The Revolving Door of Life

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “Look at how uneasy people are when they live on long streets,” he said. “They don’t relate to their neighbours; they don’t even know their names, in many cases. But put them in a courtyard—a square—and everybody knows everybody else—and looks out for them. That architect I’ve talked to you about…”

  “Christopher Alexander?”

  “Yes, him. He explains all this in his Pattern Language book. He very specifically says that happiness and courtyards go together. It’s the same as having light come into a room from two sources.” He looked intensely at Domenica, as if he wanted to convince her of something. “It’s all related, you see, Domenica. How we behave towards one another is mediated by our environment, by what we see about us.”

  “And good debating chambers lead to good government? Is that what you’re saying?”

  Angus nodded. “They play a role. Yes. A square or a rectangle is a comfortable shape for people. A long line has no resolution.”

  “No resolution?”

  “A long line goes nowhere. It doesn’t resolve.” He paused. “That’s why a meeting always goes better if people are sitting round a square table—looking at one another. You can talk to somebody you’re looking at. You can talk to people on either side of you—or you can, but it doesn’t lead to comfortable exchanges.”

  Angus picked up the invitation again. “Why do you think he’s asking us?”

  “Well, you have a reputation as a portrait painter,” said Domenica. “Perhaps this new artist in residence is interested in portraiture.”

  Angus shook his head. “Highly unlikely. Nobody’s interested in portraiture anymore. Nobody.”

  “But they are,” protested Domenica. “Look at Lucien Freud. And Hockney.”

  “They’re both considered to belong to an earlier generation,” said Angus despondently. “No, it’s all conceptual now.”

  “Shall we go?”

  Angus hesitated. He received few invitations, and this was, after all, a reception in the City Chambers. It was not quite an invitation to the Garden Party at the Palace of Holyroodhouse, but it was the next best thing. Indeed, it might even be considered rather better than the Royal Garden Party, at which all that the guests received was a cup of tea, a slice of cake, and a couple of cucumber sandwiches. Not that this was indicative of parsimony on the part of the monarchy: it spent a fortune on tea and sandwiches each year, and Angus had seen the figures. Twenty thousand sandwiches at each garden party; twenty thousand slices of cake; twenty-seven thousand cups of tea—that was hospitality on a grand scale, dispensed to citizens whose good works had attracted attention.

  So might a lifetime spent manning a lifeboat or running girl guide camps be rewarded with an afternoon of glory at Holyroodhouse, with a heavy card invitation commanding attendance and a sticker to put on your car allowing you to park in the royal car park. The card invitation was of a thickness specially chosen to allow it to be displayed on a mantelpiece for a good twelve years, and the car sticker, although by the nature of things flimsier, could be left on display for several weeks after the day of the Garden Party.

  These were small things—tiny slivers of favour and privilege—but they were enough to turn at least some heads. One man had been seen driving up and down the High Street with a Garden Party sticker eight or nine times day, enjoying the admiring and envious stares of visitors and locals alike, and the sticker had remained in place for weeks thereafter.

  “I see you’re having trouble getting your parking sticker off,” remarked a colleague of the offender. “Soap and water works, you know.”

  That was an unkind remark, even if amusing to those who heard it. We all wish to feel just a little bit important, to be recognised, to be singled out for attention, and for some of us a parking sticker may be all we have to cling to.

  44. The Decline of the Dinner Party

  In the taxi, on the way to the Lord Provost’s reception in the City Chambers, Angus said, “I know we said we’d go. I know we’ve sent in our RSVP, but I’m not sure that I want to go after all.”

  “Come, come, Angus,” said Domenica lightly. “You’ll enjoy yourself once you’re there—you always do.”

  She was concerned that Angus was becoming a stick-in-the-mud. She liked parties and hoped that now that they were married they might get a few more invitations. Say what people might, a woman on her own was often left out of things; many felt excluded, particularly widows and divorcées, who frequently felt uncertain as to where they fitted in. Domenica, although of independent mind, had thought that keenly; now, though, that there was a new entity, Domenica and Angus, she hoped that invitations that previously did not arrive would soon start to flood in.

  Of course, there were all sorts of reasons for a paucity of invitations. One of these sprang from a change in people’s social habits. Dinner parties, a staple of the social scene for those over forty, had become rarer with each year that passed. Domenica realised that this might be simply an instance of observer bias or even ignorance of all the facts; Aristotle had suffered from this, having said that moles were blind—which is not completely true—only because he never succeeded in finding their minute eyes. For this reason you might have to be careful about saying that there were fewer dinner parties; there might be just as many as before, but you might not be invited and therefore would not know about them.

  But no, she was sure that an entirely objective observer would conclude that dinner parties were on the decline, and once that fact was accepted, the interesting issue arose as to why this should be so.

  She and Angus had discussed this only a few weeks earlier.

  “People are just a whole lot busier,” Angus ventured. “They’re tired at the end of the week. They want to put their feet up.”

  “Yes,” said Domenica. “And holding a dinner party involves a lot of work. You have to plan. You have to go to Valvona & Crolla to get food. You have to cook. And then you have to wash up. That all takes time.”

  “Yes, it does. A lot of time.”

  “And more women these days tend to have jobs. They have to work and they have to run a household.” She paused, looking at Angus as the taxi chugged its way up Hanover Street. It was an older Edinburgh taxi and the seats were slightly uncomfortable; newer taxis believed in padded seats, while the earlier models were made of sterner stuff.

  She caught the driver’s eye in the mirror. There was a brief moment of understanding: the driver was a woman and had overheard the conversation.

  “Of course,” Domenica continued, “there’s no reason why men shouldn’t do all the cooking.”

  The taxi driver glanced in the mirror again.

  “Don’t you agree?” Domenica said to the back of the other woman’s head.

  “Oh, I do,” said the driver. “My man does nothing in the kitchen. Nothing.”

  “You cook everything?” asked Domenica.

  Angus squirmed.

  “Aye, I do. And I hold down this driving job. And I’ve got three kids.”

  Domenica pursed her lips before making her next remark. “Well, there you are,” she said.

  Angus sought to lead the conversation onto less awkward ground. “Money may play a part too,” he said. “Having a dinner party is expensive.”

  Domenica agreed that this was so. “But it’s not just time and money,” she said. “I think there’s something else going on.”

  “Namely?”

  “It’s to do with conversation,” said Domenica. “Dinner parties are about conversation. You don’t go to dinner with somebody to sit there and eat your meal silently. You go to a dinner party to converse.”

  “That’s right,” said Angus.

  “And structured conversation is becoming rarer,” Domenica continued. “People are talking to one another in a different way. Our conversations have become less formal.”

  “And isn’t that a good thing?”

  “Yes and no. There’s obviously a role for informal conversation, but talk pretty quickl
y becomes superficial if there’s no structure to it. A proper conversation is an exchange of ideas, and gets through the business in the same way as a well-run meeting. More is said, or rather, more of substance is said.”

  Angus thought about this. It was probably true. You had to have structure if elevated, intelligent speech was to occur. He thought of Dr. Johnson and his friend, Samuel Boswell, on their trip into Scotland.

  “Dr. Johnson was your man for that, wasn’t he? And Oscar Wilde.”

  “They were both good,” said Domenica. “Though Wilde, I suspect, liked to hold court, dropping his aperçus very carefully at just the right moment, and watching their effect. Having a conversation with him might have been a bit one-sided, I think.”

  “Whereas Johnson?”

  “He was prepared to listen. He was curious about what people had to say. Look at what Boswell wrote. Johnson was sometimes rude about Scotland, but he could not be accused of being uninterested. Nor could he be accused of not allowing others to have their say.”

  “Whereas most people don’t?”

  “I’m not sure that I would say that most people don’t. I think, though, that many don’t listen. A good conversation requires that both sides listen. It’s like a game of tennis. The serve is returned and the points go backwards and forwards. That’s what a conversation should be.”

  “But without the backhand?”

  Domenica liked that. “Very clever, Angus. Wilde himself would have been proud. But, no, one probably doesn’t want a backhanded remark in a good conversation. It’s nasty, and it destroys the courtesy that good conversation requires. You shouldn’t insult the person with whom you’re exchanging ideas. You just shouldn’t. Did you ever see William F. Buckley in action?”

  Angus was unsure. He thought he might have seen him discussing something or other on television, but the memory was vague.

  “He was famous for his television conversations,” Domenica continued. “And although there was an exchange of views, he actually seemed to sneer. There was something about his mouth, his teeth, that gave one the impression of sneering at the people with whom he spoke.”

  “I can’t stand sneering,” said Angus.

  Domenica was of the same view. “He met his match in Noam Chomsky, though. Chomsky was very courteous and just refuted Buckley’s points, one by one. You can disagree in a conversation—you can disagree very strongly—but you must be courteous.”

  Angus thought about this. She was right. That was why our national conversation was so bad. Courtesy had been abandoned in favour of the put-down, the attack, the calculated sound bite. What sort of national conversation was that? The answer came to him immediately: none.

  45. The Symbolism of the Sphinx

  At the foot of Hanover Street, directly opposite the neo-classical Royal Scottish Academy with its honey-coloured array of columns, their taxi stopped at a red light.

  “The thing about Edinburgh,” Angus observed, “is that the gaze must be raised. If you walk about this city with your eyes downcast, you miss the point. Our skyline is so important.”

  Domenica had been looking down Princes Street, watching the crowds of evening shoppers on the pavements. Now she looked up.

  “Queen Victoria,” she said.

  “Yes, there she is,” said Angus. “Seated on top of the Academy, and flanked for some reason by sphinxes. Playfair added her—and the sphinxes—afterwards, I believe. I imagine he said to himself, How about a few sphinxes? Very strange. Have you given much thought to the sphinx symbolism, Domenica?”

  She shook her head. “Never,” she said. “We take the sphinx for granted, I suppose. We see a sphinx and think Oh, there’s a sphinx, but we never ask what it’s doing there. They’re rather like cats, I’ve always thought. Rather agreeable creatures.”

  “Oh, don’t get too close to a sphinx,” said Angus, adopting a tone of mock warning. “Remember what the Sphinx got up to in Greek mythology. She asked people riddles and if they couldn’t answer, she ate them. Oedipus came up against her at Thebes, did he not? He, of course answered the riddle and the Sphinx took frightful offence and self-destructed. A bit of an overreaction, but then if one is a sphinx I suppose one looks at things a bit differently.”

  “I suppose one does,” agreed Domenica. “But why did Playfair put those stone sphinxes on top of the Royal Scottish Academy?”

  “Faute de mieux,” said Angus. “Or they may represent something other than sphinxdom. I gather they were thought to represent wisdom and learning.”

  “Or they could have been put up there to scare the seagulls,” suggested Domenica. “You know how people these days put plastic owls on their roof to keep seagulls from nesting? This may have been an early example of just that. A sphinx looks rather like a cat, doesn’t it? So if you put two massive stone cats on top of the Royal Scottish Academy you’d have no trouble with seagulls, would you?”

  Angus laughed. “Possibly.”

  The taxi began to move again, but stopped immediately to allow a man to complete his crossing of the road. Angus noticed that the man had a tattoo across the back of his neck—a tattoo that was given full exposure by the low cut of the T-shirt he was wearing. Angus noticed it, and gave a start.

  Domenica looked round. “What?”

  “That man. Look.”

  She followed his gaze. The man had reached the side of the road; shortly he would be swallowed up into the crowd of shoppers.

  Domenica uttered a small cry of surprise. “My goodness! A sphinx!”

  Angus craned his neck to get a final glimpse of the man and his extraordinary tattoo. He had only that glimpse, and it was a short-lived one. Now the taxi had started to move again and they were sweeping round the bend in the road that took them onto the foot of the Mound. He turned to face Domenica.

  “What an amazing thing,” he said. “There we were talking about sphinxes and that man…”

  “…had a large sphinx tattooed on his neck,” she supplied.

  “I feel quite unsettled by that,” said Angus. “I know it’s only a coincidence, but still…”

  “I wouldn’t read anything more into it,” said Domenica.

  He nodded. “And yet, I wonder why he chose the sphinx.”

  “Genre theory might throw some light on it,” said Angus. “If there is a lot of something—images or ideas or whatever—it’s often because they were expected within the genre.”

  Domenica looked puzzled.

  “Take Chinese poetry,” said Angus. “Scholars used to wonder why there were so many poems from certain periods—you know, ages ago, Tang Dynasty and so on—that all dealt with the same subject. There were poems about finding a strand of a mistress’s hair on a pillow, or poems about losing a favourite apricot tree to frost. Hundreds of them, apparently. Was this because lots of poets had these experiences?”

  Domenica looked thoughtful. “Possibly. I suppose Chinese poets had mistresses and mistresses do occasionally leave a strand of their hair on the pillow—that being the sort of thing mistresses like to do. Almost like establishing a territorial claim. My hair, my pillow, my poet…”

  “No,” said Angus. “It was because poets were required to write poems on certain subjects as part of their exams for the imperial civil service. They were exam or competition pieces.”

  “Ah!”

  Angus warmed to his theme. “And there were genres, too, in Greek and Latin poetry. There were certain subjects that came up time and time again. And in art.” He paused. “So in this case, you might well find the answer to your question in the design books of tattoo artists. There’s probably a sphinx.”

  Domenica smiled. “Along with all the intertwined hearts and skulls?”

  “Exactly. You’d like a sphinx? No problem. How’s this sphinx here?”

  Domenica looked out of the window. They were now level with the Old Sheriff Court and the statue of David Hume. “Why do people have tattoos?” she asked.

  “Because, like all of us, they’
re searching for beauty.”

  “An odd way of doing that.”

  “In your view,” said Angus. “But not in theirs. Remember we are the heirs of the Picts, and the Picts were so called because they were painted all over. Painted people. So that’s where all this comes from. We’re merely reverting to our previous enthusiasm for being painted.”

  “Beauty,” mused Domenica.

  “Yes,” said Angus. “The search for beauty. It carries on, you know. We’re all searching for beauty except for…”

  “Yes? Except for?”

  “Conceptual artists,” said Angus. “That’s why the Turner Prize is so absurd. It has nothing to do with the cultivation of the beautiful—which is what art should concern itself with. It’s all about posturing and banality.”

  “Oh,” said Domenica.

  They were now outside the City Chambers and the conversation came to an end. Within the City Chambers, the Lord Provost awaited his guests for his little party.

  46. A Moment of Insight

  The room in which the reception was being held was already crowded by the time that Angus and Domenica arrived. Angus hesitated at the doorway, as if reluctant to enter the crowd of people, momentarily repelled by the wave of noise that greeted him. This was the sound of the conversations that were taking place across the room, each intelligible within a few feet of its occurrence but collectively a hubbub as opaque to the human ear as the sound of a flock of squabbling birds. Here and there a word or two achieved salience—shocked rigid, European Parliament, corruption, barefaced lies, his birthday, drunk…tags, in a sense, to hinterlands of exchange covering the concerns and preoccupations of those present.

  What daunted Angus was the fact that everybody in the room seemed already to have found old friends. In groups of three or four they stood about, seemingly completely at ease, listening, smiling, laughing, expostulating on this and that. He had never understood how this happened. How could it be that the one hundred and twenty people present in the room should appear to know if not everybody else then at least a fair number of them? He considered himself sociable, and had even been for a brief time on the social committee of the Scottish Arts Club in Rutland Square, but when it came to gatherings such as this he felt as one might feel in an unfamiliar town where everybody was a stranger.