Getting a Life

by Helen Simpson

  “The Selkirk Grace,” he said, waving his soupspoon at her. “So called because Robert Burns repeated those lines when he dined with the Earl of Selkirk. Although the fact of the matter is, he didn’t write them, they were around well before he was born and were known as the Covenanter’s Grace.”

  “How interesting,” said Nicola, and then, in case that sounded satirical, “I love Scotland but I’ve never been to Selkirk,” which was inane but somehow less hostile.

  “Unfortunately my wife has just come down with the flu,” said Donald Forfar when Nicola inquired about her absence. She herself never got ill. Apart from three months’ maternity leave around each of her labors, she had never taken a day off sick. Touch wood.

  It turned out that Donald was a fan of Robert Burns. He was reading a new biography of Burns at the moment.

  “Oh dear,” said Nicola, whose busy life did not allow for this, although she always read at least two books when they went away on holiday and one of her New Year’s resolutions had been to join a book club. “I really must read more.”

  “But as a pleasure,” smiled Donald. “You make it sound like a duty.”

  Yes well, thought Nicola. The packed quality of her life meant that it was physically, mentally impossible for her to sit inside the minute like a thin-skinned raindrop proud on a nasturtium leaf, impossible for her to sit still and read a book. Her nights were necessarily short and her sleep was a dreamless passing out. No drowsing in the morning was possible, ever.

  Iain Buchanan was leaning forwards now to talk to Donald Forfar.

  “That’s right, we moved six months ago,” he was saying.

  “It’s a mansion, so I’ve heard,” said Donald Forfar. “Acres of greensward.”

  “Och, it’s nice for Susan and the boys to have a bit of a garden to run around in,” said Iain. “They love the tennis court. Talking of which. You know Roderick MacKenzie? Excuse me, Nicola. Perhaps you know him too? Investments at the Lombard Street branch of the Bank of Auld Scotia?”

  “Married to Lucy MacKenzie over at Leviathan?”

  “That’s the one. Dropped down dead during a game of tennis, the day after Boxing Day. Heart attack.”

  “Yes. Four children. Shocking.”

  “He was from Aberdeen originally, wasn’t he?”

  “I thought she was Irish.”

  “No, no, she’s English. Very English.”

  “And what is this?” said Brian Mahon, leaning across the space left by Donald Forfar’s absent wife, peering across Iain Buchanan and joining in. “Are we now reduced to comparing the English, the Irish and the Scots? Is that the game?” He looked fairly drunk already, his color high and his eyes blue as the sea.

  “Donald was just saying how industrious us Scots are compared to the feckless feckin Irish,” said Iain. “And how we carry our drink better too.”

  “Don’t listen to them, now, Nicola,” said Brian, turning his dark-fringed blue gaze on her. “We have the better poetry and music. What’s Burns to Yeats?”

  “We’ve got Shakespeare,” said Nicola, but they ignored her.

  “The Irish,” said Iain, “not to put too fine a point on it, are no so gifted in the intellectual department.”

  “The Scots are always thinking of number one, Nicola,” said Brian. “It’s impossible for a Scotsman to fall in love.”

  “Och aye, that describes Robert Burns perfectly,” hooted Iain.

  “Nature over nurture,” mused Donald Forfar. It was rather sweet, thought Nicola, the way he spoke like a schoolmaster. “He was steeped in the disciplines of survival and repression,” he continued, “but still the poetry in him triumphed.”

  “Education,” declared Iain, swirling his whiskey glass, then sniffing it. “Application. They’re the reason why Scotland’s best.”

  At the mention of education, Nicola began to salivate like Pavlov’s dog, and was just preparing to quiz these men about the schools their children attended when she was deflected by Brian Mahon.

  “Scots on the make,” he scoffed. “That’s what they do, Nicola, they emigrate as soon as they can in order to better themselves, even if it’s only down south to Guildford like Iain here, then they lecture anyone who’ll bear it on the virtues of the auld country.”

  “Of course Scotland stayed with the traditional teaching methods at the time England abandoned them,” mused Donald Forfar. “And the presence of an educated working class has meant we have a more genuinely democratic society than the English in consequence.”

  “Donald went to Fettes,” said Iain Buchanan dryly.

  “Oh, Fettes!” said Nicola, riveted.

  Before she could cross-question him about old schoolmates, however, she was interrupted by someone in a kilt shouting for them all to stand for the arrival of the haggis. She glanced at her watch during the general upheaval this involved. Gone nine. The twins would have been asleep for over an hour. Then there was an awful whining noise as a piper threaded his way through the tables, followed by a chef carrying something beige on a silver plate, then a third playactor holding a bottle of whiskey aloft in each hand. These three certainly took their time, apparently pacing themselves by the slow handclap that accompanied them to the top table.

  “Will you look there, Donald,” said Iain Buchanan, craning to see the hefty old Scot rising to his feet on the top table’s dais as the rest of the room sat down again. “It’s old Shoogie Henderson who’ll be giving the address to the haggis. He was in with the bricks, right enough. When’s he due to retire, d’you think?”

  “He’s past sixty,” said Donald, pouring whiskey into the little silver quaichs and passing them round the table.

  “That’s the trouble with this organization,” fumed Iain, tipping the contents of his quaich into his mouth. “Nae movement. Blocked at the top.”

  “I prefer the Tamdhu,” said Donald. “The Speyside malt is softer.”

  Iain’s face was redder than it had been an hour ago. He held his quaich out for a refill. He was at that crucial age, somewhere around thirty-seven or thirty-eight, when his work life must either take off very soon with the rocket fuel of promotion and increased power or stick for good in a rut until retirement age.

  Up at the crackling microphone Shoogie Henderson cleared his resented old throat, and some sort of hush crept by degrees across the huge room. Then, in the manner of Father Christmas, he read:

  Fair fa’ your honest, sonsie face,

  Great Chieftan o’ the Puddin-race!

  Aboon them a’ ye tak your place,

  Painch, tripe, or thairm:

  Weel are ye worthy of a grace

  As lang’s my airm.

  And it was as lang as his airm, too. On and on it went, incomprehensible to Nicola, and smug and ridiculous.

  “ ‘His knife see Rustic-labour dight,’ ” continued old Shoogie with relish, “ ‘An’ cut you up wi’ ready sleight . . .’ ”

  He paused and smiled at the kilted loon beside him, who seized a knife and plunged it histrionically into the haggis. A cheer went up.

  “What exactly is in it?” asked Nicola as a plate of tweedy brownish morsels was placed in front of her.

  “Och, it’s just a sausage,” said Donald, brushing her arm as he reached for the whiskey. “But they use the stomach bag as casing rather than the more usual intestinal tubing.”

  “But what’s in it?” said Nicola, meeting his eyes, which were like black glass and slightly hooded. “I want to know what it’s made of.”

  “The liver, lights and windpipe of a sheep,” said Donald, glittering at her.

  “Right,” said Nicola. “Thank you.”

  “Over here with the tatties and neeps,” Iain Buchanan sang out to a waiter.

  On every table Nicola could see men in kilts smacking their lips and going for seconds. She tasted a scrap of haggis and found it both mealy and salty. An ocean of alcohol was being drained in nips and sips and gulps in a steamingly hot room on a thousand empty stomachs. Faces were
red and damp, and drastically split with laughter. The noise was tremendous. It was almost ten o’clock, Nicola saw with another covert glance at her watch, and they weren’t even on the main course, the haggis being in the nature of an appetizer as far she could tell.

  “Here we are, Nicola,” said Iain Buchanan as a bevy of Scottish country dancers trooped onto the raised square platform in the middle of the room. “Here comes the heedrum hodrum. Listen out for the noise they make, one or the other of them will give a wee hooch now and then to show their particular enjoyment.”

  “I’ve not seen dancing at a Burns Supper before,” mused Donald. “It’s obviously no expense spared tonight.”

  The young dancers were a sad, odd-looking crew, and the platform shook as they leaped and jumped. Hi-yeuch! they went in a scrubbed desperate way, baring their teeth brightly and panting. It was almost as sexless as Irish dancing, thought Nicola, with the upper body having nothing to do with the rest, as if some radical divorce went on at hip level. She looked around her. All this archness and stiffness and verbosity! You shuddered to think of bedtime.

  She eyed her table, which had temporarily given up on conversation because of the heedrum hodrum, and considered the men. Charlie was still a main contender, though he must have put on twenty pounds since the summer. Iain wasn’t bad-looking, but for some reason he came nowhere. Tolerable, she smiled to herself, but not handsome enough to tempt me. Brian Mahon now, although well into his fifties, was obviously still interested, whereas his wife, just as obviously, had the dusty look of one who has no desires of her own. No, it would have to be this man Donald Forfar, he was definitely the favorite, although his thick black hair looked worryingly turfy. She was fascinated by the way the shadow on his jaw was growing darker as the evening progressed. At this rate he’d have a beard by midnight. He had drawn his chair out a little in order to watch the dancing and Nicola was able to steal a look at his stout calves in their woolly kneesocks, and at his big bare knees.

  The meal dragged on, through warm sliced meat, then some sort of muesli concoction, until at last they reached the coffee stage. Not long now, thought Nicola, unwrapping a mint. It was a nasty shock, then, when Donald, turning a genial eye upon her, declared, “Now at last the evening proper can begin!”

  “But that business before the haggis,” faltered Nicola, “that poem, wasn’t that it?”

  “No, no,” laughed Donald. “The heart of a Burns Night is the Immortal Memory. Someone has to make a speech in praise of Burns, and that’s what it’s called—the Immortal Memory.”

  “Look who’s giving it tonight,” crowed Brian Mahon from further up the table. “It’s Rory McCrindle. Have you seen his place in Farnham? Tartan sofas, tartan carpets, views of the heather-covered Highlands. It’s like Rob Roy’s cave.”

  “Nothing to Iain’s mansion in Guildford, so I’ve been told,” said Donald. “I hear it has a swimming pool, Iain; am I right?”

  I’m not sure I’ll be able to last through this, thought Nicola. I’ve had enough. Across the table, Charlie winked at her. He looked red and pie-eyed. A few minutes earlier she had heard him ask their waiter for more walt miskey. No help from that quarter, she thought, wondering how she would get him home.

  “And this Immortal Memory event,” said Nicola. “Roughly how, er, long does it tend to go on?”

  “Och, the Immortal Memory is only the start of it,” said Iain. “Don’t worry. You’ll love it.”

  “The Immortal Memory is a moral dose of salts,” said Donald. “Once a year you listen to the story of Burns’s life and poetry, then you examine your own life in the light of his. It’s an improving speech, Nicola.”

  “So he’s like a saint?” said Nicola.

  “Not exactly a saint,” said Donald.

  “ ‘A man’s a man for a’ that,’ ” burst in Iain.

  “ ‘The social, friendly, honest man,’ ” rolled out Donald, “ ‘Whate’er he be.’ ”

  “ ‘For a’ that,’ ” said Iain again.

  “Yes, the English all know bits of Shakespeare,” said Nicola. “ ‘To be or not to be,’ ‘Is this a dagger which I see before me.’ But we don’t try to copy his life, leaving Anne Hathaway in the lurch. With twins, too.”

  “Oor Rab had mair twins than Shakespeare,” said Iain aggressively. “He had them coming oot his ears.”

  “No, Nicola, it’s the litany of his life which has taken hold,” said Donald. “Barefoot, box bed, homespun, peat fires by which he listened to Old Betty’s ghost stories, hard labor on father’s failing farm from age of seven. They were poor but they were happy. See ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night,’ which is the great Scottish Family Values poem.”

  “Aye one for the lassies, but,” said Iain.

  “Oh, aye one for the lassies,” agreed Donald with a nasal whine of mock disapprobation. “Enough babies fathered to get him denounced from the kirk pulpit and make him consider sailing for Jamaica . . . But in the nick of time a publisher takes up his collection of dialect poems and they are a huge hit, with everyone buying them from the crème de la crème of Edinburgh society . . .”

  “Like your good self, Donald,” remarked Iain.

  “. . . from the literati in Edinburgh to the farm laborers and maidservants for miles around,” continued Donald mildly. “Highland Mary dies in childbirth, his wean of course . . .”

  “But he married bonny Jean thingwy, right enough,” said Iain.

  “Yes, he marries faithful Jean Armour, mother of nine of his children . . .”

  “Oh, that’s why the pudding was called Jean’s Brose,” interrupted Nicola. “That muesli thing.”

  “. . . fails at farming, gets a job as an exciseman, gets ill,” continued Donald, “dies aged thirty-seven.”

  “Thirty-seven!” exclaimed Nicola. “Shakespeare was over fifty.”

  “Burns had more twins, though,” insisted Iain.

  “Not only that, Nicola,” Donald continued, “but the Immortal Memory will be built round one of several well-worn themes.”

  “Burns Mark One,” cut in Iain, “the Ploughman Poet.”

  “ ‘To a Mountain Daisy: On turning one down with the Plough,’ ” said Donald. “Burns Mark Two, the Lover. Aye one for the lassies, heh heh. ‘O my Luve’s like a red, red rose.’ Burns Mark Three, the convivial man . . .”

  “. . . Burns was nae an alkie,” glossed Iain. “Enjoyed a wee dram with his friends but did not get regularly paralettic.”

  “ ‘We are na fou, we’re nae that fou,’ ” quoted Donald.

  “And so on,” said Iain with an air of resignation, pouring more whiskey. “But look, McCrindle’s on his way up to the microphone.”

  It was not really possible to see the man, so far away was the top table. He was a tartan ant in a tartan formicary.

  “Of course, Burns was—not to put too fine a point on it—a peasant,” came his amplified voice.

  “Burns Mark One,” hissed Donald and Iain each side of her, one in each ear.

  She turned off, as she did when she had to sit through an opera. She decided to regard this as relaxation time. Looking across the table at Charlie, she felt relief again at not having to talk to the wives. She knew their type, particularly Brian Mahon’s wife, the older one, whose eye she caught for a moment before looking away. Oh yes, that one had a look that said, You, with your four-wheel drive and your greedy ways, I don’t know why you bother to have children if you don’t look after them.

  She tuned in to Rory McCrindle to see how it was going.

  “As teenagers Burns and his young friends formed a club, the Tarbolton Bachelors,” he announced with laborious pleasure, “the rules laying down no admittance to snobs—here I quote— ‘and especially no mean-spirited, worldly mortal, whose only will is to heap up money.’ ”

  A ripple of laughter swept through the room like a gust of wind in a barley field.

  “ ‘Why is the bard unfitted for the world,’ ” he continued, “ ‘yet has so keen a relish of i
ts pleasures?’ ”

  Well, quite, thought Nicola. Absolutely. There was her daughter Jade insisting that she didn’t want a life like hers, but where did she think it all came from? Her latest talk was of being an events organizer, of how she was going to have a portfolio career and lots of fun. Just to irritate Nicola (Nicola felt sure), she wore a T-shirt with a slogan across her breasts—“ALL OF THIS and my dad’s loaded too.” Would she really rather be like that woman, Brian Mahon’s wife, whose high point of the year was probably masterminding her fifties-style turkey-and-sprouts family Christmas? Whereas she, Nicola, had been able to deal with the festive season by sweeping the whole lot off to Lapland. Granted it had been a nightmare to pack for with the nanny back off to Sheffield on Christmas Eve, then Chloe had broken the little finger on her left hand slipping on a patch of ice at Rovaniemi airport, but still it had been amazing. All that snow, and the children had adored the sleigh ride with Santa’s elves.

  Now he was quoting from one of the ploughman poet’s letters. “ ‘If miry ridges and dirty dunghills are to engross the best part of my soul immortal, I had better been a rook or a magpie and then I should not have been plagued with any ideas superior to the breaking of clods and picking up of grubs.’ ”

  Home was a wasteland during the week anyway, as she’d discovered during her maternity leaves, just nannies or women like Deborah Mahon for company. Your eyes went dull inside three days, your thighs turned to Turkish Delight, you put on half a stone a week. She loved her children more than life itself (forced as one was into Goneril-and-Regan hyperbole), and so did Charlie in his way; but, like him, she preferred to subcontract out much of the work of parenthood. She had a wonderful nanny, worth her weight in gold, she’d had her for four years now and dreaded to think what would happen when she left.