That fact is humbling, as it underlines the ultimate, simple humanity of all. The Scottish expression “We’re all Jock Tamson’s bairns” makes a very similar point, as does Robert Burns’s “A Man’s A Man For A’ That.” And all of this was accepted by the Duke, who used the title only out of piety to the memory of his grandfather, who had been promised a dukedom in return for a large political donation and had then been cheated of it by a reneging government. This act of perfidy should not go unremembered, the Duke reasoned, and the best way of reminding people of the injustice was to use the title that was never conferred. After all, he said, if someone promises you something and then doesn’t deliver it, you have every reason to feel aggrieved.
Matthew’s second meeting with the Duke had taken place when he, Elspeth, Anna and the triplets had been enjoying a picnic in the Pentlands and the Duke had appeared as if from nowhere. They had engaged in conversation then and the Duke had expressed views on community and the sense of belonging that Matthew had found both perceptive and comforting. He liked this rather unlikely mustachioed figure, he had decided.
“Come in and start taking a look around,” the Duke said. “I’m never sure whether you should accompany people when you show them a place you’re trying to sell, or whether you simply let them wander about themselves. I suppose the danger is that if you don’t show them round, they won’t know what’s what. But if you do, then you might inhibit them. They might wish to express disgust, for example, and may feel disinclined to do so if the owner’s standing there.”
“I’m sure we would never express disgust,” said Matthew.
“I wouldn’t mind if you did,” said the Duke. “I believe in direct speaking, no matter how mealy-mouthed our society has become.” He paused. “Have you noticed how nobody says what they feel today? Have you noticed that?”
Matthew thought for a moment. “I’m not sure …” he began.
“People are cowed,” said the Duke. “They’re worried that if they say something that offends the imposed consensus, then they’ll be censured, or even punished. They could lose their job, for example. Just for expressing a view. Let’s say you disapprove of something—anything—but that thing is held up as an important value by the opinion formers. Can you really express your views these days? Or will you be accused of all sorts of heinous crimes?”
Matthew thought about this. “I suppose we have lost freedom of speech,” he said. “But only certain sorts of speech.”
“Such as?” the Duke challenged.
“Speech that diminishes other people. Speech that makes them feel bad about themselves. Speech that disturbs the peace.”
“Such as singing a sectarian football song?” asked the Duke.
“Maybe,” said Matthew. “What’s the point of stirring up animosity between groups?”
The Duke looked bemused. “I have no time for that sort of thing either,” he said. “I don’t think it’s a good thing to make people all hot under the collar by singing rude songs about them. But before we go headlong down the road of forcing everybody to be nice to everybody else, surely we have to ask ourselves: where will it end? Once you restrict freedom of speech in one context, then it’s much easier to restrict it in others.”
Elspeth had been following this conversation without joining in. Now she did. “ ‘Sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me,’ ” she quoted. “That’s what children say, you know, when another child insults them.”
“Exactly,” said the Duke. “Don’t you think that we’re making people think of themselves as victims? We’re urging them to believe that if anybody says anything hurtful about them they’re entitled to run to the police and report it. Aren’t we effectively encouraging people to be hyper-sensitive?”
“But what if I said ‘Dukes are rubbish?’ ” said Matthew. “How would you feel?”
The Duke looked at him reproachfully. As he began to respond, Matthew saw that tears were forming in his eyes. “That’s really hurtful,” he said, his voice breaking with emotion. “We’re not rubbish, you know. We really aren’t.”
“Look what you’ve done, Matthew,” hissed Elspeth. “For the second time in one day. First Birgitte and now the Duke.”
Birgitte was comforting the Duke, putting her arm about his shoulder. “Dear Johannesburg,” she whispered. “Please don’t cry.”
The Duke winked at Matthew.
41. The Whole Point of Our World
Pat had spent precisely three hours—to the minute—wondering whether Michael would call. They had exchanged numbers in the Elephant House, Michael writing hers on his wrist with a ballpoint pen she had lent him for the purpose. It gave her a curious thrill—very curious, some might say—to see this breathtakingly good-looking young man put the numbers on his tanned skin; it was such an intimate thing, she reflected, to have one’s mobile number inscribed on somebody else. It was as if he had taken her photograph and pressed it to his chest; but then she thought: no, it isn’t; he has only written it there because he did not have a piece of paper and he did not want to write in his copy of David Esterly’s wood carving book.
He had said that he would call her in a couple of hours to suggest when they might meet again. “You might like to come and look at this table I’m working on,” he said. “It has some very detailed inlays. I’m rather proud of them, actually.”
She had accepted immediately. “I’d love to see your table.” She wanted to add, immediately, “When?” but did not.
He had eventually finished his coffee and left, as he had to see somebody about a commission, and she had sat by herself for several minutes, savouring the moment.
This is it, she thought. This is definitely it.
But what exactly was it? Love? Had she fallen in love with this boy whom she had just met? Could you fall in love within … what was it? Twenty minutes? That was the length of time they had spent together over their cup of coffee, and surely it was impossible in so short a time to get any real sense of what another was like. And yet how else could one describe the feeling that had come upon her—that feeling of sudden and intoxicating elation; that feeling of lightness in the stomach, in the head—everywhere, in fact; that feeling of wanting nothing more than to see the other person again, immediately and most urgently?
She closed her eyes, hoping that this might in some way restore her to the way she had felt before she entered the Elephant House. But it did not. When she opened them a few seconds later, she felt exactly as she had felt before. Her world was different now—quite different. An hour or so ago it had been a world in which Michael had not existed in any sense—not even as a possibility, because she had never known that there were woodworkers who made beautiful tables in Candlemaker Row and read books about wood carving and looked like that, and who wrote your number on their wrists in ballpoint ink and smiled in a way that seemed to light up the whole room, and who … She stopped. As a teenager she had been obliged at school to learn, by heart, several of Shakepeare’s sonnets, and had realised, even then, how acutely he had captured the feeling of simple cherishing that lay at the heart of love. Sonnet 18 said everything about that; it expressed that conviction of the ultimate ineffable value of the one whom you loved. There was nothing more to be said, really, because what it spoke about could only be articulated to an extent; thus far, and no further—thereafter one came up against something mysterious, something immanent that could not be explained. We loved another because we loved him or her. We just did.
And it did not matter who or what it was that we loved. Auden said that when he was a boy he loved a pumping engine and thought it every bit as beautiful as the “you” whom he later addressed. We loved people because they were beautiful or witty or smiled in a way that made us smile; we loved them because they spoke or walked in a certain way or because they had a dimple in exactly the right place; we loved them because they loved us or, sadly, because they did not love us; we loved them because they had a way of looking at things, o
r because there was a certain light in their eyes that reminded us of the sunlight you saw caught in a rock pool on a Hebridean island; or because they wore a kilt or black jeans or a Shetland sweater or could recite Burns or play the guitar or knew how to make bread or were kind to us and tolerated us and our ways and our stubborn refusal to stop loving them. There were so many reasons for loving somebody else; so many; and it made no sense to sit about and think about whether it was a good idea or not because love was like a bolt of lightning that came from a great cumulonimbus cloud that was far too great for us to blow it away; and it struck and we just had to accept it and get on with the business of trying to exist while all the time there was this great wave of longing within us like a swell in the sea, one of those great rolling waves that comes in off the Atlantic and hits Ardnamurchan and cannot be fought against, because fighting love like that is hopeless and you should just go under and let it wash over you and hope that when you come out from under the wave you will still be breathing and that you will not have drowned, as people could—they could drown in love, just drown.
She walked out of the Elephant House and made her way slowly down Chambers Street. She was going nowhere in particular, as she had no wish for a destination. She would go down to the Cowgate and walk along its narrow pavements and on to Holyrood and then … She stopped. What she really wanted was for Michael to phone her, and until such time she would not be distracted by anything that she saw about her. It was as if the whole world were suspended in anticipation of that call; a ridiculous notion, of course, but it was just possible, just, that the world did indeed turn on love, that Professor Higgs’s boson was, in fact, love by another name: the guiding force, the centre of gravity, the whole point of our world.
42. “You all right, hen?”
And he did phone her—three hours after they had said goodbye in the Elephant House, when she was standing on the corner of the narrow lane that led up to the Scottish Poetry Library, having wandered aimlessly about that part of the Old Town, waiting for her telephone to ring. She had spent the best part of an hour in the Canongate Kirkyard, drawn in by the statue at the entrance of Robert Fergusson and remembering that her father had once taken her there, when she was sixteen or seventeen, and shown her the place where the poet was buried. The grave on which Robert Burns, lionised by Edinburgh society at the time but never forgetting who he was or, most important, who his predecessors had been, had paid to have a stone erected to commemorate the young poet whose work, though cut short, had influenced him so much. And her father, who had known Robert Garioch, had quoted to her his poem about the visit that Burns had paid to the Canongate: “strong present dool, rugs at my hairt,” Garioch had written—“strong present sorrow tugs at my heart”; and then he had gone on to say: “here Robert Burns knelt and kissed the mool—“here Robert Burns knelt and kissed the soil.” She had been impatient then, as might any teenager be expected to be when there was talk of poetry and sorrow, but now, recalling the incident, at a time when her senses had been so strangely sharpened, she suddenly felt herself overcome by the emotional tenor of the story. Burns and Fergusson were no longer mere names; they were people, not all that much older than she was; and they had lived right here, in these very buildings that still stood about her—or buildings very like them—and they had presumably felt exactly how she now felt. Burns certainly had, because he wrote about love and you cannot write about love if you’ve never experienced it; it would be like describing the surface of a completely unknown planet.
She had sat on a bench in the kirkyard. The afternoon sun was on the Calton Hill, touching the monuments with gold. The Canongate Kirk, though, was in shadow, and seemed cold, in spite of the warmth of the summer day. She looked down at the ground and felt for her mobile telephone in her pocket. She took it out and checked that it was on and ready to receive a call; it would be a disaster if she had it switched off or if her battery had run out, because he might try to phone and he would get no reply and might not try again.
It was so unfair, she thought. Boys, she told herself, could phone girls but girls could not phone boys without running the risk of seeming too keen. And if you seemed too keen, then boys were put off, whatever people said about equality and how girls could make the first move if they wanted to. They could not. Ideas of equality were not as powerful as the facts of biology, and a fact of biology was that men wanted women to appear reticent and not be too forward; pushy, voracious women could make bad mates as they might not stick to their men and do what biology wanted them to do. She was sure that this was true, although when she had mentioned this theory to her father, Dr. Macgregor had merely smiled and said, “Sociobiological nonsense. Nonsense on stilts, to echo the late Jeremy Bentham.”
“So what’s your explanation?” she had challenged.
“Social custom,” he had said. “As simple as that. We do things—or don’t do them—according to the precepts that have been inculcated into us by our parents.”
“But they—our parents—must do things for a reason.”
He had thought for a moment before he answered. “Yes, there may have been a reason—an ur-explanation, so to speak—but those aetiological factors will be pretty obscure and ancient; lost in the mists of time. The point is this, my dear: many of the things we do are done for no discernible reason.”
She had left the kirkyard and wandered back down St. Mary’s Street, up which she had just walked. A meandering course had taken her to the Poetry Library’s lane and there, as she looked across the road to the towering face of the Salisbury Crags beyond, she had heard her mobile ring.
She fumbled with the buttons, and almost lost the call before she answered. And then she said, “Yes,” because she had momentarily forgotten that she normally said “Hello.”
“Well, yes sounds positive,” Michael said.
She laughed. “I mean hello.”
“Well, hello then.”
She felt her knees go weak—just from the effect of the two small words “hello then.”
She waited. “I’m glad I got you,” he said. “I washed my hands and I almost lost one of the numbers on my wrist. It was a close thing. It could have been an eight or a zero. Either. I chose eight.”
“I’m glad you did,” she said.
He cleared his throat. “You know the Canny Man’s?”
“That pub in Morningside?”
“Yes. Do you fancy meeting there tonight? Early-ish.”
She made an effort not to answer too quickly. “I think that’ll be fine. What time?”
“Six? Seven?”
She hesitated. Six might seem too eager, seven less so; socio-biology prevailed. “Seven?”
“Cool. See you then. Got to go now. Bye.”
She replaced her phone in her pocket. She was shaking. She was crying.
A woman who had been walking past stopped and looked at her with concern. “You all right, hen?”
Pat nodded.
The woman’s concern was still evident. “Bad news? You’re sure you’re all right?”
Pat wiped away her tears. “No, not bad news …”
“A feller?” asked the woman. “Fellers are awfie bad news—always have been. For weemin-fowk, that is. If a lassie greets it often means she’s having trouble wi’ a feller.”
“Not with this one,” said Pat.
The woman shook her head. “Oh, darlin’, dinnae delude yersel. They’re all the same, these fellers. We think we ken a’ there is to ken aboot them and then we find oot a wee bittie mair and it’s nae pleisant at all. You mark my words, hen. You’ll find oot.”
43. Bertie’s Fantasy
Bertie’s concern that his mother would find out that he had thrown Jo into the Water of Leith, had allowed Cyril to grasp her in his faithful but damaging jaws, and had then given the unwanted doll—or play figure—to a charity shop in Raeburn Place, was in no way alleviated by the knowledge that all of this had taken place under the aegis of his father. Bertie loved and admired
Stuart but he was realistic enough to understand that in the adult hierarchy under which he, and all children, lived their small lives, his father was definitely subservient to Irene. This disappointed him, and sometimes he nursed quite lengthy fantasies—delicious in all their detail—in which his father suddenly ripped off the suit that he wore to work each day, to reveal underneath a green and red outfit of the sort favoured by superheroes. Thus clad, with a few deft acts of realignment Stuart would then fire the psychotherapist, close down, until further notice, Yoga for Tots, inform the saxophone teacher that his services were no longer required, and purchase a large and discouraging dog—a Dobermann Pinscher, perhaps—that would be trained to growl at the slightest sign that the new order was being in any way threatened.
This, he knew, would not happen. Superheroes were as fictional as fairies and just as likely to intervene in human affairs; the reality of the situation was that his father would never dare to challenge in any real way the pervasive, unquestionable power of his mother. That was the order under which he lived his life, and so it would continue until that magical, impossibly distant date: the day of his eighteenth birthday, and his decisive and unambiguous move to Glasgow—and to freedom.
Olive, it seemed, had worked all this out. “See your father?” she said one day in the school playground. “See him, Bertie?”
Bertie was silent; wary.
“Well,” said Olive, “do you want to know what my dad says about him?”
Bertie shook his head. “No thank you, Olive.”
Bertie's Guide to Life and Mothers Page 15