“Would you have been in the Gestapo, Mummy?” Bertie asked innocently. “That is, if you had been alive when all that was going on?”
The question had caused consternation.
“Certainly not, Bertie!” exclaimed Irene.
“I don’t think that’s a very nice question to ask Mummy,” Bertie’s father had interjected. But even as he spoke, Stuart could not help but let the tiniest of smiles – invisible to the naked eye – play about his lips. Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings, he thought.
35. Ranald Braveheart Macpherson’s Mother Receives a Telephone Call
Bertie need not have worried. Having decided to tell his mother the truth, the disgrace in which he then found himself had nothing to do with the transfer of Cyril but was focused on his having made the bus journey to see Ranald Braveheart Macpherson entirely by himself. That, said Irene – and with some justification on this occasion – was not to happen again. Bertie might think that he was old enough to undertake such a trip, but he should remember that he was still six, and six-year-old boys did not get on buses by themselves.
“I really don’t see why I should still be six, Mummy,” Bertie complained. “I seem to have been six for an awful long time.”
“That’s the way things are, Bertie,” said Irene. “And just enjoy being six. There’ll come a time when you’ll wish that you were six again. Birthdays are not quite the same thing when you get a bit older, I can tell you!”
A telephone call was made to Ranald’s mother, and Irene extended a half-hearted offer to take Cyril back. Ranald’s mother, however, expressed the view that her son seemed to have formed an attachment to their new boarder and that it would be perfectly in order for Cyril to stay. “A boy needs a dog,” she said over the phone.
At first Irene received this remark in silence. Then came her response. “Some boys, perhaps. Not all.”
“Oh, I think most boys want the same sort of thing,” said Mrs. Macpherson. “You know that, of course …”
This led to a further silence. War undeclared can be more bitter, more fraught with danger, than war declared.
“Naturally,” said Irene, “having two boys, I feel that I certainly know their little needs. You only have the one, don’t you …”
Ranald Braveheart Macpherson’s mother let out an involuntary gasp – slight, but not slight enough to mean that Irene did not notice that her dart had gone home. With this knowledge, Irene followed up with a low-flying missile. “Of course dogs are easier to look after in suburbia,” she said.
The stressing of the final word was accomplished with consummate ease – only the slightest inflection was needed to convey disdain, and Irene applied that with the delicacy of a great chef seasoning his signature sauce. But there was more to come.
“And I suppose that living in Morningside,” she continued, “a dog is perfectly all right.”
Again, the choice of words was perfect. Morningside may be a perfectly pleasant part of Edinburgh, a suburb of douce villas and comfortable flats, but it also stands for everything that is Edinburgh about Edinburgh. Comedians traditionally used Morningside as a target for wit directed against respectability: the word Morningside, preferably pronounced with a distortion of side into sade, could reduce Glaswegians to guffaws, in the same way as the mere mention of Glasgow could cause seemingly endless mirth at an Edinburgh pantomime. Of such stock references is humour made, but here it was not mirth that was Irene’s objective. Her observation that the Macphersons lived in Morningside was tantamount to outright ridicule – at least in her book – and that inference was quickly and correctly picked up by Ranald’s mother, who again gave a short, involuntary gasp.
“We’re in Church Hill, actually,” she said. “But I suppose you weren’t to know.”
That equalised things – but only temporarily.
“I find it difficult to distinguish these places,” said Irene. “Please forgive me.”
A short silence, and a perilous one: Irene was unaware of the mortal danger into which she had wandered.
By now, Ranald’s mother had collected her skirts and was ready to respond. “Be that as it may,” she at last said to Irene. “Returning to the subject of that poor dog: he must have felt so confined in that small flat of yours, poor creature. I’m sure you’ll be pleased to see the back of him – it’ll give you all a bit more room. We have quite a large garden, you know – that’ll give him some space to romp about with Ranald.” She paused. “Bertie so enjoyed it when he came to see Ranald a few weeks ago. He loved the garden, with its lawn and so on. Bliss for a child who’s never had any of that.”
Irene was unable to say anything. The sheer force of this onslaught and its overt hostility had taken her by surprise and she was having difficulty marshalling a counter-attack. But there was more to come, and even as the echoes of this last bout of artillery fire from the South Side were reverberating in Scotland Street, Mons Meg was being wheeled into position.
“I mustn’t detain you,” said Ranald’s mother, thereby signalling that this was exactly what she proposed to do. “I mustn’t detain you – you must be so busy, even if you don’t have a job.”
There was a short pause while this comment was allowed to sink in. Ranald’s mother did have a job, and she knew that Irene knew that, as Irene had once come into the small gift shop in Bruntsfield where she worked four mornings a week.
Realising that if she were to recover any ground, she would have to act quickly, Irene seized the opportunity that had opened up.
“Thank heavens I don’t have to work in a shop,” she said. And then, “Oh, I am sorry, I forgot for a moment that you were a shop assistant yourself. I really am very sorry.”
There! thought Irene. That should put her gas at a peep.
But no.
“Not exactly an assistant,” said Ranald’s mother calmly. “Oh, I suppose I do assist the manager there, but … well, you see, we own that shop.”
The only sound from Scotland Street now was that of breathing, and it was irregular. Like a matador preparing for the final dispatching of the victim, Ranald’s mother, with perfect timing, administered a final lance – resplendent in ribbons like the weapon of a cruel Spanish bullfighter; and in the background, ominous and insistent as a funereal drum, might have been heard the lines of Lorca: A las cinco de la tarde. Eran las cinco en punto de la tarde. “At five in the afternoon. It was exactly five in the afternoon.” Of course, Lorca’s bullfighter came to a sticky end: not so the mother of Ranald Braveheart Macpherson.
“One of our many shops,” she said casually. “But where were we? Oh yes, our little canine refugee …”
36. A Memory of Foxes
It took Cyril some time to realise that Bertie had gone and that Ranald Braveheart Macpherson was now in charge of him. Most dogs are fairly adaptable when it comes to accepting changes in human authority and will adjust to a new command structure; Cyril was no exception, and once he understood that Bertie was no longer there, he readily obeyed Ranald in the plans that he had for him. It was not ideal, though, and he became particularly unhappy when Ranald led him out into the garden and into the garden shed that was to be his new sleeping quarters.
“This is where you’re going to spend the night, Cyril,” explained Ranald, spreading a small pile of old hessian sacks on the floor. “I’ll bring you a bowl of water and some food. You’ll be very comfortable.”
Cyril sat on the hessian sacks and waited for something to happen. He was not sure what was expected of him, but when Ranald returned with a bowl of Irish stew and pieces of bread, he at least understood that. Ranald waited for him to finish his meal and then took the empty bowl away.
“That’s all, Cyril,” he said. “Now you can go to sleep. I’ll see you in the morning.”
And with that Cyril was left alone in his unfamiliar shed, with the last light of the day fading outside and a whole library of new smells filling his nostrils. Some of these were not all that dissimilar to smells he ha
d encountered before – mice, for instance, smelled roughly similar whether they infested the cellars and cupboards of the New Town or the gardens of South Edinburgh. That smell, at least, was familiar, but lawn seed was entirely new to Cyril, as was the smell that came off a bundle of green garden string, and the smell of a dead bat that had been trapped somewhere up in the shed’s roof. But most disturbing of all was the powerful evidence of the proximity of another creature – something that Cyril had frequently picked up in the Drummond Place Gardens and was firm in the canine memory: the smell of fox.
Cyril attempted to take no notice of it; those creatures left trails of scent everywhere, and a dog that became too anxious about it would soon have no peace of mind. But after a while the smell became too powerful to ignore and was now accompanied by a scraping noise directly beneath the floorboards of the shed. Cyril had no alternative but to leave his bed of hessian and place his moist, receptive nose to the cracks between the boards. Now it was very close – and overpowering. The enemy – which was what a fox was – was right beneath him.
Cyril was at a loss what to do. He could hardly allow a fox to flaunt its presence immediately beneath him – what dog could countenance that? And yet there appeared to be no means of getting out of the shed, the door of which had been tied shut by Ranald Braveheart Macpherson after he had brought him his food. He scratched at the door with his paw: had Angus been there this would have brought an immediate response, but there was no Angus. He scratched again, and then, realising that his request would go unanswered, began to howl.
It was a prolonged, mournful howl, into which Cyril put all the sorrow of the canine condition: a howl that seemed to express deep nostalgia for the woods, for the snowy wastes of his lupine ancestors’ ancient homelands, for all the sense of loss and separation that a dog feels when his master, his reason for living, his sun, is no longer there.
Inside the Macpherson house, Ranald Braveheart Macpherson’s father heard Cyril’s howling and remarked to his wife that perhaps it was not a good idea to leave Cyril outside. “These creatures don’t like to be by themselves,” he said. “He could sleep in the kitchen.”
Ranald Braveheart Macpherson’s mother, who had opened a bottle of New Zealand white wine to celebrate her recent telephone victory over Irene – “that unspeakable Pollock woman” as she called her – was now in a state to agree to anything.
“Sure,” she said. “He can sleep in the kitchen, poor little soul. And what a pity that we weren’t able to take Bertie as well, don’t you think? I’d love to kidnap that little boy and bring him over this side of town. Do you think we’d get into trouble with the law if we did that? Did it discreetly, I mean.”
“Naughty sweetheart!” said Ranald’s father, shaking a finger at his wife. “Naughty, bad girlie! Tut tut!”
Ranald’s mother took another sip of wine. “Yes, wicked moi! But you married me, didn’t you, Buffalo Bill?”
The origin of the nickname was lost in the mists of time, but she had always called him that.
“I’m going to fetch him,” said Ranald’s father. “The neighbours will think we’re harbouring a banshee.”
“A good name for that woman, come to think of it,” mused Ranald’s mother, reaching for the bottle of wine. “Irene Banshee. It somehow sounds so suitable, don’t you think?”
“Don’t overdo it, sweetness,” said her husband, glancing at the bottle. “Do leave some for me.”
He left the kitchen and went out into the garden. The howling emanating from the shed was continuing and, if anything, had become louder and more plaintive.
“Don’t despair, Cyril,” Ranald’s father called. “Help is at hand.”
The door of the shed took a moment or two to open, as it was secured with twine, Ranald Braveheart Macpherson having employed his knowledge of knots recently acquired under the instruction of Rosemary Gold, Akela at the First Morningside Cub Scouts. But once the knot was untied and the door could be opened, it was possible for Cyril, filled with relief at his rescue from durance vile, to dash out, completely forgetting, for the moment at least, the provocative presence of a fox underneath the floorboards of the shed.
It was impossible for Ranald Braveheart Macpherson’s father to catch him. All that he could muster was a cry of “Hold on, there!” which Cyril, in the first headiness of freedom, completely ignored. Out of the garden he went and then, heading off with no real sense of where he was going, he dashed headlong down the road towards the neighbouring suburb of the Grange.
And it just so happened that once he had put a good half mile between himself and Ranald Braveheart Macpherson’s house, Cyril rounded a corner to come up against a man going out for an evening walk. The dog had not expected the man and the man had not expected the dog, and so they both stopped short in their tracks. Cyril looked up at the man. He knew immediately that this man would be kind to him; he might not be Angus, but he would be kind to him.
“Hello, young fellow,” said Cardinal Keith O’Brien, head of the Roman Catholic Church in Scotland. “Just where are you heading at such a pace?”
37. Student Life
Pat Macgregor had recently moved flats, even if not areas. After some months in one corner of Marchmont, the area of Edinburgh most popular with students – or with those students who could afford to live like students – she had moved to another corner of the same quarter, to a flat on the top floor of a Victorian stone tenement in Warrender Park Terrace, which snaked round the edge of the Bruntsfield Links, an undulating urban golf course that had once been part of an oak forest surrounding the town. The town had consumed the oak forest and gone on to swallow the farmland beyond, but the links and the Meadows remained, green lungs serving the cobbled arteries and stone chambers of the growing city. Which was so beautiful; for all that it was a city, it was so beautiful, with the good fortune to grow at a moment when people still believed – could believe – in whimsy, and were prepared to adorn their roofs, their skyline, with stone thistles and castellation and spikes; all things that are useless except as a means of lifting the spirit or answering our longing for the beautiful – whatever we think that to be.
So now Pat, who was pursuing her studies for a degree in the history of art, found herself in the fifth flat of her student existence. She had started off in Scotland Street, where for a brief time she was the flatmate of Bruce Anderson, surveyor and Narcissist-About-Town, progressing to a flat in Union Place, where subterranean subsidence had caused the floors to incline to such a degree that the furniture – and the inhabitants – would lurch or roll across the room if not fixed to the floor; a disconcerting experience that created in visitors unused to it a sensation of seasickness. Pat, and the two people with whom she shared, had become accustomed to it, jokingly calling their flat La Maison de Mal de Mer, but had not renewed their six-month lease when it had come to an end. “Nobody renews,” complained the landlord. “What’s wrong with the place?” The reply, of course, was, “It slopes.” To which the landlord had retorted, “But that’s the way the country is. Look at a map, for heaven’s sake. Scotland goes down the way – it always has.” With such a world view there was as little point in arguing, of course, as with those who believe in astrological destiny (Pat was Aries), or alien abduction (most likely to occur in Scotland near the town of Bonnybridge), or alchemy (which, delightfully, forms the basis of so many political promises).
From there she had gone to a flat in Tollcross, not far from the Rootsie-Tootsie Club. That had not been a success. Although the floors, unlike those of her flat in Union Place, were level – or close enough – the flat’s proximity to the Rootsie-Tootsie Club had meant that there was a great deal of noise at nights, including frequent disturbance from courting couples who would enter the stair – the lock on the common front door being ancient and not having worked since the nineteen fifties – to pursue their conversations in the back green, directly outside Pat’s window. The disadvantages of this flat had been compounded by the nature of th
e neighbours in the flat opposite them on the landing; these were all Goths, noted for their dark clothing, pallid complexions, and staring eyes. Pat and her flatmates – two nurses from the Infirmary – were not sure how many Goths there were, and which Goth was which, and found it unsettling to be climbing the usually unlit lower stair and to discover that one was not alone, but sharing the ascent with a silent, shadowy, and wraith-like figure, one of the Goths.
The Goths never spoke, presumably because they were either beyond speech, or because they had nothing to say to those who were not Goths. The patrons of the Rootsie-Tootsie Club were not similarly afflicted – they had plenty to say, and usually said it in loud voices after being ejected by the club, or denied entry by the doorman. Their language was colourful – full of quaint and traditional expressions intended to emphasise the point, not without their particular charm, perhaps, but developing a certain monotony after a while.
It was a relief to leave Tollcross and move to the first of her flats in Marchmont. No Rootsie-Tootsie Club there; rather lace curtains, teacups, and aquatints of Edinburgh Castle, or traditionally so; now the lace curtains had given way to blinds, the teacups had become coffee mugs, and the views of Edinburgh Castle had been replaced with posters of a beret-wearing Che Guevara, or, amongst those who felt that Che had become slightly passé, reproductions of paintings of butlers dancing on the beach in evening clothes, or long-legged women blowing smoke into the air in bars: Fife Realism, in other words. Both Guevara and Fife Realism gave artistic pleasure, and that, Pat believed, should not be sneered at. We put on our walls what we think is beautiful or inspiring, and if others think that it is manufactured or shallow, then they need not have it on their walls.