She reached forward, and with a swift movement of her wrist tore off the strip of material across his chest. Bruce felt an odd sensation—a prickling—but it was hardly pain.
“See?” she said, showing him the results. “See all the hair? Gross, isn’t it?”
He nodded. “This accident? What happened? Was it in the car?”
She tossed the strip into a bin and returned with a fresh one. “No. Here. It was a professional accident.”
He took a moment to digest this.
“The wax was a bit too hot,” she said. “It wasn’t my fault.”
“I see.”
The pace of the music suddenly seemed to increase. “I love this one,” said Arlene. “I’m not sure what the words are, but I love it. I think it might be Swedish.”
A further strip was removed, and several more after that. Then it was time to turn to Bruce’s eyebrows. A small strip was placed above Bruce’s right eye, and then, with a further deft movement, torn off. This time he felt pain.
“Look out,” he muttered involuntarily.
“Oops,” said Arlene. And then, “Oh!”
Abba continued in the background, unaffected by the unfolding waxing mishap.
“What?” exclaimed Bruce, sitting up and reaching to feel the place where, until very recently, his right eyebrow had been.
23. In the Elephant House
Pat Macgregor had at last finished her essay on the influence of Raphael on the work of Ridolfo Ghirlandaio. It was four hundred words short of the required length—five thousand words—but she had been able to add three hundred words by expanding the bibliography to include several articles with lengthy titles and of joint or multiple authorship. This was a subject once discussed with her by her father, who had described to her the importance of the position of names in scientific articles by more than one author.
“Never just cite something by X et al,” he said. “Because X will be pleased to see his name mentioned, but what about W, Z and Y who were his co-authors? How are they going to feel about being described as ‘et al’? It’s a quick way to make enemies.”
“But somebody has to be ‘et al,’ ” Pat pointed out. “We call them randoms.”
Dr. Macgregor laughed. “I’ve noticed that. Who are these randoms?”
“People you don’t know particularly well. People of no importance.”
“I see.” He paused. “Except to themselves.”
“Of course.”
It was true, he thought. The world of each of us was composed of those who meant something to us, and those who did not: passers-by, strangers, people we saw in the street who were as unknown to us and as transient as the extras in a film. He occasionally entertained himself by looking at these background people in a film scene—the anonymous extras—and studying their expressions and movements. For the most part they were good at what they did, and appeared unaware both of the camera and of the fortunate few with speaking parts, but on occasion you could see past the casual saunter, the studied indifference, and glimpse the agony, the look-at-me desperation of the person who wants to be noticed, who wants to be something. Just as it is in life, he thought.
But now the completed essay was in Pat’s hand as she entered the offices of the Department of History of Art in Chambers Street. She knew that her efforts would be read by the Watson Gordon Professor himself, but what were her chances of making him sit up at any of her observations? The other essays all looked so much more impressive; so much more memorable. Her own thoughts on the subject were quite forgettable, she thought, and would surely be eclipsed by the clever insights of the other students.
She sighed as she left the office. In a short time, no more than a month or two, she would walk out of that building for the last time, her course—her education really—finally at an end. She would be, or about to be, a graduate of the University of Edinburgh, and would leave the world in which she had spent the last four years, a world of discussion and ideas, for a world of … what? More discussion and ideas? Hardly. The real world, the world she was about to enter, was all about things; about making things and moving things; about figures and money and trading one thing for another. That’s what people did—they sold things and bought things, and paid one another for their attention, or labour, or for the things they possessed that others might want to acquire. That was all. Material needs and their satisfaction, just as Marx had said.
And so she would have to leave this world of ideas that her professors and lecturers had shared with her—this world in which there was time for the contemplation and analysis of beauty and for the finding of meaning. She thought of Professor Thomson’s lectures and of how he had talked about the ideals of the Third Republic in France; of how beliefs in science and progress had found their expression in naturalism in art. She had sat there entranced, and inspired, and had thought about how her own life might be made to mean something. But now she was leaving that world where such meaning might be found, and was going to have to find a job buying and selling things, just as everybody else bought and sold things.
Feeling slightly flat, Pat decided that she would go to the Elephant House on George IV Bridge. This café, with its curious collection of carved elephants, was popular with students, and with people who remembered that they once were students, who sat at the pleasantly scattered tables and looked out over the roofs of the Old Town. She would find somebody to talk to, or could read a newspaper if there was nobody she knew, and thoughts of graduation and reality could be put off for just a little longer.
She bought herself a cup of coffee and, after a brief moment of conscience-induced hesitation, a large Danish pastry. In the back room, well placed for the window, was an empty table, at which Pat seated herself. The smell of coffee drifted up from her cup, and her spirits rose accordingly. There would still be time for coffee in the real, post-university world. There would still be the opportunity to think, even if one could no longer think for quite so long about Raphael or Poussin or the naturalism of the Third Republic.
“Do you mind?”
She looked up. The boy was holding a mug of coffee in one hand and a paperback book in the other. He had a bag slung over a shoulder and she noticed the top of a mobile phone protruding from a pocket in his jeans.
She could not help herself. She smiled, and it was a smile of amusement, rather than just a smile of welcome.
He raised an eyebrow. “I could try somewhere else. It’s just that all the tables …”
“No,” she said quickly. “I don’t mind. Sure, sit down.”
She glanced at his face. Harmony. Perfect Renaissance proportions. He needed a shave, but only just.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I wasn’t laughing at you. It’s just that …”
He looked at her enquiringly. “Yes?”
“It’s just that you looked like an advertisement—a picture in an advertisement.” She hesitated. “In a mag … Those ads for … Oh, I don’t know what I’m trying to say.”
24. The Working of Wood
For a moment or two, neither of them said anything. Then the young man, resting one hand on the table and touching his mug of coffee with the other, as if testing its heat, said, “I’m Michael.”
Pat said, “I thought you might be.”
“That’s funny,” he said.
“I don’t know why I said it. I wasn’t expecting a Michael …”
“Who were you expecting?”
She shrugged. “Nobody special. Sometimes friends come in. Often, in fact. But today … they’re somewhere else.”
“I come here a couple of times a week. I’ve seen you once before, I think. Maybe more. Twice, perhaps. You were sitting with a group of girls. One of them had red hair …”
“Ellie.”
“Is that you, or the girl with the red hair?”
“Not me. My name’s Pat, by the way.”
“I thought it might be.”
They both laughed again, but behind her laughter Pat was studying the young m
an seated before her. He had said that he had noticed her, but she had not noticed him, which puzzled her, as he would have stood out in any crowd; not for the way he was dressed, of course, which was how most other young men dressed, but for … She found herself wondering about this. What was the quality that made him noticeable? How exactly does somebody become good-looking? It was probably a matter of mathematics, as so many things ultimately were: harmony of features could be reduced to mathematical ratios. If your eyes were just the right distance apart and this distance was just right for the distance between the top of your lips and the point of your chin, then you were, by the grace of harmony, good-looking or beautiful. And that simple fact could dictate the course of your life—could mean that you, rather than a person whose eyes were not quite in the right position, might be given the chances that led to success. It was as simple—and as unfair—as that. Beautiful poets were always published; ugly ones were not. A fine actor would never get very far unless the mathematics of facial structure were on his side.
Michael was holding his mug of coffee with both hands, as if he were warming them. She noticed that on his right hand there was a small scar running down from the knuckle of his middle finger. She glanced at his nails; boys’ nails interested her. They were usually bitten, sometimes down to the quick, but every so often one encountered a boy with unbitten nails.
Michael noticed her glance. “My hands,” he said.
She looked away guiltily.
“My hands,” he said again. “They might be knocked about a bit. I have to use them a lot.”
She looked at him inquisitively.
“Guess what I do,” he challenged.
She looked at the paperback he was holding, trying to read the title upside down. The Lost Car … The final word was partly obscured by the strap of his satchel and she could not make it out. She looked at the author’s name: David Esterly.
“You’re studying engineering,” she ventured. “Mechanical engineering?”
He shook his head. “You were looking at my book.”
“Yes, it’s something about cars.”
He smiled. “Carving. Wood carving. The Lost Carving. David Esterly is a wood carver in America. He restored the Grinling Gibbons carvings in Hampton Court after the fire. You should see the work he does—it’s unbelievable.” He opened the book and showed her one of the plates.
She looked at the picture in wonder. “Is that carved in wood? It’s so delicate. Like … like lace.”
“Yes,” he said. “That’s what wood carving can be like.”
She looked at him. “You’re a wood carver, then. Right?”
He shook his head. “No. I wish I were. I do work with wood, though. I make furniture. Tables. Chairs. You name it.”
She stared at him in admiration. “You actually make them? You don’t just design them?”
He laughed. “It’s odd, isn’t it? We’re so used to people not being able to make anything that we’re surprised that anybody still can. What do you call that? The de-skilled society?”
“Yes. I thought nobody made anything any more. Furniture … furniture comes from that big Swedish shop on the other side of the bypass. And everything else comes from China.”
He grinned. “It seems like that sometimes. But there are people who make things. And I always wanted to be one. Right from when I was a wee boy.”
She asked him where he did it, and he told her that he had a small workshop on Candlemaker Row. “It’s just behind us. If you look out of that window, you can just see my skylight. I also have a workshop down near Haymarket—for bigger things. I make the smaller things in Candlemaker Row.”
She asked him to tell her more about what he made. “Bespoke tables. If you need a special table, I can do it. I do inlaid work—you know, designs in the wood. It can be quite complex.” He paused. “But what about you?”
“I’m just a student. Or I am at the moment. Finals are in a few weeks’ time and then … and then I’ll be an ex-student. Out in the real world.”
He smiled. “The real world isn’t all that bad, you know. Once you take the plunge.”
“Is that what you did? You took the plunge?”
“Yes, I took the plunge. I left school when I was sixteen and did an apprenticeship as a joiner out near Ratho. I didn’t like it very much because we had to do everything as cheaply as possible. Modern doors, for instance, are more or less made of cardboard. They’re hollow in the middle and you can’t screw anything into them. I wanted to work with oak and lime. But people who build houses don’t use oak and lime any more.”
“So?”
“So, when I finished my apprenticeship, I said that I’d start my own business as a cabinet-maker. I hadn’t done the right apprenticeship for that, but I taught myself. I started that three years ago.”
She did a quick calculation. Left school at sixteen; assuming the apprenticeship lasted four years he would have finished at twenty; three years in his own business; that made twenty-three.
A perfect age for him to be, thought Pat. Hers.
25. Bruntsfield Noir
Angus Lordie had left plenty of time to walk to his appointment in the outpatients department of the Royal Edinburgh Hospital. He had been referred there by his own doctor, who had assured him that the psychiatrist who would be seeing him was one of the most experienced practitioners of sleep medicine in Scotland. “If there’s anybody who can sort out this somnambulism problem of yours,” he said, “then he’s your man.”
Angus was not sure that he would necessarily have thought that his being a somnambulist was a problem, had it not been for Domenica’s raising it as such. Indeed, he thought, I’m an alleged somnambulist rather than an actual somnambulist; not that the term alleged helped one very much. When people were described in newspapers as alleged burglars or alleged fraudsters, the alleged simply seemed to accentuate the noun rather than qualify it. “Oh yes,” people would think. “No smoke without an alleged fire!”
But even if he were a somnambulist—alleged or otherwise—he was not sure that this was something that required treatment. So far, Domenica had merely reported that he had opened and closed drawers, while apparently asleep, and muttered something about the Declaration of Arbroath. Well, there was nothing inherently dangerous in opening and closing drawers—people did that all the time in their waking hours, to no apparent detriment to themselves—and as for the Declaration of Arbroath, he failed to see what was wrong with muttering about that. Domenica had, of course, implied that he might fall out of a window or walk out on a ledge, as somnambulists were said to do from time to time, but there had been no sign of that and he did not consider it to be a real risk. So although Angus did not protest when the appointment was made for him, he did not feel that it was really necessary.
Now he was walking through Bruntsfield with at least an hour in hand before he was due to meet Dr. Macgregor at his clinic. Looking at his watch, he realised that unless he wanted to be excessively early, he had a good half-hour to have a cup of coffee before walking the final few blocks to the hospital. This was not an area of town he knew particularly well, but he would not have too much trouble in finding a suitable place, given that every second doorway seemed to invite the passer-by in for a cup of coffee. After walking past several crowded coffee houses belonging to well-known chains, Angus went into a small French café, La Barantine, where he ordered a cup of coffee and a pistachio macaroon. Sitting at a seat in the window, he watched the people walking past on the pavement. They were an unexceptional mix of the people one might expect to encounter in that part of Edinburgh—students at Napier University, which was just round the corner; Morningside ladies on their way to the traditional butcher more or less next door; unkempt and glassy-eyed actors arriving early in Edinburgh for some obscure production on the Festival Fringe, and … he stopped. A familiar-looking man was trudging past, a shopping bag in his hand, a rolled-up newspaper under his arm. He was wearing a black T-shirt and had a fashionable amo
unt of stubble on his chin. Angus had seen him somewhere before, but where …
Suddenly he remembered. This was Ian Rankin, the creator of Inspector John Rebus, an Edinburgh detective and habitué of the Oxford Bar. Angus looked at the passing writer with the expression of surprise that sometimes comes to the face when one sees somebody well known. It is a curious form of surprise—a slight astonishment that the person actually exists, perhaps, or a sense of good fortune in being given a glimpse of some rara avis.
The man outside stopped in his tracks, more or less directly opposite where Angus was sitting. It seemed as if he had forgotten something—some item on his list that he had left unpurchased—and for a moment he stood quite still. Then, turning slightly, he looked through the window of La Barantine, directly at Angus. The gaze of the two men met.
Angus gave a start. To be discovered staring at somebody can be embarrassing, but it was not so much embarrassment that he felt as a curious sense of meeting, or encounter. And for his part, Ian Rankin did not avert his gaze out of a corresponding embarrassment, but smiled at the man sitting within. Angus nodded and returned the smile. Then Ian Rankin gave a thumbs-up gesture—a gesture of encouragement, of fellow feeling, of understanding; a simple human gesture in which one person conveys to another a recognition of common humanity.
The writer continued on his journey, and Angus continued to sit in his seat in the window, his half-drunk cup of coffee before him, a crumb of pistachio macaroon on his lip, to be brushed away with a quick movement of the hand. He felt a curious sense of elation—an enhancement of the moment. He did not want the feeling to end, because it was so powerful, so moving. It was not just the fact that he had seen Ian Rankin that lent significance to the moment; it was the fact that he had shared with him an experience of common human feeling—a glimpse of that sentiment that links us one to the other if only we open ourselves to it, which we do rather too rarely. That this should happen between two strangers, and in such an unexpected way, struck Angus as extraordinary, and precious. Ian Rankin had no idea that he was looking through the plate glass at a man on his way to a hospital appointment, and yet his kind recognition of the other had reassured Angus in a time of anxiety. And as for the pistachio macaroon, how appropriate that a crumb should linger, and that this should happen in a French café, the owners of which would certainly have understood all about madeleine cakes and their Proustian associations, their Proustian echoes.
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