“Turner Prize stuff,” said Angus.
“Oh, far more subtle than that,” said Dr Colquohoun.
52
Akratic Action
Dr Colquohoun did not take a fourth scone, although he was offered one, but continued to address the subject of Neanderthals. He was sure that the skull that Domenica and Angus were proposing to show him would be a let-down – perhaps that of some unfortunate Victorian, set upon by footpads and then hastily buried in a shallow grave in the Gardens – but he was enjoying this visit. Domenica and Angus were exactly the sort of company he liked: intelligent, interested in the arts, and prepared to discuss – or at least to listen to him talking about – the Neolithic period. There were so many people now who were simply incurious about the past, who did not think about the echoes of ancient times that were all about us, even in the language we used in our everyday life. How many of our words were based on languages that had long since stopped being spoken? How many people talking of their clan would know that in Etruscan that meant son? Or that three in Etruscan was ci, which sounds so like three, whatever etymological caution might be sounded. Our words were ancient, handed down over thousands of years, linking us in our indifferent modernity with distant forebears who herded animals on obscure steppes, or who sailed their ships across ancient oceans. And even if one did not think back that far, how many people remembered that their not-so-distant ancestors spoke Pictish or Gaelic, lived in fear of Vikings, and devils, and pre-scientific threats of every description, and were surprised to survive to their thirtieth birthday? He thought about that every day, as he pored over pictures of mute stones, of flints, of patterns in the ground, of symbols that were now indecipherable but nevertheless once recorded somebody’s whole world.
“The interesting thing about Neanderthal art,” Dr Colquohoun said, “is that it exists at all. That’s what counts. It doesn’t matter that it consists of a few marks on the wall, or decorated stalactites. What matters is the fact that those ancient cousins of ours actually made the cognitive leap to expressing themselves. If you paint or draw something, you are recording an event or feeling outside yourself. That’s what other animals simply cannot do. They don’t see it.
“So this art attributed to Neanderthals suggests that they were capable of language. If you can draw something, then you should be able to associate sound with intention or feeling – or perception, perhaps. That means you can speak.”
“Did they?” asked Domenica.
“They had tongues and vocal cords. So yes, they should have been able to.”
“But we don’t know?” asked Angus.
“That’s right,” said Dr Colquohoun. “We don’t know, but we can surmise a great deal on the basis of what we do know. And I imagine that they had language – undoubtedly a simple one, if they had it at all. Perhaps just nouns and a few simple verbs.”
“Me Tarzan, you Jane?” suggested Angus. “That level of sophistication?”
“Yes. I like to imagine a Neanderthal saying something like Deer go hill. The deer have gone to the hill. It doesn’t take much intellectual power to make that sort of observation. Two nouns and one verb, and the verb may have a single tense. You have to be a little bit more savvy to wrap your mind around the past tense.”
Domenica smiled. “How exactly did we get these Neander-thal genes we’re meant to have?” she asked.
“Interbreeding,” said Dr Colquohoun. “It appears that members of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals came into contact with one another. So there would have been children who were a cross between the two, but as time went on and the Neanderthals became extinct, their genes would have been diluted further and further until modern man ended up with really rather few of them.”
“I see,” said Angus. “So somewhere way back we might have Neanderthal ancestors?”
“Indeed. Very early Lordies. Very early Colquohouns.” He paused and added, smiling, “And very early Macdonalds.”
“It reduces our pretensions,” observed Domenica. “Remin-ding ourselves of our hairy precursors cuts us down to size, don’t you think?”
“It does,” said Dr Colquohoun. “Although we don’t really need the Neanderthals for that. A moment’s contemplation of the higher primates might help to do that, I’ve always thought. Go and stand in front of the monkey cages at Edinburgh Zoo and reflect on your cousins. We’re just primates – for all our airs and graces.”
Angus laughed. “I often think that,” he said. “When I watch the television news and see images of human conflict – people fighting one another on disputed borders, groups throwing rocks at one another, you know the sort of scene I’m talking about – I think: these territorial disputes are exactly what the primatologists observe. One troop of baboons chases away another when it encroaches on its territory.”
“Oh yes,” Domenica said. “I know it sounds reductionist, but that’s exactly what’s going on.”
“The fundamental impulse,” continued Dr Colquohoun, “is to control territory. To defend it against those who are seen as others.”
“And you could analyse so many contemporary conflicts in those terms too,” said Angus. “Isn’t it all a matter of whose territory it is?”
Domenica nodded. “I would have thought so.” She paused. “And yet, people rise above those disputes.”
Dr Colquohoun agreed. “Of course, we’re not stuck in that mode. There’s always the ideal of co-operation that stresses a broader interest. There are plenty of precedents for that. The Risorgimento, for example. The creation of the modern German state. The United States of America. And so on. People find a common interest in co-operation. E pluribus unum, and all that.”
Angus looked thoughtful. He wondered where that left Scotland, a small state that had been absorbed into a larger state but had never forgotten that it was a country – a nation. And he loved that country, and the idea behind it. He did not want Scotland to disappear. He wanted local control – not control from London or Brussels, because he believed that people should have their own government, close, immediate, answerable; and yet…He sighed. “I suppose people attach themselves to what they have, or what they have had recently,” said Angus, “and believe that it’s the ordained position. But it’s just one stage in a process of evolution.”
Dr Colquohoun thought about this. He mentally repeated Angus’s statement, and then looked at it from both sides, and from the middle. He turned it upside down. He was not at all sure what Angus meant – if anything: people often gave voice to meaningless remarks and it was a mistake to believe that they always made sense. He stared at the plate on which two cheese scones remained. Noticing his gaze, Domenica said, “You really should have another one.”
Dr Colquohoun glanced at the scones. “Akrasia,” he said. “That’s what the Greek philosophers called weakness of will. If I have another scone, I shall be acting akratically.”
“But you’ll enjoy it,” said Domenica. “And therefore it’s in your best interests to yield to temptation. It’s what you want, after all, and surely it’s in your best interests to get what you want.”
Angus remembered the Neanderthal skull, and he now rose to retrieve it from the cupboard in which they had placed it for safekeeping. Unwrapping it carefully, he showed it to their visitor.
Dr Colquohoun drew in his breath. “I’m astonished,” he said, as he lifted it gently to make his inspection. “At first blush – and I emphasise that – at first blush this looks distinctly Neanderthal.” He laid the skull down gingerly. A fragment of earth fell off it onto the floor below – the mool of a grave, thought Angus, and for a moment he felt a pang of sorrow, for this skull had been a person once, and how could one ever not be sorry for a person?
“I shall take it back to the museum without delay,” he said. “We must photograph it. We must notify Historic Environment Scotland. We shall call in further experts. There’s a professor at the
University of Glasgow who will be very interested in seeing this.”
Angus frowned. The University of Glasgow? What did this have to do with them? This was an Edinburgh Neanderthal; if Glasgow wanted a Neanderthal, then they should look for one of their own.
53
Lobster à la Édimbourg
Bruce Anderson, property surveyor, alumnus of Morrison’s Academy in Crieff, where the girls voted him, three years in succession, the Best-Looking Guy in Perthshire – with virtually no dissent, apart from those few whose hearts he had broken; sole user in Edinburgh of a proprietary clove-scented hair gel; owner of a desirable three-bedroom flat in Abercromby Place in the Georgian New Town; close follower of Scottish rugby; this same Bruce Anderson now stood in his kitchen and dipped his brand new red silica ladle into the lobster bisque he was preparing for his dinner guest.
“Lobster bisque,” he muttered, taking a sip from the ladle. Smiling, he added, “Lobster à la Édimbourg, prescription-only.”
It was a private joke, made all the more private by the fact that there was nobody else in the kitchen, or indeed in the flat. The reference was to something said by his university friend, Freddie Carruthers, a dab hand in the kitchen, who used to refer to the dishes he cooked up for various girlfriends as prescription-only aphrodisiacs. Freddie had been a great favourite of the girls, but had fallen into matrimony, as Bruce put it, earlier than any of the others in their immediate student circle. Freddie had married Cholestrola Lupo, a member of a highly regarded Italian-Scottish family, and had soon become the father of three children. He had changed his name to Federico Lupo, and had been set up by the family in a prosperous restaurant business on the Ayrshire coast.
“I swear it was lobster bisque that got me where I am,” Freddie said to Bruce when they met for dinner in the Ubiquitous Chip in Glasgow. “I gave it to Cholestrola and she was like, Wow! Never fails.”
Freddie had passed on the recipe, and Bruce had made it three or four times since then. It had been well-received by those for whom he had made it, although not always with the results that Bruce had anticipated. In every case, though, it seemed to trigger a release of emotion, whether through olfactory resonance or through some undiscoverable hormonal effect. One guest, a young woman whom Bruce had met in the Wally Dug and had then invited back to his flat for dinner, had been moved by the bisque to start talking about her last boyfriend, whom she hoped to recover. For a good half hour Bruce had listened to a long and intimate exposition of her relationship that included detailed discussion of strategies to get him back. The evening came to an end when she broke down in floods of tears and was only calmed by Bruce’s assurances that the former boyfriend was highly likely to grow tired of his new girlfriend.
“That’s what guys are like,” said Bruce. “They’re fickle.”
After that, the romantic possibilities of the evening were more or less destroyed, as was the case with the next guest for whom he made the bisque. She made short work of her first bowl of it and readily accepted a second. It was only towards the end of this second helping that she asked, quite casually, “What do you put in this soup? It’s terrific.”
Bruce grinned. “Actually, it’s not soup, it’s what we call bisque.”
“So, it’s bisque. But what’s in it? Lots of cream, obviously, I love cream. I seriously love cream.”
“It’s lobster. Your actual lobster. You know – those big critters with the claws. You have to watch the claws. My friend, Freddie Carruthers, although he’s Lupo now, he almost lost his middle finger when a lobster got hold of it. No, I’m not making this up: those claws are like giant nutcrackers.”
Bruce’s guest had paled. Her spoon dropped into her bowl.
Bruce noticed. “Sorry. I shouldn’t talk about fingers being crushed. He was all right, as it happens, because the lobster thought better of it, let go of his finger, and went for his nose – missed it, though – fortunately. You wouldn’t want a lobster to get your nose…”
He stopped. The young woman had brought her hands to her mouth.
“Are you all right?” Bruce asked.
She brought her hands down. “I can’t eat lobster,” she said, her voice wavering. “I can’t eat any seafood.”
And with that, she was copiously ill.
Bruce attended to the emergency as best he could, and she recovered after she had divested herself of the bisque. After that, Bruce busied himself in calling a taxi for her to be taken home to rest and drink the substantial quantity of water that she claimed would remove the last trace of lobster from her system.
It was best not to remember these incidents, he decided, and he put them out of his mind as he added the last ingredients of the complicated and time-consuming recipe with its call for Cognac, mirepoix, rice, tarragon, and stocks and pastes that needed to be prepared in advance. As he worked, his mind went to Katie, who would be arriving at seven-thirty, with a view to their sitting down to lobster bisque an hour later.
Bruce had enjoyed his lunch with Katie, and had asked her to dinner that evening. She had hesitated; she had regretted leaving Stuart in the National Portrait Gallery. She was not sure why she had done so, but had decided that it was a momentary revolt against being corralled. That’s what she disliked, she felt: being obliged to do things that she did not want to do simply because that was what a man wanted to do. So when Bruce had suggested lunch, she had, on impulse, accepted his invitation. She was not a chattel. She could do what she wanted.
And then, when he suggested dinner, she had said to herself, I shall say no, but somehow it had come out as yes. This was something to do with the way Bruce looked; that was the only possible explanation. There are some men, she thought, who are irresistible. That’s the only way of putting it. It was his eyes, perhaps. Or his skin, maybe. He was very slightly olive in colour; not quite, but a bit, and she loved olive. And then there was his hair, which stood up at the front in a sort of wave that went nowhere because it was cut short-ish, and he wore something in it, a gel of some sort, that made her remember her grandmother’s cupboards in her house in Ullapool, where you could sit in the front window and watch the ferry going out to the Outer Hebrides.
I have to stop thinking like this, she said to herself, as she made her way to Abercromby Place. I shall tell him that Stuart and I are…well, whatever we are, and he’ll understand, I’m sure. I shall bring this to an end before it’s started.
But then, as she climbed the stairs to Bruce’s flat, she smelled something in the air: lobster bisque, and the effect of lobster bisque is to weaken the resistance. She struggled, but failed, and knew that she was failing.
It was not until she was directly outside the door, though, that she remembered. She had been at Morrison’s Academy, and although she was a few years younger than Bruce, she had been there when he had been voted the Best-Looking Guy in Perthshire. This was that Bruce Anderson – of course it was! And she had voted for him.
54
Martini Time
While Bruce was preparing his lobster bisque in Abercromby Place, Sister Maria-Fiore dei Fiori di Montagna was mixing a martini for her flatmate, Antonia Collie, in their Drummond Place flat, only a few doors away from where Compton Mackenzie, Jacobite, spy, author of Whisky Galore and President of both the Siamese Cat Society and the Croquet Association, had lived with his two MacSween wives, seriatim. Sister Maria-Fiore and Antonia had taken to the regular consumption of a martini at six-fifteen in the evening, when the evening sun, slanting in from the western end of Drummond Place, shone at such an angle through their large front windows as to illuminate the right half of their carved wooden mantelpiece with its figure of Demeter dispensing sheaves of wheat to worthy recipients. The previous year, Antonia had made an extraordinary discovery: she had found that at the summer solstice, a beam of evening sunlight, entering the flat by their principal Drummond Place-facing window, fell on a point of salience in the ma
ntelpiece carving, and then directly shone through a gap in the carving of Demeter onto a half-concealed surface. There, on that surface, had been carved the words My journey starts afresh.
Antonia had pointed out her discovery to Sister Maria-Fiore dei Fiori di Montagna, who had peered at the inscription in fascination. “I assume that this is meant to be the sun talking,” she said.
“Indeed,” said Antonia. “There is no doubt in my mind about that. This is undoubtedly the Scottish equivalent of Newgrange in Ireland.”
Sister Maria-Fiore looked blank, but only momentarily: she did not know much about Ireland, and had no idea where Newgrange was, yet even in such circumstances she was able to find a suitable aphorism. “One place,” she pronounced, “is often a reminder of another place. And that place may, in turn, bring to mind a third place. So it is that we find our place – among places.”
“Yes,” said Antonia. “Quite possibly.” And then added, “Of course, Newgrange allows the sun to enter the chamber in the mound at the winter solstice, whereas the light falls on our mantelpiece at the summer solstice.”
“Summer and winter are two sides of the same coin,” said Sister Maria-Fiore. “Summer says to us the things that winter says, but in a different voice.”
Antonia did not disagree with that. She found Sister Maria-Fiore’s observations charming, and had even been thinking of compiling them into some sort of book, once she had finished her current work on the lives of the early Scottish saints. Perhaps Sister Maria-Fiore’s book of aphorisms might have the same measure of success as had been enjoyed by Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet. The Lebanese mystic had been immensely successful with that compilation of utterances on all sorts of subjects including, she recalled, the eating of apples. Had he not said something about what you should say in your heart when your teeth sank into an apple: “I, too, am an apple…” Or was that about something else? It was difficult with mystics to work out what they were talking about, which, of course, was one of the things that made being a mystic relatively easy. If you were a mystic, then the more obscure your observations, the better – or the more mystical. The most successful mystics were those whose saying and writings were quite impenetrable, tantalising others with a shifting allusiveness that promised enlightenment, even if not just yet.
A Promise of Ankles Page 21