And the answer came to him quite suddenly: because this is Scotland, and guilt, historically, is what we feel – about so many things. You are not French, Stuart – if you were, there would be no problem. You are Scottish – and there it is.
39
Skinny Latte, No Vanilla
He saw Katie the moment she came through the gallery’s front door. He waved, but she did not see him, and was busy, anyway, taking off the light mackintosh she had been wearing; rain had been threatened, but not materialised. Once she had done that, she made her way purposefully past the gallery shop towards the café. Stuart was now standing to attract her attention, gesturing to the table he had secured.
“Have you been waiting for ages?” she asked. She leaned forward and planted a kiss on his cheek; he blushed.
I must get used to this, he thought. There’s nothing wrong – now – in being kissed by another woman. And then he thought: when did Irene last kiss me? Or I her?
He shook his head in answer to her question. “A few minutes. I was a bit early, but not all that much.”
She took the seat opposite his, and as she did so, she reached across the table to lay her hand upon his. “I was at Valvona & Crolla. I think I told you.”
“Yes, you did. You were going to buy Parmesan cheese.”
She pointed to the bag she had been carrying. “I get it there because it’s much nicer than the stuff you get in supermarkets. I think that the supermarket cheese is younger. Parmesan cheese should be aged in those great big wheels. For years, I think.”
Stuart had seen segments of wheels, but never the full three hundred and sixty degrees, or at least not in the flesh, or in the curd, as one might say. Did one buy cheese in degrees? Five degrees of Parmesan, please…
She looked at him and smiled. “One of these days I’ll make you some Parmesan ice cream. Have you ever tasted it?”
“Parmesan ice cream?” It seemed unlikely to him.
Katie kissed her fingers in a gesture of gourmand satisfaction. “Savoury ice creams are all the rage, you know. And it’s not hard to make.”
“It just seems a bit unlikely.”
Katie smiled. “There’s more to life than vanilla, Stuart.”
He looked at her. Her remark had taken him by surprise. Vanilla had a code meaning; Stuart was worldly enough to know that, but surely Katie would not mean in that sense. Perhaps vanilla could be generalised to embrace conventionality in cuisine. Fried chicken, spaghetti bolognese, pizza margarita – all of these were vanilla, in the sense that they were completely standard fare of the sort to be found on the menus of countless restaurants, whereas Parmesan ice cream was redolent of a much more exotic culinary life.
He laughed nervously. “Oh, I know that.”
She was staring at him. He met her gaze, and then looked away. “May I tell you something?” she said. “I’m realising that you and I hardly know one another. I don’t know what you like, for example. Just for example.”
He caught his breath. Once again, he was not sure how to interpret this remark. Was she talking about ice cream, and by extension his more general likes and dislikes when it came to food, or was this some other sense of like.
“I’m not sure what you mean,” he said. “What I like…what I like about what?”
She shrugged. “Nothing in particular. Or, rather, everything, I suppose. What music you like. What food. What you like to drink. I know that you like beer – you had that when we were in the Wally Dug. I know that at least. And I know you like brown leather deck shoes because…” She glanced down at his feet.
He was relieved. He did not want the conversation to drift into intimate areas, and of course that was not what she had meant at all.
“Music?” he said. Music was safe. “I like music. I like music – I like it a lot.”
“I could tell that,” she said. “You like poetry, and therefore you like music. Post hoc, propter hoc.”
He loved that. How many young women in their twenties could use Latin like that? Very few, he thought. It was just not what one expected…but hic abundant leones, he thought. Why should such a person not use Latin expressions? Were Latin expressions just for dry-as-dust male classicists, for whom nobody these days had any time? Such people were history – historia, even, and nobody needed to bother about them any longer, not according to the contemporary Zeitgeist.
“I know that you like poetry,” she continued, “or you told me you do…”
“I do. I do like poetry.”
“That’s great. It’s just that I’ve found that when I mention that I’m doing a PhD in Scottish poetry, people say, ‘Oh, I love poetry,’ and you ask them to tell you who their favourite poet is, and then they look blank. Or after a while they say Burns, or William Wordsworth. You’d be surprised at how many people can’t name any poets – other than Burns or Wordsworth.”
Stuart smiled. “Fergusson,” he said. “Henryson. Frost. Heaney. Longley. MacDiarmid. MacCaig. Kathleen Jamie. Liz Lochhead.” He beamed at her. “Of course, Wordsworth is a bit…a bit vanilla, wouldn’t you say?”
Katie laughed. “Definitely. Although there are poets who are far more vanilla poets than Wordsworth.” She paused. “I wonder why nobody’s ever published An Anthology of Vanilla Poetry.”
“Who would be in it?” asked Stuart.
Katie held up her hands in alarm. “It would be an invidious business editing that. A minefield.”
Stuart pressed her. “But there must be the usual suspects.”
Katie looked thoughtful. “It might be easier to identify the vanilla poems themselves,” she said. “Ode to a Nightingale, Fern Hill, If, Adlestrop, My Love Is Like a Red, Red Rose…”
“So you would include Burns?”
“Burns as a poet isn’t vanilla,” Katie said. “He doesn’t belong there at all – as a poet – but what counts, you see, is what is made of the poem. So a very heartfelt, moving poem – one of great depth – can be made to be vanilla in the mouths of its proponents.”
Stuart nodded. “I’ve always loved Red, Red Rose.”
“Of course, you have. It’s a beautiful, profound poem. A great poem. And it speaks to everyone.”
“So please take it out.”
She laughed. “You’re probably right. Okay, it’s out.”
“And there’s another one in your list,” said Stuart. “Adlestrop doesn’t belong there. It’s not vanilla poetry.”
“It isn’t, I agree. And yet, if the test of vanilla is whether it’s going to offend anybody, then Adlestrop won’t offend. Who’s going to take exception to a poem about stopping at a village station and hearing the steam hiss and birds sing? Nobody I know.”
Stuart pointed towards the service counter. “There’s no queue. Shall I get you a cup of coffee?”
“Please,” she said. “Skinny latte.” And then she added, “No vanilla.”
40
The Discomfort of the Past
Stuart came back with their coffee: her skinny latte and his cappuccino. Resuming his seat, he said, “The problem, surely, with poetry – as with any of the arts – is working out how you defend a distinction between good and bad. We were talking about vanilla poetry in the sense of stuff that is, well, bland, I suppose.”
“Yes,” Katie said. “We were. Poems that may be easy on the ear but don’t really say very much. Or, if they do say something, say it in a way that doesn’t linger.”
“And by linger you mean make an impression?”
“Yes, because they’ve stimulated our imagination. Or because they raise an issue of importance. Or they make us weep, or gasp, or think yes, precisely. There are all sorts of ways in which poetry can escape being banal.”
Stuart nodded. “Yes, I suppose there are. And we have to be able to say this is a good poem or this is a bad poem, don’t we?”
Katie ag
reed that we did. “There’s a big difference between McGonagall, say, or his equivalent today, and a serious work of art.” She smiled. “We have to be able to distinguish, otherwise we put the greeting card verse – the doggerel – on the same level as one of Shakespeare’s sonnets. We know that there’s a difference…”
“Of course there is.”
“But we have to be able to say why there is a difference,” Katie continued. “It isn’t just personal preference – it has to be something more than that.”
“And what is it?” asked Stuart.
“Depth. Profundity. Moral significance. That special quality that real art has of lighting up the world.” She paused. “You know it when you see it – and then you have to have the courage of your convictions and say, outright, that the jingles are shallow and impermanent, of no lasting significance. People will hold up their hands and say, Elitist! And you have to be able to say, No, you’re wrong.’ You have to be able to say that defending real art is not being elitist or, if it is, then there’s nothing wrong with elitism. As long as your elitism is an open elitism – in other words, as long as it extends an invitation to everybody to come to the intellectual feast. You’re not stopping anybody from enjoying art – you’re saying, Come on in. This is for all of you.”
Stuart was inclined to agree. But he had been married to Irene long enough to be aware of the forces ranged against that approach. “I think you’re right,” he said. “But the problem is that there are plenty of people who judge art not by what it is, but by who made it.”
“There are,” said Katie. “And if an artist’s face doesn’t fit, then bad luck. Or if the artist holds views that don’t accord with what people are expected to believe.”
“Like the old Soviet Union,” said Stuart. “If you didn’t toe the party line, then you were silenced.”
He was not sure, though. Was that not a bit extreme? Was it really like that?
“Of course it’s more subtle than that,” said Katie. “The language of enforced conformism is different, but I think one would have to be naïve not to see it in operation right under our noses.” She sighed. “In the past, men silenced women. We didn’t hear women’s voices because everything was dominated by men. People fought against that – thank goodness – and women’s voices came to be heard – were given their proper place. But we have to be careful, I think, that we don’t drift into the other position of discounting something because it happens to have been created by a man. That’s just one example. There are others.”
Stuart thought about that. “Are we in danger of doing that? Do you really think that’s happening?”
“You tell me,” said Katie.
“I’m not sure,” said Stuart.
Katie looked at her watch. “Have we got time to go upstairs?” she asked. ‘There’s an exhibition of portraits by Virginia Crowe. I’d rather like to see it.”
“Of course we have,” said Stuart. “We have all the time in the world. We don’t have to go to Cramond. We can stay in town. We can have lunch here, or walk along to The Chaumer at the other end of the street and get lunch there. Why don’t we do that?”
“I’d like that,” said Katie. “Cramond can wait.”
A small group of young children walked past, having finished an early lunch at a nearby table under the supervision of several parents.
Katie asked, “How old is your little boy again? Bertie? How old is he?”
“Seven,” said Stuart. And then he smiled as he remembered something. “He told me that he came here with his class from the Steiner School. The teacher brought them all down to look at the paintings. She’s called Miss Campbell.”
Katie smiled. “Sweet.”
“Bertie said that they were looking at a portrait of Mary, Queen of Scots, and there was a heated discussion about what happened to her. One of the children said that she had had her head chopped off.”
“Well…”
“There’s a horrible little girl called Olive in Bertie’s class. Apparently, this was the signal for her to go into gory detail about the execution, and about how Mary’s little dog was hiding under her skirts. Awful details.”
Katie shuddered. “Our history’s full of cruelty.”
“But one of the boys came to the rescue and said that her head hadn’t been chopped off – it fell off.”
Katie laughed. “What a wonderful way of protecting children from grim reality. Presumably that child had been told this by a parent who didn’t want him to be frightened.”
“I imagine so,” said Stuart. “A benevolent rewriting of history.”
“Bertie asked me if it was true,” Stuart continued. “He said, ‘Daddy, is it really true that Mary, Queen of Scots’ head fell off?’ ”
“And you answered?”
Stuart looked into his coffee cup. “I so wanted to protect Bertie. I so wanted to protect him from the cruelty of the world. I was so tempted.”
“I can understand why,” said Katie. “The idea of chopping another person’s head off is so abhorrent, so barbaric.”
“Yes, it’s barbaric,” said Stuart. “Yes, that’s just what it is. But what’s the difference between that and executing in any of the other ways on offer? Hanging, injecting them with poison, electrocuting them, gassing them. What’s the difference?”
“None,” said Katie. “They’re all barbaric.”
“So I changed the subject,” said Stuart. “I started to talk about something else. I just couldn’t face telling him.”
“I understand,” said Katie.
He looked at her. He felt a sudden surge of tenderness, and knew that what he felt was love. He was sure of it.
Then Bruce Anderson arrived.
41
Behold Bruce Anderson
Bruce Anderson, property surveyor; alumnus of Morrison’s Academy, Crieff; aficionado of a particular brand of clove-scented hair gel (no longer widely available); owner of a well-appointed flat in Abercromby Place (south-facing); breaker of hearts; narcissist…There were so many ways of describing Bruce, just as there are so many ways of describing virtually any of us, although in Bruce’s case, each description concealed a hinterland of complications. Yet at the end of the day, a pithy description might be as apposite as any: very good-looking – and knows it. Now here was Bruce coming into the café of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery where his eye fell on Stuart, whom he knew, of course, from the Cumberland Bar. And then he saw who Stuart was with – noting, with interest, that it was not Irene, that unspeakable woman, as Bruce described her – but some rather attractive – no, very attractive – young woman who could hardly have anything to do with Stuart, of all people, who was such a thoroughly hauden doun husband.
The Scots expression, Bruce thought, said it perfectly, as Scots expressions so often did: hauden doun caught the nature of oppression under which Stuart had for many years laboured: held down, in English, which somehow made the subjugation seem less vivid and hopeless – and Stuart’s life under Irene had been just that, thought Bruce. I would never have put up with that woman, he said to himself, although she would never have tried it with me. Women didn’t, of course, he went on to think, because I have them in my thrall. They don’t try that sort of thing with me because I can make them go weak at the knees just like that – and here Bruce imagined himself clicking his fingers – that’s all – and Irene, or any other woman for that matter, going weak at the knees and gazing at him with that look that he so effortlessly evinced in women – that indefinable but unmistakable look that said, ‘I’m yours.’ Hah! thought Bruce, and then Hah! again: biology, phenomes, whatever – the trump card. Of course, it was all the more pronounced if he wore his kilt, he reminded himself; that sent them wild. Funny that, but it just did.
Now Bruce ignored the very strong convention – one that is written down nowhere, but that most people intuitively under
stand and observe: that if you go into a café or bar, or even more so, any restaurant, and you see somebody you know already seated, you do not go up to them and simply seat yourself at their table without first asking. What you do is that you approach and then say, “Do you mind if I join you?” It is as simple as that. Or you might say, if the person already seated is alone, “Are you waiting for somebody?” And then if – and only if – the person whom you know says, “Please do,” or words to that effect, do you sit down.
Of course, if the person who you know is already with somebody, you are hesitant about approaching in the first place. People go to such places to talk, and may not want to involve others in their conversation. If you feel that, then you say, “Don’t let me interrupt,” and you then read the response. “No, you’re not interrupting – please join us” is usually enough to make it clear that you are welcome to join, whereas a silence, even slight, will send the opposite message. Bruce ignored all this, drew up one of the two spare seats at the table and sat down.
“Crowded,” he said. “This place is popular, isn’t it?”
Stuart bit his lip.
“So,” Bruce continued, “are you going to introduce us, Stuart?”
Stuart looked down at the table. He did not like Bruce; he never had. How was it possible, he had wondered, to be so pleased with yourself? What did it feel like to think there was no room for any possible improvement?
“This is Katie,” he said. And then, “Katie, this is Bruce Anderson. He…” He stopped. What could be say about Bruce? “He lives in Abercromby Place.” It was lame, but it was true, and better than uttering the word that had come to mind: Lothario.
Katie looked at Bruce. She smiled at him. “But I think we’ve met before, haven’t we?”
A Promise of Ankles Page 16