‘Cheers,’ said Nicola, who knew this man slightly and liked him, his sharpness and frankness.
‘Slanjiva,’ he replied, or something like it.
She was aware of Donald Forfar on her right, a strong thick-set presence, the sort of build that looked good in a kilt. Whereas tall lean men like Iain Buchanan were far better off in jeans. She was about to turn and introduce herself but then Iain was tapping her arm.
‘Here’s Torquil Cameron now,’ he said, directing her gaze towards the top table on its platform hundreds of metres away from them. ‘He’ll be giving the welcome and he’ll take his time because he’s a big balloon, but then he’ll say grace and we can all get started.’
‘Oh good,’ said Nicola.
It was very hot. She picked up the menu to fan herself, and her mind stretched back through the packed day. Every minute had been spoken for. Her chargeable hours were on target so far this year but it was a constant battle. She hadn’t managed a full half-hour with the children this morning; it couldn’t be helped but it made her feel a bit sick considering she was out tonight again for the second time this week and it was only Wednesday. Jade was so sarcastic these days but she liked the benefits, the good school, the nice holidays. She, Nicola, would make up that twenty-minute shortfall, she would squeeze it in somehow tomorrow.
She took a sip of wine and immediately the alcohol rose up behind her face to somewhere at eyebrow level and she thought, that’s hit the spot. The one thing all us hard-working and often successful people can’t have, she realised as she gazed around her at the sea of heated faces, is TIME. She took another sip and felt a number of tiny muscles in her shoulders relax like a sigh. That’s it, she decided. Water from now on or I’ll never last.
It made her crisp with irritation, that she could have arrived half an hour later and no harm done. But that’s the deal, she reminded herself. She had always to be thinking ahead. That was what she had to do. She was unable to sit inside the minute; it was a joke in their family that she couldn’t sit still. She had a beautiful house and she was never in it. She knew what the children were doing at every hour of the day, and she wasn’t there. She kept it all up in the air, she never lost her grip. So much so that it would be positively dangerous for her to relax. If she were to let go it didn’t bear thinking about, the fall-out.
The waiters were moving in massed ranks across the floor, bearing soup to the tables while Torquil Cameron carried on. He was paying lip service to Burns now.
‘And where, ladies and gentlemen,’ boomed Torquil Cameron, ‘Where would we be without poetry?’
Nicola caught Charlie’s eye across the table and smothered a giggle. She glanced at other faces and saw the pained expressions of piety, as though God had been mentioned, or cancer.
The moment passed. Poetry! thought Nicola. That’s all we need. Doubtless some Scot would start spouting Burns later and it was in dialect if she remembered rightly. Wee sleekit cowrin timrous beastie. As the man boomed on, she became aware of an unfamiliar feeling: boredom. Of course one ought to be able to make these dead patches of time work for one. She had friends who recommended meditation techniques for just such occasions. Om, wasn’t it. Or was it visualise a beach. Which reminded her, she must get that cheque off to Better Villas asap.
At last the big balloon had finished. Now he was announcing grace, and they all had to bow their heads over their soup bowls.
Some hae meat that canna eat,
And some wad eat that want it;
But we hae meat, and we can eat,
And sae the Lord be thankit.
Then the hubbub started up again and there was the chinking of a thousand spoons as they tackled their Cullen Skink.
Nicola glanced around their table. She realised with relief that, so great was the noise, she would not be obliged to talk to anyone beyond Iain Buchanan on her left and this other man on her right. Iain’s wife Susan, directly opposite, was giving Charlie the sparrow’s bright look askance, while he smiled falsely back. Susan was smart and chirpy, as Nicola remembered, but not very deep. Also she was a full-time mother of the sort who drew their skirts away when Nicola approached, while exuding a neediness to freeze the cockles of your heart. This man Iain on her left was working all the hours of the day and night, Nicola happened to know, as he badly wanted to be made deputy head of the branch, and that move was still a good year off.
On the other side of Charlie was Deborah Mahon, a vaguely smiling woman of fifty-five or fifty-six, who had not earned any money for over thirty years. She had had a front-of-house job in the bank for a little while before she got married, back in the mists of time, when she was still in her decorative early twenties, and since then had stayed indoors to look after her husband and three demanding, confident and ambitious daughters, the youngest of whom had just started university.
Nicola knew how the talk went at this kind of mixed do with spouses. The men would address the women beside them with bored chivalry, feeding them brief obvious questions about their children or their house or their little part-time jobs and then the women would chat on, working away at keeping the conversational bonfire alight, pulling more than their weight in an exchange which really was nineteen to the dozen. But she herself was not one of these women. She had a foot in both camps. Not only had she borne four children but she also earned as much as her husband and more than Iain Buchanan. So she would be able to talk with the men about money and the new Japanese restaurant near Gracechurch Street and – barring sport, of course – things that really interested them. Still she wore high heels and earrings and noticed that this man on her right, Donald Forfar, was quite appealing in a solid saturnine sort of way.
‘“The Selkirk Grace”,’ he said, waving his soup spoon 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 gone down with the flu,’ said Donald Forfar, when Nicola enquired about her absence. She herself never got ill. Apart from three months’ maternity leave around each of her labours, 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 green sward.’
‘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 colour 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 whisky glass then sniffing it. ‘Application. They’re the reason why Scodand’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 drily.
‘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 play actor holding a bottle of whisky 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 whisky into the little silver quaichs and passing them round the table.
‘That’s the trouble with this organisation,’ 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 whisky. ‘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 entrée 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 favourite, 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 knee socks, 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 ha
ggis,’ 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 misky. 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’ 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.’
Hey Yeah Right Get a Life Page 8