“So!” exclaimed Sylvie. “You have heard of Melanie Klein! Formidable!”
Bertie had learned that the hallmark of sophisticated conversation in Paris was the tossing out of derogatory remarks, usually calling into question an entire theory or oeuvre. He had been waiting to do this with Melanie Klein, and now the opportunity had presented itself. “She’s rubbish,” said Bertie.
It made him feel considerably better to say that, and he felt even better when the others agreed with him.
“I’m surprised that anybody still reads her,” said Sylvie. “Perhaps in places like Scotland…”
Bertie thought quickly. He knew that his mother read Melanie Klein religiously, but he did not want to reveal that now. At the same time, his Scottish pride had been pricked by the suggestion that people in Scotland were less at the forefront of intellectual fashion than people in Paris.
“We only read her to laugh at her,” said Bertie quickly. “In Scotland, she’s considered a comic writer.”
The students laughed at this. “Very good, Bertie-Pierre,” said Sylvie. “So, tell me, who do you read at your university?”
Bertie shifted his feet uncomfortably, even though they did not quite reach the floor. “I’m still at school,” he said meekly. “I’m not at university yet.”
The students pretended surprise at this revelation. “But there you are knowing all about Melanie Klein and still at school!” said Marie-Louise. “Remarkable. Perhaps this is the new Scottish Enlightenment.”
Bertie let the remark pass. Jean-Philippe, he noticed, was looking at him with interest. “Tell me, Bertie-Pierre,” the student said. “Who are your friends at school?”
“There is a boy called Tofu,” Bertie replied. “He’s my friend. Sometimes.”
“And tell us about this Tofu,” asked Sylvie. “Would we like him?”
“I don’t think so,” said Bertie.
“Ah!” said Jean-Philippe. “And are there other friends?”
Bertie thought for a moment. “There’s Olive,” he said. “She’s a girl.”
“Well, perhaps we would like this Olive,” said Sylvie.
“No,” said Bertie. “I don’t think you would.”
They were silent for a moment. Then Jean-Philippe looked at his watch. “Well, Bertie-Pierre, time is marching on. We were all going to a lecture this afternoon. Jean-François François, the well-known deconstructionist, is talking at three. Everybody is going to be there. Would you like to join us?”
Bertie did not hesitate to accept the invitation. He had never heard of Jean-François François, nor of deconstruction, but he thought that it would be fun to listen to a lecture with his three friends.
“Time to pay,” said Sylvie, signalling to Henri.
Henri brought the bill over to the table and presented it to Jean-Philippe. He glanced at it quickly and then slipped it over the table to Marie-Louise, who shook her head in disbelief.
“Please let me pay,” said Bertie. “I have lots of money.”
“But Bertie-Pierre,” protested Sylvie. “You are our guest!”
“On the other hand,” said Jean-Philippe, “it’s very generous of you, Bertie-Pierre. And perhaps we should accept.”
Bertie extracted a wad of banknotes from his pocket and passed them to Henri. Then, collecting their belongings, he and his friends left the restaurant and made the short journey on foot to the lecture theatre in the Sorbonne where Jean-François François was due to speak.
There was a good crowd already waiting there. Bertie sat near the back row with his friends and watched the scene as the theatre filled up. There was a great deal of conversation going on between members of the audience, but this died down when a door at the side opened and Jean-François François entered the room. There was applause as he made his way up to the podium, but when he reached it he quickly spat out some words into the microphone and the applause died down.
“What’s he saying?” Bertie whispered to Jean-Philippe. “I haven’t learned French yet.”
“Don’t worry,” said Jean-Philippe. “I’ll translate for you. He just said that applause is infantile. He says that only the bourgeoisie claps. That’s why everybody has stopped clapping.”
Bertie thought about this. What was wrong with clapping, particularly if somebody said something you agreed with? They had been clapped at their concert; was that because the bourgeoisie had been present?
Jean-François François now burst into a torrent of French, pointing a thin, nicotine-stained finger into the crowd for emphasis. Bertie listened enthralled. It seemed to him that whatever the lecturer was saying must be very important, as the audience was hanging onto every word.
“What’s he saying now?” he whispered to Jean-Philippe.
“He says that the rules of science are not rules at all,” Jean-Philippe whispered back. “He says that the hegemony of scientific knowledge is the creation of an imposed consensus. The social basis of that consensus is artificial and illusory. He says that even the rules of physics are a socially determined imposition. There is no scientific truth. That’s more or less what he says.”
Bertie was astonished. He did not know many rules of physics, but he did know Bernoulli’s principle which explained how lift occurred. And surely that was true, because he had seen it in operation on the flight from Edinburgh to Paris.
Bertie turned to Jean-Phillipe and said: “But would Mr François say that Bernoulli’s principle was rubbish when he was in a plane, up in the air?”
Jean-Philippe listened to Bertie’s remark and frowned. Then the frown disappeared and he turned and passed the observation on to Sylvie, who listened with a slowly dawning smile and passed it on to the person next to her. Soon the remark was travelling across the lecture theatre in every direction and people could be heard muttering and giggling. Then a young man at the front of the lecture theatre stood up and shouted out a question, interrupting the lecturer’s flow. Bertie could not understand what it was about but he did hear reference to Bernoulli.
Jean-François François hesitated. He pointed a finger into the crowd and began to speak. But he was now shouted down. There were jeers and more laughter.
“Amazing!” said Jean-Philippe, turning to Bertie in frank admiration. “Bertie-Pierre, you’ve deconstructed Jean-François François himself! Incredible!”
Bertie did not know what to say, but thought it polite to say thank you, and so he did.
95. A Portrait of a Sitting
The portrait which Angus Lordie was painting was not going well. It was not a commissioned work–those paintings always seemed to go smoothly, aided, no doubt, by the thought of the fee–but the result of an offer which he had made one day in the Scottish Arts Club. It was one of those rash offers one makes, more or less on impulse, and which are immediately taken up by the recipient. Most people understand that offers of that nature are not intended to be taken seriously, or are only half-serious, and do nothing about them. Others–and they are in a small minority–take them literally, largely because they take everything literally.
Ramsey Dunbarton, the retired lawyer and resident of the Braids, now sat in Angus Lordie’s under-heated studio in Drummond Place, gazing at a fixed point on the wall with what he hoped was an expression that combined both dignity and experience. This was his third sitting, the first having taken place very shortly after Angus had made his subsequently regretted offer to paint his portrait.
“It’s very good of you,” said Ramsey, sitting back in the red leather chair in which Angus positioned his sitters, “but I hope that I give you a bit of a challenge. One or two people have said that this old physiognomy is a typical Edinburgh one. Perhaps you’ll be able to catch that. What do you think?”
Angus was non-committal. He would do his best by Ramsey, but there were limits.
“I wondered whether you’d like to paint me in one of my thespian moments,” Ramsey went on. “I played the Duke of Plaza-Toro once, you know. It was at the Church Hill Theat
re.”
Angus busied himself with his brushes.
“It’s not an easy character to play,” Ramsey went on. “It requires a certain panache, of course, but the difficulty with parts like that is that one can go over the top. But I hope that I didn’t. We still sing a bit, you know. One’s voice changes, of course–like so much else.”
Angus nodded. He tended to listen with only half an ear when Ramsey was talking. It was like having the radio on in the background, he thought. One picked up what was being said from time to time, but for the most part it was just a comfortable drone.
“Yes,” said Ramsey. “The world has certainly changed. And not necessarily for the better. When I compare the world of my youth with the world of today, I have to shake my head. I really do.”
“Please don’t move your head like that,” said Angus. “I’d like you to stay still as far as possible.”
“So sorry,” said Ramsey. “I was getting carried away. But the world really is a different place, isn’t it? And Edinburgh has changed too. There used to be a good number of people who disapproved of things. Now there are hardly any, if you ask me. Everybody is afraid to disapprove.”
“Yes,” said Angus. “I suppose we’ve become more tolerant.”
“Don’t speak to me about tolerance,” said Ramsey. “Tolerance is just an excuse for letting everything go. Tolerance means that people can get away with anything they choose.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Angus. “I think that we needed a slightly more relaxed view of things.”
Ramsey snorted. “Look at what’s happened to breach of the peace,” he said. “We didn’t do any criminal law work in my firm, of course–we’re not that sort of firm–but I used to take a close interest in the subject and would follow the Sheriff Court reports in the Scots Law Times. It was fascinating stuff, I can tell you.”
“A bit murky, surely,” said Angus. “Aren’t the criminal courts full of people who do nasty things to other people?”
“To an extent,” said Ramsey. “But there are some very amusing moments in the criminal courts. I heard some frightfully funny stories, you know.”
Angus’s brush moved gently against the canvas. “Such as?” he said.
“Well,” said Ramsey. “Here’s one. It was the Sheriff Court at Lanark, I think, or maybe Airdrie. Anyway, somewhere down there. I don’t really know that part of the world very well, but let’s say that it was Lanark. The sheriff was dealing with the usual business of the court, and I think that this was a speeding matter. A local butcher was caught doing something way over the odds and was hauled up in front of the sheriff. There he was, in his best suit–there are lots of ill-fitting suits in the Sheriff Courts, you know, taken out of mothballs for each court appearance. Anyway, the sheriff looked down at him from the bench and said: ‘How are you pleading?’ And the butcher looked up and said: ’Oh fine, sir. I’m fine. How’s yoursel?’”
When he finished this story, Ramsey burst out laughing. “Can’t you just hear it, Angus?” he said.
Angus nodded. “Very funny,” he said. “And then what happened?”
“No idea,” said Ramsey. “He was fined, no doubt. But how did we get on to this? Oh, yes, the criminal law. Well, then, breach of the peace: I was always a great supporter of it, because it was so broad. They could deal with any nonsense by calling it breach of the peace. And there were some wonderful examples. This is a bit risqué, Angus, but some of those cases were terribly funny. I always remember a breach of the peace prosecution that followed upon some events that took place at Glenogle Baths. There was this chap, you see, who had been spying on the ladies’ changing rooms, and so they got a woman police officer to go to the baths and she found that somebody had drilled a peep-hole in a partition wall. Well, the woman constable looked through the hole at the same time as the accused looked through the hole on his side of the partition…”
Ramsey’s voice tailed off. Angus, behind his canvas, applied a small dab of paint to a passage he was working on.
He added another dash of colour and stared at the result. Colour was strange; one’s life as an artist was one long affair with colour.
And how should we live that life? How should we make the most of our time, make a difference with it?
He paused. Ramsey was quiet. Through the window, Angus saw a gull fly past, a brief flash of white against the blue. Ramsey had stopped talking. Strange. Angus looked past his canvas. The limbs of his sitter were immobile, and the face composed. The eyes were closed. He was perfectly still.
96. Angus Reflects
On the following day, Angus wrote to Domenica a letter on which, had the intended recipient held it up to the light, might have been made out the faintest of watermarks–a tear.
“My dear Domenica,” he began. “I write this letter seated at the kitchen table. It is one of those cold, bright winter mornings that I know you love so much, and which make this city sparkle so. But the letter I write you will be a sad one, and I am sorry for that. When one is alone and far from home, as you are, then one longs for light-hearted, gossipy letters. This is not one of those.
“Yesterday, as I was painting his portrait, Ramsey Dunbarton, a person I have known for a good many years, died in my studio. He was seated in my portrait chair, talking to me, when he suddenly stopped, mid-anecdote. I thought nothing of it and continued to paint, but when I glanced from behind my canvas I saw him sitting there, absolutely still. I thought that he had gone to sleep and went back to my painting, but then, when I looked again, he was still motionless. I realised that something was wrong, and indeed it was. Ramsey had died. It was very peaceful, almost as if somebody had silently gone away, somewhere else, had left the room. How strange is the human body in death–so still, and so vacated. That vitality, that spark, which makes for life, is simply not there. The tiny movements of the muscles, the sense of there being somebody keeping the whole physical entity orchestrated in space–that goes so utterly and completely. It is no longer there.
“You did not know Ramsey. I thought that you might perhaps have met him at one of my drinks parties, but then, on reflection, I decided that you had not. I do not think that you and he would necessarily have got along. I would never accuse you of lacking charity, dear one, but I suspect that you might have thought that Ramsey was a little stuffy for you; a little bit old-fashioned, perhaps.
“And indeed he was. Many people thought of him as an old bore, always going on about having played the part of the Duke of Plaza-Toro at the Church Hill Theatre. Well, so he did, and he mentioned it yesterday afternoon, which was his last afternoon as himself, as Auden puts it in his poem about the death of Yeats. But don’t we all have our little triumphs, which we remember and which we like to talk about? And if Ramsey was unduly proud of having been the Duke of Plaza-Toro, then should we begrudge him that highlight in what must have been a fairly uneventful life? I don’t think we should.
“He was a kind man, and a good one too. He loved his wife. He loved his country–he was a Scottish patriot at heart, but proud of being British too. He said that we should not be ashamed of these things, however much fashionable people decry love of one’s country and one’s people. And in that he was right.
“He only wanted to do good. He was not a selfish man. He did not set out to make a lot of money or get ahead at the expense of others. He was not like that. He would have loved to have had public office, but it never came his way. So he served in a quiet, rather bumbling way on all sorts of committees. He was conservative in his views and instincts. He believed in an ordered society in which people would help and respect one another, but he also believed in the responsibility of each of us to make the most of our lives. He called that ‘duty’, not a word we hear much of today.
“There is a thoughtless tendency in Scotland to denigrate those who have conservative views. I have never subscribed to that, and I hope that as a nation we get beyond such a limited vision of the world. It is possible to love one’s fellow man i
n a number of ways, and socialism does not have the monopoly on justice and concern. Far from it. There are good men and women who believe passionately in the public good from very different perspectives. Ramsey was as much concerned with the welfare and good of his fellow man as anybody I know.
“People said that he had a tendency to go on and on, and I suppose he did. But those long stories of his, sometimes without any apparent point to them, were stories that were filled, yes filled, with enthusiasm for life. Ramsey found things fascinating, even when others found them dull. In his own peculiar way, he celebrated the life of ordinary people, ordinary places, ordinary things.
“I suspect that Scotland is full of people like Ramsey Dunbarton. They are people whose lives never amount to very much in terms of achievement. They are not celebrated or fêted in any way. But there they are, doing their best, showing goodwill to others, paying their taxes scrupulously, not cheating in any way, supporting the public good. These people are the backbone of the country and we should never forget that.
“His death leaves me feeling empty. I feel guilty, too, at the thought of the occasions when I have seen him heaving into sight and I have scuttled off, unable to face another long-winded story. I feel that I should have done more to reciprocate the feelings of friendship he undoubtedly had for me. I never asked him to lunch with me; the invitations always came from him. I never even acknowledged him as a friend. I never told him that I enjoyed his company. I never told him that I thought he was a good man. I gave him no sign of appreciation.
“But we make such mistakes all the time, all through our lives. Wisdom, I suppose, is seeing this and acting upon it before it is too late. But it is often too late, isn’t it?–and those things that we should have said are unsaid, and remain unsaid for ever.
“I am heart-sore, Domenica. I am heart-sore. I shall get over it, I know, but that is how I feel now. Heart-sore.”
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