Chrissie nodded her agreement. “That’s absolutely true,” she said.
“Oh well,” said Matthew. “At least you have some friends.”
Nairn gave him a sideways glance.
“Of course I imagine you have plenty of friends,” Matthew said hastily. “But at least you have…you have some you can stay with.”
Nairn looked up at the ceiling. “Friends are a mirror,” he said. “If we want to see ourselves, then we only have to look at our friends.”
“Totally,” said Chrissie, and then, as if to forestall any contradiction, repeated, “It’s there staring us in the face. Self-knowledge.”
Matthew felt that he should introduce the couple to Elspeth, who had remained in the kitchen.
“We tend to live in the kitchen,” he said, as he led his guests through. “It gets the afternoon sunlight.”
“The gentlest of lights,” said Nairn. “Ready to forgive; preparing us for night.”
“Possibly,” said Matthew.
Nairn stared at Matthew, as if challenged. “Definitely,” said Nairn, pronouncing it the Glasgow way—defin-ately.
They entered the kitchen, where Matthew introduced the MacTaggarts to Elspeth. Tea was offered, and accepted.
“So,” said Matthew as they sat down at the table, “so, you’re going to enjoy living in India Street. We have great neighbours, and you’re just a toddle away from Stockbridge. There are plenty of great shops down there.”
“We lived in Stockbridge years ago,” said Nairn. “In St. Bernard’s Crescent. It was our first flat after we married.”
“Only for a year or so,” said Chrissie. “Before we went away.”
“Where?” asked Matthew. “Where did you go away?”
“America,” said Nairn. “Then Italy. We were in Bologna for a couple of years. Then Milan. Then home.”
“You got around,” said Matthew. “You went to quite a few places.”
“Most places are much the same,” said Nairn. “At least that’s what I’ve found. You get what you get, don’t you? You get some of this, and then you get some of that.”
Chrissie seemed to brighten at this comment. “Very true,” she said.
Matthew glanced at Elspeth, who was frowning slightly. He was not sure that he understood Nairn’s comment, and he could see that Elspeth was also puzzled.
“What did you do in Bologna?” he asked.
Nairn made a slightly dismissive gesture, as if Bologna meant very little. Or perhaps, thought Matthew, it was to demonstrate that Bologna came to him, rather than the other way round.
Matthew waited for an answer, but none came.
“You must have been busy,” he said, rather lamely. “Bologna and then Milan. Were you busy in Milan?”
Chrissie answered for Nairn. “Frantic,” she said.
“Milan was very heavy,” said Nairn.
Matthew glanced at Elspeth again. He decided to try another tack. “And America? Did you work there?”
“America is all about work,” said Nairn. “New York in particular.”
Matthew seized at the scrap of information. “You were in New York?”
Nairn nodded. “On and off,” he said.
“Mostly on,” said Chrissie.
Nairn shrugged. “Or off.”
“And Chicago,” added Chrissie. “We were in Chicago. Do you know Chicago?”
Matthew had been there once some time ago; Elspeth had not.
“Everybody likes Chicago,” Chrissie said.
“Except those who don’t,” interjected Matthew, a note of disagreement in his tone.
Chrissie accepted the rebuke. “If you don’t like Chicago, then it’s not for you,” she said.
Elspeth joined in. “It’s the same as anywhere,” she said. “If you don’t like it, then you don’t like it. There’s not much more to be said, I suppose.” She paused. “But what did you do in Chicago?”
“Work,” said Nairn. “Not too strenuously, but it was work nonetheless.”
“You worked very hard, Nairn,” said Chrissie. “You did, you know.” She turned to Elspeth. “He was worn out after a few months. We had to go to San Diego to recover.”
“But that’s far away,” said Matthew. “Isn’t that in Southern California?”
“It was when we were last there,” said Nairn.
There was a silence. Matthew, who now felt irritation growing with him, made a last attempt. “What exactly did you do in Chicago? It was obviously stressful work.”
“Whose work isn’t stressful?” asked Nairn.
“Let’s not talk about work,” said Chrissie. “Let’s talk about the flat. Is there anything you think we should know?”
Matthew thought: but I want to talk about work; I want to find out what you do. But he did not say that, and instead he said, “We’ve made you a list of what’s where—you know, the controls for the central heating and so on.”
“That’s great,” said Nairn. “I always find those things rather hard.”
“So you’re not an engineer,” said Matthew quickly. That, at least, excluded one possibility.
Nairn laughed. “Me? An engineer? Certainly not.”
“Nairn can do many things,” said Chrissie. “But he can’t change a lightbulb.”
Matthew smiled. “What’s that joke? How many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb? You aren’t a psychiatrist, are you?”
“Nairn would have been a great psychiatrist,” ventured Chrissie.
“But he isn’t?” asked Matthew.
“Not in a narrow, formalistic sense,” said Nairn. “But we can all be the things we aren’t, don’t you think? So we can all be engineers, if that’s what we want to be—engineers of the human self.”
Matthew bit his lip at the pretentiousness. But he was piqued by the mystery. Who was this Nairn character and what exactly did he do? Matthew suspected that the answer to these questions was as follows: nobody, and nothing. But he could not be sure, and he was determined to find out.
14. Above Edinburgh Airport, She Wept
Nicola Pollock was the grandmother of Bertie Pollock, the mother of Stuart Pollock, and the widow of the late Henderson MacDougall Pollock, barley broker and distillery director. Henderson had been her first love—she had met him at a dance in Kelso when they had both been seventeen, and they had married at twenty-four. He was the man by whom she judged all other men, and found, more often than not, them lacking. If a politician, for example, wanted her vote, the question she asked herself was this: Would Henderson have voted for him? If he would, then the matter was settled; if he would not, then no amount of argument would obtain her support. And the same went for books—Would Henderson have read it?—for holiday destinations—Would Henderson have gone there?—and indeed for her own choice of outfits—Would Henderson have liked this particular outfit?
To lead one’s life in the shadow of another is hardly anybody’s idea of self-fulfilment. For a feminist, it is, understandably, abhorrent; so many women’s lives have been stunted by the infliction of male decisions and preferences—blighted lives that made up a vast historical hinterland of oppression, unhappiness, and sheer waste. In Nicola’s case, though, marriage had not been that. Henderson Pollock had been anything but an overbearing husband and never sought to impose his views on his wife. On the contrary, he had encouraged her to develop her own interests and tastes, and if she tended to follow his lead, it was no doing of his. No, this was sheer admiration at work—admiration inspired and fueled by love. And when Henderson had died at the age of forty-nine, Nicola had settled into a life of quiet reflection on how fortunate she had been in the marriage that had molded every aspect of her life.
Her widowhood was a sociable one, and she met the occasional man who was available and who might have been interested in this vivacious and unusually attractive widow, but these men were few and far between and anyway routinely failed comparison with Henderson’s memory. They were few in number because of the brute
facts of demography: for every single woman aged over forty there is only 0.3 of a man—which is another way of saying that there are three times as many single women looking for a husband than there are single men looking for a wife.
This paucity of suitable males is something that first dawns on women in their late teens. Prior to that, the composition of school classes conveys an impression of rough equality of numbers. But this impression of equality is misleading, and males are favoured—in the reproductive sense—by the fact that their rate of mortality is higher—men are greater risk-takers and risk goes hand-in-hand with earlier demise.
And so it is that young women begin to find out in their twenties that there are not quite as many eligible young men as they had earlier imagined. But other factors come into play: the liberation of both men and women from pressure to conform sexually further diminished the number of those men looking for a female partner. The personal fulfillment that many men now found in being able to acknowledge and engage with an alternative sexuality made many much happier, but was not always greeted with the same whole-hearted enthusiasm by women. Whatever their publicly professed views, many women discreetly regretted the loss of precisely those men who were the most sympathetic, the most amusing company, the most prepared to help in the kitchen; of course these men should be allowed to be themselves, but what a pity—many women thought—that quite so many intelligent and artistic men should be lost to them.
Nicola had never imagined that she would meet another man with whom she would be prepared to share her life, but rather to her astonishment she did. With Abril, she found both a partner and a whole new identity within a culture very far removed from the douce world of bourgeois Melrose. Over the years, that Borders world seemed to become more distant; the clothes she wore changed—no more tweeds; her palate became accustomed to a whole different range of tastes; her very soul, she felt, broadened and acquired a Portuguese sensibility. Scotland now seemed almost alien, at that distance—a world of muted colours and hushed voices, a world in which so much was unspoken, a world in which cold somehow seemed at the heart of things.
But it was still home. However she redefined herself, that part of one that made for the core of the self, that part that we think of as the ultimate, inner being—that was ineradicably Scottish. That part spoke with a Scottish voice; that part looked out through Scottish eyes; and it was that part that now welled within her as she gazed out through the window of the descending plane and saw below her the rolling Borders hills…and there, in their midst, a loch, and a large one at that. St. Mary’s Loch? She strained to see, but the plane banked slightly to the right and the sun shone in her eyes. She raised a shading hand to her brow; a few minutes later, a road snaked through a glen and then climbed a broad hill—Soutra, perhaps, still there, still commanding, although marred now by a forest of great wind turbines, a monument to our indifference to our environment. The sight saddened her, and she wondered how long it would be before Scotland disappeared under these Quixote-provoking structures and we had only a memory of our beautiful hills remaining, a memory of Eden before we wrecked it with machines.
She gripped the armrest of her seat. She felt her eyes begin to fill with tears. She fought the welling up within her, but unsuccessfully. She began to cry—silently, as she was surrounded by people and she did not want to make an exhibition of herself. But she could not suppress her tears.
“Are you all right?” the man beside her whispered.
She nodded. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just that…” Words failed her and she gestured through the window at the scene below.
“Scotland,” muttered the man.
“Yes,” she said. “Home.”
The man placed his hand gently on her forearm, and left it there. It is such an easy thing to do—to touch another in sympathy—but it is such a hard thing too.
15. The Sad Fate of the Danish Car Industry
Stuart Pollock, together with Bertie and Ulysses, left in good time for the airport—or would have done so had he remembered where he had parked the car. This was a recurring issue in the Pollock household, and had led to a number of fairly sharp domestic disagreements.
The problem sprang from the fact that Scotland Street, a short street by the standards of the New Town, did not have enough parking for its residents, who were obliged to find a space—if they could—in one of the neighbouring streets. This was easy enough when the residents of those streets were using their cars, but was considerably more difficult when they chose to be at home and to be parked. At such times, it could become necessary for Stuart or Irene to drive to the far end of Cumberland Street, or even up into Heriot Row to find a vacant spot. That was no great hardship, of course, but if one regularly put the car in a different place it could become difficult to remember where that place was, especially if the car was not used for a week or two, as sometimes happened.
Thus it was that the Pollock family’s aged Volvo had been forgotten about in Northumberland Street, Great King Street, North West Circus Place, and Dublin Street. Then, when the car was suddenly needed, there would be a moment of panic that nobody knew where it was. This led to accusations and recriminations, often of an unseemly sort.
“You’d think that with something as significant as a car,” said Irene sarcastically, “one might remember where one put it. We’re not talking about a small item here, you know, Stuart: we are talking about a large chunk of Danish engineering.”
“Swedish,” corrected Stuart.
“Don’t change the subject, Stuart. It matters not a jot whether the Danes or the Swedes make these things—the point is…”
“But it does matter,” protested Stuart. “The Danes don’t make cars.”
Bertie had been listening. “Excuse me, Daddy,” he interjected. “I think they did make some cars. Not many, but they did make some. I read about them.”
Both Irene and Stuart looked down at Bertie with astonishment. Although barely seven, Bertie was a voracious reader and had soaked up information on a range of topics that constantly surprised them.
“They made electric cars,” said Bertie. “They were very nice, but they didn’t work.” He paused; he had remembered something else. “And then they made a sort of sports car and they sent it over to the BBC to film on one of those programme about cars that Tofu likes so much. The one with…”
“Ridiculous programme!” snapped Irene.
“And then the Danish sports car caught fire,” Bertie continued.
Irene brushed this diversion aside. “Danish or Swedish—the point is this, Stuart: you need to concentrate when you park the car. Say to yourself I have parked the car in Drummond Place—commit it to memory. Then this sort of situation wouldn’t arise.”
Stuart took a deep breath. “Unless you used it last,” he said between clenched teeth. “Who went to her Melanie Klein Reading Group in Barnton—of all places—by car, may I ask? Oh yes! Anybody around here drive to Melanie Klein Reading Group by any chance? Anybody round here then leave their Volvo right down by Canonmills—and forget where she had parked it until her husband just happened to be walking that way and noticed a whole stack of Melanie Klein books on the back seat of a Volvo that looked slightly familiar? Ring any bells?”
And so the arguments continued. Neither Stuart nor Irene was blameless, but, on balance Stuart mislaid the car more often than Irene did. And the occasions on which he did, it had more dramatic consequences—as when he went through to Glasgow by car for a meeting and then returned by train. This was easily done, of course: everyone else at the meeting was returning by train and it was the most natural thing in the world to accompany them back to Queen Street, continuing the discussion on the train. That oversight, though, had unexpected consequences, in that it had resulted in Stuart and Bertie having to return to Glasgow—by train—and discovering that their car, that had been parked, coincidentally, outside the house of the well-known Glasgow gangster, Lard O’Connor (RIP), had been stolen.
Lard had proved to be helpful in recovering the car—although the one he had delivered to them was not quite the same car, being a similar model but with one more gear than their own. He had also befriended Bertie, and had helpfully taken him and his father to see the Burrell Collection before they returned, by car, to Edinburgh.
Bertie was proud of his car. It seemed to him, as it seems to most children, that other families led a more normal life than his own. Other people’s mothers did not insist on psychotherapy and yoga lessons; other people’s mothers did not breast-feed their babies on the 23 bus, as Irene did: Nihil humanum mihi alienum est, she said to Bertie as he squirmed with embarrassment—Nothing human is strange to me, but even the most reconstructed boy of seven would be mortified by his mother breast-feeding on the bus, no matter how socially accepted such things were. At least when it came to their car, he had no reason to feel ashamed, as there were several members of his class at the Steiner School who had very odd vehicles in the family. Tofu’s father, for instance, had converted his car to run on olive oil, which made its exhaust fumes smell like ciabatta bread—Bertie did not have to contend with anything like that; nor did he have to endure being picked up in an old Dormobile covered with Nuclear Power? No thanks! stickers, as did Olive’s friend, Pansy. At least an old red Volvo would hardly be noticed, which is what most children want; and it would be missed, too, when, through some awful confusion it was mistaken for a part of an avant-garde artist’s installation and sent down to London, where it in due course won the Turner Prize.
With their car subsumed into the world of conceptual art, they had to find another one, and it was this car, an anodyne grey station wagon, that they eventually located just in time to arrive at Edinburgh Airport as the flight carrying Nicola Pollock touched down on the runway, bounced back into the air, but only briefly, and for no more than a few feet, and then settled down again onto terra firma with a smouldering of expensive rubber and a transitory puff of smoke.
The Revolving Door of Life Page 6