Love Over Scotland 4ss-3

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “Would you mind . . . ?” he suddenly asked Irene. “Would you mind if one of these days I wrote about Bertie? I would change his name, of course, so that nobody would know it was him. But he is a rather interesting case, you know.”

  Irene gave a little squeal of delight. “Of course I wouldn’t mind,” she exclaimed. “It would be wonderful to be able to share Bertie with the world. Just as Little Hans’s father allowed us to hear about Little Hans’s castration anxieties and all that business with the dray horses and the giraffe. Imagine if he had refused Freud permission to write about his son. Imagine that.”

  Dr Fairbairn agreed. It would have been a terrible loss. But at the same time, there was always the danger that a famous analysand might find himself discovered much later on. Irene should be aware of that.

  “I should warn you,” he said, “that sometimes people track down these famous patients, even after years have passed.

  Remember what happened to the Wolf Man.” He paused. “And of course, Little Hans himself visited Freud later, when he was nineteen.”

  248 Smugness Explained

  “And?” prompted Irene.

  “He – Little Hans – had forgotten everything. Horses.

  Giraffe. All forgotten. Indeed, he recognised nothing in the analysis.”

  “How interesting,” said Irene. “Of course you already have at least one famous patient. You have Wee Fraser.” She paused; Wee Fraser was dangerous territory. “You were going to track him down, weren’t you? Did you ever find him?”

  Dr Fairbairn stiffened. Up to this point he had been fiddling with the cuffs of his blue linen jacket; now his hands dropped to his sides and he stared fixedly ahead. He had located his famous patient, now fifteen or so, and had risen to his feet to make amends for having smacked him in the early analysis (when Wee Fraser had put the toy pigs upside down), only to be head-butted for his pains by the unpleasant adolescent. But then, to his profound shame, he had responded by striking Wee Fraser on the chin, breaking his jaw.

  “I found him,” he said. “ I found him, and then . . .”

  Irene leaned forward. “You asked his forgiveness?”

  Dr Fairbairn looked miserable. “I wish I could say that I had.

  Alas, the truth is the rather to the contrary.”

  “How much to the contrary?” pressed Irene.

  “Completely,” said Dr Fairbairn.

  Irene held up a hand. “I do not want to hear what happened,”

  she said. “We can all make mistakes. We can all do things that we didn’t plan to do.”

  Dr Fairbairn looked at her with gratitude. Here was absolu-tion – of a sort. “Yes,” he said. “We all do things that we didn’t plan to do. How right you are.” He paused, and stood up. Moving to the window behind his desk, he looked out over the Queen Street Gardens. “Yes, I have done many things I did not intend to do. That is the human condition.”

  “Many things?” asked Irene.

  “Yes,” said Dr Fairbairn, turning round again. “Such as . . .”

  But then he stopped.

  Irene waited for him to continue, but Dr Fairbairn had become silent. He looked up at the ceiling, and Irene followed An Evening of Scottish Art 249

  his gaze. But there was nothing to be seen there, and so they both lowered their eyes.

  He is so unhappy, thought Irene. He is so unresolved.

  80. An Evening of Scottish Art

  Neither Matthew nor Pat said anything about the unfortunate incident in the bathroom, although neither of them was quick to forget it. Both learned something from the experience.

  Matthew now knew to lock the door and to remember that he was no longer alone in the flat. This meant that he should be careful about breaking out into song – as he occasionally liked to do – or uttering the odd mild expletive if he stubbed his toe on the corner of the kitchen dresser or if he dropped part of an egg shell into the omelette mixture. For her part, Pat learned to assume that a closed door meant that the bathroom was not free, and she learned, too, that Matthew was a sensitive person, easily embarrassed and not always able to articu-late the causes of his embarrassment. And for both of them, there was also the lesson that living together, even merely as flatmates, was a process of discovery. For although we are at our most secure – in one sense – in our own homes, we are also at our most vulnerable, for the social persona, the one we carry with us out into the world, cannot be worn at home all the time. That is where resides the real self, the self that can be so easily hurt.

  There were things about Matthew that Pat had not suspected.

  She had not imagined that he was a member of the Scotch Malt Whisky Society and received its newsletters with all those curious descriptions of the flavour of whiskies. She had paged through one of these which she found lying on the kitchen table and had been astonished by the terms used by the tasting panel. One whisky was described as smelling of school jotters; another smelled like a doctor’s bag (or what doctor’s bags used to smell like). She had never seen Matthew drink whisky, but he later 250 An Evening of Scottish Art

  explained to her that he had been given the membership by his father, who was an enthusiast of whisky.

  And then she had never seen Matthew reading Scottish Field before, but that is what he liked to do, sitting in a chair in the corner of the drawing room, paging through the glossy magazine. He liked the social pages, he said, with their pictures of people looking into the camera, smiling, happy to be included.

  “I’ve never been in,” he said to Pat. “Or never been in properly. My left shoulder was, once, when there was a photograph of a charity ball down in Ayrshire. I was standing just to the side of a group who were being photographed and you could see my shoulder. It was definitely me. I have a green formal kilt jacket, you see, and that was shown. It was quite clear, actually.”

  “That was bad luck,” said Pat.

  “Yes,” said Matthew. “You have to be somebody like Timothy Clifford to get into Scottish Field. Either that, or you have to know the photographers who take these things. I don’t.”

  Pat thought for a moment. “We could have an opening at the gallery. We could have a big event and ask all these people.

  Then, when they came, the photographers could hardly cut you out of your own party.”

  Matthew thought for a moment. “Yes, that’s quite a good idea.” He paused. “I hope that you don’t think I sit here and worry about not being in Scottish Field. I have got better things to think about, you know.”

  “Of course you have,” said Pat. “But should we do that?

  Should we have an opening?”

  “Yes,” said Matthew. “We could call it An Evening of Scottish Art. Let’s start drawing up the guest list soon. Who should we have?”

  “Well, we could invite Duncan Macmillan,” said Pat. “He’s written that book on Scottish art. He could come.”

  “Good idea,” said Matthew. “He’s very interesting. And then there’s James Holloway from the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. He lives near here, you know. And Richard and Francesca Calvocoressi. And Roddy Martine. Are you writing this down, Pat?”

  An Evening of Scottish Art 251

  They spent the next half hour composing the guest list, which eventually included two hundred names. “They won’t all come,”

  said Matthew, surveying the glittering list. “In fact, I bet that hardly anyone comes.”

  Pat looked at Matthew. There was a certain defeatism about him, which came out at odd moments. Defeatism can be a frustrating, unattractive quality, but in Matthew she found it to be rather different. The fact that Matthew thought that his ventures were destined to fail made her feel protective of him. He was such a nice person, she thought.

  He is never unkind; he never makes sharp comments about others. And there he is trying to be a bit more fashionable in that awful distressed-oatmeal cashmere sweater, and all the time he just misses it. Nobody wears distressed oatmeal, these days; it’s so . . . it
’s so yesterday. It’s so golf club.

  Matthew needed taking in hand, Pat thought. He needed somebody to sit down with him who could tell him not to try so hard, who could tell him that all that was required was a little help with one or two matters and that for the rest he was perfectly all right. But who could do that? Could she?

  Pat was thinking of that possibility when Matthew looked at his watch, rose to his feet, and remarked that they only had half an hour to get ready for dinner. Pat had forgotten, but now she remembered.

  That night they were due to go out for dinner with Leonie, the architect, and her friend, Babs. She had been invited as well, on the insistence of Leonie, although Matthew seemed a little bit doubtful about this.

  “She’s a rather unusual person,” he said hesitantly. “She has all these ideas about knocking down walls and open spaces. You know what architects are like. But I suspect that she’s a bit . . .

  well, I suspect that she’s a bit intense.”

  He paused, and looked up at the ceiling. “You may find that she’s a bit intense towards you. I don’t know. Maybe not. But you may find that.”

  “Intense, in what way?” asked Pat.

  “Just intense,” said Matthew. “You know what I mean.”

  252 At the Sardi

  Pat shook her head.

  “Well, anyway,” said Matthew. “I’m going to go and have a shower.”

  Pat blushed.

  81. At the Sardi

  The Caffe Sardi, an Italian restaurant on Forrest Road, was already quite busy when Pat and Matthew arrived for dinner.

  He had chosen the restaurant, which he particularly liked, and had left a message on Leonie’s answering machine telling her where they would meet.

  “I hope that she picked it up,” he said. “Some people don’t listen to their answering machines, you know.”

  “I do,” said Pat. “I listen to my voicemail every day. Once in the morning and then again at night.”

  Matthew looked thoughtful. “And do you get many messages?” he asked.

  “Quite a few,” said Pat. “Most of them aren’t very important, you know. ‘Meet me at six.’ That sort of thing.”

  “Meet whom?” he asked.

  Pat shrugged. “Oh, nobody in particular. That’s just a for instance.”

  “But sometimes there will be a message saying ‘Meet me’ or something like that?” persisted Matthew.

  Pat thought that there was no real point to Matthew’s questions. Sometimes he surprised her, with his opaque remarks, or with those Macgregor undershorts. That was odd. She wondered whether he was wearing them now; it was a disconcerting thought. “Yes,” said Pat. “Sometimes people ask me to meet them.”

  Matthew looked down at the tablecloth. He was about to say

  “Who?” but at that moment they were joined by Leonie and her friend Babs.

  “Have you guys been waiting long?” asked Leonie, as she At the Sardi 253

  took off her jacket and hung it over the back of a chair. “Babs and me walked.”

  Matthew thought: why can’t people distinguish between nominative and accusative any more? He wanted to say to Leonie: “Would you say me walked?” But he realised that he could not. People did not like being corrected, even when they were obviously wrong.

  He looked at Babs, who was now being introduced by Leonie.

  She was about the same age as Leonie, perhaps slightly older, but was more heavily-built. She had an open, rather flat face, but she was still attractive in an odd sort of way.

  Babs shook hands with Matthew and Pat. “How are you doing?” she said, glancing first at Matthew and then at Pat. She was thinking of something, thought Matthew. She’s wondering whether Pat and I are together. That’s what people do when they meet others, he thought. There’s an instant judgment, an instant assessment. In this case, the question was: is he? Is she?

  Perhaps I should say to her right now: “I’m not and she isn’t either.” What would be the result of that?

  The waitress gave them menus and they looked at them closely.

  “Babs doesn’t like anything with garlic in it,” said Leonie.

  “And Leo doesn’t like anything with capers,” said Babs, staring at the menu as if scrutinising it for offending items. “Nor mashed potato nor veal. In fact, little Miss Fussy is just a little on the picky side.”

  “Picky yourself,” retorted Leonie. “Oh, I like the look of that!

  That’s what I’m going to have.”

  Babs stared over Leonie’s shoulder. “Me too. Well spotted, Leo. And no garlic! No! No! No! Naughty garlic!”

  “What about you, Pat?” asked Matthew. “Why don’t you have one of those nice pizzas?”

  Leonie and Babs looked at Pat. Then Leonie turned to Matthew. “Let the poor girl choose,” she said in a mock-reproachful tone.

  “But she likes pizza,” said Matthew. “She always has.”

  “Okay,” said Babs. “But she can say that herself, can’t she?”

  254 At the Sardi

  Leonie nodded her agreement. “Men sometimes think that women can’t make their own choices in life. I’ve noticed that quite a lot, actually. Particularly in this country.” Matthew felt his face becoming warm. “Why do you say that?” he asked. “And why this country?”

  Leonie smiled. “It’s just what I’ve picked up,” she said. “I see a lot of men giving orders to women – telling them what to do.”

  “And you didn’t see that in Australia?” asked Matthew. He was aware that Babs was watching him as he spoke. She seemed vaguely amused by his response, as if he was behaving exactly as she had imagined he would.

  “Oh, bits of Australia are like that,” said Leonie. “There are places out in the boondocks where you get the real ockers, but things are very different in Melbourne and Sydney.”

  “I see,” said Matthew.

  “I haven’t found that many men have tried to tell me what to do,” said Pat suddenly. “And Matthew certainly doesn’t. Even though he’s my boss, he doesn’t do that.”

  Babs turned her gaze from Matthew to Pat. “Well, that’s very good to hear,” she said.

  “Yes,” said Pat. “And actually, if you come to think of it, there are plenty of women who tell men what to do. I think it’s men who have got the problem these days.”

  “You can say that again,” said Leonie. “Or, rather, you can say the last bit again.”

  Matthew now decided that it was time to move the conversation forward. He turned to Babs. “Are you an architect too?”

  he asked.

  Babs shook her head. “I used to be a designer,” she said. “I was a designer when I lived in Milan. But I was one of those people whose hobby rather took over and became their job. So I changed.”

  “Babs has always been good with cars,” said Leonie. “She has a real talent.”

  Babs acknowledged the compliment with an inclination of the head. “Well, put it this way, I can talk to cars,” she said. “Cars and me – we’re on the same wavelength.”

  Misunderstandings 255

  Cars and I, thought Matthew.

  “So now I’ve opened a new business,” Babs went on. “I’ve started a small panel-beating shop – you know, car bodywork repair. I fix cars up.”

  Leonie raised a finger in the air. “But it’s a very special business, this one,” she said. “It’s just for women who have dented their car. They can take it to Babs for confidential repair. Men needn’t even know about it.”

  “Yes,” said Babs. “It’s called Ladies who Crash. And I can tell you something – I’m busy. Boy, am I kept busy!”

  Matthew was very wary. “But this implies that women are worse drivers than men,” he said. “Whereas all the evidence goes the other way. Women are safer drivers than men. All the accident statistics show that.”

  “But they can’t reverse,” said Babs. She spoke in a matter-of-fact way, as if enunciating an uncontroversial truth. But then she added: “Well, I supp
ose, neither can Jim.”

  “Who’s Jim?” asked Matthew.

  “My husband,” said Babs. “Bless him!”

  82. Misunderstandings

  Dinner that evening at the Caffe Sardi was not a protracted event. Matthew tried valiantly to keep the conversation going into a second cup of post-prandial coffee, but Leonie announced that she had an important site meeting the next day with a demanding client and she wanted an early night. And Jim, Babs announced, did not like her to be too late.

  “He worries about me,” she explained, looking at her watch.

  “He worries when I go out.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Matthew apologetically. “I would have asked him, too. It’s just that I thought . . .” He left the sentence unfinished. Both Leonie and Babs were staring at him, and Pat, embarrassed, was looking up at the ceiling.

  “You thought what?” asked Babs.

  256 Misunderstandings

  Matthew swallowed. “I thought that you and Leonie were . . .

  were friends.”

  “But we are,” said Babs. “We’ve been friends for ages, haven’t we Leo?”

  “Yes,” said Leonie, still glaring at Matthew. “Did you think . . .”

  “You didn’t!” said Babs, seemingly amused.

  Matthew laughed nervously. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I suppose I did rather assume that. It’s just that when you came into the restaurant . . .” He glanced at Pat, but she was still looking up at the ceiling.

  “Yes,” pressed Babs. “We came in. So what?”

  “Perhaps he thought that you looked a bit . . .” offered Leonie.

  Babs leaned forward and pointed a finger at Matthew’s chest.

  It was an aggressive gesture, but she was smiling as she spoke.

  “It’s because I fix cars. Is that it? Well, you work in a gallery, don’t you? That’s a job for a sensitive man. And you don’t get many sensitive men playing rugby, do you?” She laughed, and was quickly echoed by Leonie.

  “No,” said Leonie. “Can you imagine it?”