That looked interesting, and, once her toast was made and duly spread with Dundee marmalade – not quite as thinly as it should have been, but one had to have some pleasures in life – she began to read the article. Neanderthals and Homo sapiens encountered one another somewhere between Europe and Asia sixty thousand years ago. Neanderthals appeared not to have survived the encounter and it had always been assumed that they had fallen victim to the superior technology and brain power of Homo sapiens. But it was not as simple as that, it seemed.
Domenica took a sip of coffee, and then a bite of her toast. Neanderthal man would have loved Dundee marmalade, she thought. And then she smiled at the ridiculousness of that thought. The Neanderthals never got anywhere near inventing Dundee marmalade.
She read on: interbreeding between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals means that modern humans have a certain amount of Neanderthal DNA in their genome. She paused, and read the relevant paragraph again. Could that be true? Could she really be two per cent Neanderthal, as this article was suggesting? But then it became more interesting: the amount of Neanderthal DNA in the genome of various individuals varied quite considerably, and there were people who had more than that small percentage.
She thought for a moment. Was she likely to know anybody who fell into that category, who had a larger quantity of Neanderthal DNA than was the norm? Anybody in Edinburgh – or Glasgow, perhaps?
It was at this point that the bell rang and thoughts of Neanderthals, of sloping foreheads and distant caves, faded. Domenica put down her coffee cup, wiped a trace of marmalade from her chin, and went to the front door.
Torquil, the young man from the ground-floor flat, the new neighbour she had met a few days previously, stood in the doorway, finger poised to press the bell a second time.
“I thought you might be out,” he said. “I saw your husband and his dog and…”
Domenica gestured for him to come in, but he shook his head.
“I’ve actually come to borrow something,” he said.
Domenica smiled. “That’s what neighbours are for.”
He returned her smile with his own, and she noticed he had a dimple on his left cheek, perfectly placed in relation to the corner of his mouth. That, she knew, was rare: dimples usually came in twos, one on each cheek, with the exception of the chin dimple, which cleaved the chin with a single indentation in just the right way to be suggestive of firmness of purpose. That dimple, commoner in men than women, had launched a hundred film and modelling careers, and here…She shifted her gaze. Yes, Torquil had a slight chin dimple as well as a single dimple on his left cheek.
She stopped herself. Auden had written in “In Praise of Limestone” that the blessed will not care what angle they are regarded from, having nothing to hide, which she had always thought was true, but any gaze could still be disconcerting. And so she waited expectantly to find out what he needed to borrow, trying hard not to look at the young man’s chin, as difficult as affecting indifference to achonodroplasia or a port-wine stain. Oddly, she found herself thinking about the implications of good looks of the sort with which Torquil had been favoured. How would one view the world if one contemplated it through the eyes of one who had his looks? Positively – because the world was kind to the good-looking? How many perfect monsters were perfect monsters because, through physical misfortune, they had repelled those they encountered? How many of the sweet and gentle were sweet and gentle because they got the attention we all crave, and were given it liberally from their first days as appealing infants?
He broke the silence, still smiling. “I need to borrow a bucket and mop. It’s our turn to wash the stair.”
29
Absolut (sic)
“But of course,” said Domenica. “I’ll get them for you.”
She left him on the landing and made her way to the cupboard where she and Angus kept their ancient mop and battered tin bucket. Torquil’s request was, she thought, a promising sign. In Scotland, the rules on tenement living were deeply embedded and jealously policed: every householder, by immemorial custom, had to play his or her part in cleaning the common stair, a shared flight of stone steps linking landing to landing. That task was allocated on the basis of a weekly rota, with a small printed notice being hung on each doorway in succession: It is your turn to clean the common stair. There were no exceptions, although neighbours might deputise for the frail or incapacitated or, by mutual agreement, engage a cleaner to do the work for them. Students, of course, were known to be a problem and not infrequently had to be reminded of their duty. Domenica was well aware of that, and had half expected that the new occupants of the downstairs flat would need to be spoken to about their obligations; now Torquil had shown that concern to be pessimistic, and she was pleased.
She handed the equipment over to him with an apology for the state it was in. “It’s seen better days,” she said. “But the bucket doesn’t leak, and the mop just about does the job. I’ve been meaning to get a new one, but…”
“Life gets in the way,” said Torquil, with a smile. “I know. I’ve been meaning to buy one for ourselves ever since we moved in, but haven’t. I will, though.”
Domenica laughed. “When you’ve finished,” she began, only to be interrupted by his saying, “Of course, I’ll return it straight away.”
“No, I wasn’t going to say that. I know you will. I was going to invite you in for a cup of coffee.”
The invitation seemed to be welcomed. “I’d love that,” he said.
“I have a coffee machine that makes proper coffee,” Domenica said. “I can do all the usual things. Cappuccino, latte, Americano…”
Torquil laughed. “Any old how,” he said. He hesitated, and an anxious frown came over his brow. “You didn’t hear noise yesterday, did you?”
Domenica shook her head. There would be parties, she imagined: five young people in a New Town flat usually meant parties were in the offing. But she sought to reassure him. “Noise doesn’t travel very much in this building,” she said. “We very rarely hear anything from our neighbours. Even from young Bertie – you’ve met him, I take it?”
“That little boy?” asked Torquil. “The one who sometimes sits on the stairs?”
“That’s him,” said Domenica.
“I saw him yesterday,” said Torquil. “He was sitting outside his flat door, all by himself, his nose buried in a book. I asked him what it was. You won’t believe the answer.”
“Oh, I’ll certainly believe it,” said Domenica. “Bertie’s reading tastes are rather advanced – although he himself is not at all – how might one put it? – trying. Some highly intelligent children can be a bit exhausting, you know. Bertie’s not. He’s lovely.”
“It was a book about Kierkegaard,” said Torquil. “I couldn’t believe it at first, but I asked him to show me, and sure enough. There it was: A Life of Søren Kierkegaard. And he’s only…” He looked to Domenica for guidance.
“Seven. He’s seven.” She sighed. “I remember his birthday. He’s always wanted a Swiss Army pen-knife, and that mother of his gave him a gender-neutral play figure…”
Torquil raised an eyebrow. “A doll?”
“Yes, but a gender-neutral one. You couldn’t really tell what sex it was supposed to be.”
“I suppose dolls can be fluid,” mused Torquil. “I mean, when they leave the factory they might be a bit uncertain.” He laughed. “In the sense of it being left up to their owner to decide for them.”
“You’re suggesting that dolls should be able to self-identify? So to speak?”
Torquil smiled. “I don’t see why not.”
Domenica thought for a moment. “But what if you bought a doll that you believed was a girl doll, but then you discovered, when you opened the box, that it was a boy doll. Would you be able to go back to the shop and ask for an exchange?”
Torquil thought about this. “I don’
t think so,” he said at last. “I think people need to move with the times.”
“Oh, we all must do that,” said Domenica. “And rightly so. Move with the times or you’re history, as they say.”
Torquil nodded. “My parents are history,” he said. “I think their lives are actually in black and white – like an old movie.” The grin returned. “Mind you, I rather like them for it. They belong to a generation that…”
“That was less afraid to say what it felt?” prompted Domenica.
Torquil hesitated.
“But also tolerated all sorts of cruelty and discrimination,” Domenica went on.
“Absolut,” said Torquil, and added, “Sorry. That’s a bit of an affectation on my part. Absolut is absolutely in Swedish. I’ve watched too many Swedish films. In Scandinavian noir people say absolut all the time.”
Domenica stared at him. This was wonderful. They were going to get on very well indeed, she thought: here was a young man whose taste in film was Swedish! “So Bertie was reading about Kierkegaard? What did he have to say about it?”
“Oh, he told me that Mr Kierkegaard was Danish. He called him Mr Kierkegaard. He was terribly polite. He said that he wrote hundreds of books and liked to go for walks about Copenhagen.”
“Dear Bertie!”
“I could hardly believe it. Seven! Then he said something about trying to read the book to his friend, who couldn’t read yet, but not getting very far with it.”
“That’ll be a little boy by the name of Ranald Braveheart Macpherson,” explained Domenica. “He lives over on the other side of town, but the two of them are to be seen running around Drummond Place Garden.
“It’s his mother, you see,” Domenica continued. “She’s – how shall I put it? – ambitious for him. Which is fair enough – to an extent. Mothers need to be ambitious for their children otherwise…well, nobody would ever learn the piano. Mothers have to be pushy. But there are limits and that woman is way beyond them.”
“Absolut,” said Torquil.
30
A Category Three Row
It took Torquil rather longer to clean the common stair than he had anticipated. He had thought he would finish within twenty minutes; in fact, it was a full three-quarters of an hour before he appeared once more at Domenica’s door, the bedraggled and dripping mop in hand.
“That’s your duty done for the month,” said Domenica, relieving him of the equipment. “You’ve earned your coffee.”
He sniffed at the air. “I can smell it,” he said. “Coffee. One of my favourite smells. Alongside freshly cooked bacon. And the smell of a new shirt.”
“I go for dried lavender,” said Domenica, adding, “À chacun son parfum.”
“Bay rum,” said Torquil. “Do you like the smell of that?’
Domenica looked doubtful. “Those are what I’d call masculine smells. Angus likes bay rum. He had a bottle of it in the bathroom but the cap was a bit loose and the rum part evaporated. It smelled of nothing in particular after that.”
“I sometimes use it as an aftershave,” said Torquil, rubbing his chin.
Domenica took the opportunity to glance at his chin again – at the strategically placed dimple. She thought: a few millimetres the wrong way, and a facial feature can be all wrong. That was not the case here.
They made their way into the kitchen, where Domenica poured their coffee.
“You said something about noise,” said Domenica. “And then we were sidetracked by talk about young Bertie. Did you have a party? As I said, we don’t hear much in this building.” She paused. “Mind you, Bertie plays the saxophone from time to time. We get As Time Goes By drifting up occasionally. He plays it rather well.”
“My favourite film,” said Torquil.
Casablanca, thought Domenica. The right attitude to cleaning the stair. Dimples. All very positive.
“Yes,” she said. “It has wonderful lines.”
“About the day the Germans invaded Paris?”
Domenica nodded. “Yes. What does Rick say? I remember every detail: the Germans wore grey; you wore blue.”
Torquil took a sip of his coffee. “That’s very funny.” He hesitated. “It wasn’t a party, you know.”
“No?”
“No. It was a row. A real screaming match, I’m afraid.”
Domenica said that she was sorry to hear that. “Mind you, I remember how, in my student days – rather a long time back – we had a flat over in Marchmont. It was in Warrender Park Terrace – in one of those buildings that look down over the Meadows. We had a view of the Castle. There it was, on the horizon. I remember thinking: how lucky I am to be able to look out over a castle from my bedroom.”
“I think that living in Edinburgh is a little like living on an opera set,” said Torquil. “You almost expect a window to be opened and an aria to burst forth.”
“Or a chorus of tobacco-factory girls to appear – as in Carmen. Except, nobody has tobacco factories any longer. Or, rather, they’re discreet about them.”
“A chorus of computer programmers doesn’t have quite the same ring,” said Torquil.
“Modern life is inimical to opera,” said Domenica.
Torquil disagreed. “Nixon in China? Scottish Opera did that recently. I saw it. It was wonderful.”
“Oh, I think there are plenty of suitable themes,” said Domenica. “For example, Mr Gorbachev would have made a wonderful opera. And Mr Obama too. Nelson Mandela. These would all be great operatic subjects.” She paused. “No, I was thinking more of the accoutrements of modern life. That’s the problem for opera, I’d have thought.”
Torquil looked puzzled. “But Nixon in China had a plane…”
“Planes are fine,” said Domenica. “Flight is timeless. Icarus is an ancient story. No, I was thinking of antibiotics. Take Bohème, for instance. Mimi is ill for the entire opera, and then, of course, succumbs – as is only proper for an operatic heroine. Credible enough for the nineteenth century. But if it were set in modern times…well, what could the librettist do? The obvious solution is antibiotics – and Mimi would be as right as rain.”
Torquil burst out laughing. “No prolonged death scene.”
“No. You see? Modern technology ruins everything: our sense of the unknown, for example – because there’s no longer any reason for anything to be unknown. If you don’t know something, the internet is a few keystrokes away – and you have your solution. There are no secrets any longer.”
Torquil reached for his coffee cup. “Is that such a bad thing?”
“I would have thought so,” said Domenica. “It makes it rather difficult to escape your past – if you want to do that, of course – which some people may.” She took a sip of her coffee. “But we’re getting into profound issues here. What was this row you people had?”
Torquil sighed. “All of us are good friends, you know. There’s no fundamental problem. It’s really to do with…”
He broke off, as if uncertain whether to continue. But Domenica’s curiosity had been roused. Rows in shared flats fell into three categories, she thought: a row about food was category one (Who ate my cheese?); a row about mess was category two (You’re a real pig, you know); and the third category was a row about sex (I didn’t know you felt that way…)
“I shouldn’t pry,” she said. She shouldn’t, but she was still very interested. And she was an anthropologist, after all. “Nil humani mihi alienumi. Terence, I think.”
“It’s about bedrooms,” said Torquil. “It’s about who gets which bedroom.”
Domenica nodded. Category three row, she thought. “You don’t have to tell me,” she said, somewhat reluctantly.
“No, I don’t mind,” said Torquil.
She looked at him appreciatively.
“You see,” he began. “As I think I told you, there are five of us: me, Rose, P
aul, Alastair and Phoebe.”
“Yes, you did. You told me.”
“And the flat has three bedrooms. It’s spacious enough, but there are only those three bedrooms.”
Domenica waited.
“So,” Torquil continued, “everybody has to share – except one person.”
“And that person is?” prompted Domenica.
“Me, as it happens,” said Torquil. And then, in justification, “I found the flat. I signed the lease. I’m the one who’s responsible for everything.”
“Then it’s fair enough that you should have the single room.”
He looked grateful for the recognition of his claim. “Thank you. But then that means that Rose and Phoebe share, and Paul and Alastair share too.”
Domenica thought about that. “That sounds reasonable.”
“Yes, but…”
Sometimes but conceals a whole hinterland of issues, decided Domenica, and this, she suspected, was just such a but.
31
Irene Reversed
It had been Stuart’s suggestion that Nicola should abandon her flat in Northumberland Street and move into Scotland Street permanently – or at least for the foreseeable future. The arrangement that had been in place since Irene left for Aberdeen had been working well enough – Nicola looked after the children, often staying overnight if Stuart had to work late or wanted to go out, but it would be easier all round, he thought, if she moved in altogether.
“I know you like your own space, Mother,” he said. “But we could clear out Irene’s study and install you in there. It’s probably the best room in the flat – with its view of Drummond Place Garden. It’s very light.” He smiled. “If one can possibly keep one’s mother in south-facing circumstances one should do so.”
Nicola had received the proposal with interest. Irene’s study? Cleared out? This was a delicious prospect, not only because of the attractions of the room itself – and she did prefer a room with a southern aspect – but for what this would represent in terms of victory over her daughter-in-law. She had done her best to like Irene – she really had; it was her Christian duty to like her – but years ago her patience had been exhausted and she had decided that Irene was simply not possible. That was a powerful term when applied to people: not possible. A person who was not possible was different from a person who was impossible. Being impossible involved having various behavioural quirks that made you difficult company; whereas being not possible implied that there was simply no chance of an ordinary human relationship, ever. To be not possible was to be beyond reach; a person who was not possible simply would not understand what the problem was.
A Promise of Ankles Page 12