built man, out of breath from the effort of walking up the stairs, stood on the landing.

“Mrs Pollock?”

Irene nodded. She did not recognise the man, and she did not like the way that his glance shot into the hall behind her.

Stewart had told her to use the chain when opening the door, but she never did. Perhaps . . .

“Bertie!” the man suddenly exclaimed. “So there you are, son!”

Irene gave a start as Bertie suddenly materialised from behind her. “Mr O’Connor!” he said.

The mention of the name made Irene freeze. So this was that man from Glasgow, Fatty O’Connor, or whatever he called himself. She looked at him coldly. “I suppose this is something to do with our car?” she said.

Lard O’Connor smiled at her. He was not easily intimidated, and he did not want to talk to her anyway. It was Stewie he was looking for. “I’d like to talk to your man,” he said flatly. “And aye, it’s about your motor.”

“Well he’s not here,” said Irene, beginning to close the door.

“You’ll have to come back some other day. Very sorry.”

Lard O’Connor glanced at Bertie. “You keeping well, son?”

he asked. “Good. Well tell your Da that our man Gerry left something behind by mistake in the car. He’d like to have a wee look for it.”

202 Reunited

“But you can pick that up from the police, Mr O’Connor,”

said Bertie. “They found something in the car, you see.”

Lard O’Connor took a step backwards. “Oh jings!” he said quietly.

65. Reunited

That evening, Angus Lordie went to the Cumberland Bar, as he did once or twice a week; but today there was no anticipation on his part of a couple of hours spent in pleasant company, conversing and catching up on the day’s news. Rather there was a heart which was still numbed by loss. Cyril always accompanied him to the bar and was a popular canine figure there. Seated under a table, the dog would wait patiently until a dish of beer was placed before him, to be lapped at in contentment. Then Cyril would rest his head on the ground and sleep for a while before waking up and looking around the room with interest.

It was a reassuring routine for both man and dog, but now it was over. Cyril was lost; he was stolen; he was, quite possibly, no more.

Angus sat alone at his table, teetering on the edge of self-pity. And then he fell in, closed his eyes, and gave himself over to thoughts of how pointless his life was. Here he was, fifty-ish, solitary, barely recognised as an artist, and then only by those who were themselves fifty-ish and unrecognised for anything very much. When had he last had a show? Two years ago, at least; and even then the paintings had hung on the walls unsold until Domenica – bless her – had out of loyalty bought one.

Tom Wilson – bless him, too – had invited him to submit something for his small-scale Christmas show, and Angus, grateful for the invitation but worried that he had nothing small to offer, had simply cut a small portion out of the middle of one of his canvases and framed that. And later, when Angus had dropped in at the Open Eye Gallery to see the show and look at what others had submitted, he had noticed a couple standing in front

Reunited 203

of his painting, peering at it. They had not noticed Angus, which was as well, for he knew them slightly – Humphrey and Jill Holmes – and he had heard Humphrey turn to Jill and say:

“That’s funny! I could swear that this is part of a larger painting.

Don’t you get that feeling?” And Angus had slipped out of the gallery in shame and had even contemplated withdrawing his painting, but had not done so. It would come back to him later on, he feared, unsold, and in this he had been proved right.

So now he sat in the Cumberland Bar and reflected on how bad was the hand of cards dealt him. If I died tomorrow, he asked himself, who would notice, or care? Now that Domenica had gone, there were few people he could drop in on; few people who were close friends. The people he knew in the Cumberland Bar went there to drink, not to see him, and if he were not there, they would carry on drinking just the same. Oh, life was dreadful, he told himself, just dreadful. And the words came back to him, the words of a song he had picked up in the Student Union bar, all those years ago, the bowdlerised words of a song sung at Irish wakes and which expressed so clearly what he now felt: Let’s not have a sniffle, boys,

Let’s have a jolly good cry,

204 Reunited

For always remember the longer you live, The sooner you jolly well die . . .

“Angus?”

One of the barmen, the one he occasionally chatted with, had walked round the end of the bar and was standing at his table, drying his hands on a brewery towel. Angus looked up.

“You seemed very deep in thought,” said the barman.

Angus tried to smile. “I suppose I was,” he said. “An unhealthy state to be in. Sometimes.”

The barman laughed. “Well, I wanted to tell you that that fellow who works down in the Royal Bank of Scotland – I forget his name – a nice guy. Comes in here from time to time. He phoned earlier today and left a message for you. I meant to tell you when you came in, but I forgot.”

Angus looked confused. “I’m not sure if I know him,” he said.

“Which . . .”

The barman finished drying his hands and began to fold the towel neatly. “He said he found your dog. He found Cyril. He’s bringing him in here this evening. He didn’t know where you lived and he couldn’t find you in the phone book . . .”

He did not finish, for at that moment the door opened and a man entered with Cyril on a lead. When Cyril saw Angus, he launched himself forward, as if picked up and propelled by a great gust of wind. The lead was pulled from the man’s hand, but he did not try to stop it, as he had seen Angus at his table and he understood.

Cyril bounded over the floor of the bar, a strange sound coming from his mouth, a howl of a sort that one would not have thought a dog capable of, a whoop, an almost human wail of delight. Angus rose to his feet, and with a great leap Cyril was in his arms, licking his face, twisting his body this way and that in sheer delight, still howling in between gasps for air.

In a far corner of the bar, a young man sitting quietly at a table with a friend, turned and said: “You see that? You see that?

That shows you – doesn’t it? – how if you’re looking for love in this life, you’d better buy yourself a dog.”

The other said: “That’s rather cynical, isn’t it?”

Bathroom Issues 205

“Realistic, you mean,” said the first.

And they were silent for a moment, as were many in the bar who had witnessed the reunion, for they had all seen something which touched them to a greater or lesser extent. And at least some felt as if they had been vouchsafed a vision of an important truth: that we must love one another, whatever our condition in life, canine or otherwise, and that this love is a matter of joy, a privilege, that we might think about, weep over, when the moment is right.

66. Bathroom Issues

Matthew had become so accustomed to living on his own that when he arose that first morning of Pat’s residence in his India Street flat he quite forgot that she was there. His morning routine was set in stone: he would pick up any post lying on the doormat, glance at the letters, and then he would take a shower in the very bathroom whose walls might have been knocked down had Leonie’s plans progressed. Leonie, though, was not in his mind as he slipped out of the Macgregor-tartan jockey shorts in which he liked to sleep and stepped into the shower.

Matthew was thinking of whether he should wear his new distressed-oatmeal sweater that day. He was not one to worry unduly about clothes, but he had recently realised that there was a uniform for art dealers and that if he wanted to be convincing in the role, then he had to look the part. And the one thing that art dealers in Edinburgh did not wear, it seemed, was distressed-oatmeal sweaters. That had been a mistake.

Many people in Edinburgh, it seemed to Matthew, had a uniform. Lawyers were most conspicuous in this respect, of course, with advocates in their strippit breeks striding up the Mound on their way to Parliament House each morning. India Street and its environs provided a good place for the more pros-perous advocates to live, discreetly, of course, behind Georgian doors on which professional brass plates had been fixed, and 206 Bathroom Issues

Matthew knew some of them sufficiently to nod to in the morning when he made his way to the gallery. What was their life like? he wondered: full of arguments and interpretation and the drafting of answers? His father, Gordon, had wanted him to study law, but Matthew had resisted. He had read – and quoted to his father – Stevenson’s account of life in Parliament House, where the courts sat, and where advocates had to pace up and down the Hall deep in conversation with their instructing solicitors and their clients. They could make very incongruous groups, marching up and down, heads bowed in thought. Tall advocates were at an advantage, in that they could look down on their bread and butter trotting beside them – bread and butter that, by having to look up, would be reminded just who was running the case. But height could work to the disadvantage of these tall advocates, who might not be instructed by short solicitors who did not like to be overshadowed in this way, whatever the realities of the professional relationship.

Matthew had heard of one very short advocate whose career had been built upon instructions given him by not-very-tall solicitors, who could walk in Parliament Hall with him and enjoy the – for them – rare experience of being able to look down on an advocate. He had done very well, even if the cases he received were small ones, with short hearings. That, thought Matthew, was an unkind story, typical of the unkind stories which lawyers told one another. The Bar, he had been told, was a strange place, given to the imposition of nicknames, which stuck. An acquaintance of Matthew’s had once told him of some of these, and Matthew had listened in fascination. Who was the Pork Butcher?

Who was the Tailor’s Dummy? Who was the Head Prefect?

Stevenson, he pointed out to his father, had been forthright.

He had been unhappy while training to be a lawyer and had called Parliament Hall la Salle des Pas Perdus of the Scottish Bar, where

“intelligent men have been walking daily here for ten or twenty years without a rag of business or a shilling of reward . . .”

Matthew’s father had sighed. “What Stevenson wrote is hardly anything to do with the law today,” he said. “Think of what fun you could have, Matthew. Look at Joe Beltrami.”

Bathroom Issues 207

“Who’s Joe Beltrami?” Matthew had asked.

“He’s a very influential criminal lawyer,” Matthew’s father had replied. “A very great jurist, I believe. Glasgow, of course.”

Matthew was silent. “I don’t think it’s really what I want to do,” he had said. And his father had looked at him tight-lipped and the subject had been dropped.

That was the law. But now Matthew had found his vocation, which was in art dealing, although he had to sort out the appearance side of things. He had looked closely at what the other art dealers in Dundas Street wore and had decided that there was a distinct style. Denim was safe, but not blue denim. A black denim jacket on top of olive moleskin trousers was fine, and the shirt should be open-necked. In general, a slightly distressed look was appropriate, but this did not extend to distressed oatmeal.

Matthew finished his shower and had dried himself prior to getting dressed when Pat came into the bathroom. For a moment he stood stock-still, frozen in surprise. He had not locked the door because he never did so; people who lived by themselves rarely did. Pat was similarly motionless in the doorway. She had not heard the shower being run, and had just woken up. Seeing a light on in the kitchen – one which Matthew had, in fact, forgotten to switch off the previous night – she had assumed that he was in there having his breakfast. But he was not, as she now saw. He was standing before her in the nude, an expression of astonishment on his face.

Her eye ran down – to the pair of Macgregor undershorts lying on the chair. That was her family tartan.

“That’s Macgregor tartan,” she heard herself mutter.

Matthew looked down at the undershorts. It seemed to him that she was accusing him of something; that she was implying that he had no right to wear Macgregor tartan undershorts.

Surely, he thought, that’s no business of hers.

Pat recovered herself and turned away, closing the door behind her. Out in the hall, she looked up at the ceiling. This unexpected encounter with Matthew had unnerved her. It was not the embarrassment of the intrusion – anybody can burst in on anybody inadvertently – but it was that the memory of 208 Bathroom Issues (Continued)

Matthew standing there had affected her in a curious way.

The fact she had discovered was this: Matthew was very attractive. It was just a question of seeing him in the right light, so to speak, and now she had.

But at the same time, it irritated her to know that he wore Macgregor undershorts. What right had he to do that? she asked herself.

67. Bathroom Issues (Continued)

Matthew did not see Pat over breakfast that morning. When he emerged from the bathroom, fully clad, to have his breakfast, Pat’s door was closed. And while he was eating his breakfast, which always consisted of a couple of slices of toast and an apple, he heard the bathroom door being opened and subsequently locked, almost demonstratively, and then the sound of a bath being run. He was glad to have the opportunity of creeping out of the flat without encountering his new flatmate. It would be embarrassing enough to appear naked to a flatmate with whom one had lived for some time; to do so on the very first morning of cohabitation was immeasurably worse. Of course, it was not his fault, unless one took the view that it was incumbent upon those within to prevent those from without from bursting in.

And that was the precise question which he asked Big Lou when he crossed the road at ten-thirty for his morning cup of coffee in her coffee bar.

The coffee bar was empty when Matthew arrived – apart from the familiar figure of Big Lou, of course. The resourceful auto-didact from Arbroath was standing behind the counter, a cloth on the polished surface to her left, a book open before her. As Matthew came in she looked up and smiled. She liked him, and being from a small town she had that natural courtesy which has in many larger places all but disappeared.

“Hello, Matthew,” she said. “You’re the first in today. Not a soul otherwise. Not even Angus and that dog of his.”

Bathroom Issues (Continued) 209

Matthew leaned against the bar and peered at Big Lou’s book.

He reached out and flipped the book over to reveal its cover.

“A Pattern Language: Towns, Building, Construction?” he said.

“Interesting, Lou. You going to build something?”

Big Lou reclaimed her book. “You’ll lose my place, you great gowk,” she said affectionately. “It’s a gey good book. All about how we should design things. Buildings. Rooms. Public parks.

Everything. It sets out all the rules.”

Matthew raised an eyebrow. “Such as?”

Big Lou turned to her coffee machine and extracted the cupped metal filter. Opening a battered white tin, she spooned coffee into the small metal cup and slotted it into place. “Such as always have two sources of light in a room,” she said. “This Professor Alexander – he’s the man who’s written this book –

says that if you have a group of people and let them choose which of two rooms they’ll go into, they’ll always choose the room with two windows – with light coming from more than one source. That’s because they feel more comfortable in rooms like that.”

Matthew looked around him. There was only one window in Big Lou’s coffee bar, and a gloomy window at that. Did he feel uncomfortable as a result? Big Lou noticed his glance and frowned. “I know,” she said. “I’ve only got one window. But sometimes one has no choice. I didn’t design this place, you know.”

“And what else does he say?” asked Matthew.

“Always put your door at the corner of the room,” said Lou, leafing through the book to find the reference. “If you put the door in the middle, then he says that you divide the room into two.”

For a moment Matthew visualised his flat in India Street.

Like most flats in the Georgian New Town, it was designed with attention to classical principles, and in particular with an eye to symmetry. Palladio had understood what proportions made people feel comfortable, and so had Robert Adam and Playfair.

Matthew’s doors in India Street, he reflected, were all at the corner of a room, and the rooms certainly felt comfortable. This 210 Bathroom Issues (Continued)

mention of doors made him remember the awkward event of earlier that morning. He would ask Big Lou about it, because it was just the sort of question which she relished and because he thought that in most matters she was intuitively right.

“Lou,” he began. “You know how one locks the bathroom door when one . . . er . . . has a bath or shower or whatever.”

Lou stared at him. “I believe I’ve heard of the custom,” she said.

“Well, of course,” said Matthew. “But the point is this, Lou.

Do you have to lock it when you go in, or is it up to the person who is coming in to check and see if the bathroom’s occupied?

To knock, if the door is closed, for instance?”

Big Lou busied herself with her coffee machine. “You don’t have to knock,” she said. “You can assume that if there’s somebody in there, then the door will be locked.”

“I see,” said Matthew. He paused. “But then why does the person who opens the door feel bad about it?”

The receptacle locked in place, Big Lou flicked a switch on her coffee machine. “Well now, Matthew,” she said. “That’s an interesting point. Why would that be? Is it because he – the person who’s opened the door – has caused embarrassment to the person inside? Is that it, do you think? He has the advantage – he has his clothes on and the other person doesn’t. And we don’t always bother to think whether a person who causes something is at fault, do we? We say: ‘You did it, you’re in the wrong.’ That’s what we say.”

The coffee machine hissed away while Matthew digested this observation. He had handled things badly, he thought. He should have stayed in the flat until Pat had come out of the bathroom and then he should have discussed it in a mature way. He should have said: “Look, Pat, I’m sorry. I totally forgot that you were there. That’s why I didn’t lock the door.” And Pat, being reasonable, would have accepted the explanation and have laughed the incident off. But he had not done that, and the whole business had been allowed to become awkward, with the issue of his Macgregor tartan undershorts complicating matters.

The Rootsie-Tootsie Club 211

“Lou,” he said. “Here’s another thing. Do you think that you should be able to wear clothes in another person’s tartan? Do you really think it matters?”

Big Lou turned round with Matthew’s cup of coffee. “Don’t be so ridiculous,” she said. “Here’s your coffee. And anyway, here comes Eddie.”

68. The Rootsie-Tootsie Club

Matthew had spent only a very short time in the company of Big Lou’s fiancé, Eddie, but had decided that he did not like him. It was not one of those dislikes that develops with time, matures as more and more is learned of a person’s irritating habits and faults; it was, rather, a dislike based on an immediate assessment of character, made on first meeting and never thereafter doubted. We make such judgments all the time, often on the basis of appearance, bearing, and, most importantly, the look of the eyes. Matthew’s father had instilled this habit in his son and had defended it vigorously.

“Take a look at the eyes, Matt,” he had said. “The old adage that they are the windows of the soul is absolutely dead right.

They tell the whole story.”

“But how can eyes, just bits of tissue after all . . . ?”

Gordon had interrupted his son’s protest. “They can. They just do. Shifty eyes – shifty chap. I’ve found it time after time in my business career. All the human failings are there – and the good qualities, too. You only have to . . . sorry, this is unintentional, keep your eyes open to pick it up.”

“Give me some examples,” said Matthew.

His father thought for a moment. “All right. Richard Nixon.

President of the United States for a good long time. If the voters had looked at his eyes, they would have realised. Scheming.

Untruthful.”

“But that’s because you knew what he was like,” said Matthew.

“If Nixon had been a saint, you would have thought his eyes 212 The Rootsie-Tootsie Club

looked saintly.” He paused. “You’ve heard of phrenology, have you, Dad?”

Gordon frowned. “It sounds familiar, but . . .”

Matthew was accustomed to filling in the gaps in his father’s knowledge. “They were the people who looked at the head. At the bumps. At the face, too.” Gordon looked interested. “Well?

What’s wrong with that?”

“Because the shape of your head has nothing to do with what you’re like inside,” said Matthew. “Character comes from . . .”

He hesitated. Where did character come from? The way you were brought up? Genes? Or a bit of both? “From the mind,”

he said. “That’s where character comes from.”

Gordon nodded. “And the mind shows itself physically, doesn’t it? Well, don’t shake your head like that – which, incidentally, proves my point. Your shaking head shows a state of mind within you. Yes, it does. It does.”

Matthew sighed. “Nobody believes in phrenology any more, Dad. It’s so . . . so nineteenth century.”

“Oh is it?” challenged Gordon. “And you think they knew nothing in the nineteenth century? Is that what you’re saying?

Well, I’m telling you this: I judge a man by the cut of his jib. I can tell.”

The argument had fizzled out, and later that day Matthew had stolen a glance at himself in the mirror, at his eyes. They had flecks of grey, of course, a feature which some girls had found interesting, and attractive, but which now seemed to Matthew to say something about his personality: he was a grey-flecked person. He knew that phrenology was nonsense, and yet, years later, he found himself making judgments similar to those made by his father; slippery people looked slippery; they really did. And how we become like our parents! How their scorned advice – based, we felt in our superiority, on prejudices and muddled folk wisdom – how their opinions are subsequently borne out by our own discoveries and sense of the world, one after one. And as this happens, we realise with increasing horror that proposition which we would never have entertained before: our mothers were right!

The Rootsie-Tootsie Club 213

Had the scorned phrenologists got their hands on Eddie, they would have reached much the same conclusion as had Matthew.

Eddie had a thin face – not in itself a matter for judgment – but a thin face combined with shifty, darting eyes and topped with greasy, unwashed hair conveyed an impression of seediness. It was, quite simply, not the face of an honest person – or so Matthew had concluded on first encountering Eddie.

And combined with this impression of unreliability – backed up, of course, by Matthew’s knowledge of Eddie’s past – was the conviction that Eddie was planning to take advantage of Big Lou by getting her to back his restaurant endeavour. Matthew had been horrified to discover that Big Lou was proposing to lend Eddie the money to buy a restaurant without anybody even looking at the accounts. Matthew may not have been a conspicuously successful businessman in the past, but his gallery now turned a profit and he knew the importance of keeping a good set of books.

When Eddie entered the coffee bar, Matthew was carrying his cup back from the counter to his accustomed seat by the wall.

“Good morning, Eddie,” Matthew said politely.

Eddie nodded, but did not return the greeting. “Lou, doll,”

he said. “Big news!”

Big Lou leaned over the counter to plant a kiss on Eddie’s sallow cheek. He smelled of tobacco and cooking oil and . . .

She drew back. There had been another smell – that cheap, cloying perfume that teenage girls like to use. That was there too. “What’s the news, Eddie?” she asked.

“We’re going to be a club,” Eddie announced. “Not a restaurant after all. This boy came round – this boy I know from the old days – and he’s putting in a bit of money too, on top of what you’re subbing me, and we’re going to make it a club.”

Big Lou was silent. A club for whom? she wondered.

“There’s money in clubs,” Eddie went on. “And it’s less work just serving drinks. Less overheads. Although you have to pay the waitresses and the dancers.”

Big Lou’s voice was faint. “Dancers?”

214 An Unfortunate Incident

Eddie reached for a stool and drew it up to the counter.

Matthew, who had been listening while pretending to read the newspaper, glanced at him as he sat down. He’s a funny shape, he thought.

“Aye,” said Eddie. “Pole dancers. Not every day, but maybe once or twice a week. There’s lassies very keen to develop a career as a pole dancer. We’ll give them their chance.”

Big Lou picked up her towel. “Well, that’s nice for you, Eddie,”

she said. There was a sadness in her voice, a resignation, which Matthew picked up and which tugged at his heart. She does not deserve this, he thought. She does not deserve this man.

“What will you call the club, Eddie?” she asked.

“The Rootsie-Tootsie Club,” said Eddie. “How’s that for a name, Lou, hen? See yourself there?”

69. An Unfortunate Incident

Waking in her bungalow in the pirate settlement overlooking the Straits of Malacca, Domenica looked out at the world through the white folds of her mosquito net. Glancing at her watch, she saw that it was almost seven o’clock; the dawn had come some time earlier and already the sun was over the top of the trees around the village clearing.

Pushing aside the net, Domenica rose from her bed and stretched. The air was warm, but not excessively so. In fact, the temperature, she thought, was just perfect, although she knew that this would not last. If she felt fresh and exhilarated now, by the end of the day she would be feeling washed out, drained of all energy by the heat. So if anything had to be done, it would be best to do it in the first few hours before the sun made everything impossible and nobody could venture outside. That was the folk wisdom so neatly encapsulated by Noel Coward in ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’; they were the only ones to be seen out in the midday sun. Well, Domenica knew better than to do that sort of thing.

An Unfortunate Incident 215

She crossed the room to where her clothes were draped over a chair. She donned her blouse and her light-fitting white cotton trousers, and then, picking up her shoes – a pair of light moccasins which could be worn without socks – she slipped first her right foot in and then the left, and then . . . And then she screamed, as the sharp jab of pain shot into the toes of her left foot. Instinctively and violently, she tore the shoe off her foot and dashed it onto the floor. Out of it, half crushed and limping from the encounter, a dark black scorpion emerged and began to drag itself away across the boards.

Domenica stared in fascination at the creature that had stung her. It was so small by comparison with her foot; not much bigger than her large toe, and yet it had caused such pain. As it scuttled away, its curved stinging tail held up like a little question-mark, she felt an urge to throw a shoe at it, to crush it and destroy it, and she bent down to retrieve a shoe to do this. But then she stopped, shoe in hand. The scorpion, exhausted perhaps by its own injuries, had paused, and had turned round in a circle.

Now it faced her, as if to stand up to the threatened onslaught, although it could not possibly have seen her with its tiny eyes.

216 An Unfortunate Incident

If it had, she must have been a mountain to it, the backdrop to its minute, floor-level world.

She watched as it turned again and continued its limping escape. She did not have the heart to kill this little thing, this scrap of creation, which was, after all, no more predatory than anything else and considerably less so, when one thought about it, than we were ourselves. We, as homo sapiens, packed a mighty sting; a sting capable of blasting the miniature world of such arachnids into nothingness. And all it had done was to try to defend itself in its recently-discovered home against a great threatening toe. That was all.

And suddenly she remembered the lines of D.H. Lawrence about his encounter with a snake. A snake came to his water trough, a visitor, he said, from the bowels of the earth somewhere, and he threw a stone at it. Afterwards, he felt guilty, sensed that he had committed a pettiness. That was what she would feel if she crushed this small creature. She would feel petty.

She watched as the scorpion completed its retreat and disappeared over the edge of the veranda. That would have been a terrible tumble for it, falling three feet or so to the ground below, but arachnids did not seem to be injured by great falls.

That was because they were so light; whereas, we, great leaden creatures, fell so heavily.

She looked down at her foot. The place where the scorpion had stung her was now inflamed and, she thought, had begun to swell. And it was painful too, the stinging having been augmented by a throbbing sensation. She bent down and felt that place. It was hot to the touch, the surface with that parch-ment-feel of damaged skin.

She stood up and gathered her thoughts. She had been stung by a scorpion once before, in Africa, but it had been a very small one and it had not been much worse than a bee sting. This had provoked a reaction of a completely different nature and it occurred to her that she might even need medical treatment.

She remembered reading somewhere that scorpions’ stings could be fatal, or could lead to the loss of a limb. Where had that been, and what sort of scorpions had they been talking about?

Mrs Choo’s Tale 217

Domenica suddenly felt afraid. She was normally courageous, and accepted the risks of living and working in the field, but now she was frightened. It would take hours to get to a doctor, possibly a whole day, and how would she be able to walk up that path to the other village if she lost the use of her left leg?

Very tentatively, she put her weight on the affected foot. It was sore, but she could still stand, and now she walked slowly out onto the veranda. She would have to find Ling and get his help.

There was very little happening in the village. A few children were playing under a tree and a woman was washing clothes in a small plastic bucket outside her house. Domenica decided to walk over towards the woman. If she spoke English, then she could explain to her what had happened. If not, she could ask for Ling.

The woman watched Domenica approaching. As she got closer, she noticed that her visitor was limping, and she immediately dropped the clothes back into the bucket and ran over to Domenica’s side.

“What’s wrong?” she asked in English. “What’s happened to you?”

“I’ve been stung by a scorpion,” said Domenica. “Look.”

The woman’s eyes widened as Domenica pointed out the angry bite. “That is very sore,” she said. “But you will not die.

Don’t worry. I was stung by one three weeks ago, and look, I am still alive.”

She touched Domenica lightly on the shoulder, in a gesture of reassurance. “Come inside,” she said. “You must not stand in the sun. Come inside and I will give you an antihistamine.”

70. Mrs Choo’s Tale

The woman to whom Domenica had gone in her pain and distress introduced herself as Rebecca Choo. Putting her arm around Domenica to help her limping neighbour up the steps, 218 Mrs Choo’s Tale

she led her into the front room of her house. There, Domenica lowered herself into the chair indicated by Mrs Choo and looked about her as her hostess went off into another room to find the promised antihistamine. The pain from the scorpion sting seemed to have abated somewhat, and when she looked down at her left foot she saw that the swelling also seemed to have subsided. She felt a strong surge of relief at this; obviously the scorpion was not too toxic, and she was not going to die, as she had feared earlier on.

The room in which she found herself sitting was plainly furnished and there was nothing on the walls – no pictures, no photographs, no religious symbols.

Domenica was still looking about her when Mrs Choo returned with a glass of water and a small white pill.

“This is an antihistamine,” she said, dropping the pill into Domenica’s outstretched hand. “It helps with stings and bites.”

“It was my own fault,” said Domenica, as she swallowed the pill. “One should never put on one’s shoes without looking into them first. I completely forgot where I was.”

Mrs Choo nodded her agreement. “You have to be careful,”

she said. “All sorts of things breed in the mangrove. Scorpions like it to be a bit drier, but we do get them from time to time.”

Domenica finished the rest of the water and handed the glass back to Mrs Choo. “You have been very kind to me,” she said.

“But you are our guest,” said Mrs Choo. “We have a tradition of hospitality here. We look after our guests.”

Domenica found herself wondering how many guests the pirate village received. She had assumed that not many people ended up here, but then she remembered the story of the Belgian anthropologist. He had been a guest too. She looked at Mrs Choo. Perhaps this was the time to start asking a few questions, now that she was seated comfortably and Mrs Choo was offering to make the two of them tea.

“Is your husband,” she began. “Is Mr Choo a . . . a pirate?”

Mrs Choo laughed. “Yes, I suppose he is,” she said. “It sounds very odd to say it, but I suppose he is.”

Domenica frowned. It was a rather insouciant answer that she Mrs Choo’s Tale 219

had been given and she wondered whether this was the right moment to begin her research, but Mrs Choo seemed happy to talk and it might be useful to clear the ground before she started to make detailed charts of relationship and social function.

“Has he always been a pirate?” she asked.

Mrs Choo shook her head. “Choo used to be a train driver,”

she said. “Then he met the headman of this village in a bar in Malacca and he invited him to come down and look at their business. That’s how he became involved.”

Domenica nodded her encouragement. “And you were married at the time?”

“Yes,” said Mrs Choo. “Choo and I had been married for eight years.”

“Were you not worried that he was going to be doing something illegal?” asked Domenica. “After all, it’s a dangerous job.”

“Not all that dangerous,” said Mrs Choo. “I sometimes think that it’s more dangerous to be a train driver or virtually anything else. Most jobs have their dangers.” She paused. “We haven’t lost any of the men over the last five years. Not one.”

Domenica expressed surprise at this. Pursuing large ships on the high seas could hardly be a risk-free occupation, she thought.

After all, some of the vessels would return fire these days. “But what about the illegality?” she pressed. “Aren’t you worried that the men – and that would include your husband – may be arrested?”

Mrs Choo waved a hand in the air. “There’s very little danger of that,” she said. “Nobody has been arrested so far.”

Domenica changed tack. “But do you approve?” she asked.

“Do you think that piracy is right?”

The question did not appear to embarrass Mrs Choo. “I’m not entirely happy about it,” she said. “After all, I come from a very law-abiding family. My father was the headmaster of a school. And my mother’s people were a well-known mercantile family from Kuala Lumpur. But it’s not as if Choo is involved in anything too serious. Just a little piracy.”

Domenica decided that she would not press the matter at this stage. But she would return to it in future, she thought. There 220 Mrs Choo’s Tale

must be substantial dissonance of beliefs there; it would be fascinating to investigate that. There was, though, one question that she wanted to get out of the way now, and so she asked Mrs Choo about the Belgian anthropologist. Had she known him, and how had he died?

She asked the question and then sat back in her chair, awaiting the answer. But for a time there was none. Mrs Choo seemed to freeze at the mention of the Belgian. She had been sitting back in her chair before Domenica asked it; now she sat bolt upright, her hands folded primly at her waist. It was not body language which suggested readiness to talk.

There was silence for a good few moments before Mrs Choo eventually spoke. “That man,” she said coldly, “went back to Belgium. He went back to where all those other Belgians live.

That is what happened to him. More tea?”

Domenica, an astute woman, even in unfamiliar social circumstances, guessed that the conversation was an end. It had been a mistake to stray into matters of controversy so quickly, she thought. People did not appreciate that, she reminded herself.

They liked subtlety. They liked discretion. They liked the circumlocutory question, not the brutal, direct one. So she immediately made a superficial remark about the attractive colour of the orchids on the veranda. Did Mrs Choo know that one could buy such orchids in Edinburgh? They were imported, she believed, from Thailand and Malaysia.

“They are very attractive flowers,” said Mrs Choo, warming a bit. “I am glad that people in Scotland like orchids.”

“Oh, they do,” said Domenica. “They are always talking about them.”

Mrs Choo looked surprised. “I’m astonished,” she said.

“Always talking about orchids? Even the vulgar people?”

Domenica smiled. It was such a strange expression, but she knew exactly what Mrs Choo meant. “Maybe not them,” she conceded.

71. A Formic Discovery

Domenica spent a further hour or so drinking green tea and talking to Mrs Choo. She did not wish to overstay her welcome, but it very soon became apparent to her that her hostess had very little to do. In fact she said as much at one point, when she referred to the heaviness with which time hung on her hands now that her children were at school. But apart from the occasional self-pitying remark, she was a light-hearted companion who made Domenica feel appreciably better about her situation.

And her situation, of course, was that of having been the victim of a rather uncomfortable scorpion sting.

At the end of the hour, though, the swelling on the tip of Domenica’s left foot had diminished considerably, and the stinging pain which had followed upon the initial encounter with the scorpion had all but disappeared. When she rose to leave, she found that it was perfectly possible to put her full weight on her left foot without feeling much discomfort, and her walk back to her own house was a proper walk rather than a hirple.

Ling was waiting for her on the veranda, seated on the planter’s chair, a paperback book on his lap. Domenica did not see him until she had mounted the steps, and she gave a start when he rose to his feet to greet her.

“You frightened me,” she said, “sitting there in the shadows.”

“I’m very sorry,” he said. “I saw you go across to Mrs Choo’s house, and so I thought that I would just wait for you.” He paused, and looked at her foot. “You were limping. I was worried that you had hurt yourself.”

Domenica explained about the scorpion, and Ling bared his feet in sympathy and shared discomfort. “If you see another scorpion,” he said, “you must ring this bell. You see, I have brought you a bell.”

He fished into the pocket of the tunic top he was wearing and extracted a small brass bell. As he gave it to Domenica, he shook it and a penetrating, surprisingly loud sound rang out.

“If I hear that sound,” he said, “then I shall come running over from my place.”

222 A Formic Discovery

Domenica thanked him and took the bell. “I shall only use it in a dire emergency,” she said. “Only then.”

Ling nodded. “If the Belgian had had a bell . . . “ He tailed off, as if he had suddenly remembered that this was a subject that was not to be talked about. But Domenica had heard.

“This Belgian,” she said quickly. “The anthropologist. Mrs Choo said to me . . .”

She did not have the chance to finish the sentence. “Now then,”

said Ling firmly, “we have much to do. Or rather, you have much to do.” He looked about him. “Do you wish me to interpret?”

Domenica shrugged. “Well, I’ll need to meet people,” she said. “I’ve only spoken to Mrs Choo so far, and that was just a general conversation.”

“Mrs Choo is not always accurate,” said Ling, his voice lowered, as if Mrs Choo herself might hear. “She means well, but she is not an accurate person.”

Domenica said nothing. If one was using an interpreter in an anthropological study, it was important that the translation be scrupulously correct. There was nothing worse than an interpreter who had his or her own view of what was what, and this, she feared, might be the case with Ling.

“It’s very kind of you to be concerned about accuracy,” she said gently. “But the important thing for me is that I hear exactly what people say. It doesn’t matter if you think that they are wrong about something. I can work that out later. All I want to hear is what they say.”

Ling frowned. “But what if they’re telling lies?” he asked.

“What if I know that what they are saying is just wrong? I cannot stand by and let people deceive you.”

For a moment Domenica said nothing. This was going to be difficult, she feared, and a measure of tact was required. “Well, how about this, Ling?” she said. “You can tell me exactly what somebody says. Then, afterwards, you can tell me what you think they should have said. In that way we can keep the two things separate.”

Ling smiled. “That is a very good idea,” he said. “You can hear what the vulgar people say first; then you can get the truth from me.”

Preparations for Paris 223

Domenica nodded enthusiastically. But she had noted, again, the use of the term “vulgar people”, the expression used by Mrs Choo earlier, when they had discussed orchids. This was obviously a literal translation from the local Chinese dialect. Unless, of course, Ling thought that the people of the village were truly vulgar. That was always a possibility.

“Tell me, Ling,” she said. “What do you think of these local people?”

“I despise them, of course,” he said evenly, as if that were the only possible answer. “Why do you ask?”

Domenica left it at that. She had talked enough that morning, and she told Ling that she would like to take a small walk around the village, just by herself, to get her bearings. He left her then, and after a refreshing drink of fruit juice, she set off for a stroll round the periphery of the village. After a while, she came to a path, and she followed this, assuming that it would lead to the sea.

Halfway down the path there was a small clearing off to one side, and in this clearing there was a large, solitary tree. Domenica hesitated. It was very still, and she felt vaguely uneasy, as if she were somewhere she should not be. She looked about her. On either side of her, the jungle rose, a high green wall, lush and impenetrable. One could not see far into that, she thought, and if one could, what would one see? She turned, and stared at the tree in its clearing. She had noticed something under it – a marker of some sort – and she went to investigate. It was a grave, a simple, untended grave, at the head of which a small board had been placed on a stake and fixed into the ground.

She bent to read the inscription on the wooden board. HERE

LIES AN ANT, it said.

72. Preparations for Paris

“My goodness, Bertie!” said Irene. “Your little diary is very full these days. Let’s think of what we have. In fact, let’s play a little 224 Preparations for Paris

game. Mummy will list the things you have to do in Italian, and you can translate. How about that?”

Bertie, sitting at the kitchen table in the Pollock flat in Scotland Street, his legs not quite reaching the floor yet, sighed.

“If you want to, Mummy.”

“Allora,” said Irene. “In primo luogo: Tutti insieme appassionatamente! ”

Bertie looked puzzled. “Cosa? ” he asked.

Irene smiled, and repeated herself carefully. “Si, Bertie: Tutti insieme appassionatamente! Do you know what that means? Tutti

– we know that word, don’t we, Bertie? Tutti frutti! You know what that means.”

“All fruits,” said Bertie.

“Bravo! Allora, if tutti means all, what about insieme? A nice little word that, Bertie. Very useful. No? Well, it means together, doesn’t it, Bertie? You should have known that by now. But no matter. So . . .”

“All together passionately,” said Bertie. “What’s that got to do with me, Mummy?”

Irene raised a finger. “Well, Bertie,” she said, “that’s what The Sound of Music is called in Italian. Yes! That’s what they call it.

Isn’t that interesting? But let’s move on to the second thing.”

Bertie was silent. He was thinking of the problems that lay ahead with the school production of The Sound of Music, in which he was to play Captain von Trapp. The fact that he had been chosen for this role was bound to lead to conflict with Tofu –

he was sure of that – and Bertie had no desire for conflict, particularly with a friend. Tofu was not much of a friend, but he was all that Bertie had.

“In secondo luogo,” said Irene brightly. “In secondo luogo, we have L’Orchestra degli adolescenti di Edimburgo. And we know what that is, don’t we, Bertie?”

Bertie did, and the thought of playing in the Edinburgh Teenage Orchestra filled him with even more dread than did the prospect of being in The Sound of Music. They had already had one or two rehearsals, which Bertie had attended with some reluctance. Now it was almost time to go to France on the much-

Preparations for Paris 225

vaunted Parisian tour, and it seemed to him that there was no way out for him. He could try to feign illness, of course, but he very much doubted whether he would get away with that. So it looked as if he would have to go, in spite of being at least seven years younger than everybody else.

There was one consolation, though – the fact that his mother would not be coming after all. That prospect had truly appalled him, but had been eventually ruled out after the committee running the orchestra had refused point-blank to make an exception to their no-parents rule.

“It’s not that we have any objection to parents per se,” the chairman of the committee had told Irene. “It’s just that it’s difficult enough doing the logistics for the children themselves. If we have to start making arrangements for the parents too, then it would become a nightmare.”

Irene had begun to protest. “But in my case . . .”

“And there’s another thing,” persisted the chairman, raising his voice. “If we allowed one parent to come, we’d have to allow all the others. And that would inhibit some of the children. We’ve found that they play better if they don’t have parents breathing down their necks. It brings them out of themselves a bit.”

226 Preparations for Paris

Irene glared at the chairman. “Are you suggesting that I would actually inhibit Bertie?”

The chairman made a calming gesture. “Perish the thought!

Naturally, this doesn’t apply to you, Mrs Pollock. You wouldn’t inhibit Bertie. But not every parent is as reasonable as you clearly are. You’d be surprised at some of the people I meet in this job.

You really would. I meet some really pushy people, you know.

Mothers who just won’t let go, particularly of their sons.”

The chairman looked at Irene as he spoke. He wondered what degree of insight she had into her behaviour. Probably none, he thought. These people smother their sons, poor boys, and then, the first opportunity the sons have, they distance themselves. It was rather sad, really. One boy who had been in the orchestra had actually emigrated to Australia to get away from his mother under the Australian government’s Son Protection Scheme. And then she went to live there too.

Reluctantly, Irene had accepted that she would not be able to travel with Bertie. However, she had a list of things for Bertie to be reminded to do, and she asked the chairman to write these down and pass them on to one of the women who would be looking after the teenagers. There were instructions about Bertie’s clothing, about his diet, and about the need for him to be given time to work on his Italian exercises.

“Bertie also does yoga,” she went on. “It would be helpful if he were to be given a mat to do his yoga on. But please remind him to do it.”

There were other things on the list, and these were all duly noted. Poor boy, thought the chairman, but did not say that.

Instead, he said: “What a lucky little boy Bertie must be – to have all these things in his life.”

“Thank you,” said Irene. “My husband and I . . . well, we call it the Bertie Project.”

The chairman said nothing. He had looked out of the window, where a bird had landed on a branch of the elm tree near his window. Birds are such an obvious metaphor for freedom, he thought.

And so now Irene had packed Bertie’s case for him, neatly At the Airport 227

folding and tucking in a spare pair of dungarees and an adequate supply of socks. It was a strange feeling for her, sending Bertie off to Paris like this, and she had more than one pang of doubt as to whether the whole thing was a good idea. But then she told herself that the people in charge of the orchestra would be experienced in looking after children on such trips, and that if they could look after teenagers, who were notoriously unruly and difficult, then looking after a compliant little boy such as Bertie would be simplicity itself. So she became reconciled to Bertie’s imminent departure, as did Bertie himself. Paris, he thought, would just have to be endured, and three days would go quickly enough. And it would, after all, be three days without his mother. That was something.

73. At the Airport

By the time he arrived at Edinburgh Airport, Bertie’s view of his impending trip to Paris had changed almost completely.

Dread had been replaced by anticipation and the excited questioning of his father, who had driven his son out to the airport in their newly-recovered Volvo, the precise status of which remained an awkward issue. That it was not their original car was now beyond doubt, but Stuart felt – and in this he was backed up by Irene – that they now had some sort of prescrip-tive right to it. It was not as if they had acquired anything new; they had started with one Volvo and still had only one.

Somewhere in between, presumably as a result of the helpful intervention of Mr Lard O’Connor, of Glasgow, the precise identity of the car had changed, but this still left them with only one car. Somebody else must have theirs, and so the overall number of cars in circulation had not changed. It was a rough calculation, but a just one nonetheless.

Stuart parked the car, taking careful note of which section it was in. Then, carrying the small brown suitcase that Irene had packed for Bertie, he accompanied his son into the terminal.

228 At the Airport

“Look, Daddy,” shouted Bertie, pointing to the tail of a plane that could just be made out peeking over a covered walkway.

“Look, that must be my plane.”

“Perhaps,” said Stuart, looking down at his son. This was Bertie’s first flight; could he remember his own first time in the air? It was a remarkable moment for most people, a moment when the laws of gravity are for the first time ostensibly flouted, and for him this had been in Fife, he thought, during a brief time as an air cadet. He had been fifteen and had been taken, along with several other boys, on a flight from Leuchars. He had not thought about that for a long time, but now it came back to him. How young the world was in those days, how fresh.

They had been told that the members of the orchestra would all congregate just inside the terminal so that they might check in together. And there they were, all milling about near the foot of the escalator. Bertie spotted them first and tugged at his father’s sleeve. Everybody was so tall, so grown-up, and this made his heart sink. Nobody was in dungarees, of course, except him.

Stuart would have wished to have remained with the group until they had gone through security, but he sensed that it would be important for Bertie that he should not.

“Well, that’s it, Bertie,” he said, passing the suitcase over.

“That’s you all set up. I’ll let you get on with it now.”

Bertie looked up at his father. “You’re not staying, Daddy?”

“Well, I think you can look after yourself,” said Stuart. “So I’ll just say goodbye.”

He wanted to pick this little boy up and hug him. But he could not do that, not with all these teenagers around, and so he put out his hand and Bertie took it in his.

“Good-bye, Bertie,” he said. “Good luck in Paris, son!”

Bertie shook hands solemnly with his father and then Stuart turned round and walked off. He did not look back.

Left with the others, Bertie stood in silence. He imagined that people would be staring at him, but he soon realised that nobody was paying him any attention and he relaxed. One of the flautists, a girl of about sixteen, glanced at him at one point and smiled. Bertie smiled back. Then she said something to her At the Airport 229

friend, which Bertie did not hear, and the friend looked over in his direction and gave him a wave. Bertie waved back.

Bertie was fascinated by the whole process of checking in for the flight and going through the security search. The conductor seemed to be in charge of the party and Bertie decided to follow him closely, keeping a pace or two behind him. And then, on the other side of the barrier, he waited while the rest of the orchestra came through and they could go off to wait at the departure gate. Bertie looked about him; he felt very important.

“All right, Bertie?” asked the conductor. “You looking forward to Paris?”

“Yes, I am,” said Bertie. “Thank you very much, sir.”

The conductor laughed. “You don’t have to call me sir,” he said. “My name’s Richard. Richard Neville Towle. But you can just call me Richard.” He paused. “You checked your saxophone in, did you? I hope that you had a strong enough carrying case.”

For a few moments, Bertie said nothing. Then, his voice barely audible, he said: “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry about what?” asked Richard. “Do you think the case will break?”

“I didn’t bring it,” said Bertie, his voice small and broken.

“Mummy just gave me my suitcase. That was all. I forgot my saxophone at home.”

Richard sighed. Taking an orchestra anywhere was always a difficult business; taking a youth orchestra was even worse. This was not the first time that he had been obliged to deal with an instrument being left at home, and at least it would be easy to borrow a saxophone at the other end. It was not as if Bertie played the cor anglais or anything like that; that might have been a bit more problematic.

He reached down and patted Bertie on the shoulder. “Not to worry, old chap,” he said. “Paris is full of tenor saxophones. We can very easily borrow one for the three days that we’re there.

In fact, I’ll call ahead to a friend I have over there and get him to have it sorted out by the time we arrive at the hotel. No need to be upset.”

Bertie had begun to cry, and so Richard knelt down and put 230 The Principles of Flight

an arm around his shoulder. “Come on, Bertie,” he said gently.

“Worse things have happened.”

Bertie made an effort to control his tears. This was a terrible start, he thought; to go off with a group of teenagers and then to start crying. It was just terrible. He looked about him furtively, half-covering his face with his hands so that the others might not see his tears. Fortunately, they all seemed to be busy talking to one another. They were smiling and laughing. As well they might, thought Bertie: they had their instruments with them.

74. The Principles of Flight

By the time they boarded the aircraft, Bertie’s spirits had picked up again. He tried to give an impression of knowing what to do

– an impression which would have been weakened if anybody had seen him turn left on the entrance to the plane, rather than right, and head purposefully towards the flight deck. But nobody saw this solecism, apart from a cabin attendant, who gently pointed him in the direction of the window seat that had been allocated him and into which he was shortly strapped, ready to depart.

Bertie had already seen, but not met, the boy who came and sat next to him. Now, turning to Bertie, this boy, who in Bertie’s reckoning was at least fifteen, introduced himself. “I’m Max,”

he said. “And you’re called Bertie, aren’t you?”

Bertie nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I play the saxophone, only . . .”

He was about to explain that he did not actually have his saxophone with him, but he decided not to mention this. Max would think him rather stupid to have left his instrument behind, and Bertie wished to impress Max.

“Where do you go to school?” Max asked, as he adjusted his seat belt.

“The Steiner School,” Bertie said.

“That’s nice,” said Max. “I go to the Academy. I play the cello there. And I’m in Mr Backhouse’s chamber choir.”

“I bet you’re good at the cello,” Bertie said generously.

The Principles of Flight 231

“Quite good,” said Max. “But not as good as somebody called Peter Gregson. He used to be at the Academy and now he’s gone to study the cello in London. I’ll never be as good as he is.”

“But you do your best, don’t you?” said Bertie seriously. He was enjoying this conversation and he wondered whether Max would be his friend. It would be grand to have a friend in Paris. Some people went to Paris without a friend, and that couldn’t be much fun, thought Bertie. He looked at Max. He had a kind face, he thought, and he decided that it might be best to ask him directly.

“Will you be my friend?” Bertie asked. And then added: “Just for Paris. You don’t have to be my friend forever – just for Paris.”

Max looked at Bertie in surprise. Then he smiled, and Bertie noticed that his entire face lit up when this happened. “Of course I will,” he said. “That’s fine by me. I don’t know many of the people in this orchestra and so it would be nice to have a friend.”

Bertie sat back in his seat feeling quite elated. The forgetting of the saxophone was not really a problem, according to the conductor, and now here he was about to take off on his first flight and he was doing it in the company of a nice boy called Max. Really, he had everything he could possibly wish for.

The last preparations for the departure were completed and the plane began to taxi towards the end of the runway. Bertie stared out of the window, fascinated. And then, with a sudden, throaty roar the plane began to roll down the runway, slowly at first and then picking up speed. Bertie felt himself being pressed back into his seat by the force of the acceleration, and then, almost imperceptibly, they were airborne and he saw the ground drop away beneath him.

He watched as the plane banked round and began to head off towards Paris. He saw the motorway to Glasgow, with the cars moving on it like tiny models. By craning his neck, he saw the Pentland Hills and the Firth of Forth, a steel-grey band snaking up into the bosom of Scotland. And then, down below them, hills; green and brown folds, stretching off to the south and west.

Soon they were at altitude, and the plane settled down into even flight. The members of the orchestra made up the majority of the passengers and the cabin was filled with an excited buzz of 232 The Principles of Flight

conversation between them, restrained among the strings and woodwind, rowdy among the brass and percussion. Bertie looked over his shoulder and down the rows behind him. One of the girls who had waved to him earlier caught his eye and smiled.

Bertie smiled back. He felt quite grown-up now, here with this group of which he was now a member, even if they were so much older. Somebody has to be the youngest, he thought, and they were all being very nice to him about it. Nobody had laughed at him, so far; nobody had suggested that he was too small.

After a while, Bertie slipped past Max and whispered something to one of the attendants. She smiled and told him to follow her to a small door near the galley. Bertie entered the cramped washroom and emerged shortly afterwards to find that the Captain of the aircraft was standing in the galley area, in conversation with one of the attendants. Bertie gazed in admiration at the Captain, who looked down at him and smiled.

“Hello, young man,” said the Captain, winking at Bertie. “Is this your first flight?”

“Yes,” said Bertie. “But I know how it works.”

The Captain smiled. “Oh do you?” he said. “Well, you tell me then.”

“Bernoulli’s principle,” said Bertie.

The Captain glanced at the attendant and then back at Bertie.

“What did you say, young man?”

“You need lift to fly,” explained Bertie. “Mr Bernoulli discovered that pressure goes down when the speed of flow of a fluid increases.

That’s what pushes the wing up. The air flows more quickly over the top than the bottom.” He paused, and then added: “I think.”

The Captain reached out and shook Bertie’s hand. “Well, that’s pretty much how it works. Well done! You carry on like that, son, and . . .”

Bertie waited for the Captain to say something else, but he did not, and so he went back to his seat.

“I saw you talking to the Captain there,” said Max. “What did you say?”

“I was telling him about Bernoulli’s principle,” said Bertie.

“But I think he knew already.”

Scotland’s Woes 233

The flight was over far too quickly for Bertie. It seemed to him only a matter of a few minutes before the plane started to dip down through the clouds to Charles de Gaulle Airport.

“Charles de Gaulle was President of France,” observed Bertie to Max, as they taxied up to the terminal.

“Ooh la la!” replied Max. “Paris! Boy, are we going to have fun, Bertie! Have you heard of a place called the Moulin Rouge, Bertie? You heard of it?”

75. Scotland’s Woes

Antonia Collie, Domenica’s tenant during her absence in the Malacca Straits, was uncertain what to do about Angus Lordie.

The artist had invited her to dinner a few weeks previously and 234 Scotland’s Woes

then, with very little notice, had cancelled the invitation. He had explained that his dog, Cyril, had been stolen, and he had said that he was, frankly, too upset to entertain. She had been surprised, and had wondered whether the excuse was a genuine one. She had been cancelled once or twice before, by others, and had herself occasionally had to call something off. But she had never encountered, nor used, a pretext relating to a dog. It had the air of the excuse which children use for their failure to produce homework: The dog ate it. Presumably there were dogs who really did eat homework, but they must be rare.

She thought that it had been kind of Angus to let her into the flat and make her welcome on the day of her arrival in Edinburgh, and it had been kinder still of him to invite her to dinner. But her conversation with him had been a curious one, full of tension just below the surface. It seemed to her as if he was keen to assert himself in her presence; that he was for some reason defensive.

Of course there were men like that, she realised – men who felt inadequate in the presence of a woman who was intellectually confident, who could do something which perhaps the man himself wanted to do but could not. Some men only felt comfortable if they could condescend to women, or if they felt that women looked up to them. Her own husband had been a bit like that, she thought. He had found it necessary to take up with that empty-headed woman from Perth, a woman who could hardly sustain an intelligent conversation for more than five minutes, if that.

Or could it be envy? Antonia was very conscious of the corro-sive power of envy and felt that it was this emotion, more than any other, which lay behind human unhappiness. People did not realise how widespread envy was. It was everywhere – in all sorts of relationships, insidiously poisoning the way in which people felt about one another. Antonia had been its victim. As a girl, she had been envied for her academic prowess, and she had been envied for her looks, too. She had no difficulty in attracting boys; girls who could not do this envied her and wished that something would happen to her hair, or that her skin would become oily.

Children, of course, knew no better. But she saw envy persisting into adult life. She saw it at work in her marriage,

Scotland’s Woes 235

and now she noticed it in public life too, now that she knew what to look for. Scotland was riddled with it, and it showed itself in numerous ways which everyone knew about but did not want to discuss. That was the problem, really: new ideas were not welcome – only the old orthodoxies; that, and the current of anti-intellectualism that made intelligent men (and she was thinking of men now) want to appear to be one of the lads.

These men could talk and think about so much else, but were afraid to do so, because Scotsmen did not do that. They talked instead about football, trapped in that sterile macho culture which has so limited the horizons of men. Poor men.

Antonia moved to her window and looked out over Scotland Street. Our country, she thought, is such an extraordinary mixture. There is such beauty, and there is such feeling; but there is also that demeaning brutality of conduct and attitude that has blighted everything. Where did it come from? From oppression and economic exploitation over the centuries. Yes, it had. And that continued, of course, as it did in every society.

There were blighted lives. There were people who had very little, who had been brutalised by poverty and who still were.

But it was not just the material lack – it was an emptiness of 236 Scotland’s Woes

the spirit. If things were to change, then the culture itself must look in the mirror and see what rearrangement was required in its own psyche. It had to become more feminine. It had to look at the national disgrace of alcoholic over-indulgence. It had to stop the self-congratulation and the smugness. It had to realise that we had almost entirely squandered our moral capital, built up by generations of people who had striven to lead good lives; capital so quickly lost to selfishness and discourtesy. It had to admit that we had failed badly in education and that this could only be cured by restoring the respect due to teachers and cajoling parents into doing their part to discipline and educate their ill-mannered children. It had to think sideways, and up and down, and round the corner. It had to open its mind.

This train of thought had started with Angus, who had re-issued his invitation for dinner for that evening. She had accepted, although she would rather have stayed at home and continued to write about her Scottish saints and their difficult lives. She did not think that the acquaintanceship with Angus would go anywhere.

It was curious, was it not, that people expected those who were by themselves to be looking for somebody else. There were plenty of people – and she was one – who rather relished being on their own. If she met a man who interested her – and, thinking over the last year, she found it difficult to bring any such man to mind

– then she might be prepared to contemplate an affair, or should she call it an involvement? The word “affair” was an odd one. It had suggestions of the illicit about it. And it implied the existence of a terminus: affairs were not meant to last. That, she thought, was why Graham Greene was right in that title of his, The End of the Affair. There was a sad inevitability about that.

Antonia turned away from the window and smiled. Graham Greene! That was Angus Lordie’s problem. He was a Graham Greene-ish character, just like that dentist who had run out of gas and went down to the jetty every day to see if the boat would bring him new supplies. Dentists on jetties; whisky priests; seedy colonial officials; and now a failed portrait painter in the unfashionable end of the Edinburgh New Town. C’est ça! Greeneland.

76. Brunello di Montalcino

Had he known that Antonia was mentally comparing him to a character from a Graham Greene novel, Angus Lordie’s existing dislike of his prospective guest would have doubled, or quadru-pled perhaps. And had he known that a literary comparison was being made, he would himself have sought comparisons of his own. There she was, writing her novel in Domenica’s flat, not doing anything of importance really. And the novel – if it existed at all – might never be published anyway. Plenty of people were writing novels; in fact, if one did a survey in the street, half of Edinburgh was writing a novel, and this meant that there really weren’t enough characters to go round. Unless, of course, one wrote about people who were themselves writing novels. And what would the novels that these fictional characters were writing be about? Well, they would be novels about people writing novels.

Angus Lordie stood in his kitchen, his blue and white striped apron tied about his waist, contemplating the appetising collection of ingredients he had bought from Valvona & Crolla. Even if he was not looking forward to receiving Antonia, he was certainly looking forward to the experience of cooking the meal.

He glanced at his watch; it was now five o’clock, which meant that it would be roughly three hours before Antonia arrived (provided, he thought, that she knew that an invitation for seven-thirty meant ten to eight). There were always people who did not understand this, and who arrived on time, but he did not think Antonia would be one of these. So he had his three hours to prepare the meal.

He had planned the menu carefully. They would start with ravioli Caprese, ravioli stuffed with a mixture of parmesan and goat’s milk cheese. Angus had decided against using sheep’s milk caciotta, the sort used in Tuscany, on the grounds that in Capri itself he had read that caciotta was made of goat’s milk. That is something that he thought he might raise with Antonia, telling her, perhaps, that he had assumed that she would want the Caprian version rather than the Tuscan. That would catch her out, because she would not know anything about that. They 238 Brunello di Montalcino

would then move on, for their main course, to sogliole alla Veneziana, sole with Venetian sauce. That would involve a white wine sauce in which he would put a lot of garlic, and with it he would serve carciofi ripieni alla Mafalda, stuffed artichokes which he had learned to make by reading Elizabeth David’s Italian Food.

That was quite a complex recipe, involving more garlic and some anchovies, but he had plenty of time to get everything ready; and what was the time now that he had laid out all the ingredients? – five-thirty, which was time, perhaps, for a drink. He had obtained two bottles of a southern wine, a Cirò Bianco from Calabria, and he already had a supply of Biondi-Santi Brunello di Montalcino, which a friend had given him in payment for a portrait a few months ago.

Antonia would know nothing about Brunello, of course. He might mention Montalcino and ask her whether she thought it had been spoilt. “You don’t know Montalcino? Oh, you should go there. But maybe it’s a bit late, now that it’s become so popular. That’s the trouble with Tuscany. Terribly busy.”

He had opened one of the bottles of Brunello to let it breathe, and while he was thinking these delicious thoughts involving the putting of Antonia in her place, he decided to allow himself a glass of the elegant Italian wine. He raised the glass to the light and stared at it lovingly. It would be wonderful to be back in Montalcino, perhaps walking in the woods with Cyril. Would Cyril have a good nose for truffles? he wondered. It would be interesting to take him there now that dogs could get a passport.

The Brunello slipped down very easily and Angus decided to refill his glass. The second helping would be more subtle, he felt, and he could savour it as he prepared the stuffed artichokes.

He took a sip and closed his eyes. It was delicious. But what he needed now was some music, and this is where Cyril came in.

Angus had taught Cyril very few tricks. There were some dogs who were trained to carry the newspaper back from the paper shop, walking obediently behind their master, the day’s news clamped in their jaws.

That, thought Angus, was a rather pointless trick. Like Mr Warburton in Somerset Maugham’s The Outstation, a pristine Brunello di Montalcino 239

newspaper was one of Angus Lordie’s main delights, and it would not do to have canine toothmarks all over the front page.

But Cyril’s inability to perform such standard tricks did not mean that he could do nothing useful. In fact, Cyril had been trained to perform a trick of which he was inordinately proud and which Angus Lordie felt was positively useful. On the command “Cyril! Music!” the obedient dog would bound through to the drawing room and press the on/off button of the CD player with his nose.

That would activate the disc, one of which Angus always kept in the player, and music would be heard. And in anticipation of the Italian cuisine planned for Antonia, Angus had loaded a disc of Florentine music of the sixteenth century.

On his master’s command, Cyril dashed off to perform his trick. In the kitchen, Angus called out his thanks and cut off a small piece of anchovy to feed to Cyril as a reward. Then, into the white enamel bowl from which Cyril was given liquid treats, he poured a small quantity of Brunello di Montalcino.

It was far too good a wine to give to a dog in normal circumstances, but Angus was still enjoying the euphoria of being re-united with Cyril after his recent kidnap, and felt that an exception should be made.

Cyril wolfed down the anchovy fragment and then turned to the Brunello, which he sniffed at appreciatively before licking it quickly from the bowl. By this time, Angus had poured himself a third glass of the Brunello.

It’s extraordinary how the level of a good wine in the bottle sinks so quickly, he said to himself as he lifted the bottle to the light.

Oh well, that was a gorgeous piece of early Florentine music playing: Ecco la Primavera, a favourite song of his. Spring has arrived. At last, at last. And here, Cyril my boy, is a toast to spring! La Primavera!

Cyril gazed at his master. There was much that he did not understand.

77. Angus Impresses Antonia

Antonia Collie, bound for dinner in Angus Lordie’s Drummond Place flat, but none too enthusiastic about the prospect, left Domenica’s flat shortly before twenty-to-eight that evening. She imagined that it would take her not much more than five minutes to walk up the street and round the corner, which would mean that she would arrive at about the right time for a seven-thirty invitation. In the event, it took her only two minutes to reach the top of Scotland Street, from which point the walk to Angus Lordie’s front door would require only another forty-five seconds. So, rather than arrive too early, she decided to walk round the square once before ringing his doorbell. These things might not seem important, but Antonia thought that they were, and she was right, and Immanuel Kant, famous for the utter regularity of his walks around Königsberg, would doubtlessly have agreed with her.

Unknown to Antonia, her host was at that moment peering out of the window of his drawing room, which looked over the gardens in the middle of the square. He had finished his preparations in the kitchen, and had moved into the drawing room, taking with him Cyril and the second bottle of Brunello di Montalcino. Angus had not intended to have more than one or two glasses of wine while cooking the dinner, but he had found that the sheer quality of the Brunello had dictated otherwise. The contents of the first bottle had slipped down almost unnoticed, and now the second bottle was seriously broached.

He was now in an extremely good mood. The sinking feeling which he had experienced earlier on at the thought of entertaining Antonia had been replaced by a rather more positive attitude. In fact, now he was looking forward to her arrival, as he hoped to show her a recently-acquired Alberto Morrocco still-life, a present from an old friend. It had been a handsome gift, and Angus had given the painting pride of place on his walls. Antonia, he thought, was bound to like it, just as he imagined that she would in due course approve of the portrait he Angus Impresses Antonia 241

was planning of the retired lawyer Ramsey Dunbarton. Angus Lordie knew Ramsey Dunbarton from the Scottish Arts Club, where they occasionally had lunch at the same table. He found Ramsey’s conversation somewhat dull – in fact, extremely dull, for most of the time – but he was a tolerant man and was prepared to put up with long-winded stories about Morningside as he ate his lunch, provided that the subject could be changed by the time they went upstairs for coffee. In a rash moment, Angus had offered to paint Ramsey’s portrait, and the offer had been immediately accepted. Ramsey had taken out his diary and said:

“When? Will next week do? Monday morning?”

Now, looking out of his window, he saw the figure of a woman come up from the top of Scotland Street and hesitate. He thought that it might be Antonia, but then his long vision was not very good at night and he could not make out the woman’s features. He saw her hesitate, look about her, and then start to stroll around the square. That was interesting, he thought. “That woman has an agenda,” he said to Cyril, who was sitting on the carpet in the middle of the room looking up at the light. Cyril cocked his head in his master’s direction in acknowledgement of the comment addressed to him, and then resumed his contemplation of the light. Angus poured himself another glass of Brunello.

Angus was still at his window when Antonia completed her walk round the square and arrived outside his door. He was now very interested in the behaviour of this woman, but when the doorbell rang shortly thereafter he realised that it was, after all, Antonia. But why would she have gone for a walk round the square? Killing time, of course. He looked at his watch. Yes, that was it. How considerate of her.

He went into his hall to operate the buzzer that would open the door onto the street. Then, going out onto the landing, he looked down into the stairwell.

“Come on up!” he called out, and added: “Yoo hoo!” His voice echoed rather satisfactorily against the stone walls and stairway and so he decided to call out again. “Hoots toots!” he shouted, using the exact phrase which David Balfour’s uncle used 242 Angus Impresses Antonia

when he received his nephew in the House of Shaws. Would Antonia get the reference, he wondered? Did she know her Robert Louis Stevenson? Of course, this stair was considerably safer than that up which Balfour’s uncle had sent him; there were no voids here into which one might step. So Angus shouted out to Antonia as she began her climb up to his floor: “No voids!

Don’t worry! This is not the House of Shaws!” Unfortunately, his voice was slightly slurred and he ended up shouting something which sounded rather like “This is not a house of whores”.

Or so it seemed to Antonia, who paused and looked up in puzzlement.

Angus met her at his doorway. “Antonia, my dear,” he said, reaching out to kiss her on the cheek. “You are very welcome.

Totally welcome.”

She glanced at him sideways as she took off her coat. “I hope that I’m not late,” she said.

“But not at all,” said Angus, taking the coat. “My mother had a coat like this, you know. Virtually identical. In fact, this could be the very coat. Remarkable. Hers was in slightly better condition, I believe, but otherwise pretty similar. Amazing. Shows that fashion doesn’t change, does it?” He paused. “My mother’s dead, you see.”

Antonia smiled, but said nothing.

“On y va,” said Angus. “Let’s go through to the drawing room.

You’ve met Cyril, of course. He’s my dog. Got a gold tooth, you know. Do you mind dogs, Antonia? Because if you do, I can send him out. Or should I say: Do you mind men? Because if you do, I can be sent out and Cyril can stay! Hah!”

Antonia smiled again, but more weakly.

“By the way,” said Angus, “I saw you walking round the square.

I didn’t know it was you. And you know what? – I thought you were a streetwalker. I really did! Shows how wrong one can be

– at a distance.”

78. The Third Person

“Purely a social call,” said Irene as she put her head round Dr Fairbairn’s door. “I was passing by, you see, and they said downstairs that you had no patients until twelve o’clock. So I thought . . .”

Dr Hugo Fairbairn, seated behind his desk and absorbed, until then, in an unbound copy of The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, greeted her warmly.

“But there’s no need to justify yourself,” he said. “Not that you entered apologetically, of course. You’re not one of those people who announces themselves with: ‘It’s only me’.”

Irene slipped, uninvited, into the chair in front of the psychotherapist’s desk. “But does anybody really say that?” she asked.

Dr Fairbairn nodded. “They certainly do. And it shows a fairly profound lack of self-esteem. If one says: ‘It’s me’, then one is merely stating a fact. It is, indeed, you. But if you qualify it by saying that it’s only you, then you’re saying that it could be somebody more significant. Wouldn’t you agree?”

Irene did agree. She agreed with most of Dr Fairbairn’s pronouncements, and wished, in fact, that she herself had made them.

“You see,” went on Dr Fairbairn, “how we announce ourselves is very revealing. J.M. Barrie, you know, used to enter his mother’s room saying: ‘It’s not him, it’s me’. He was referring, of course, to David, his brother who died. And that shaped, and indeed explained, everything about his later life. All the psychopathology. The creation of Peter Pan. Everything.”

“Very sad,” said Irene.

“Yes,” said Dr Fairbairn. “Very. And then there’s the interesting question of those who use the third person about themselves.”

“Oh,” said Irene, vaguely. It occurred to her that she used the third person on occasion when talking to Bertie. She said things such as: “Mummy is watching, Bertie. Mummy is watching Bertie very closely.” That was using the third person, 244 The Third Person

was it not? In fact, it was a double use of the third person; first (I, mother figure) became third, as did second (you, son). What did this reveal about Irene? she asked herself. No, deliberate play; what does that reveal about me?

“Yes,” said Dr Fairbairn. “I knew somebody once who did this all the time. He was called George, and he said things like:

‘George is very much hoping to see you tomorrow.’ Or: ‘George had a very good time yesterday.’ It was very strange.”

“Why did he do it?” Irene asked.

Dr Fairbairn looked up at the ceiling, which was a sign, Irene had noted, of an impending insight. “It’s a form of dissociative splitting of the self,” he said. “Or that’s what it is in the most extreme cases. It’s as if a decision has been taken that there are two persons – the person whose actions and thoughts are reported and the person who does the reporting. So if you’re George and you say that George has done something, then it’s as if you’re speaking from the perspective of another person altogether, an observer.”

Irene thought about that for a moment. “I can see that,” she said. “But this self-bifurcation?”

Dr Fairbairn leaned forward and made an emphatic gesture with his right hand. “Ah!” he said. “Two possibilities. One is that it’s a defensive withdrawal from a threatening social reality.

I don’t like what I see in the world and so I stand back for a while and let the alter ego get on with it. I take a breather, so to speak.”

“And the other possibility?” asked Irene.

“Smugness,” said Dr Fairbairn. “Have you noticed something about the people who do it? Well, I have. They’re often smug.”

Irene hesitated. She had been about to say that she sometimes referred to herself in the third person when talking to Bertie, but she was going to suggest that it was different with children. Adults spoke to children in the third person because it provided the child with a key to the understanding of a social world which would otherwise be too subjective. The extraction of the subjective element in the situation conveyed to the child the understanding that the social world involved impersonal, The Third Person 245

objectified transactions between people. In other words, we were all role players, and the child may as well get used to that fact.

That was what she was going to say, but she could not say it now. Smug? Was she smug? Of course not.

Dr Fairbairn leaned back in his chair, pulling at the cuffs of his blue linen jacket. “Smugness is a very interesting concept,”

he said slowly. “You may know that there’s a fascinating literature on it. Not a very extensive one, but very, very interesting.”

He reached for the journal which he had been reading when Irene entered the room. “Right here,” he said. “As it happens.

Much of this issue is devoted to the topic. Fascinating stuff.”

Irene listened attentively. She knew that it was disloyal, but she could not help but compare Dr Fairbairn with Stuart. The worlds of the two men were surely about as different as one could imagine. Indeed, there were so few men like Dr Fairbairn

– so few men who could talk with such ease and insight about matters such as these. It was like being with an artist who simply saw the world in a different way; saw colours and shades that others just did not see. Proust must have been like that too. He saw everything, and then everything behind everything. Behind the simplest thing, even inanimate objects, there was a wealth of associations that only somebody like Proust could see. So it was with Dr Fairbairn, and for a moment it made Irene feel a great sense of regret. Had she married somebody like this, then her daily lot would have been so different. She would have been able to explore the world with him in a way in which she would never be able to do with Stuart. Stuart lived in a world of statistics and brute facts. Dr Fairbairn inhabited a realm of emotions and human possibilities. They were so utterly different – two sides of a mountain range, she thought, and I am on the wrong one.

She told herself that she should not waste these precious minutes with Dr Fairbairn in thinking about what might be, but which was not. So she said to him: “Do tell me about smugness.”

79. Smugness Explained

“Have you ever encountered a really smug person?” asked Dr Fairbairn, fixing his gaze on Irene as she sat before him in his consulting room. Not that this was a consultation; this was a conversation, and a rather enjoyable one, with no therapeutic purpose.

Irene thought for a moment. Who, in her circle, was smug?

But then, she thought, do I really have a circle? She was not at all sure that she did.

“Plenty,” she said. “This city is full of smug people. Always has been.”

Dr Fairbairn laughed. “Of course it is,” he said. “But can you think of anybody in particular?”

Irene’s mind had now alighted on one or two examples. Yes, he was smug all right. And as for her . . . “Well, there’s a certain facial expression,” began Irene.

Dr Fairbairn cut her short. “There might be, but not always.

If there is, it’s the expression of oral satiety. The smug person has what he really wants, the good object, which is the . . . Of course, you know all about that. So he has it and he feels utterly fulfilled. He isn’t really interested in anything else – not really.

That’s why smug people never talk about you – they talk about themselves. Have you noticed that?”

Irene had. She was now thinking of a cousin of hers, a man whom it had never occurred to her to label as smug, but that is what he was. He was insufferably smug, now that one came to think about it. And it was quite true; when they met, which was relatively infrequently, he never once asked her about herself but spoke only of himself and his plans.

“I have a cousin,” she said. “He’s extremely smug.” She paused. “And do you know, he makes me want to prick him with a pin. Yes, I have this terrible pin urge.”

Dr Fairbairn stared at his friend. Pin envy. He had been about to tell her of the common pathology of those who reacted with violent antipathy towards smug people. A lot of people were like that; the mere presence of a smug person made them livid. But Smugness Explained 247

he decided that it was perhaps best not to mention that aspect of it just at that moment.

“Smug people are completely satisfied with themselves,” said Dr Fairbairn. “In that respect they are similar to narcissists. The narcissist is incapable of feeling bad about anything that he does because he is, in his own estimation, so obviously perfect. Smug people don’t necessarily feel that way about themselves. They are very contented with what they have, and they may appear self-righteous, but the really salient feature of smugness is its sense of being satisfied and complete.”

Dr Fairbairn paused. One day, he thought, he would write a paper on smugness. He would need, though, to find a few more patients to write about, but the problem with smug people was that they never sought analysis. And why should they? They had everything they wanted. So perhaps he should write about something else altogether; he should look for another patient, one undergoing regular treatment. He thought for a moment . . .

“Would you mind . . . ?” he suddenly asked Irene. “Would you mind if one of these days I wrote about Bertie? I would change his name, of course, so that nobody would know it was him. But he is a rather interesting case, you know.”

Irene gave a little squeal of delight. “Of course I wouldn’t mind,” she exclaimed. “It would be wonderful to be able to share Bertie with the world. Just as Little Hans’s father allowed us to hear about Little Hans’s castration anxieties and all that business with the dray horses and the giraffe. Imagine if he had refused Freud permission to write about his son. Imagine that.”

Dr Fairbairn agreed. It would have been a terrible loss. But at the same time, there was always the danger that a famous analysand might find himself discovered much later on. Irene should be aware of that.

“I should warn you,” he said, “that sometimes people track down these famous patients, even after years have passed.

Remember what happened to the Wolf Man.” He paused. “And of course, Little Hans himself visited Freud later, when he was nineteen.”

248 Smugness Explained

“And?” prompted Irene.

“He – Little Hans – had forgotten everything. Horses.

Giraffe. All forgotten. Indeed, he recognised nothing in the analysis.”

“How interesting,” said Irene. “Of course you already have at least one famous patient. You have Wee Fraser.” She paused; Wee Fraser was dangerous territory. “You were going to track him down, weren’t you? Did you ever find him?”

Dr Fairbairn stiffened. Up to this point he had been fiddling with the cuffs of his blue linen jacket; now his hands dropped to his sides and he stared fixedly ahead. He had located his famous patient, now fifteen or so, and had risen to his feet to make amends for having smacked him in the early analysis (when Wee Fraser had put the toy pigs upside down), only to be head-butted for his pains by the unpleasant adolescent. But then, to his profound shame, he had responded by striking Wee Fraser on the chin, breaking his jaw.

“I found him,” he said. “ I found him, and then . . .”

Irene leaned forward. “You asked his forgiveness?”

Dr Fairbairn looked miserable. “I wish I could say that I had.

Alas, the truth is the rather to the contrary.”

“How much to the contrary?” pressed Irene.

“Completely,” said Dr Fairbairn.

Irene held up a hand. “I do not want to hear what happened,”

she said. “We can all make mistakes. We can all do things that we didn’t plan to do.”

Dr Fairbairn looked at her with gratitude. Here was absolu-tion – of a sort. “Yes,” he said. “We all do things that we didn’t plan to do. How right you are.” He paused, and stood up. Moving to the window behind his desk, he looked out over the Queen Street Gardens. “Yes, I have done many things I did not intend to do. That is the human condition.”

“Many things?” asked Irene.

“Yes,” said Dr Fairbairn, turning round again. “Such as . . .”

But then he stopped.

Irene waited for him to continue, but Dr Fairbairn had become silent. He looked up at the ceiling, and Irene followed An Evening of Scottish Art 249

his gaze. But there was nothing to be seen there, and so they both lowered their eyes.

He is so unhappy, thought Irene. He is so unresolved.

80. An Evening of Scottish Art

Neither Matthew nor Pat said anything about the unfortunate incident in the bathroom, although neither of them was quick to forget it. Both learned something from the experience.

Matthew now knew to lock the door and to remember that he was no longer alone in the flat. This meant that he should be careful about breaking out into song – as he occasionally liked to do – or uttering the odd mild expletive if he stubbed his toe on the corner of the kitchen dresser or if he dropped part of an egg shell into the omelette mixture. For her part, Pat learned to assume that a closed door meant that the bathroom was not free, and she learned, too, that Matthew was a sensitive person, easily embarrassed and not always able to articu-late the causes of his embarrassment. And for both of them, there was also the lesson that living together, even merely as flatmates, was a process of discovery. For although we are at our most secure – in one sense – in our own homes, we are also at our most vulnerable, for the social persona, the one we carry with us out into the world, cannot be worn at home all the time. That is where resides the real self, the self that can be so easily hurt.

There were things about Matthew that Pat had not suspected.

She had not imagined that he was a member of the Scotch Malt Whisky Society and received its newsletters with all those curious descriptions of the flavour of whiskies. She had paged through one of these which she found lying on the kitchen table and had been astonished by the terms used by the tasting panel. One whisky was described as smelling of school jotters; another smelled like a doctor’s bag (or what doctor’s bags used to smell like). She had never seen Matthew drink whisky, but he later 250 An Evening of Scottish Art

explained to her that he had been given the membership by his father, who was an enthusiast of whisky.

And then she had never seen Matthew reading Scottish Field before, but that is what he liked to do, sitting in a chair in the corner of the drawing room, paging through the glossy magazine. He liked the social pages, he said, with their pictures of people looking into the camera, smiling, happy to be included.

“I’ve never been in,” he said to Pat. “Or never been in properly. My left shoulder was, once, when there was a photograph of a charity ball down in Ayrshire. I was standing just to the side of a group who were being photographed and you could see my shoulder. It was definitely me. I have a green formal kilt jacket, you see, and that was shown. It was quite clear, actually.”

“That was bad luck,” said Pat.

“Yes,” said Matthew. “You have to be somebody like Timothy Clifford to get into Scottish Field. Either that, or you have to know the photographers who take these things. I don’t.”

Pat thought for a moment. “We could have an opening at the gallery. We could have a big event and ask all these people.

Then, when they came, the photographers could hardly cut you out of your own party.”

Matthew thought for a moment. “Yes, that’s quite a good idea.” He paused. “I hope that you don’t think I sit here and worry about not being in Scottish Field. I have got better things to think about, you know.”

“Of course you have,” said Pat. “But should we do that?

Should we have an opening?”

“Yes,” said Matthew. “We could call it An Evening of Scottish Art. Let’s start drawing up the guest list soon. Who should we have?”

“Well, we could invite Duncan Macmillan,” said Pat. “He’s written that book on Scottish art. He could come.”

“Good idea,” said Matthew. “He’s very interesting. And then there’s James Holloway from the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. He lives near here, you know. And Richard and Francesca Calvocoressi. And Roddy Martine. Are you writing this down, Pat?”

An Evening of Scottish Art 251

They spent the next half hour composing the guest list, which eventually included two hundred names. “They won’t all come,”

said Matthew, surveying the glittering list. “In fact, I bet that hardly anyone comes.”

Pat looked at Matthew. There was a certain defeatism about him, which came out at odd moments. Defeatism can be a frustrating, unattractive quality, but in Matthew she found it to be rather different. The fact that Matthew thought that his ventures were destined to fail made her feel protective of him. He was such a nice person, she thought.

He is never unkind; he never makes sharp comments about others. And there he is trying to be a bit more fashionable in that awful distressed-oatmeal cashmere sweater, and all the time he just misses it. Nobody wears distressed oatmeal, these days; it’s so . . . it’s so yesterday. It’s so golf club.

Matthew needed taking in hand, Pat thought. He needed somebody to sit down with him who could tell him not to try so hard, who could tell him that all that was required was a little help with one or two matters and that for the rest he was perfectly all right. But who could do that? Could she?

Pat was thinking of that possibility when Matthew looked at his watch, rose to his feet, and remarked that they only had half an hour to get ready for dinner. Pat had forgotten, but now she remembered.

That night they were due to go out for dinner with Leonie, the architect, and her friend, Babs. She had been invited as well, on the insistence of Leonie, although Matthew seemed a little bit doubtful about this.

“She’s a rather unusual person,” he said hesitantly. “She has all these ideas about knocking down walls and open spaces. You know what architects are like. But I suspect that she’s a bit . . .

well, I suspect that she’s a bit intense.”

He paused, and looked up at the ceiling. “You may find that she’s a bit intense towards you. I don’t know. Maybe not. But you may find that.”

“Intense, in what way?” asked Pat.

“Just intense,” said Matthew. “You know what I mean.”

252 At the Sardi

Pat shook her head.

“Well, anyway,” said Matthew. “I’m going to go and have a shower.”

Pat blushed.

81. At the Sardi

The Caffe Sardi, an Italian restaurant on Forrest Road, was already quite busy when Pat and Matthew arrived for dinner.

He had chosen the restaurant, which he particularly liked, and had left a message on Leonie’s answering machine telling her where they would meet.

“I hope that she picked it up,” he said. “Some people don’t listen to their answering machines, you know.”

“I do,” said Pat. “I listen to my voicemail every day. Once in the morning and then again at night.”

Matthew looked thoughtful. “And do you get many messages?” he asked.

“Quite a few,” said Pat. “Most of them aren’t very important, you know. ‘Meet me at six.’ That sort of thing.”

“Meet whom?” he asked.

Pat shrugged. “Oh, nobody in particular. That’s just a for instance.”

“But sometimes there will be a message saying ‘Meet me’ or something like that?” persisted Matthew.

Pat thought that there was no real point to Matthew’s questions. Sometimes he surprised her, with his opaque remarks, or with those Macgregor undershorts. That was odd. She wondered whether he was wearing them now; it was a disconcerting thought. “Yes,” said Pat. “Sometimes people ask me to meet them.”

Matthew looked down at the tablecloth. He was about to say

“Who?” but at that moment they were joined by Leonie and her friend Babs.

“Have you guys been waiting long?” asked Leonie, as she At the Sardi 253

took off her jacket and hung it over the back of a chair. “Babs and me walked.”

Matthew thought: why can’t people distinguish between nominative and accusative any more? He wanted to say to Leonie: “Would you say me walked?” But he realised that he could not. People did not like being corrected, even when they were obviously wrong.

He looked at Babs, who was now being introduced by Leonie.

She was about the same age as Leonie, perhaps slightly older, but was more heavily-built. She had an open, rather flat face, but she was still attractive in an odd sort of way.

Babs shook hands with Matthew and Pat. “How are you doing?” she said, glancing first at Matthew and then at Pat. She was thinking of something, thought Matthew. She’s wondering whether Pat and I are together. That’s what people do when they meet others, he thought. There’s an instant judgment, an instant assessment. In this case, the question was: is he? Is she?

Perhaps I should say to her right now: “I’m not and she isn’t either.” What would be the result of that?

The waitress gave them menus and they looked at them closely.

“Babs doesn’t like anything with garlic in it,” said Leonie.

“And Leo doesn’t like anything with capers,” said Babs, staring at the menu as if scrutinising it for offending items. “Nor mashed potato nor veal. In fact, little Miss Fussy is just a little on the picky side.”

“Picky yourself,” retorted Leonie. “Oh, I like the look of that!

That’s what I’m going to have.”

Babs stared over Leonie’s shoulder. “Me too. Well spotted, Leo. And no garlic! No! No! No! Naughty garlic!”

“What about you, Pat?” asked Matthew. “Why don’t you have one of those nice pizzas?”

Leonie and Babs looked at Pat. Then Leonie turned to Matthew. “Let the poor girl choose,” she said in a mock-reproachful tone.

“But she likes pizza,” said Matthew. “She always has.”

“Okay,” said Babs. “But she can say that herself, can’t she?”

254 At the Sardi

Leonie nodded her agreement. “Men sometimes think that women can’t make their own choices in life. I’ve noticed that quite a lot, actually. Particularly in this country.” Matthew felt his face becoming warm. “Why do you say that?” he asked. “And why this country?”

Leonie smiled. “It’s just what I’ve picked up,” she said. “I see a lot of men giving orders to women – telling them what to do.”

“And you didn’t see that in Australia?” asked Matthew. He was aware that Babs was watching him as he spoke. She seemed vaguely amused by his response, as if he was behaving exactly as she had imagined he would.

“Oh, bits of Australia are like that,” said Leonie. “There are places out in the boondocks where you get the real ockers, but things are very different in Melbourne and Sydney.”

“I see,” said Matthew.

“I haven’t found that many men have tried to tell me what to do,” said Pat suddenly. “And Matthew certainly doesn’t. Even though he’s my boss, he doesn’t do that.”

Babs turned her gaze from Matthew to Pat. “Well, that’s very good to hear,” she said.

“Yes,” said Pat. “And actually, if you come to think of it, there are plenty of women who tell men what to do. I think it’s men who have got the problem these days.”

“You can say that again,” said Leonie. “Or, rather, you can say the last bit again.”

Matthew now decided that it was time to move the conversation forward. He turned to Babs. “Are you an architect too?”

he asked.

Babs shook her head. “I used to be a designer,” she said. “I was a designer when I lived in Milan. But I was one of those people whose hobby rather took over and became their job. So I changed.”

“Babs has always been good with cars,” said Leonie. “She has a real talent.”

Babs acknowledged the compliment with an inclination of the head. “Well, put it this way, I can talk to cars,” she said. “Cars and me – we’re on the same wavelength.”

Misunderstandings 255

Cars and I, thought Matthew.

“So now I’ve opened a new business,” Babs went on. “I’ve started a small panel-beating shop – you know, car bodywork repair. I fix cars up.”

Leonie raised a finger in the air. “But it’s a very special business, this one,” she said. “It’s just for women who have dented their car. They can take it to Babs for confidential repair. Men needn’t even know about it.”

“Yes,” said Babs. “It’s called Ladies who Crash. And I can tell you something – I’m busy. Boy, am I kept busy!”

Matthew was very wary. “But this implies that women are worse drivers than men,” he said. “Whereas all the evidence goes the other way. Women are safer drivers than men. All the accident statistics show that.”

“But they can’t reverse,” said Babs. She spoke in a matter-of-fact way, as if enunciating an uncontroversial truth. But then she added: “Well, I suppose, neither can Jim.”

“Who’s Jim?” asked Matthew.

“My husband,” said Babs. “Bless him!”

82. Misunderstandings

Dinner that evening at the Caffe Sardi was not a protracted event. Matthew tried valiantly to keep the conversation going into a second cup of post-prandial coffee, but Leonie announced that she had an important site meeting the next day with a demanding client and she wanted an early night. And Jim, Babs announced, did not like her to be too late.

“He worries about me,” she explained, looking at her watch.

“He worries when I go out.”

“I’m sorry,” said Matthew apologetically. “I would have asked him, too. It’s just that I thought . . .” He left the sentence unfinished. Both Leonie and Babs were staring at him, and Pat, embarrassed, was looking up at the ceiling.

“You thought what?” asked Babs.

256 Misunderstandings

Matthew swallowed. “I thought that you and Leonie were . . .

were friends.”

“But we are,” said Babs. “We’ve been friends for ages, haven’t we Leo?”

“Yes,” said Leonie, still glaring at Matthew. “Did you think . . .”

“You didn’t!” said Babs, seemingly amused.

Matthew laughed nervously. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I suppose I did rather assume that. It’s just that when you came into the restaurant . . .” He glanced at Pat, but she was still looking up at the ceiling.

“Yes,” pressed Babs. “We came in. So what?”

“Perhaps he thought that you looked a bit . . .” offered Leonie.

Babs leaned forward and pointed a finger at Matthew’s chest.

It was an aggressive gesture, but she was smiling as she spoke.

“It’s because I fix cars. Is that it? Well, you work in a gallery, don’t you? That’s a job for a sensitive man. And you don’t get many sensitive men playing rugby, do you?” She laughed, and was quickly echoed by Leonie.

“No,” said Leonie. “Can you imagine it?”

Matthew bit his lip. “Plenty of sensitive men play rugby,” he said wildly. “Plenty.”

“Oh yes?” challenged Babs. “Name one.”

Matthew thought. He could not think of any sensitive men who played rugby – not a single one. “Oh well,” he said. “I don’t think we should speak about stereotypes. Men who work in the arts are just the same as anybody else. Some play rugby, some don’t.”

“None play rugby,” said Leonie. “I’m telling you.”

“Does it matter?” interrupted Pat. “Does anybody really care any more at all who plays rugby and who doesn’t?”

“Is rugby some sort of metaphor?” asked Babs.

Matthew shook his head. “It’s a game.”

“Which is not played frequently by sensitive men,” interjected Leonie.

There was a silence. Then: “Let’s not argue,” said Babs pleasantly. “It’s been such a nice evening and it would be a pity to Misunderstandings 257

ruin it with an argument, wouldn’t it? I suppose that I am a bit of a direct speaker. And I know that these days you can’t speak freely about anything. I’ll try to be a little bit more politically correct, I really will.”

“Good girl!” said Leonie, putting an arm around her friend’s shoulder.

They sat together for a few moments, with nobody saying anything. Then Matthew signalled to the waitress for the bill and the party began to break up.

“You don’t have to pay just because you’re a man,” said Babs.

“Leo and I can pay our share.”

“Well . . . .” Matthew began.

“But thanks anyway,” said Leonie hurriedly. “Thanks very much for the evening, Matthew.”

Afterwards, when Babs and Leonie had disappeared together in a taxi, Matthew and Pat walked over the road to the pub on the opposite side of the road. Sandy Bells Bar was known for its folk music, and as they made their way to the broad mahogany bar they saw a fiddler at the other end of the bar rise to his feet.

Matthew stopped where he stood. “Listen,” he said.

“ ‘Lochaber No More’.”

The long, drawn-out passages of the heart-rending lament largely silenced the drinkers present. An elderly man, seated by the window, clutching a small glass of whisky in both hands, started to sway gently in time with the music. The fiddler, glancing up, saw him and smiled.

“I love that tune,” Matthew whispered to Pat. “It makes me so sad.”

Pat stole a glance at Matthew. It had been a confusing evening.

She had not known how to take their fellow-guests over dinner; things were not as they seemed, she realised, but then, it still seemed a bit strange.

“Leonie and Babs,” she said quietly to Matthew. “Do you think that . . .”

“That they’re an item?” whispered Matthew. “No, I don’t.

And anyway, it doesn’t matter.”

258 Misunderstandings

He looked at Pat, and suddenly, with complete clarity of understanding, he realised that he was in love with her and that he had to tell her that. He had not been in love with her half an hour ago. He had liked her then. He felt a bit jealous of her.

But now he loved her. He simply loved her.

He moved very slightly towards Pat, who was standing a few inches away from him. Now they were touching one another, his right leg against hers. She did not move away. Emboldened, he reached out and took her hand in his, squeezing it gently.

She returned the pressure. “Let’s sit down,” she said. “Over at the table. Over there. I want to talk to you, Matthew.”

Matthew followed Pat to the table. He felt that he had misjudged the situation, and now his fears were to be confirmed.

She would tell him that she thought of him as a brother; he had heard that sort of thing before. Or, worse, she might say that she thought of him as an employer.

“Matthew,” she said. “We’re friends, aren’t we? No, don’t look so down-in-the-mouth. We’re friends, aren’t we?”

“Yes,” said Matthew, flatly. “We’re friends.”

“And friends can speak their minds to one another?”

Matthew sighed. “Yes, I suppose they can.”

Mothercraft 259

Pat lowered her voice. “I feel very awkward about this,” she said. “But I think that I know you well enough to talk about it.”

Matthew said nothing. It was all so predictable.

Pat reached out and took his hand. “I’m rather keen on Babs,”

she said.

Matthew remained quite immobile. He opened his mouth, and then closed it. His mouth felt dry.

“Only joking,” said Pat. “But the point is this, Matthew. I know that you want to find somebody. I know that you want to find a girlfriend. But you don’t seem to be able to do it, do you?”

Matthew looked down at his feet. He said nothing.

“Well, why don’t you let me help you?” said Pat quietly. “Let me help you find somebody.”

83. Mothercraft

With Bertie away in Paris, Irene felt at something of a loose end. She had enjoyed her recent visit to Dr Fairbairn, and they had agreed to meet again for coffee later that week. She felt slightly guilty about this, because she had not mentioned to Stuart that she was seeing the psychotherapist in this way, but on subsequent reflection she concluded that it was perfectly appropriate for the two of them to meet, on the grounds that Bertie almost always cropped up in their conversation. Her meetings with Dr Fairbairn could therefore be justified as directly related to the therapy that Bertie so clearly needed.

And Bertie really did need therapy – at least in his mother’s view. The original incident which triggered the first visit to Dr Fairbairn – Bertie’s setting fire to his father’s copy of The Guardian (while he was reading it) – had not been followed by any acts of quite so dramatic a nature. But even if that was so, it was obvious that Bertie was still puzzled by life and uncertain about himself and who he was. And there was also an outstanding question about his dreams. Bertie had vivid dreams, and it was 260 Mothercraft

not uncommon for Irene to go into his bedroom early in the morning and find Bertie lying in his little bed with a puzzled frown on his face. That, thought Irene, was an indication of a confusing or threatening dream.

If she could visit Dr Fairbairn, then there was at least something to take her mind off her situation. And that situation was this: she was pregnant, she had very little to do, and she found the behaviour of her husband increasingly irritating. The only salience in this otherwise dull existence was the Bertie Project, and for a large part of the day Bertie was away at school or, as now, in Paris.

But then there arose an interesting possibility. Irene’s first pregnancy had gone very smoothly and uneventfully. She had felt very little discomfort. There had been virtually no nausea and she had experienced no cravings of the sort that many women feel in pregnancy. So in her case there had been no furtive snacking on chocolate bars, nor gnawing on raw artichokes, nor anything of that sort. Irene had simply sailed through the whole process and, more or less exactly on the day predicted by her doctor, given birth to Bertie in the Simpson Maternity Unit.

Of course it had been an enhanced pregnancy. She had read of the importance of playing music to the baby in utero, and had placed headphones against her stomach each afternoon while resting and played Mozart through them. She was convinced that Bertie had responded, as he had kicked vigorously each time she turned up the volume of ‘ Soave sia il vento’

from Così fan Tutte, and, indeed, after his birth whenever this piece of music was played a strange expression would come over Bertie’s face.

There were other enhancements. Irene had changed her diet during pregnancy and had embarked on courses of vitamin pills and nutritional supplements that would ensure good brain development. Although she had previously scorned what she had considered to be the old-wives’ tale that fish was good for the brain, she had been won round by recent scientific evidence to this precise effect and had consequently eaten a great deal of fish in the later months. There had also been an intensive beet-Mothercraft 261

root programme in the final weeks before Bertie’s birth, and Stuart had remarked on the fact that Bertie as a very young baby had a fairly strong beetroot complexion – a remark which had not been well received by Irene.

This second pregnancy was, if anything, less stressful than the first and Irene actually found herself rather bored by it.

That was until she saw a notice in the local health centre advertising special birth and mothercraft classes at a hall in St Stephen Street. Had Irene been more fully occupied she would not have bothered with these, but in her current state she thought that it might be interesting to see what these classes entailed – not that she had anything to learn, of course, about bringing up children. Indeed, it was she who should be imparting knowledge in this area, not receiving it. But the barricades in this life are never in the right place, and so she duly enrolled in a class that was scheduled to run for six weeks, with meetings on Tuesday and Thursday mornings and on the evenings of the same days for those mothers-to-be who were still at work.

The classes were to be run by somebody called Nurse Forbes, and there was a picture of Nurse Forbes on the poster.

Irene peered at her. She had a rather bovine face, Irene decided; the sort of face that one used to see in advertisements for butter. In fact, thought Irene, she looked a bit Dutch. The Dutch, she felt, had that rather milky look about them, as if they had eaten too many dairy products. And they probably had, she reflected.

Irene smiled. Poor Nurse Forbes! She probably had not the slightest idea who Melanie Klein was; for her, babies were a matter of bottles of milk and injections and nappy rash and all the rest. Hers would be a life filled with unguent creams and immunisations and breast-milk issues. Poor woman.

And then, shortly after she had seen the poster and studied the picture of Nurse Forbes, Irene had the chance to meet her.

It happened after a routine check-up that Irene had with her doctor. This doctor for some reason did not appear to like Irene

– a feeling which Irene decided was based on his fundamental 262 No More Nonsense, Nurse Knows Best insecurity and his inability to engage in a non-paternalistic way with an informed patient.

“I’d like you to have a chat with Nurse Forbes,” said the doctor. “If you don’t mind, that is. She runs a class, you know.

Not that you would need a class, of course. Not in your case.”

“On the contrary,” said Irene coldly. “I have already decided to sign up for it.”

“In that case,” said the doctor, “you can see Nurse Forbes straightaway. She’s in the building. Speak to the receptionists first. I’m sure that the two of you will get on very well.”

Irene had not bothered about the receptionists. She had left the consulting room and walked down the corridor to the door marked Nurse Forbes. She had knocked on the door and, a moment later, a voice had called out: “Come in!”

It was a milky-sounding voice, Irene thought.

84. No More Nonsense, Nurse Knows Best Nurse Forbes was a woman in her early forties. She had been brought up in Haddington, the youngest of three girls, all of whom became nurses. Her mother had been a nurse, as had her grandmother.

That she should become a nurse too had been accepted from the very beginning, and when the time came for her to leave Knox Academy, she had enrolled on a nursing course at Queen Margaret College in Clermiston. In due course she had graduated with distinction, as her two sisters had done. She completed her training in the Royal Infirmary and in that classic of Caledonian-Stalinist architecture, the Simpson Memorial Maternity Pavilion.

Marriage came next – to a man who worked as an accountant in a brewery – and then there had been public service: she had served for a short time on the Newington Community Council, and had been appointed by the Secretary of State to the Departmental Committee on Maternity Services and the Healthy No More Nonsense, Nurse Knows Best 263

Eating in Pregnancy Initiative. She was very good at her job.

Irene, of course, knew nothing of this distinguished career when she knocked on the door marked Nurse Forbes. There were so many people who seemed to work in the health centre that it was impossible for her to keep up with them all, and she had great difficulty in working out who was a receptionist, who was a doctor, and who was a nurse. It was most confusing – and irritating.

Nurse Forbes looked up from the report she was reading.

Patients were normally announced by the receptionists and she was mildly surprised to see Irene in her doorway. Now, who was this woman? She seemed vaguely familiar, but then she saw so many people. Pregnant, obviously.

“You are Nurse Forbes, I take it,” said Irene.

Nurse Forbes smiled. “Yes, I am. Please come in. Did doctor send you?”

Irene winced. She did not like the doctor to be referred to simply as “doctor”; it was so condescending to the patient, as if one were a child.

“Yes,” she said. “My doctor sent me.” There was a great deal of emphasis on the possessive.

Nurse Forbes invited Irene to sit down. This, she thought, is the typical patient for the area. Thinks she knows everything.

Will condescend, if given the chance. But she knew how to deal with people like Irene.

“I’ll just take a few details,” said Nurse Forbes. “Then we can have a wee talk.”

Irene sat down. “I don’t have a great deal of time,” she said.

“I was planning to come to those classes you’re running.”

“You’ll be very welcome,” said Nurse Forbes. But she would not. This sort of person tended to be disruptive, and sometimes she wondered why they came at all.

“The classes are quite well-subscribed. I think that people find them quite useful,” she said.

“I’m sure they are,” said Irene.

“But if there are any particular issues you’d like to raise with me privately,” said Nurse Forbes, “please do so now. Sometimes people have concerns that they don’t like to raise in front of others.”

264 No More Nonsense, Nurse Knows Best Irene nodded. “There are,” she said. “I do have some questions . . .”

Nurse Forbes raised a hand. “But first we need to go over one or two things,” she said. “You know, diet issues. General health matters.”

“I have a very healthy diet,” said Irene. “You need have no worries on that score. And I take all the necessary supplements.”

Nurse Forbes looked up sharply. “Supplements?”

Irene smiled tolerantly. Nurses could not be expected to understand dietary issues. “Shark oil capsules. Slippery elm. Red raspberry. Wild yam,” she paused. Nurse Forbes was staring at her. Would she have to explain each of these?

“Why are you taking these . . . these substances?” Nurse Forbes asked.

Irene took a deep breath. It was going to be necessary to explain after all.

“As you may know,” she began, “modern foods are lacking in certain important constituents. This is a result of farming techniques which . . .”

No More Nonsense, Nurse Knows Best 265

“During pregnancy,” Nurse Forbes interrupted, her voice raised, “during pregnancy, mother should eat a healthy, balanced diet. She should not – and I repeat not – take non-medicinal supplements, herbal remedies and the like. These may be harmful to both mother and baby. And we do not want baby to be harmed, do we?”

Irene was silent. This would be risible, if it were not so insulting. Here was this . . . this bureaucrat, in her ridiculous uniform, telling me – me – what I should and should not take.

And what did she know about slippery elm? Nothing. Nothing at all.

This woman, this ridiculous Nurse Forbes was the state. She was the local, immediate face of the state, presuming – yes presuming – to lecture me as if I were some sixteen-year-old first-time mother who subsisted on a diet of fish and chips.

Absurd! They glared at one another.

For her part, Nurse Forbes thought: this woman thinks that she is superior to me, she really does. Nothing I say to her is going to make any difference. But I must be tolerant. There is no point in alienating people, even somebody like this. It’s tempting, but it’s just not professional. So, count to ten, and take it from there.

“Well, we can return to this issue some other time,” Nurse Forbes said quietly. “There is some literature I can pass on to you. But, in the meantime, have you discussed delivery matters with doctor?”

“I have reached a decision on that,” Irene replied. “I would like a home delivery, of course. I would like my son, Bertie, to play a part in the delivery of his little brother or sister. I would like him to be the one to welcome the baby to the world.”

Nurse Forbes sat quite still. She spoke quietly, as if in shock.

“You’re proposing that Bertie should actually . . .”

Irene laughed. “Oh, not by himself, of course! With the midwife. Bertie could help to bring the baby . . .”

“But I am the midwife,” said Nurse Forbes. “And I forbid it.

Birth would be a very, very traumatic experience for a little boy.

And, I’m sorry to have to say this, it would be completely inap-266 Poor Lou

propriate for a son to attend to his mother in this way. Any boy would be deeply, deeply embarrassed to do this. No, I forbid it.”

“Melanie Klein . . .”

“I don’t care who your MSP is. I forbid it!”

85. Poor Lou

Angus Lordie went with Cyril down the steps that led into Big Lou’s coffee house, the very steps down which the late Dr C.M.

Grieve, or Hugh MacDiarmid, had tripped and fallen all those years ago when visiting what was then a bookshop. The steps were still perilous, and Angus had once almost fallen; now he was careful to avoid the place where the railings largely disappeared and the step which was cambered in the wrong direction. These snares negotiated, he pushed open the door of the coffee bar and entered the dimly-lit interior, Cyril walking obediently at his heels.

Big Lou was standing in her accustomed position behind the bar, a book open in front of her. She looked up as Angus came in and nodded in his direction. Angus greeted her and walked up to the bar with Cyril.

“I must say, Big Lou,” he began, “I must say that you’re looking more than usually attractive this morning.”

Big Lou glanced up from her book. “I’m looking the same as I always do,” she said. “No different.” She wrinkled her nose slightly. “Is that smell your dog?”

“My goodness,” said Angus. “That’s no way to refer to a regular customer! Cyril pays good money here, same as anybody else. And he licks the plates clean, which is more than can be said of most of your clients.”

“Malodorous beastie,” said Big Lou.

Angus smiled. “Now, now, Lou. Cyril may have the occasional personal hygiene issue, but that’s absolutely normal for dogs. They may be smellier creatures than the opposition, that is, than cats. But they are infinitely more intelligent and agreeable in every respect. You should understand that, coming from Poor Lou 267

Arbroath. You have working dogs up there, don’t you?”

“There are some,” said Lou. She closed her book and slipped it under the counter. “The usual?”

“If you don’t mind. And a dish of warm milk for Cyril, please, with just a dash of espresso in his. Not too much. Just a dash.”

Angus made his way over to his table, sat down, and opened the newspaper. The news, he noticed, was uniformly grim, with seemingly endless vistas of conflict opening up in every corner of the world. It was always thus, he reflected: the struggle for resources, the struggle for space, the struggle for primacy. And as we grew in numbers, remorselessly straining the earth’s capacity to sustain us, so the levels of conflict rose.

“Bad news, Cyril,” he said. “Look at this, boy. Bad news for us; bad news for dogs. We’re in it together, I’m afraid.”

Big Lou now came across with a cup of coffee for Angus and a dish of milk for Cyril. She laid the dish down on the ground, near Cyril’s snout, and he looked up at her with moist, appreciative eyes. Then she put the coffee in front of Angus.

“Lou . . .” Angus had noticed her strained expression and reached out to hold her forearm. “Lou? Are you . . .”

She tried to move away, but he tightened his grip.

“Lou, you sit down. You sit down right there.”

She tried to pull away again, but he resisted, and she sat down, opposite him, her head lowered.

“What is it?” he asked gently. “You’re greeting.” He used the Scots word for crying, instinctively, because that was the word that had been used with him as a child and it seemed to him that it was far more sympathetic. As a little boy, in Perthshire, there had been a girl from a neighbouring farm who had helped look after him. She had comforted him when he had cried, holding him to her, and he remembered how soft she had been, when all around him there was hardness – the hardness of the byre floor on which he had tripped and scraped his knee, the hardness of the shepherds and their smell of tar remedy and lanolin, the hardness of his remote father, with his smell of whisky and the fishing flies in his bonnet. And that girl had cuddled him and said: “Dinnae greet, Angus. Dinnae greet.”

268 Poor Lou

For a few moments she said nothing. Angus kept his hand on her arm, though, and she let him. He squeezed it gently.

“Lou? Come on, Lou. Tell me. It’s Eddie, isn’t it?”

She nodded, but did not speak.

“He’s not the right man for you, Lou,” said Angus gently. “He really isn’t. He’s . . .” He tailed off, and Lou looked up. Her voice was strained, her eyes still liquid with tears. “He’s what?”

“He’s just not a good enough man,” said Angus. “You know, other men can tell. Women don’t always see it, but men are the best judge of other men. Men know. I’m telling you, Lou. They know. I could tell that Eddie wasn’t right, Lou. I could just tell.

Matthew too.”

She frowned. “Matthew? Has he talked to you?”

Angus nodded. He and Matthew had spoken at length about Eddie one evening in the Cumberland Bar and they had been in complete agreement.

“He’s after Lou’s money,” Matthew had said. “It’s glaringly obvious. He’s got some stupid idea of a club. He needs her dough.”

And Angus had agreed, and added: “And then there’s the problem of girls. He goes for younger women. Traceys and Sharons galore. Eighteen-year-olds.”

He could not reveal that conversation to Big Lou, but he had been left in no doubt but that Matthew thought of Eddie in exactly the same way as he did.

“I thought that he loved me,” said Big Lou. “I really thought that he loved me.”

Angus squeezed her arm again. “I think he probably did, Lou. I think that he did – in his way. Because you’re well worth loving. Any man would love you. You’re a fine, fine woman, Lou. But . . .”

She looked at him, and he continued. “Some men just can’t help themselves, Lou. They just can’t help it. Eddie’s one. He’s not a one-woman man. That’s all there is to it.”

“And then there’s the money,” said Big Lou.

Angus grimaced. He had hoped that she had not actually paid over any money, but it seemed as if it might be too late. He A Letter to Edinburgh 269

knew that Lou had a bit of money, the legacy from the farmer she had nursed, but how much would have been left after the purchase of the flat and the coffee bar?

“How much, Lou?” he asked quietly. “How much did you give Eddie?”

“Thirty-four thousand pounds,” said Lou.

86. A Letter to Edinburgh

Domenica was fussy about the circumstances in which she wrote.

In Scotland Street, she would sit at her desk with a clean block of ruled foolscap paper in front of her and write on that, with a Conway Stewart fountain pen, in green ink. There were those who said that writing in green ink was a sign of mental insta-bility, but she had never understood the basis for this. Green ink was attractive, more restful on the eye than an intense black, and she persisted with it.

Such rituals of composition were impossible in that small village near Malacca.

There, she made do with a simple, rather rickety table, which provided a surface for her French moleskin notebook and for a rather less commodious writing paper. But there was still the Conway Stewart pen, and supplies of green ink, and it was with this pen that she now wrote a letter to James Holloway in Edinburgh.

“Dear James,” she began, “I know that you are familiar with the Far East and will be able to picture the scene here – the scene of me upon my veranda, at my table, with a frangipani tree directly in front of me.

“The tree is in flower, and its white blossoms have that gorgeous, slightly sickly smell which reminds me of something else, but which I cannot remember. Perhaps you will supply the allusion; I cannot.

“I have at last begun my researches. Ling, the young man who has been assigned to look after me, is proving very helpful, 270 A Letter to Edinburgh

even if he has a tendency to moodiness. I am not sure, though, of his reliability as an interpreter, as he has a strong contempt for everybody to whom we speak and he keeps arguing with them very loudly in dialect before he translates. This leads me to believe that he is distorting the answers and giving me a highly flavoured account of what is being said. Let me give you an example. The following is a transcript from my notebooks.

The informant, informant 3, is the wife of a minor pirate, a rather depressed-looking woman with six children, all of them under twelve. Her house is on the edge of the village.

“DM: ‘Please ask her to tell me how she pays for the family provisions.’

“Interpreter speaks in Chinese for four or five minutes.

Informant 3 is silent. Interpreter speaks again, raising his hand at one point as if to strike informant 3. Informant 3 speaks for two minutes, and then is silenced by a threatening look from interpreter, who translates: ‘My husband is a selfish man. He likes to keep the money he earns under his bed. There is a trunk there which is locked with a key which he keeps tucked away in his sarong. That is where the money is. He gives me a small amount each week on Monday and I go to the market to buy provisions. There is never quite enough, but if I ask him for money he shouts at me. People are always shouting at me.’

“Interpreter: ‘This is a very self-pitying woman. Her husband is a good man. It must be very difficult to be married to a woman like this. That is all she has to say.’

“DM: ‘Please thank her.’

“Interpreter: ‘That will not be necessary.’”

“So you will understand, James, how very difficult it is for me to get accurate information. However, I persist!

“But now let us move on from such matters to more intriguing issues. There are, I think, several mysteries here, and I find myself increasingly drawn to them. One of these is the question of what happened to the Belgian anthropologist who apparently preceded me here and whose doings, alas, remain obscure. Nobody seems willing to talk about him, and when I raised him with Ling I met a very unambiguous brick wall. The poor man died while doing A Letter to Edinburgh 271

his field work, and the other day I chanced upon his grave when I was walking down a path that led to the sea. I found myself in a clearing in the jungle and there, under a tree, was a rather poignant marker which simply said: HERE LIES AN ANT. I found this very puzzling. Why should he be so described?

“Then I had an idea, and yesterday I went down that path again.

I had the feeling that there were eyes on me, and indeed at one point when I turned round I’m pretty sure that I saw a quick movement in the bush. I was frightened, I’ll admit, but not too frightened to abandon my mission. So I continued, still with that feeling that somebody was not far away. From time to time, I stopped and mopped my brow – the jungle is frightfully sticky, rather like the humid part of the hot house in the Royal Botanic Garden at Inverleith (Edinburgh references are so reassuring, James, when one is in the real jungle; it makes one feel that one could turn a corner and suddenly find Jenners there, which would be wonderful, but too much to ask for, alas!). Eventually, I reached the clearing and there was the grave and its rather sad little marker. So far from home, poor man; so far from everything that Belgians appreciate (whatever that is). Such a very poignant place.

“I sat down near the grave and, rather unexpectedly, the words of a hymn came into my mind. It was the hymn which dear Angus Lordie composed (you know how peculiar he is), and which he once sang at a dinner party in my flat in Scotland Street. If I remember correctly, he called it ‘God Looks Down on Belgium’ and the words went through my mind, there by that poor man’s grave. “God’s never heard of Belgium/But loves it just the same” . . . and so on.

“I was humming away to myself when I suddenly noticed a piece of wood lying by the grave. I picked it up and read what was painted on it: HROPOLOGIST.

“Hropologist? And then I realised, and that solved that mystery. Part of the marker had fallen off. No ant lay there.

“HERE LIES AN ANTHROPOLOGIST. What a touching tribute. If I don’t return from these parts, that is all I would wish for. That, and no more.

“Yours aye, Domenica.”

272 Stendhal Syndrom

87. Stendhal Syndrome

Some of the members of the Edinburgh Teenage Orchestra had been to Paris before, while others, including Bertie, had not. In fact, Bertie had been nowhere before, except for the trip he had made to Glasgow with his father, and so to be here in the great city, sitting in a bus on his way to the hotel on the Boulevard Garibaldi, was seventh heaven indeed. And when the bus trun-dled across a bridge and they found themselves close to that great landmark, the Eiffel Tower, there was an excited buzz of conversation among the young musicians. For a few minutes they were lured out of the cultivated insouciance of adolescence into a state of frank delight, experiencing, for a moment, that thrill which comes when one sees, in the flesh, some great icon; as when one walks into the relevant room of the Uffizi and sees there, before one, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus; or in New York when, from the window of a cab that is indeed painted yellow, driven by a man who is indeed profoundly rude, one sees the approaching skyline of Manhattan; or when, arriving in Venice, one discovers that the streets are subtly different (as was found out by the late Robert Benchley, who then sent a telegram to Harold Ross, the editor of the New Yorker, in the following terms: STREETS FULL OF WATER. PLEASE ADVISE).

Such experiences may become too much – and awaiting those who lay themselves open to cultural epiphany is that curious condition, Stendhal Syndrome. This afflicted Stendhal on his visit to Florence in 1817, and is brought about by seeing great works of art, there before one, and simply being overcome by their beauty. Shortness of breath, tachycardia, and delusions of persecution may result; in other words, a complicated swoon.

Bertie was not a candidate for Stendhal Syndrome. He was thrilled to be in Paris, and he stuck his nose to the window of the bus and gazed, open-mouthed, at the streets of the elegant city. But he was in no danger of swooning; he was merely absorbing and filing away in memory that which he saw: the old Citroën Traction parked by a small boulangerie; the white-gloved policeman standing on a traffic island; the buckets of flowers

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outside a florists; the crowded tables of a pavement café; these were all sights that Bertie would remember.

And then they arrived at their hotel. This was one of those typical small Parisian hotels, occupying six narrow floors of a building overlooking a raised portion of the Metro. Bertie was put in a room on the second floor with Max, his companion from the flight, and from the window of this room he could look out onto the Metro track and see the trains rattle past. For Bertie, who had always been interested in trains, it was the best possible view, and, as he sat on the end of his bed, he thought of the immense good fortune that had brought him to this point in his life. Now he glimpsed what he had thought existed but which had always seemed to be out of his reach – a life in which he was not constantly being cajoled by his mother into doing something, but in which he was, to all intents and purposes, his own master. It was a heady feeling.

“What are we going to do now?” he asked Max, who was busy unpacking his suitcase into the small chest of drawers at the end of the room.

“Richard says that we have to meet downstairs in fifteen minutes and go for a rehearsal,” said Max. “That’s all we have to do today. But I’m going to go out tonight.”

274 Stendhal Syndrome

Bertie looked at his shoes. What time would he have to go to bed? he wondered. Would they insist that he went earlier than everybody else, because he was the youngest, or would he be allowed to go out with Max?

“Go out?” he said timidly.

Max shut a drawer with a flourish. “Yes. Paris is a great place for night life. Didn’t you know that, Bertie?”

“Oh yes,” said Bertie quickly.

“So I thought I might go somewhere like the Moulin Rouge,”

said Max casually. “And I’ve heard that the Folies Bergères is a great place too. Have you ever seen the can-can?”

Bertie was silent. He was unsure what the can-can was, but he was reluctant to appear ignorant – or too young. At least he had known who General de Gaulle was, and Max had not, but then Bertie sometimes wondered whether the things he knew –

and he knew quite a lot – were up-to-date enough. He had a set of encyclopaedias in his room, but he had found out that these were published in 1968, and might not be as reliable as he thought. But there was time enough to think about that later.

For the moment, there was the Moulin Rouge. Were you allowed to go to the Moulin Rouge if you were only six? he wondered.

Or did you have to be at least ten?

“Would you like to come with me, Bertie?” asked Max. “I don’t mind if you come along. But you may have plans of your own.”

“I haven’t really made any plans yet,” said Bertie. “And I would like to come with you.” He paused. “Are we allowed?”

“Of course not,” said Max. “We’ll have to slip out the back.

But I noticed a fire escape as we came up the stairs. You can get to it from out there, and we can shin down that and then catch the Metro. Easy.”

“All right,” said Bertie.

“Good,” said Max. “We’re going for dinner somewhere after the rehearsal and then we come back here. We’ll wait fifteen minutes until everyone has gone to bed, and then we’ll leave.

Boy, are we going to have fun, Bertie!”

They went downstairs a few minutes later and then the whole Girl Talk 275

orchestra was driven off in a bus to the hall where they were due to rehearse.

At the rehearsal, Bertie found it difficult to concentrate, but the small parts he had been given to play were simple and his distracted state did not show. He threw a glance at Max, sitting with the strings, and the other boy at one point winked at him, as if in confirmation of their conspiracy.

At the end of the rehearsal, as they were packing up their instruments, Bertie went to stand close to Max, so that he could sit next to him on the bus and discuss their outing.

“It’s very exciting,” whispered Bertie.

“Yes, sure,” said Max nonchalantly.

88. Girl Talk

They were taken from the rehearsal to the restaurant, which was a large, hall-like establishment, specialising in the feeding of school parties on visits to Paris. The menu, which was printed on laminated cards, was written in English, Italian and German. There was no French. The description of each course was helpfully accompanied by a small picture of what the dish looked like.

To Bertie’s disappointment, Max appeared to have found some new friends and sat with them, leaving him to sit with a small group of girls, who made a place for him and seemed to be quite happy with his company.

“You’re very sweet, you know,” said one of the girls.

Bertie blushed. He was not sure whether it was a good thing to be described as sweet, but he thought that it probably was not.

“How old are you?” said another. “Somebody said that you were only four. Is that true?”

Bertie looked down at his plate. “I’m going to be seven on my next birthday,” he said.

“Six!” exclaimed another girl.

Fortunately, the conversation soon moved on to another topic, 276 Girl Talk

and Bertie’s embarrassment subsided. The topic, it transpired, was the other members of the orchestra, particularly the boys.

“Have you seen that boy called Kevin?” asked one of the girls.

“He plays the oboe, or thinks that he does.”

“He’s gross,” said another. “He thinks he’s so cool, but he’s really gross. Have you seen his ears? They stick out like this.

It’s really gross.”

“He needs surgery,” said the first girl. “That’s his only chance.”

They laughed at this. Bertie, who could see Kevin sitting on the other side of the room, looked at his ears. They did not seem too large to him.

“And that boy in percussion,” one said. “I saw him looking in the mirror in the hotel. There’s this big mirror in the hall, see, and he was standing in front of it looking at his profile. It was really sad.

“He actually asked Linda out, you know. She couldn’t believe it. She said: ‘Are you mad or something?’ She said to me that she saw the seat he’d been sitting in on the plane and there was a large patch of hair gel where his head had been.

“And what about Max? Do you know him? He sits next to Tessa in the cellos. She says she can’t bear him. She says that he’s really stupid and that she has to do all the counting for him.”

Bertie opened his mouth to say something. Max was his friend, and he did not think he was stupid.

“He’s not stupid,” he said.

One of the girls glanced at him. “You said something, Bertie?”

Bertie tried to make his voice louder, and deeper. “I said: He’s not stupid. Max isn’t stupid.”

“All boys are stupid,” said one of the other girls, and laughed.

“Except you, Bertie. You’re not stupid. You’re sweet.”

At the end of the meal, they returned to the hotel by bus and, after receiving instructions about the following day, when the concert was to be performed, they dispersed to their rooms. When Bertie got to his room, he found that Max was already there.

“I saw you sitting with those girls,” Max remarked. “What were they like?”

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Bertie met his friend’s gaze. He was a truthful boy and he thought: would it be a fib, a real fib, not to tell Max what they had said about him? Was it a fib to say nothing when the effect of that would be exactly the same as if you had said something?

“They were quite . . .” Bertie began.

“I think one of them fancies me,” said Max casually. “You know that one with the fair hair? You know the one I mean?”

Bertie nodded. It was the girl who had passed on the comment about Max being stupid.

“She’s the one,” said Max. “Do you think I should ask her out, Bertie?”

Bertie looked doubtful. “I think she may be busy,” he said.

“I’ll think about it,” said Max. “Maybe I’ll give her a chance.”

Bertie looked out of the window. In the streets below, the cars moved slowly past and there was the sound of an approaching Metro train. “When are we going?” he asked Max.

Max lay back on the cover of his bed and looked at his watch.

“It’s a bit late, Bertie,” he said. “And anyway, do you know the way?”

“To the Moulin Rouge?” asked Bertie.

“Yes,” said Max. “Because I don’t. And we can’t go if we don’t know the way.”

“I don’t,” said Bertie, looking crestfallen. “But maybe we could ask somebody in the street.”

Max laughed. “I can’t speak French,” he said. “We can’t ask if we don’t speak French. I do German, you see. And that’s no use in Paris.”

Bertie sighed. “So we can’t go?”

“Not this time,” said Max, slipping out of his shoes and throwing them onto a chair. “Next time we’re in Paris, boy will we have fun then!”

It took Bertie some time to get to sleep that night. He was disappointed by the cancellation of the visit to the Moulin Rouge, but he was looking forward to the concert tomorrow and they still had another night in Paris after that. He drifted off to sleep in a state of contentment and pride at being by himself – or almost – in Paris, fully accepted by a group of 278 Irene Has a Shock

teenagers, more or less an honorary teenager. It was a fine state to be in.

He dreamed, and in his dream he was in the Moulin Rouge, which was a large room bearing an uncanny resemblance to the Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh. He was sitting at a table with one of the girls from the orchestra, who was talking to him, although Bertie did not hear anything that she said. And then, into the Moulin Rouge, came Dr Fairbairn.

It seemed to Bertie that Dr Fairbairn was looking for him, and he tried to hide under the table. But he had been spotted, and the psychotherapist came up to him and pulled him back onto his chair.

“What are you doing in the Moulin Rouge, Bertie?” asked Dr Fairbairn.

“I came here because . . .” Bertie started to reply.

“Because it’s a dream, Bertie?” interrupted Dr Fairbairn. “Is that why you’re here? Is that why any of us is here? Is that it, Bertie?”

89. Irene Has a Shock

The following day was the day of the concert, which took place in a hall in the UNESCO building. The performance was to be in the evening, which left the day for sightseeing, including a boat trip on the Seine, a trip to the Pompidou Centre, and a walk round Île de la Cité. Bertie, guidebook in hand, enjoyed all of this a great deal, and ticked off each sight against a check-list in the back of his book.

The Edinburgh Teenage Orchestra was one of a number of youth orchestras which had been invited to perform in the UNESCO Festival of Youth Arts. The day before, there had been a concert performed by the Children’s Symphony Orchestra of Kiev, and the day afterwards was to feature the Korean Youth Folk Dance Company, which had recently danced in Rome, Milan and Geneva, before admittedly small, but Irene Has a Shock 279

nonetheless enthusiastic audiences. Now it was the turn of Edinburgh, and the orchestra had prepared a programme of predominantly Scottish music, including Hamish McCunn’s

‘Land of the Mountain and the Flood’, George Russell’s rarely-performed ‘Bathgate Airs for Oboe and Strings’ and Paton’s haunting ‘By the Water of Leith’s Fair Banks’.

This programme was well received by the audience of several hundred Parisians. In Le Monde the following week, it was to receive a mention in a feature on young people and the arts, in which the writer referred to the fact that while the youth of France appeared to be burning cars at weekends, Scottish youth seemed to be more engaged in cultural pursuits. This, the writer suggested, was the complete opposite of what one might expect, were one to believe the impression conveyed in film and literature.

After the concert, the members of the orchestra were given a finger buffet and listened to a short speech of thanks delivered by a UNESCO official charged with responsibility for youth culture. In the mingling that followed, Bertie attracted a circle of admiring concert-goers, who stood round him in wonderment while he charmed them with his frank answers to their questions. Then, the party over, the members of the orchestra made the short walk back to their hotel. The concert, the conductor declared, had been a great success and he was proud of everybody, from the oldest (a trumpet-player of nineteen) to the youngest (Bertie). Now it was time for bed, as everybody would have to get up at five the following morning in order to catch the flight back to Edinburgh.

When five o’clock came, there was a milling crowd of teenagers in the hotel vestibule. The bus was waiting outside, its coachwork shaking from the vibration of its diesel engine, which made it look as if it was shivering in the cold morning air.

“In the bus everybody,” called out one of the adult volunteers who had accompanied the orchestra. “And whatever you do, don’t forget your instruments!”

Nobody forgot their instruments – but they did forget Bertie.

Max had awoken him and then made his own way downstairs.

Bertie had sat up in bed, rubbed his eyes, and then flopped back 280 Irene Has a Shock

again. He had been in a deep sleep, and he had not been properly roused. So it was not until nine o’clock that morning, halfway across the North Sea, that somebody in the plane asked the question: “Where’s Bertie?”

The question passed up and down the plane, and nobody was able to provide anything but one answer: wherever Bertie was, he was not on the aircraft. And once that conclusion had been reached, messages were rapidly radioed back to Charles de Gaulle Airport. It was possible that Bertie was still in the terminal somewhere and an immediate search should be instituted. But then further questions were asked and it became clear that nobody had seen Bertie on the bus to the airport. He was therefore still in the hotel.

Irene was at Edinburgh Airport to meet her son. When the first of the members of the orchestra appeared from behind the doors of customs, she readied herself for an emotional reunion.

But then, grim-faced and apologetic, one of the volunteers rushed up to her and informed her of what had happened.

“He’ll be fine,” said the volunteer. “It’s a charming hotel and they were most co-operative. We shall phone through immediately and tell them to go and check his room and make sure that he’s all right. And I’m sure that they’ll put him on the next flight back.”

Irene stared at the well-meaning woman, mute with incomprehension. Then, when the significance of what had been said was absorbed, she sat down in a state of shock.

“I’m so sorry about this,” said the volunteer. “But look, I’m getting through to them right away. I’m sure that they’ll have Bertie on the line in no time at all.”

As Irene stared dumbly at the ceiling, the volunteer spoke quickly into her mobile phone. Then she paused, smiled encouragingly at Irene, and waited for a response. When it came, her face clouded over. “I see,” she said quietly. And then, again: “I see.”

“What did they say?” said Irene. “Let me speak to Bertie.”

The volunteer put the mobile away. “They said that he’s not in his room,” she announced apologetically. “They said that he appears to have gone out.”

Irene sat back in her seat, her head sunk in her hands.

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“I’m sure that he’ll turn up somewhere,” said the volunteer, looking anxiously about her. “In the meantime, I suggest that we just . . . that we wait.”

Irene stared at her. “I can’t believe I’m hearing all this,” she said, her voice rising in anger. “I can’t believe that you could take a six-year-old to Paris and leave him there. I just can’t believe it.”

“But you’re the one who insisted that he go,” said the volunteer. “It was explained to you that it was a teenage orchestra and yet you . . .”

“So now you’re blaming me?” said Irene. “Is that it?”

The volunteer sighed. She had been at the audition where Irene had insisted on Bertie being given a hearing. She had heard Irene dismiss the argument that Bertie was far too young. If he was incapable of coping with the arrangements, then it was hardly anybody’s fault but his mother’s.

“Well, now that you mention it,” she said, “yes. Yes. I do happen to think that it’s your fault. Sorry about that. But I really do. You insisted that he should be included. You really did. But he was far too young. That’s all there is to it.”

90. Stuart Lends a Hand

Matthew had seen Stuart several times in the Cumberland Bar.

They had exchanged a few words on occasion, but neither had really worked out exactly who the other was. Matthew knew that Stuart lived in Scotland Street and had a vague idea that he might have lived on the same stair as Pat. He also thought that he had seen him with that impossible woman – the one whom Cyril had once bitten in the ankle – and that strange little boy.

Somebody had said, too, that he worked in the Scottish Executive somewhere; but that was all that Matthew knew. And for his part, Stuart knew that Matthew had something to do with one of the galleries in Dundas Street, or that he was an antique dealer or something of the sort.

On that evening, though, when Matthew went into the Cumberland, Stuart was standing at the bar ordering a drink, and the circumstances were right for a longer conversation. And this was particularly so when Angus Lordie came in and suggested that they all sit at one of the tables, under which Cyril could drink his dish of beer undisturbed.

The conversation ranged widely. Matthew had seen a picture in an auction catalogue which he was thinking of buying and he wanted advice from Angus. It was a Hornel – a picture of three girls sitting in a field of flowers.

“I don’t really like it,” he said. “Flowers all over the place.”

Angus agreed. “I never put flowers in a painting,” he observed.

“Not that I’m disrespectful of flowers. Far from it. I have no wish to upset them.”

Matthew laughed. “Are you one of these people who talk to plants?”

Angus shook his head. “I have nothing to say to plants,” he replied. “Although you may be aware of Lin Yutang’s lovely essay on conditions that upset flowers.”

Stuart stared at Angus. One did not come across people like this when one worked in the Scottish Executive.

“I have a lot of time for Lin Yutang,” Angus went on. “People don’t write essays any more, or not many of them do. He wrote Stuart Lends a Hand 283

beautifully about tea and flowers and subjects like that. He said that flowers were offended by loud conversations. One should talk softly in the presence of flowers.”

“Very nice,” said Matthew. “I’ll remember that.”

“And then there’s Michael von Poser’s essay, ‘Flowers and Ducks’,” Angus continued. “Another lovely bit of whimsy. But back to Hornel, Matthew. People like him, and I’d buy it. Look at how art has out-performed other investments. Imagine if one had a few Peploes about the house. Or Blackadders. She’ll be the next one.”

“I had a Vettriano,” said Matthew, thoughtfully.

Angus looked down at the floor. That had been an incident in which he had unfortunately put a rather excessive amount of paint-stripper on Matthew’s painting, obliterating all the umbrellas and people dancing on the beach. It had been most regrettable, and it was inconsiderate of Matthew – to say the least – to bring the subject up again.

The conversation drifted on in this vein, and then Angus mentioned his discussion with Big Lou that morning.

“Big Lou is pretty miserable,” he said. “I saw her this morning.”

Matthew, who had been unable to go for coffee that day, frowned. “Miserable? Why?”

“That man of hers,” said Angus. “That Eddie character.”

“Not my favourite person,” said Matthew.

“Nor mine,” said Angus. “I never liked the cut of his jib.

From the moment I met him. Well, we were right. You and I were absolutely right.”

“He’s left her?” asked Matthew.

He thought that this would be sad for Big Lou, but only in the short term.

“Not as far as I know,” said Angus. “But the penny’s dropped anyway. She realises that he’s no good. I didn’t ask her how it happened, but I suspect that she found out about the girls he gets mixed up with. You know what he’s like in that department.

But that’s not the point. The point is money.”

“This club of his?” asked Matthew.

Angus nodded. “He’s taken her for thirty-four thousand pounds.”

284 Stuart Lends a Hand

Matthew whistled. Turning to Stuart, he explained the background. “Eddie wants to set up a club. Lou has a bit of money.

It was left to her by some old farmer in Aberdeenshire or somewhere. It’s the answer to this character’s dreams.”

“I wonder if it was a loan,” asked Stuart. “Would she have any way of getting it back?”

“Fat chance!” snorted Angus. “She can kiss that money goodbye.”

Stuart was silent. He was a very fair man, and it caused him great distress to hear of dishonesty or exploitation. That this should happen under his nose, round the corner, to somebody who sounded like a good woman, angered him. It was awful, this lack of justice in the world. We believed that the state would protect us, that the authorities would pursue those who preyed on others. But the truth of the matter was that the authorities could set right only a tiny part of the injustice and wrong that was done to the weak. Justice, it seemed, was imperfect.

It would be wonderful to be able to bring about justice. It would be wonderful to be some sort of omniscient being who saw all, noted it down, and then set things right. But that was a wish, a wish of childhood, that we grew to understand could never be. Except sometimes, perhaps . . . Sometimes there were occasions when the bully was defeated, the proud laid low, the weak given the chance to recover that which was taken from them. Sometimes that happened. “When I was young,” he said.