Love Over Scotland 4ss-3

by Alexander McCall Smith

  The picture taken, Domenica reached into her pocket and thrust a few banknotes into the boy’s hand.

  “Why are you giving him money?” Ling called out. “I have paid him. Take the money back.”

  “I’m not paying him for carrying the case,” Domenica said lightly, indicating to the now delighted boy that he should leave.

  “That was for his photograph.” She glanced at Ling and smiled.

  She felt pleased with herself. She had repaired the injustice without causing a loss of face to her guide. The natural order of things had not been disturbed, and the amount of happiness 174 By the Light of the Tilley Lamp in the world had been discreetly augmented. It was a solution of which Mr Jeremy Bentham himself could only have approved.

  The young man who was to be Domenica’s house-servant now picked up her suitcase and walked into the house. He moved, Domenica noticed, with that fluidity of motion that Malaysians seemed to manage so effortlessly. We walk so clumsily, she thought; they glide.

  She followed him into the living room of the house. It was cool inside, and dark. Such light as there was filtered through a window which was largely screened by a broad-leafed plant of some sort. She suddenly thought of the Belgian anthropologist.

  Had he lived here? She looked about her. On one wall, secured by a couple of drawing pins, was a faded picture of le petit Julien, le Manneken Pis, symbol of everything that Brussels stood for, culturally and politically, or so the Belgians themselves claimed.

  I detect, she thought, a Belgian hand.

  56. By the Light of the Tilley Lamp There was no electricity in the village, of course, and when night descended – suddenly, as it does in the tropics – Domenica found herself fumbling with a small Tilley lamp which the house servant had set out on the kitchen table. It was a long time since she had used such a lamp, but the knack of adjusting it came back to her quickly – an old skill, deeply-ingrained, like riding a bicycle or doing an eightsome reel, the skills of childhood which never left one. As she pumped up the pressure and applied a match to the mantle, Domenica found herself wondering what scraps of the old knowledge would be known to the modern child. Would that curious little boy downstairs, Bertie, know how to operate an old-fashioned dial telephone? Or how to make a fire? Probably not. And there were people, and not just children, who did not know how to add or do long division, because they relied on calculators; all those people in shops who needed the till to tell them how much change to give because nobody By the Light of the Tilley Lamp 175

  had ever taught them how to do calculations like that in school.

  There were so many things that were just not being taught any more. Poetry, for example. Children were no longer made to learn poetry by heart. And so the deep rhythms of the language, its inner music, was lost to them, because they had never had it embedded in their minds. And geography had been abandoned too – the basic knowledge of how the world looked, simply never instilled; all in the name of educational theory and of the goal of teaching children how to think. But what, she wondered, was the point of teaching them how to think if they had nothing to think about? We were held together by our common culture, by our shared experience of literature and the arts, by scraps of song that we all knew, by bits of history half-remembered and half-understood but still making up what it was that we thought we were. If that was taken away, we were diminished, cut off from one another because we had nothing to share.

  The light thrown out by the Tilley lamp was soft and forgiving, a light that did not fight with the darkness but nudged it aside gently, just for a few feet, and then allowed it back.

  Looking out through her open door, she saw that here and there in the village other lights had been lit. In one of the houses a kitchen was illuminated and she could make out the figures within: a woman standing, holding a child on her hip; a man in the act of drinking something from a cup or beaker; the moving shadow of fan-blades. She had yet to adjust to where she was, and it seemed to her to be strange that the people she was looking at through the window were outlaws – contemporary pirates. How peculiar it was that ordinary life should take place in spite of this sense of being beyond the law. She would get used to that, of course; anthropologists in New Guinea came to accept even head-hunting after a while.

  The house servant, who had gone off to his hut shortly before dusk fell, had left a meal for her in the kitchen: a bowl of noodles, a plate of stewed vegetables and a pot containing pieces of grilled chicken. Domenica was not particularly hungry; she always lost her appetite in the heat, but now she tackled the meal almost for want of anything else to do. It was, she found, tastier than 176 By the Light of the Tilley Lamp she had expected, and she ate virtually everything prepared for her. Then, sitting in an old planter’s chair, she read for two hours by the light of her Tilley lamp.

  It was nine o’clock when she went to bed. Taking the lamp with her, she made her way through to her bedroom, the only other room in the small house. Above her bed, suspended from an exposed rafter, hung a voluminous mosquito net. It was a comfort for her, a luxury, the only means of ensuring a night untroubled by stinging insects.

  Sitting on the edge of her bed, she blew out the lamp’s flame and slipped behind the net. The bed was narrow, but not uncomfortable, and it seemed to her that the sheets had been freshly laundered, for they were crisp and sweet-smelling. She wondered who had gone to all this trouble. It was unlikely that the pirates themselves – crude types, she suspected – would have bothered to ensure her comfort in this way, and if they had not done this, then it could only be Edward Hong who was behind it. In fact, the more she thought of it the clearer it became to her. In Edward Hong M.A. (Cantab.), she had a protector, a man who cared for her welfare. It was a reassuring feeling, a feeling that can normally be expected to induce in many single women a warm feeling of contentment. And Domenica, for all that she was a distinguished anthropologist, was a woman; and what woman would not be pleased to know that there was a lithe young man immediately at hand, at her beck and call, while, in the background, there was a more mature and urbane M.A. (Cantab.) who had her interests at heart?

  With these pleasant thoughts in her mind, Domenica began to feel drowsy. It had been an unusual and demanding day. The walk down the track to the village had been physically tiring, and the change of surroundings had also had an effect.

  As she lay there in this state of agreeable tiredness, Domenica allowed her mind to wander over what lay ahead. Tomorrow, she would introduce herself, with Ling’s assistance, to the people of the village. She would introduce herself to the women first, as they would be the focus of her scientific inquiry, and then in due course she would meet the pirates themselves. For a moment she thought of pirates, and a few snatches of Gilbert and Sullivan A Nocturnal Visitation 177

  came to her mind, faintly, as if from a distant, half-heard chorus: For he is a pirate king! Hurrah for the pirate king! And it is, it is a glorious thing, to be a pirate king . . . How absurd, thought Domenica sleepily; how completely inappropriate. It was not at all glorious; not at all.

  57. A Nocturnal Visitation

  Domenica was a sound sleeper, even if she had a tendency to awake somewhat early. In Scotland Street, in the summer, she would often find herself wide awake at five in the morning; it was, she felt, the finest part of the day, and she would often go out and walk round Drummond Place at that hour, enjoying the quiet of the morning. In Malaysia, where the day was divided into two roughly equal parts, it would still be dark at five and she imagined that if she woke up that early she would stay in bed for a while before getting up and starting the day. Once the sun rose, of course, it would be too hot to stay in bed anyway, and one might as well get up and begin by pouring a large jug full of tepid water over one’s face and shoulders. She looked forward to that; bathing oneself in a place without running water was an almost sacramental act, underlining the preciousness of that water that one takes so much for granted when it flows from a tap.

  However, she d
id not wake up at five that morning, but closer to two. She did not confirm that it was two o’clock; it just felt like that, when she suddenly became conscious of her surroundings and of the shafts of moonlight which came through the small window above her bed. The moonlight, soft and diffuse, fell half upon the folds of the mosquito net and half upon the floorboards.

  Beyond it, the room was filled with dark shadows; the shape of the roughly-finished chest of drawers in which she had stacked her clothes before retiring; the form of the table and the small pile of books that she had piled there on retrieving them from her suitcase; the low hillock of the chair near the door. But then, between the bed and the chest of drawers, just touched in part 178 A Nocturnal Visitation

  by the moonlight, was the shape of a man, standing quite still.

  The first thing that came to Domenica’s mind was a literary reference. She had read somewhere, some time ago, that one of the most disturbing experiences in this life was to wake up and discover that one is not alone in a house in which one had gone to bed believing oneself to be alone. Who had said that? Who?

  It was John Fowles; yes, that was who it was; not in The Magus, but somewhere else. Or at least she thought it was him; and now the words, whatever their provenance, came back to her, and caught at her wildly palpitating heart.

  She did not move. She lay there, her limbs heavy beneath the sheets, her eyelids the only part of her moving, and very slightly at that, as she watched the still figure at the end of her bed.

  For a moment she wondered if she was imagining it, if this was just another shadow, a trick of the light; but it was not, and she knew that it was not. She thought: I can scream. I can wake people up. It’s a small village and they will all hear me. People would come; Ling, the young man, the family in the house next door, which was not far away. And if I scream and this man comes for me, I can throw myself off the bed; there is a mosquito net between him and me, and he will have to fumble with that, which will give me the time to escape. She wondered if the man could see that her eyes were open. Probably not, she thought, for her head was in the shadows and he would not be able to see her face. That made her feel better. And the fact, too, that he was just standing there made her fear subside slightly. He was looking at her, just looking, and there was no sign that he was planning to attack her. And again, unbidden, there came to her mind another literary reference; this time its source quite clear. Carson McCullers, she thought. Reflections in a Golden Eye. The private soldier, the slow one, watches the Major’s wife from outside her window; that is all he does, he watches her. And then he comes into the house and watches her there too. He is gentle, unthreatening, a watcher. Boo Radley, she thought; another gentle watcher; the man who watches Jem and Scout Finch; watches over them, really, and saves their lives eventually. I am being watched. That is all this man is doing. He is watching me.

  Moving In, Moving Out 179

  She felt calmer now, and for a moment almost as if she would laugh, with the release of tension. The figure in the shadows had ceased to be threatening; it was as if he had become a companion. That is what she now thought, and it was at that moment that he stepped forward; not a great step, but just a small movement in her direction. And as he did so, the moonlight fell on his face, and she saw who it was. It was not a man at all. It was the boy, the teenage boy who had carried her suitcase and whose photograph she had taken.

  She caught her breath in surprise, a gasp that he heard, for he turned round quickly and ran out of the room.

  “What do you want?” Domenica called out. “Why are you here?”

  Her voice was not loud at all, and the boy probably did not hear it. Or her words might have been lost in the sound of the outer door slamming behind him.

  She reached for the box of matches on the table beside her bed and struck one to light the lamp. In the glow of the lamp, the shadows resolved and became solid, unthreatening objects.

  Domenica no longer felt alarmed, just curious. She had frightened the boy away, and in a strange way she was sorry about that.

  If he had not fled, she would have let him remain there, perhaps, and he would have been company for her. She had no idea why he had been there; it was curiosity, perhaps, on his part; she did not think it was anything more sinister than that. Perhaps she was something of a miracle in his mind; a woman from somewhere distant, who had given him money. It had been a small thing for her to do, but it was probably not small for him.

  58. Moving In, Moving Out

  “Here we are,” said Matthew, as he fumbled for the key of his flat. “Home.” Pat said nothing. It was evidently home for Matthew, but was it home for her? She had accepted his offer of a room, of course, but this had been only because of his 180 Moving In, Moving Out

  persistence and the suddenness of her need to leave Spottiswoode Street. Home for her was her parents’ house in the Grange, where her room was kept exactly as she had left it, as parents often will keep their child’s room, as a museum. Home was not here in India Street; Matthew, she felt, should not make un-warranted assumptions.

  She had never been in Matthew’s flat before and she had not expected the spaciousness and grandeur which greeted her. The front door gave onto a large hall, perfectly square, topped by a sizeable cupola. There were flagstones on the floor and these were covered, in part, by dark oriental rugs. There were several paintings on the walls of this hall, one of which Pat recognised from the gallery – a gilt-framed but otherwise dreary view of the Falls of Clyde by a Victorian painter whom they had been unable to identify.

  Matthew showed her to her room, which was at the back of the flat, next to the kitchen. It was considerably larger than the room she had occupied in Spottiswoode Street, and better provided with cupboards and drawers.

  “I’ve always used this as a guest room,” said Matthew. “Or, rather, I would have used it as a guest room if I’d had any guests.”

  He looked out of the window, as if searching for guests who had never arrived.

  Pat glanced at him. There was something inexplicably sad about Matthew; a sense of life having passed him by. There were some people who had that aura of sadness, often inexplicably so, she thought, and Matthew was one of them. Or was it loneliness rather than sadness? If it was, then it could be relieved by company. There was no reason why Matthew could not find somebody. He was presentable enough, quite good-looking in fact when viewed from a certain angle, and even if he required some gingering up there were plenty of girls in Edinburgh who would be prepared to see Matthew as a project.

  Matthew dragged Pat’s suitcase into her room and then left her to unpack. He would make coffee, he said, in half an hour, after she had sorted things out. He would then show her the kitchen and where things were.

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  “You can use everything,” he said. “There’s never much food in there, but you can help yourself to what there is. Feel free.”

  Pat thanked him, but thought that she would buy her own supplies. His insistence that she stay rent-free was difficult enough; to be fed by him too would have made her position impossible. I would be a kept woman, she thought; and smiled at the thought. It was a wonderful expression, she reflected; so exotic, so out-of-date, rather like the expression “a fallen woman”. She knew somebody who lived in a house in Edinburgh that used to be a home for fallen women; after their fall, the women went there to have their babies before the babies were then given up for adoption. One of the rooms in the house had been a lecture room, where the women were lectured on the avoidance of further falls, perhaps.

  After she had unpacked, she went through to the kitchen, where she found Matthew seated at the scrubbed-pine table, a coffee pot and two mugs in front of him.

  “Don’t you love the smell of freshly-brewed coffee?” he said brightly. “And the smell of the grounds before you make the coffee. That’s even better.” He sniffed at the air. “Lovely.”

  Pat sat down. She had resolved to talk to Matthew and decided that
it would be best to do so now, right at the beginning. It would be easier that way.

  “Matthew,” she began. “I’m really grateful to you for letting me stay here. You know that, don’t you?” He made a gesture with his hand, as if brushing aside, in embarrassment, an unwanted compliment. “I’m happy to be able to help,” he said.

  “And I really don’t mind. That room is never used.”

  The guests who never came, thought Pat; he was lonely – it was so obvious. She almost stopped herself there, but continued.

  She had to.

  “Well, it’s kind of you,” said Pat.

  “Don’t think about it,” said Matthew. “You’d do the same for me. I know you would.”

  Pat was silent. Would she? Perhaps.

  “And it’s not going to be for long,” she went on. “No more than a couple of weeks. Until I find somewhere else.”

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  Matthew was staring at the coffee pot. He reached out and picked it up, as if to start pouring, but then put it down. He reached for one of the mugs and peered inside it.

  “Only a few weeks?”

  She could tell that he was making an effort to keep his voice level, to hide his disappointment. But she had to go through with this; it would be far more difficult to say anything later on, when misunderstandings had already occurred.

  “You see,” she said, “I’m not sure if it’s a good idea to share just with one person, particularly with a . . .” she hesitated for a moment before continuing, “with a man.”

  Matthew continued to stare into the mug. Then he looked up. “I hoped that you’d stay a bit longer than that,” he said. “It gets very . . . very quiet around here. I just hoped . . .” He bit at his lip. “I would never make it awkward for you. Why would you think that? Why would you think I’d make it awkward for you?”