She looked at her watch. “It’s still, technically, three-something,” she said. “It’s not quite four.”
Matthew smiled. “You told me. Don’t worry. I knew you were going to be late.”
“But not this late,” said Pat. “I’m really, really sorry.”
Matthew reassured her that it was not the end of the world. “It hasn’t exactly been busy,” he said. “We almost sold a painting, and then the person changed her mind. It was that woman who lives round the corner. She came in with her husband and I could see that he didn’t like it.” Matthew paused. “Imagine being married to somebody who doesn’t understand.”
“Doesn’t understand what?”
Matthew shrugged. “Oh, the things that you yourself understand. Music. Art. Literature.”
“A Philistine, in other words?”
“Yes,” said Matthew. “How does the nursery rhyme go? Jack Spratt could eat no fat, and his wife could eat no lean…”
“Yes, that’s how it goes. But it doesn’t really say much about them, does it? Or not as far as I remember.”
Matthew shook his head. He had been reading nursery rhymes to the triplets, from a book that Elspeth had had as a child, Nursery Rhymes for Good Children, and they were fresh in his mind. The boys, for some reason, liked Little Jack Horner – he who had sat in the corner, gorging himself on carbohydrates – and Georgie Porgie, a most unsavoury character, Matthew thought, who would be in deep trouble were he to behave like that today.
“The Spratts were actually quite happy,” he said. “I think the message – if there is one – was that people could be happily married even if they had rather different tastes.” He paused. “A rare example of harmony in a nursery rhyme.”
Pat sat down at her desk. “They’re full of misfortune, aren’t they? Jack and Jill and their abortive trip up the hill. Humpty Dumpty too – I remember feeling so sorry for him, falling off his wall like that.” She laughed. “He was such a nice character, Humpty Dumpty.”
Matthew considered this. He was not sure that he agreed with Pat. “Actually, I find him a bit sinister. There’s something odd about Humpty Dumpty – and I don’t just mean his shape. I think there was a hint of…well, I’m afraid to say a hint of something…” He shrugged. “I can’t put my finger on it, but I think it’s there. A psychosexual issue, I suppose.”
Pat laughed. “Come on, Matthew. It’s a nursery rhyme.”
“But innocent little stories are full of hidden meaning,” said Matthew. “Don’t be fooled. You can deconstruct anything. You should know that. You have a degree in art history – and that leaves nothing undeconstructed.”
Pat looked at her watch again. “I’m really sorry about being so late, but that interview I told you about…”
Matthew waited.
“That interview…Well, it turned out to be rather different from what I had imagined.”
“The job was different, or the interview?”
“The job,” she replied. “It was completely different. It’s for a full-time post.”
Matthew said nothing. He knew that there would come a time when Pat would go after a full-time job somewhere – it was inevitable. But he had become used to having her as his part-time assistant, being there for when he needed a few hours away from the gallery, or for when he went down for a day or two to the London Art Fair or to some other trade gathering. Pat was good at her job – she was tactful with the clients, being not too pushy nor too diffident in her sales techniques, and she knew about art. She had a good eye, too, and there had been more than one occasion when she had spotted a warning sign in a painting that Matthew was contemplating buying at auction – some infelicity of style that suggested the auctioneer’s attribution might be too optimistic or simply misinformed.
Eventually, Matthew said, “You mustn’t hesitate.”
She seemed surprised. “To take this job?”
“To take a job. I know that I don’t have a permanent claim on your time. I know that.”
She looked away. “But you’ve been so good to me. All the way through. When I was a student in my first year. Right since then.”
Matthew made a self-deprecatory gesture. “You were good at the job. Now…well, you have to have a career. I’m not going to stand in your way.”
“It’s in Paris.”
Matthew was not prepared for this. “Paris? Your actual Paris?”
“Yes, your actual Paris. I can hardly believe it myself, but one of the people interviewing me for the part-time job, which was here in Edinburgh, said at the end that he could offer me something far better. I wasn’t sure what he meant – I didn’t have a clue, in fact – and then he said, ‘How would you like to work in Paris?’ I couldn’t believe it.”
Matthew shook his head. “You can’t refuse anybody who says, ‘How would you like to work in Paris?’ You just can’t.”
“I didn’t,” said Pat.
Matthew thought: I should have been prepared for this, but I’m not. I’m going to get emotional. Struggling to keep his voice even, he said, “That’s wonderful, Pat.” And then he added, lamely, “Paris.”
“It turned out that he – this guy who was interviewing me – is on the board of the Gargantuan Institute.”
Matthew drew in his breath. “The Gargantuan? The people who…”
Pat nodded. “Yes, them. Mr Gargantuan has six researchers working for him in Paris. They want to appoint a seventh who will handle British painting in general, but particularly Scottish art. They’ve been dealing in the Colourists recently and they felt they didn’t have the necessary expertise. Not to have the final say, of course, but somebody who would know where to go for an opinion.”
“You can certainly do that,” said Matthew.
Pat turned to look at him. “You aren’t cross with me, are you? Leaving, and everything…”
He was quick to reply. “Of course not. Of course I’m not cross.”
Then he thought: “This could change everything. What if Pat took James with her? If you were going off to Paris, what would stop you from taking your younger boyfriend with you?”
19
Scotsmen Don’t Cry (Well, Not Much)
Pat offered to work her notice.
“I don’t want to leave you in the lurch,” she said. “You’ve been so good to me, Matthew.”
Matthew said nothing. Like all truly good people, he was unaware of his goodness. He was not a moral philosopher with a theory as to why we should act in one way rather than another; he simply acted in the way he did in order to avoid pain in others. That, of course, might be called a moral theory, but it did not answer the more difficult question as to why it was wrong, rather than merely uncomfortable, to inflict pain on others.
Now Pat was staring at him. Had he looked at her more closely, he might have noticed that she was close to tears; but he was not looking at her at all. He was staring out of the window, engaged in a private emotional battle of his own. Matthew, at heart, did not want the world to change. He liked things to remain the same: for people to continue to do what they had always done; for the world about him to look more or less the way it had always looked – or at least the way it had looked to him over the past few years; for newspapers and clothing and what came out of the radio to be recognisable and not too surprising; for continuity to be the prevailing note in human affairs. That was not to say that he was insensitive to that which was wrong in the world about us – he was well enough aware of that, and had a stronger dislike of injustice and suffering than many others who wore their hearts more conspicuously on their sleeves; it was just that he wished such things would go away without disturbing everything else. The radical, the iconoclast, knew in his stomach that this would not happen, that only by upheaval would the wrongs of the world be rooted out, and would mock Matthew’s naïvety in these matters. And yet Matthew, when it came
to the minor decisions of his personal world, probably acted more kindly than many of those who loudly professed a reformist role. The loudly good are often not the best of people; the intuitively good, to whom it may not occur ever to discuss what they do, let alone why they do it, may be morally unsung, but are heroes nonetheless.
And now, consistent with that disposition, he said to Pat, “You don’t have to do that. You don’t have to work your notice because…” He turned to her and smiled. “Because I have no idea what your notice should be. How do you work that out with a part-time job like yours?”
She started to protest, but he cut her short. “No, you don’t have to worry, Pat. You can go whenever you like. This afternoon, if you like. I’ll give you…” He hesitated before deciding. The gallery barely made a profit, but that was not the point. Matthew had funds behind him, and he had always been generous with these. It was that generosity that had led him to invest heavily in Big Lou’s business, and now it manifested itself again. “I’ll give you three months’ pay. As a sort of thank-you present.” He rapidly changed that. “No, I shouldn’t call it a present – it’s not. It’s something you’re entitled to.”
Pat shook her head vigorously. “I can’t accept that, Matthew. That’s really kind, but…but you don’t have to.”
He brushed her objections aside. “Please, let’s not argue.” He paused. “And I really don’t mind if you finish right now. Today. It’s not that I want to get rid of you – I don’t. I just don’t want to hold you up.”
“Oh, Matthew…”
“No, I’m serious. When did they want you to start at the Gargantuan?”
Pat looked embarrassed. “They did mention next week…I told them, though, that I had this job and…”
“No, that’s fine by me. Really.” He smiled. “Imagine, Pat – just imagine. Working in the Gargantuan…in Paris. Mixing with people who really know what they’re talking about.”
Pat laughed. “But I’ve been working with somebody like that for years now. You.”
Matthew blushed. “Not me. No, you don’t mean me.”
“I do,” said Pat. “Maybe at the beginning you didn’t, but then nobody knows what they’re doing when they first do it, do they? The important thing in the art world is to have an eye. And you, Matthew, have that.”
He blushed more deeply, and shook his head. “I don’t – not really.”
Pat opened the top drawer of her desk and gazed at the contents. “I don’t want to leave a mess. I should sort this out.”
Matthew said that he would do that. “And it isn’t a mess, anyway. You’ve always been tidy.” He paused. “Where will you live in Paris?”
“I have a friend,” Pat answered. “She and I were at school together. She was half French and she went to university there. She works for UNESCO. She arranges exhibitions. Her Italian flatmate is going back to Rome.”
“Convenient.”
“Yes. It’s a fabulous flat. It belonged to her grandmother, who died. She left it to Angie – that’s my friend – and her sister. The sister lives in Lyon. She’s older than Angie and she’s married to a surgeon. He’s Congolese. Angie wants to buy them out of the flat if she can. She’s looking into ways of doing that.”
Matthew nodded. “It’s simpler that way. Having two people owning the same place never works…”
“Except sometimes.”
He laughed. “I suppose so. People can share. It shouldn’t be that hard.” He looked at his watch. “I was thinking of closing. I should help with bath-time back at home.”
Pat smiled at the thought of bathing three boys as active as the triplets were. “That’ll be splashy,” she said.
“It always is.”
And then Matthew took out his handkerchief and blew his nose. And Pat knew that he was actually crying, and she rose to her feet, crossed the room, and put her arm around him.
“Matthew, I don’t have to take this job. I don’t have to go to Paris.”
He shook his head. “Don’t talk nonsense. Of course you do. It’s just that…It’s just that I’m thinking of how much I’ve liked having you…in my life, I suppose. Yes, I have. I’ve liked having you in my life.”
She comforted him. “I’ve liked having you in mine.”
“It’s odd,” he said. “It’s odd, isn’t it? We hardly ever say that sort of thing to people. We hardly ever tell them that.”
“Well, we should,” she said.
“Of course, we should. But we don’t because we’re…” He struggled to think of how he might put it.
“Because we’re Scottish? Is that it?”
He nodded, mutely. His tears were flowing freely now.
“And Scottish men have to be tough, don’t they?” Pat continued. “They have to pretend not to have feelings. They have the whole football-culture, macho, hard-man rubbishy face to put on, while inside they’re wanting to be something else altogether.”
Matthew nodded again.
“We have to rewrite our myths,” muttered Pat.
20
Rhododendrons and Missionaries
Matthew drove up towards the house at Nine Mile Burn, manoeuvring round the rhododendrons clustered by the drive. These exuberant shrubs had rampaged since he and Elspeth had purchased the house, as if they were deliberately planning to test the resolve of the new owners. The Duke of Johannesburg, from whom they had purchased the property, had warned them that this might happen. “I have a cousin over in Argyll,” he said, “who had a frightful lot of rhododendrons. They were all over his place, and actually eventually covered the house.”
Matthew shook his head. “They need little encouragement. My aunt had rhododendrons at the edge of her lawn in Currie and she…”
The Duke interrupted him. “Yes, yes. Currie. A great place for rhododendrons, but they really like the west. It’s wetter there, you see. Rhododendrons like a spot of rain. They like that. Anyway, this poor cousin of mine, Basil Campbell-Campbell – they not only lost sight of the house, but they lost sight of Basil too. He was somewhere in there, they thought, but nobody knew where and eventually they lost interest. Somebody said he might have gone to Argentina – Basil had a boyfriend over there. A gaucho, apparently. He had spoken of meeting up with him. But nobody was sure.”
Matthew had laughed, thinking the Duke could hardly be serious. Nobody could be lost in a cluster of rhododendrons – it was inherently unlikely. And as for Basil Campbell-Campbell and his gaucho…
“They’re frightful things, rhododendrons,” the Duke continued. “In retrospect it was not the best idea to bring them back to Scotland. They were fine in the Himalayas, but not in the Highlands. The problem was those plant collectors. We had a lot of them in Scotland, you know. Forrest, and people like that. Extraordinary people. He was pursued by homicidal lamas, you know. Up in the mountains, when he was collecting plants. These lamas took exception to his presence. Very awkward. One doesn’t think of the danger of being pursued by Buddhists keen to eviscerate one, but there we are. They were different times. And I suppose we were on their turf, so to speak. They didn’t take kindly to missionaries. And who can blame them – sometimes?”
“Oh,” said Matthew, “I’m not…”
The Duke interrupted him once again. “I was stopped by a couple of missionaries in Morningside the other day, you know. In broad daylight, outside that rather nice hardware store that sells all that useful stuff. You know the place? Anyway, these two young men came up to me and asked me whether I was interested in reading some book or other. Written by some chap who saw an angel. They all did in those days, you know. There were plenty of angels flying around, we’re led to believe.”
Matthew laughed.
“Oh, you can laugh, Matthew,” went on the Duke. “But I’ll tell you something about angels: a very high proportion of the population actually believes in them. They think the
y have a guardian angel, would you believe. A sort of government angel allocated to them. So, don’t take angels lightly, Matthew.”
“If you say so.”
“Well, these two young men thrust this book into my hands and urged me to read it. They were very polite. Clean-shaven, too, which is a change these days.” The Duke lowered his voice. “I found out something interesting, Matthew. These young missionaries are actually rather nice people. They’re well-behaved and courteous and cause no trouble. A nice change. But…” He lowered his voice still further. “They wear the most peculiar sacred underwear, though. Not many people know that. They call them temple garments, apparently, and they’re garments that you sort of slide into and which cover the torso too and the top of the arms. Must get a bit warm in the summer.” The Duke’s voice was now not much more than a whisper. “Apparently the purpose is to remind one of higher things. So I read, Matthew.”
“Well,” said Matthew. “I suppose…”
“It’s very odd being proselytised, Matthew, don’t you think? The basic assumption of the missionary is that what you – the other person – believes is somehow inferior.”
“I suppose that…”
“Whereas the people approached may have a perfectly reasonable set of beliefs – or at least their beliefs may be no more ridiculous than those of the people trying to convert them.”
Matthew drew in his breath. “I don’t think you should be too hard on missionaries. They set up hospitals and schools. They had the best interests of others at heart, don’t you think?”
The Duke seemed to lose interest. “You’ll need to watch those rhododendrons, Matthew. It’s very difficult to get rid of them once they establish themselves.”
But Matthew was thinking of Cousin Basil. “Did he really disappear? Under a whole lot of rhododendrons?” It seemed improbable to him, but one never knew with the Duke. After all, who would have believed that the Duke would have been secretly building a microlight flying boat with his vaguely sinister Gaelic-speaking driver, Pàdruig? If you had told anybody about that, they would have thought it was one of those exaggerated stories that people in the Highlands loved to tell – most of them embellished, at best, or completely apocryphal at worst.
A Promise of Ankles Page 8