Matthew, of course, had read it and had hooted with laughter. Relieved? Were they serious? And as for the no flowers please, perhaps that was a typographical migration from the neighbouring deaths column. Even so, it made for a wonderful engagement notice. Poor Big Lou! She deserved something better, Matthew thought; something better than this rather greasy chef.
And now here was Eddie coming in for his morning coffee, his lanky hair hanging about his collar, which was none too clean as far as Matthew could make out. Eddie nodded in the direction of Matthew before he crossed the floor to speak to Lou.
“Well,” he announced proudly, “it’s mine.”
Big Lou looked at him uncomprehendingly and then burst into a broad smile. “The restaurant?”
“Aye,” said Eddie. “As from the end of the month. A year’s lease–and quite a bit cheaper than I had thought. They were keen to get me to take it. They lowered the price.”
Matthew raised an eyebrow. When people were keen to sell things and get other people to take things, there was usually a reason. Eddie might think that he had found a bargain, but there could be a serious snag lurking in the small print.
“Where is this place, Eddie?” Matthew asked.
“Stockbridge,” said Eddie. “Very close to Henderson Row.”
Matthew nodded. Stockbridge was a popular place for cafés and restaurants. But why had the owners been so keen to get Eddie to take the lease? “That’s a good place to be,” he said. “Was it a restaurant before?”
It was, Eddie said. He had spoken to the owner, who was retiring and going back to Sicily. He had been there for five years, he said, and was reluctant to leave.
“Have you looked at the books?” asked Matthew.
Eddie hesitated. “Books?”
Matthew glanced at Big Lou, who had picked up a cloth and had started to wipe the top of the bar, somewhat thoughtfully, Matthew felt.
“The accounts,” said Matthew quietly. “They show how a business has been doing. You know, profit and loss.”
Eddie turned to Big Lou, as if for support. She put down her cloth. “Eddie knows about restaurants, Matthew,” she said. “He kens fine.”
“But you should take a look at the books,” Matthew insisted. “Before you put your money into anything, Eddie, you should ask to see the books. Just in case.”
Big Lou turned round and slid the coffee drawer out of the large Italian coffee machine. Noisily, she banged the tray on the side of a bin to loosen the used grounds. “It’s not Eddie’s money,” she said quietly. “It’s mine. I’m subbing Eddie on this one.”
Matthew glanced at Eddie, who was smiling encouragingly at Big Lou. “Well, you should look at the books, Lou,” he said. “It’s basic…”
“Basic nothing,” said Big Lou firmly. “The real question is whether you know what you’re doing. It’s the same as farming. You can’t teach somebody to be a farmer. You either know how to farm or you don’t. You understand restaurants, don’t you, Eddie?”
Eddie nodded gravely. “I do, Lou, doll.”
Big Lou looked at Matthew. “See, Matthew?”
Matthew was not one to be defeated so easily. He winced when Eddie called Big Lou “doll”. It was so condescending, so demeaning. And Big Lou was not doll-like; she was a large-boned woman, larger than Matthew, larger than Eddie himself, in fact. To call her “doll” was a travesty of the truth. And the thought that Eddie was going to take her money for his ill-advised restaurant venture was unbearable. Matthew knew that Big Lou had been exploited all her life. She had told him about how she had looked after that uncle in Arbroath and how she had worked all the hours of creation in that nursing home in Aberdeen. There had been no joy, no light in her life–only drudgery and service to others. And now here was Eddie about to take her money.
Matthew was on the point of saying something, but Eddie now addressed Big Lou. “And here’s another thing,” he said. “I’ve negotiated with the waitresses. They’re going to stay on and work for me. Braw wee lassies.”
Big Lou paused. Then she picked up a spoon and began to ladle coffee into the small metal container. “Oh yes?” She sounded nonchalant, as if inquiring about a minor detail. But it was not minor. “What age are they?”
Eddie looked down at the ground. “One’s seventeen,” he said. “Nice girl, called Annie.”
Big Lou’s tone was level. “Oh yes. And the other?”
“She’s sixteen, I think,” said Eddie.
Matthew watched Big Lou’s expression carefully. He knew, as did Lou, that Matthew’s bride in Mobile, Alabama–the one who had run away from him–had been sixteen. He would do anything to protect Big Lou from disappointment and sorrow. But there was a certain measure of these things from which we cannot be protected, no matter what the hopes and intentions of our friends may be.
16. How To Let Down the Opposite Sex Gently
While Matthew was at Big Lou’s, Pat remained in the gallery. She regretted misleading Matthew about Wolf. It had been a lie, no matter how she might try to clothe it in the garb of kindness. There was something shoddy about lying, even if the motive for lying was concern for the feelings of another. She had wanted to protect Matthew from the disappointment of rebuff, but there was something else which had prompted her to lie, something else not so altruistic. Pat wanted to spare herself the embarrassment of telling Mathew that she did not want a deeper involvement with him. That was nothing to do with Matthew’s susceptibilities; that was to do with her own feelings.
She watched Matthew cross the road to Big Lou’s coffee bar. He had been so chirpy in his new distressed-oatmeal sweater, and now he walked with his head down, staring at the ground in front of him. He looked disconsolate, and no doubt was. And yet, did she really owe Matthew anything? One could not pretend to have feelings that one did not really have. That, surely, was unkinder still: lying about an imaginary boyfriend might be considered cruel, but a precautionary let-down was surely less hurtful than a let-down after one has been allowed to cherish hopes.
Friendship, thought Pat, was for the most part straightforward, but the moment that friendship was complicated by sex, then its course became beset by dangers. One did not have to see every member of the opposite sex in a sexual light; quite the opposite, in fact: she had plenty of friends of the opposite sex with whom her relationship was entirely platonic. Such friendships, which rather surprised people of her father’s generation, were relaxed enough to allow sharing of tents on holiday or sleeping in the same room–on the sofa or the floor–without any suggestion of intimacy. That used not to be possible other than in exceptional conditions. She had heard from an aunt about the ethos of the Scottish mountaineering clubs in the past, when a form of purity allowed mixed bathing in Highland rivers without any suggestion of anything else. And she had read, too, that in Cambridge young men used to bathe in the river, naked, even when women passed sedately by in punts. Perhaps there was something about rivers that promoted this sense of purity; she was not sure.
But none of this helped her in her current predicament. She felt the opposite of pure; she felt dirtied by her lie to Matthew and now, as she saw him, walking back across the road, she resolved to tell him that Wolf was only a friend, and that there was no boyfriend. And then she would go on to the delicate issue of her feelings for him. She would tell him that while she valued him as a friend…No, that really was too clichéd. She simply could not bring herself to tell Matthew she did not think of him “in that way” nobody wanted not to be thought of “in that way” men, in particular, would prefer not to be thought of at all. And yet it was true that she did not think of Matthew “in that way”. Matthew was safe; he provided comfortable, unthreatening company, like the company of an old school-friend one had not seen for many years.
Wolf was different. From the moment she had seen him, in that tutorial in which poor Dr Fantouse wittered on about Benedetto Croce, she had thought of Wolf “in that way”. And he, looking at her across the table, had clearly recip
rocated the perspective. He had that gaze which some people have of mentally undressing the person at whom they are looking, but Pat had not resented this. Rather, she had enjoyed it. And she had enjoyed, too, the short time she had spent with him in the Elephant House and walking across the Meadows until that moment of surprise that had occurred in Spottiswoode Street, when she had discovered that Wolf was heading for her flat, too, where his girlfriend, Tessie, lived.
They had gone upstairs together to the door of the flat on the third floor. Pat reached into her pocket for her key and let them both in.
“She may not be in,” said Wolf. “I didn’t tell her I was coming.”
“That’s her room,” said Pat, pointing to a closed door off the hall.
Wolf smiled. “I know that,” he said.
Of course he would, thought Pat, and looked sheepish. And at that moment, as Wolf knocked at the door, his back to her, she felt an intense, visceral jealousy. It hit somewhere inside her, in her stomach perhaps, with the force of a blow. For a few seconds she stood stock still, shocked by the emotion, rendered incapable of movement. But then, as the door opened slightly and she saw Tessie, half-framed within, she found it within herself to turn away and walk into her own room. There, she took a deep breath and closed her eyes. The force of the emotion had surprised her; it had been as if, on a dusty road to Damascus, she had been hurled to the ground. And the realisation that came to her this forcefully was that she had found in this boy, this Wolf, with his fair hair and his wide grin, one who touched her soul in the most profound way. Without him she was incomplete. Without him she…
But such thoughts were absurd. She had known him for a very short time. They had talked to one another for–what was it?–an hour or two at the most. She knew nothing about him other than that his mother had been an enthusiast for herbal remedies, that his father sold valves in the oil industry and had accumulated a vast number of air-miles, and that he had a girlfriend called Tessie. And that last piece of knowledge was the most difficult of all to confront. Wolf was not available. He was taken. And by one of her flatmates too! That horrid, horrid girl, Tessie, who even now, no doubt, was in Wolf’s arms, her fingers running through his hair. “Spottiswoode!” wailed Pat, as if the word had curative power, a verbal scapegoat for her misery, her sense of utter loss. Its effect was mildly cathartic. “Spottiswoode!” she wailed again.
There was a knock at the door, hesitant, tentative.
“Pat?” came a voice. “Are you all right?”
It was Wolf.
17. Anguish
“Why were you shouting out ‘Spottiswoode’?” asked Wolf, as he opened the door of Pat’s room.
Pat looked at him with what she hoped was a blank expression.
“Spottiswoode?” she said.
Wolf nodded, allowing a fringe of hair to fall briefly across his brow. This was soon tossed back. “I heard you out in the hall. You shouted out ‘Spottiswoode’. Twice.”
Pat clenched her teeth. Rapidly she rehearsed a number of possibilities. She could deny it, of course, and suggest that he had experienced an auditory hallucination. She was, after all, a psychiatrist’s daughter and she had heard her father talk about auditory hallucinations. He had treated a patient, she recalled, who complained that the roses in his garden recited Burns to him. That had seemed so strange to her at the time, but here she was shouting out Spottiswoode in her distress.
No, she would not resort to denial; that would only convince him that there was something odd about her, and he would be put off. That would be the worst possible outcome.
“Spottiswoode?” she said. “Did I?”
Wolf nodded again. “Yes,” he said. “Spottiswoode. Very loudly. Spottiswoode.”
Pat laughed, airily (she hoped). “Oh, Spottiswoode! Of course.”
Wolf smiled. “Well?”
“Well, why not?” said Pat. She looked about the room and made a gesture with her hands. “I was just thinking–here I am in Spottiswoode Street at last. You know, I’ve always wanted to live in Spottiswoode Street, and now I do. I was just so happy, I shouted out Spottiswoode, I suppose.”
Her explanation tailed off. She saw his eyes widen slightly, and with a sinking heart she realised that this meant that he did not believe her. Desperate now, she thought, I must do something to change the subject in a radical way.
She looked at her watch. “Look at the time!” she muttered. “I’m sorry, I’m going to have to have a bath.”
She turned round and began to unbutton her top. Wolf did nothing. Turning her head slightly, she saw him staring at her, a bemused expression on his face. She stopped the unbuttoning.
“So you don’t have to have a bath after all?” said Wolf.
“No,” she said lamely. “I forgot. I don’t.”
Wolf smiled at her, his teeth white against his lips. “Oh well,” he said. “I’d better be going. So long.”
“So long.”
He closed the door, and Pat sat down on her bed. She felt confused and raw; unhappy too. And in her unhappiness, as ever, she retrieved her mobile from her bag and pressed the button which would connect her immediately with her father.
He answered, as he always did, in the calm tones that she had always found so reassuring. He inquired where she was and asked her how she was settling in, and then there was a brief silence before she spoke again.
“Can you tell me something, Dad?” she asked. “Why do we utter words that don’t mean anything?”
Dr MacGregor laughed. “Perhaps you should ask a politician that. They’re the experts in the uttering of the meaningless.”
“No, I don’t mean that. I’m talking about when you murmur a word to yourself. A name perhaps. The name of a place.” She did not say the name of a street, of course.
There was a moment’s silence at the other end. Dr MacGregor realised that this was not theoretical inquiry; doctors were never asked theoretical questions. They were asked questions about things that were happening to real people, usually to the questioner.
“Why?” he asked gently. “Have you found yourself doing this?”
“Yes,” said Pat. “I suppose I have.”
“It’s nothing too worrying,” said Dr MacGregor. “It’s usually an expression of agony. Something worries you, something haunts you, and you give verbal expression to your anguish. And what you say may have nothing to do with what you feel. It may be the name of somebody you know, it may be a totally meaningless word.”
“Such as…such as Spottiswoode?”
“Yes. Spottiswoode would do.” Dr MacGregor paused. So that was what his daughter had uttered. Well, Spottiswoode was as good as anything. “You’re unhappy about something, aren’t you? That’s why you gave a cry of anguish. It’s a perfectly normal response, you know. Lots of people do it. They don’t admit it, but they do it. People don’t admit things, you see, Pat.”
“They don’t?”
“No, they don’t. And that’s very sad, isn’t it? We’re all weak, human creatures, with all those foibles and troubles which make us human, and we all–or most of us–feel that we have to be strong and brave and in command of ourselves. But we can’t be. The people with the strong, brave exteriors are just as weak and vulnerable as the rest of us. And of course they never admit to their childish practices, their moments of weakness or absurdity, and then the rest of us think that’s how it should be. But it isn’t, Pat. It isn’t.
“And here is another thing, Pat. When you find yourself doing something like this–something which appears to have no meaning–remember that it might just be plain old superstitious behaviour. A lot of the things we do are superstitious. And although we don’t know it, we do them because we think that our actions will protect us from things getting even worse.”
Pat was intrigued. For the time being, she had forgotten about her misery and about Spottiswoode and its attendant embarrassments. It was so like her father to understand so completely. And it was so like him, too, to make it that
much easier.
“Of course,” went on Dr MacGregor, “this will all be about a boy, won’t it?”
She drew in her breath. He always knew; he always knew.
“Yes, it is.”
“In that case,” he said, “your options are very clear, you know. You find out whether it’s going to work out, or you forget him. If he’s unattainable, or not interested in you, then you simply have to forget him. Forget he exists. Tell yourself that he’s really nothing to you.”
Their conversation continued for a few minutes after that. Then Pat went to the window and looked out. Wolf is nothing to me, she said to herself. Wolf is nothing to me.
She heard a noise outside the closed door, and she spun round. The thought occurred to her that she had said–actually articulated the words Wolf is nothing to me–rather than merely thinking them. She could not be sure. And if that was Wolf outside, then he would have heard her.
But it was not Wolf. It was Tessie.
18. Fibs
Irene had taken Stuart to task for suggesting in front of Bertie that they should report the theft of their car without mentioning their suspicions that the car was already a stolen car, passed on by the Glasgow businessman, Lard O’Connor. Her squeamishness, though, did not preclude her from reporting the matter herself; she had been shocked by the idea that Bertie might hear of the planned concealment rather than that Stuart should propose such a thing in the first place.
“It’s not really a deception,” she said to Stuart, once Bertie was out of earshot. “All we are doing is reporting the theft of a car which has a certain number plate. It makes no difference that the car in question is not the original vehicle which had that number. That’s all there is to it.”
Stuart was not sure that it was so simple. In his view, the difference between their positions was that while Irene was happy to employ half-truths, he was happy to achieve the same end by simple misstatement. The end result was the same–as far as he could see. But he felt disinclined to argue the point with Irene, who inevitably won any such debate between them. So he agreed with her that she should make the report to the police, and should do so at the Gayfield Square Police Station, which was only ten minutes’ walk from Scotland Street, at the very eastern edge of the New Town.
Love Over Scotland Page 6