Love Over Scotland 4ss-3

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “Well,” she said as she drew level with him on the stairs,

  “here you are, sitting on the stairs. And if I knew your name –

  which I don’t – I would be able to say hallo whoever you are.

  But I don’t – unless you care to tell me.”

  Bertie looked up at Antonia. This was the lady who lived upstairs, the woman whom his mother had described as “yet another frightful old blue stocking”. Bertie had been puzzled by this; now here was an opportunity for clarification.

  “I’m called Bertie,” he said politely.

  “And I’m Antonia,” said Antonia.

  Bertie squinted at Antonia. “I think my Mummy must be wrong about you,” he said.

  340 On the Stairs

  “Oh yes?” said Antonia. “What does Mummy say about me?”

  “She said that you wear blue stockings,” said Bertie. “But I don’t think you do, do you?”

  There was a sharp intake of breath from Antonia. “Oh really?”

  she said. “You’re right. Mummy has got it wrong.” She paused.

  “Tell Mummy that you asked me about that, and I said to tell her that I don’t wear blue stockings. Will you tell her that?”

  “Yes,” said Bertie. “If she listens. Sometimes she doesn’t listen to what I say. Or what Daddy says either.”

  Antonia smiled. “That’s sad,” she said. “But surely somebody listens to you, Bertie. What about at school? Surely your teacher listens to what you have to say.”

  Bertie looked down at his feet. “Miss Harmony listens sometimes,” he said. “But not always. She didn’t listen to me when I said that I didn’t want to be Captain von Trapp in The Sound of Music. She made me be Captain von Trapp.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” said Antonia. “But perhaps there wasn’t anybody else who wanted to play the part. Maybe that’s why you had to do it.”

  “But there were plenty of people who wanted to be Captain von Trapp,” said Bertie. “There’s a boy called Tofu. He really wanted to be Captain von Trapp. But she wouldn’t let him.”

  “But I’m sure that he would understand.”

  Bertie shook his head. “No,” he said. “He didn’t. And there’s a girl called Olive. She wanted to be Maria, but wasn’t allowed to be. She didn’t understand either.”

  “Dear me,” said Antonia. “But I’m sure everything will go well in the end.”

  “No it won’t,” said Bertie. “And now Tofu and Olive both hate me.”

  Antonia stared down at Bertie. He was a most unusual child, she thought; rather appealing, in a funny sort of way, and she found herself feeling sorry for him. These little spats of childhood loomed terribly large in one’s life at the time, even if they tended to disappear very quickly. It was not always fun being a child, just as it had not always been fun being a medieval Scottish saint. Poor little boy!

  On the Stairs 341

  “Well, cheer up, Bertie,” said Antonia. “Even if things aren’t going well in The Sound of Music, isn’t Mummy going to have a new baby? Doesn’t that make you excited? You and Daddy must be very pleased about that.”

  Bertie shook his head. “I don’t think that Daddy is pleased,”

  he said. “He said that the new baby is a mistake. That’s what he said. I heard him telling Mummy that.”

  Antonia raised an eyebrow. “Oh well,” she said. “Everybody will love him or her. I’m sure they will.”

  “And then Daddy said we should call the new baby Hugo,”

  went on Bertie.

  “That’s a nice name!” said Antonia quickly.

  “Because that’s the name of Mummy’s friend,” said Bertie.

  “He’s called Dr Fairbairn. Dr Hugo Fairbairn.”

  Antonia bit her lip. Oh goodness! One should not encourage this sort of thing, but she could not resist another question, just one more question.

  “And Dr Fairbairn,” she asked. “What does he think of all this?”

  “He’s mad,” said Bertie. “Really mad.”

  “I see,” said Antonia. “Well I suppose that . . .” She tailed off. It was easy to imagine him being angry, he probably did not plan for things to work out this way.

  Now Bertie, who was enjoying his conversation with Antonia, came up with a final piece of information. He had been told of his mother’s pregnancy one day in the Floatarium. Irene had been in her flotation chamber, speaking to Bertie, who was sitting outside, and that was where she had told him of the imminent arrival of a new sibling. Bertie, whose understanding of the facts of life was rudimentary, had misinterpreted her and had concluded that his mother had become pregnant in the flotation chamber itself.

  “Mummy became pregnant in the Floatarium,” Bertie now explained. “That’s where it happened.”

  Antonia picked up her shopping bag. This was wonderful.

  She had a great deal to tell Domenica when she came back.

  Why did she bother going to the Malacca Straits when all this 342 In the Ossian Chair

  was going on downstairs? Anthropology, she thought, like charity, surely begins at home.

  109. In the Ossian Chair

  Antonia entered Domenica’s flat and thought about her encounter with Bertie on the stair. It had been a strange experience – amusing, of course, with all those innocent disclosures

  – but there was something more to it, and that was puzzling her. At one level their conversation had been exactly the sort of talk that one might expect to have with a boy of – what was he?

  six, at the most, she thought – and yet there had been another level to it altogether, and this had made her feel an extraordinary warmth towards him. Yes, that was it: the warmth.

  She made her way into the kitchen, dropped her shopping bag on the floor near the cooker, and sat down in the chair near the window. It was a high-ish chair, plain in its lines, and covered with a Macpherson tartan throw. Domenica was not a Macpherson, but a Macdonald. Why should she have a Macpherson throw? Was it the sheer prettiness of that particular tartan with its soft greys and wine-red stripe? But then it occurred to her that there was another reason. Domenica had many enthusiasms, but one of them, Antonia recalled, was for the works of Ossian, or, should one say, the works of James Macpherson. That must be it.

  Antonia sat back in the Ossian chair and remembered. It had been right there – in that very spot – eight or nine years ago –

  and she had been in Edinburgh to look something up in the National Library; something to do with early Scottish monastic practices, if she remembered correctly; but the memory of what it was, like the memory of the early Scottish monastic practices themselves, had faded. After her visit to the Library she had come here, to Scotland Street, to drink a cup of coffee with Domenica and to seek solace. Antonia’s marriage was not going well then and she had wanted to talk about that, but had not In the Ossian Chair 343

  raised it in the end because Domenica had been in full flight about Ossian.

  “In the scrap between Dr Johnson and Macpherson, I’m on Macpherson’s side,” pronounced Domenica. “He had seen the subjugation of his world. The burnings. The interdiction of the kilt, language, everything. All he wanted to do was to show that there was Gaelic culture that was capable of great art. And all those dry pedants in London could do was to say: where are the manuscripts?”

  “Well, I suppose if one claims to have discovered a Homer, it might be reasonable to ask . . .”

  “Not a bit of it,” said Domenica. “The poetry was there, passed from mouth to mouth. Not everybody worships the written word, you know. And that Dr Johnson . . . Do you know what he said about the stick that he carried down in London?

  He said that it was just in case he should bump into Macpherson and would have the chance to wallop him with it! What a thing to say! A typical Cockney bully.”

  “Macpherson could look after himself. All that money he made . . .”

  “No different from the money anybody else made. Better, in fact. Look at
the fortunes that were to be made from slave-trading and Jamaican sugar plantations and all the rest.

  Macpherson’s fortune was less tainted than the fortunes of many of those strutting Highland grandees. Why begrudge him his Adam mansion? And, anyway, even if he invented most of the Ossian stuff, it was great literature by any standards. Does it matter whose pen it came from?”

  They had moved off the subject of Ossian and on to other controversial cases: to that of Grey Owl, the bogus Indian chief who was really only Archie Belaney from Sussex, or somewhere like that; to Lobsang Rampa who claimed to have been a Tibetan monk, but who was really a man called Cyril Hoskins, from Devon; to Budu Svanidze and his memoirs of his Uncle Joe (Joseph Stalin).

  Such conversations! Hour after hour they had passed together

  – Antonia and Domenica – and much of what had been said had been forgotten, or remembered only in part. When her friend 344 In the Ossian Chair

  came back, as she shortly would, then they would doubtless have many more such discussions, especially as they would now be neighbours. And they usually agreed with one another in the end, even after great differences of opinion had been discovered.

  She thought back to that little boy, to Bertie, and now she saw what it was about him that made him so appealing: he spoke the truth. Candour was so attractive because we were so accustomed now to obfuscation and deceit, to what they called spin. Everything about our world was becoming so superficial. All around us there were actors. Politicians were actors, keeping to a script, condescending to us with their brief sound-bites, employing all sorts of smoke and mirrors to prevent their ordinary failings from being exposed. And rather than say yes, things have gone wrong and let’s find out why, they would side-step and weave their way past the traps set for them by equally evasive opponents.

  Light, clarity, integrity. Every so often one saw them, and in such surprising places. So she had seen it in that peculiar conversation with the little boy on the stair. She had seen candour and honesty and utter transparency. But you had to be a child to be like that today, because all about us was the most pervasive cynicism; a cynicism that eroded everything with its superficiality and its sneers. And a little child might remind us of what it is to be straightforward, to be filled with love, and with puzzlement.

  She arose from the chair and looked out of the kitchen window. The sky was perfectly empty now, filled with light; the rooftops, grey-slated, sloping, pursued angles to each other, led the eye away. When Domenica came back, Antonia thought, I shall do something to show her how much I value our friendship. And Angus Lordie, too. He’s a lonely man, and a peculiar one, but I can show him friendship and consideration too. And could I go so far as to love him? She thought carefully. Women always do this, she said to herself. Men don’t know it, but we do. We think very carefully about a man, about his qualities, his behaviour, everything. And then we fall in love.

  She thought about Angus Lordie, standing as she was in front of the window. And then, at exactly half past four, she came to her decision.

  110. Domenica talks to Dilly

  When Dilly Emslie went upstairs to the coffee room at Ottakars Bookshop, she was concerned that she might not find a seat, as it was busier than usual. What had brought people out on a Tuesday morning was not clear to her; the town seemed bustling, and even George Street was thronged with shoppers. But they were well-behaved shoppers, who did not push and shove, as shoppers did on Princes Street, but moved aside graciously to allow others to pass, lifting their hats where appropriate, making sure that nobody felt that he or she was about to be crowded off the pavement and into the road. Even the motorists, contending for the scarce parking places in the middle of the road, would concede a space if they saw another car about to turn in, gesturing with a friendly flick of the wrist for the other driver to go ahead. It was just as life in Edinburgh should be ( c.1950).

  Dilly ordered a pot of coffee for two and found a table. She looked about her, glanced idly at a magazine which had been left behind by a previous customer, and began her wait. This was not long; barely five minutes later into the coffee room came Domenica Macdonald, smart in her newly-acquired Thai silk trouser-suit, her face and her forearms deeply tanned by exposure to the sun. Dilly rose to greet her long-absent but now-returned friend. She was not quite sure what to say. If she said, simply: “You’re back!” it would come out in a surprised tone, because she had half-expected Domenica not to return. And a simpler “Hallo” would clearly be inadequate to mark return after several months in the Malacca Straits. And of course she could not say: “You’ve caught the sun”, because that would be on the same level of triteness as the late President Nixon’s words on being taken to the Great Wall of China (“This surely is a great wall.”). So she said: “Domenica!”, which was just right for the circumstances.

  When two friends meet for the first time in months, there is usually a fair amount to be discussed. How much more so if one of the friends has spent those months in a remote spot, the guest of pirates, living amongst them; and yet that was not the first topic of discussion. First there were books to be talked about: 346 Domenica talks to Dilly

  what was new, what was worth reading, and what could safely be ignored.

  Domenica confessed that she had read very little in the village.

  “I had my Proust with me,” she said. “The Scott-Moncrieff translation, of course. But I must admit that I got as far as volume four and no further. I also had Anna Karenina in reserve, and of course I always take Seth’s A Suitable Boy with me in the hope that this will be the year that I actually read past page forty. But, alas, I did not. It’s a wonderful book, though, and I shall certainly read it one of these days. I carry it, you see, in optimism.”

  “Rather like A Brief History of Time,” observed Dilly.

  “Everybody has that on their bookshelves, but very few people have read it. Virtually nobody, I gather.”

  The conversation continued in this vein for a while, and then Dilly, reaching forward to pour a fresh cup of coffee, said: “Now, what about the pirates?” She spoke hesitantly, as it was she who had urged Domenica to go out to the Malacca Straits in the first place and she felt a certain responsibility for the expedition. It was, in fact, a matter of great relief to her that her friend had returned safely to Edinburgh.

  “Oh yes,” said Domenica. “The pirates. Well, they were very hospitable – in their way. And I certainly found out a great deal.”

  Dilly waited expectantly. What exactly had Domenica seen, she wondered. And had it changed her?

  “I spent a lot of time on their matrilineal succession patterns,”

  said Domenica. “And I also unearthed some rather interesting information about domestic economy matters. Who does the shopping and matters like that.”

  “It must have been fascinating,” said Dilly. “And the pirates themselves? What were they like?”

  “Smallish, for the most part,” said Domenica dryly. “I was a bit taller than most of them. Small, wiry people, usually with tattoos. Their tattoos, by the way, would make an interesting study. They were mostly dragons and the like – more or less as one would expect – but then I came across quite a number with very interesting contemporary motifs. Fascinating, really.”

  “Such as?” asked Dilly.

  Domenica talks to Dilly 347

  “Well, mostly pictures by Jack Vettriano,” said Domenica.

  “The Singing Butler is very popular out there. The pirate chief had it on his back. I noticed it immediately.”

  “How extraordinary,” remarked Dilly.

  They were both silent as they thought about the implications of this. Then Domenica continued: “Right at the end of my stay I followed the pirates, you know. I followed them all the way to a little town down the coast. They tied up outside a warehouse, a sort of godown, as they call them out there.”

  “And?” said Dilly.

  Domenica smiled. “Well, I crept up the jetty and managed to find a small win
dow I could look through. I had my friend, Henry, with me. He gave me a leg-up so that I could look through the window.”

  There was now complete silence, not only at their table, but at neighbouring tables, where they had overheard the conversation.

  “The window was rather dirty,” Domenica went on, “so I had to give it a wipe. But once I had done that, I could see perfectly well what was going on inside.”

  348 Matthew Bears Gifts

  Dilly held her breath.

  The denouement came quickly. “It was a pirate CD factory,”

  said Domenica. “That’s what they did, those pirates of mine.

  They made pirate CDs.”

  For a moment nobody said anything. Then Domenica began to laugh, and the laughter spread. “It was terribly funny,” she said. “I had imagined that they were still holding up ships and so on. But they’ve adapted really well to the new global economy.”

  “And the CDs?” asked Dilly. “What sort of pirate CDs were they making?”

  “Mostly Italian tenors,” said Domenica. “As far as I could see.

  But I noticed some Scottish Chamber Orchestra recordings and one or two other things.” She paused. “I didn’t see The Pirates of Penzance . . .”

  This was tremendously funny, and they both laughed, as did one or two people at neighbouring tables who had heard the joke and who were, strictly speaking, not entitled to laugh.

  111. Matthew Bears Gifts

  That afternoon, Matthew closed his gallery early – at two o’clock, in fact. He had sold two paintings at lunch time – one an early Tim Cockburn, painted during his Italian period, depicting an Umbrian pergola – and the other a luminous study of light and land by James Howie. He had felt almost reluctant to let the paintings go, as he had placed them on the wall immediately opposite his desk and had become very fond of them.