“Matthew,” she said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude to you.”
Matthew looked up from the table. “And I didn’t mean to be rude to you either, Lou,” he said.
“You’re unhappy?” Big Lou’s voice was gentle. “I can tell.”
Those who have known unhappiness, as Big Lou had, knew its face, knew its ways.
Matthew nodded.
“That girl?” asked Big Lou.
Matthew said nothing, but he did not need to speak. Big Lou could tell.
“I always liked her,” said Big Lou. “And I can understand why you feel the way you do. She’s very bonny.”
“And we get on very well together,” mumbled Matthew. “I thought that maybe . . . But now she’s gone and got herself a boyfriend. Some student type.”
Big Lou reached out and took his hand. “I was in love for 44
No Flowers Please
years with somebody who had somebody else,” she said. “I know what it’s like.”
“It’s such a strange feeling,” mused Matthew. “Have you noticed, Lou, how it feels when you know that somebody doesn’t like you? I’m not talking about love or anything like that – just somebody you know makes it clear that they don’t like you. And you know that you’ve done nothing to deserve this. You’ve done them no wrong. They just don’t like you. It’s an odd feeling, isn’t it?”
Big Lou looked up at the ceiling. Matthew was right. It was an odd feeling. One felt somehow that it was unfair that the other felt that way. But it was more than that. The unmerited dislike of another made one think less of oneself. We are enlarged by the love of others; we are diminished by their dislike.
“I’m sure that Pat likes you,” said Big Lou. “And perhaps she would like you even more if she knew how you felt about her.
Have you ever told her that?”
“Of course not,” said Matthew. Big Lou should have known better than to ask that question. This was Edinburgh, after all.
One did not go about the place declaring oneself like some lovesick Californian.
15. No Flowers Please
It may be that Big Lou would have urged Matthew to reveal his feelings to Pat – that would have been in keeping with her general tendency to speak directly – but if that is what she had been on the verge of doing, she was prevented from saying anything by the arrival of Eddie. Big Lou was now engaged to Eddie, the chef who had returned from Mobile, Alabama, with the intention of persuading Big Lou to marry him. She had readily agreed, as she loved Eddie, for all his inconsiderate treatment of her in the past, and an engagement notice had duly appeared in the personal columns of both The Scotsman, for the information of the general public, and The Courier, for the infor-No Flowers Please
45
mation of those who lived in Arbroath. The wording of this notice had been unfortunate, as Eddie had chosen it without consulting Big Lou. Both families are relieved to announce, it read, the engagement of Miss Lou Brown to Mr Edward McDougall. No flowers please.
When she had seen the notice, Big Lou’s hand had shot to her mouth in a gesture of shock. She was aghast, and she had telephoned Eddie immediately, her fingers shaking as she dialled his number. Before he answered, though, she replaced the handset in its cradle. Eddie was not good with words, and he had probably not realised how ridiculous the notice sounded.
And very few people read such notices, in Edinburgh at least; it was different, of course, in Arbroath, where the personal columns were scoured for social detail by virtually everybody.
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 46
No Flowers Please
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-How To Let Down the Opposite Sex Gently 47
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 48
How To Let Down the Opposite Sex Gently 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.
How To Let Down the Opposite Sex Gently 49
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 reciprocated the perspective. He had that gaze which some people have of 50
How To Let Down the Opposite Sex Gently 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 Anguish
51
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.”
52
Anguish
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.
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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.
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