Love Over Scotland

  “Groovy?” asked Matthew.

  “Yes,” said Leonie. “I was in quite a groovy street the other day. I forget what it was called. But it was definitely groovy. The doors were all painted different colours and there was this strange old shop that sold the most amazing old clothes.”

  “Stockbridge,” said Matthew. “It must have been in Stockbridge. St Stephen’s Street, probably.”

  “I can’t remember,” said Leonie. “But it was just like one or two streets we have in Melbourne. In fact, there’s a street there that has the same sort of old clothes shops. Vintage clothing, they call it. They sell all sorts of things. Old military uniforms. Flapper dresses. Sweaters just like yours…”

  It slipped out. She had not thought about what she was saying, and the remark slipped out. And she knew immediately what she had done, and regretted it. For his part, Matthew was assailed by the remark. It came from the side, struck him, and lodged. His distressed-oatmeal cashmere sweater, which he had paid so much for at Stewart Christie in Queen Street…

  She reached out and took his arm. “I’m sorry,” she blurted out. “I didn’t mean to say that.”

  He tried to smile. “My sweater? This thing? It’s just an old…”

  “I really didn’t mean it. I promise you. Look…there’s nothing wrong with it. There really isn’t. I like beige.”

  Matthew bridled slightly. “Beige? It’s not beige. It’s distressed oatmeal.”

  She thought: porridge. It’s a porridge-coloured sweater. They must like porridge-coloured clothes in Scotland, and I’ve gone and hurt this really gentle, nice man with my stupid Australian tactlessness.

  “I really didn’t mean…”

  They had now reached the end of Cumberland Street and Matthew, who wanted to change the subject, pointed out St Vincent’s Church and the beginning of St Stephen’s Street. “And up on the corner there was where Madame Doubtfire had her shop,” he said. “She was a real person whose name was used by Anne Fine in her book. My father knew the original Madame Doubtfire. She was an old lady who kept a large number of cats and claimed that she ‘had danced before the Tsar’. That’s what she told everybody. Danced before the Tsar.”

  “Who’s the Tsar?” asked Leonie.

  Matthew hesitated. Was it possible that there were people who did not know who the Tsar was? He was about to explain, when Leonie said, “Oh him! The president of Russia.”

  He burst out laughing, and immediately regretted it. The laughter had slipped out, as had her remark about his sweater. It just slipped out, as the best laughter will always do, in spontaneity, uncontrollable. He recovered himself quickly and looked grave. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to laugh. It’s just that the Tsar was not exactly a president.”

  Leonie did not seem offended. “I never learned much history,” she explained. “I was always drawing in history lessons. I drew houses–all the time.”

  “And so you became an architect.”

  “Yes.” She looked at him, and smiled. “What about you? I bet you knew that you were artistic when you were a little boy. Did you draw things too?”

  Matthew felt flattered. Am I artistic? I suppose I am. I own a gallery. I can talk about art. “Yes,” he said solemnly, “I knew. I always knew.”

  They continued their conversation easily. There was no further talk about sweaters or tsars. They moved on to the subject of where Leonie lived. She explained how she had a studio flat in a converted bonded warehouse in Leith. “It’s very fashionable to live in a bonded warehouse,” she said. “It’s the same as living in a loft in New York. All the really fashionable people live in lofts in New York. Bonded warehouses and lofts provide very flexible space. You can put in moveable room dividers. Tent walls. Living curtains.”

  “What’s a living curtain?” Matthew asked.

  “It’s a curtain you live behind,” answered Leonie. “Curtains are replacing walls. Take your flat, for example. Do you really need your walls?”

  Matthew thought that he did, but he decided it sounded rather stuffy, rather conventional, to say that one needed walls. People who lived in Moray Place were welcome to walls–they clearly needed them. India Street was far less psychologically dependent on walls.

  “No,” he said. “I’d like to get rid of some of my walls.”

  “Great,” said Leonie. “When we get to your place, I’ll take a look around. I can do some sketches. We can work out what walls can come out.”

  Matthew said nothing, but Leonie continued. “The thing about walls is that they hide things. Society is much more open now. Everything’s more open. The old culture of walls is finished.”

  Matthew frowned. “But what about…what about bathrooms?”

  “Open plan,” said Leonie, adding: “these days.”

  28. The Boy in the Tree

  Antonia Collie had settled into Domenica’s flat rather more quickly than she had imagined would be the case. Antonia did not consider herself a city person; she had been born and brought up in St Andrews, the daughter of a professor of anatomy, and apart from her student years in Edinburgh had lived the rest of her life in the country or in small towns. She had always felt vaguely uncomfortable in large cities; in a metropolis it felt to her as if something unsettling was always on the point of happening, but never quite happened. She had spent two weeks in London once, researching in the British Library, and had felt confused and threatened by the crowds of people on the street (“All going somewhere,” she had complained. “Nobody actually staying where they are.”)

  Antonia had married young. Her attractive looks and her amusing tongue had caught the attention of the son of a prosperous East Perthshire farmer, a man who was regarded by his father as a hopeless prospect, by virtue of his complete lack of interest in crops and cattle, but who had, nonetheless, a talent for dealing in stocks and bonds by telephone. This young man, Harry Collie, found in Antonia an easy companion. They set up home in a converted mill at the edge of his father’s sprawling farm, and enjoyed the country life that such people might lead. This was an existence dominated by a social round that both of them came to regard as ultimately rather pointless, although diverting enough at the time.

  Harry encouraged Antonia to pursue her interest in history. She enrolled for a Ph.D. at Edinburgh, and spent a great deal of time travelling to and from the National Library of Scotland and the Scottish Records Office. She found herself drawn ever deeper into the mysteries of medieval Scotland, and completing and submitting her doctoral thesis was, as she described it, like having, at last, a baby, which one then promptly gives away. Its publication by the Tuckwell Press was a matter of pride not only to her father, the now retired professor of anatomy, who had taken to writing monographs on silkworms, but also to her husband, who liked the idea that intellectual distinction might shine from a corner of Perthshire generally only associated with the cultivation of soft fruit.

  Antonia and Harry had two children, a son and a daughter, Murdo and Antonia, known in the family as Little Antonia. When the children were ten and eight respectively, Harry started to see a woman in Perth who owned and ran a dress shop. Antonia became aware of this, and thought that his dalliance with this woman, whom she called the Dress Shop Assistant, would pass once he saw through what she imagined to be the other woman’s intellectual vacuity. She was wrong. Although he was not by nature fickle in his affections, what developed between Harry and the Dress Shop Assistant was a deep mutual dependence which neither was capable of defeating. Antonia suggested that Harry should move into Perth, but he refused. His family had lived on that bit of land for several hundred years, and it was all he knew. So Antonia decided that she would move back to St Andrews, taking Murdo and Little Antonia with her, and would live in a corner of her father’s house.

  Then disaster struck. When she explained to Murdo and Little Antonia that they would be coming to live with her in St Andrews, they refused to go. Murdo, in particular, had a deep affection for the farm, and said that he would simply ru
n straight back if taken to St Andrews. Little Antonia wept copious tears and said that she would not touch a morsel of food until the decision had been rescinded. She was as good as her word. She simply stopped eating, and in admiration for his sister’s act of defiance, Murdo climbed a tree in the garden of the house and refused to come down.

  “But if you stay here, then you’ll be staying just with Daddy,” shouted Antonia into the foliage.

  “Exactly,” came a disembodied voice from above. “That’s what we want to do.”

  Antonia left him where he was. Those who climbed trees usually came down from them after a short while, although in the back of her mind she remembered Calvino’s novel The Baron in the Trees, a favourite book of hers. Calvino’s hero, the twelve-year-old Baron Cosimo Piavosco di Rondo, takes to the trees after a row at the dinner table over the eating of snails. He never comes down, and thereafter leads a full life in the treetops, covering considerable distances by moving from tree to tree; impossible, of course, but a very affecting story nonetheless. Murdo could hardly remain where he was for very long. Cosimo lived in a more forested age; Murdo had only the one tree, with sky on every side.

  She returned to call him down an hour later. He was still there, though uncommunicative, and an hour after that she returned with the eighteen-year-old son of the stockman. “I’ll get him down for you,” muttered this young man, and he promptly scaled the tree, worked his way out onto the bough on which Murdo sat, and grabbed at the young boy’s shirt.

  In his attempt to avoid capture, Murdo hung for a moment on the branch and then fell, crashing through lower branches on his descent. Antonia screamed and ran forward to attempt to catch him. She could not, of course, and the boy fell heavily on a grass-covered mound of earth at the base of the tree, winded and unable to cry, but otherwise unharmed. For the next five days, he refused to talk, and turned his face away from Antonia whenever she addressed him.

  She had little alternative. The children stayed on the farm with their father and the Dress Shop Assistant. Antonia went to live in St Andrews, which made it possible for her to see the children regularly and also to look after her father. It was an arrangement that seemed to make everybody content, and Antonia, rather to her surprise, found that she was inordinately happy. Even the formal ending of the marriage was amicable, and she had the satisfaction of knowing that it was not her fault. In this state of blessedness, she began to write her novel.

  29. On the Machair

  The idea of spending several months in Edinburgh appealed to Antonia. Novels–and other works of the imagination–are sometimes best written in unfamiliar surroundings, where the mind can wander without being brought back to earth by the constant interruptions of one’s normal life. In Domenica’s flat in Scotland Street, separated from St Andrews by the green waters of the Firth of Forth, she felt quite free of distraction. She knew one or two people in Edinburgh, it was true, but she had not told them that she was there and there was no reason why they should find out. If she walked up Scotland Street, if she wandered about Dundas Street, which was about as far as she intended to go, nobody would know who she was nor have any reason to speculate. Of course there was Angus Lordie, who had let her into the flat. She was not sure about him: she had not encouraged him, but one never knew with men. They could become interested without receiving any invitation, and some of them were very slow to take the hint. Really, men were most tedious, she thought, and a life without them was so much simpler.

  When Harry had first gone off with the Dress Shop Assistant she had missed him painfully; but that feeling of loss had faded remarkably quickly and had been replaced by a feeling of freedom. She felt somehow lighter–it was as if Harry had been a burden who had been lifted off her. And what was there to miss? His physical presence? Certainly not! His conversation? Hardly. And anyway, if one were to miss the sound of his voice, there was always Radio Four, with its comfortable chattiness. How many lonely women the length and breadth of Britain found Radio Four a very satisfactory substitute for a man? And Radio Four could so easily be turned off, just like that, whereas men…

  Antonia’s novel was set in that period which interested her most, the sixth century. This was a time when missionaries from the Celtic Church made their perilous journeys into the glens and straths of Scotland, brave Irishmen who lived in windswept settlements on the edge of Scottish islands and who shone the light of their teaching into the darkness. It was a moment of civilisation, she thought; it was as simple as that–a moment of civilisation.

  Now, at the desk in Domenica’s study, Domenica’s papers pushed to the side, she sat before a sheet of lined paper, pen in hand, and closed her eyes. She was on the machair of a Hebridean island. The flowers of early summer grew amidst the grass, and there, to either side of her (the island was a narrow one), were waves coming in upon the shore; glassy walls of water which seemed higher than the land, toppling and crashing upon the rocks…

  “Here, in this place,” thought St Moluag, “I am under the sea. I am under the water just as surely as that Irish brother who lived under the river in a holy place, who could, miraculously, breathe and live under water as ordinary men live upon the land.” He turned his head to the north. Another man, a man whom he recognised, was walking down the strand towards him, his crook in his hand.

  Antonia wrote: “Oh dear,” thought St Moluag. “Oh dear. Here comes St Columcille. And I’ve never really liked him.”

  She lifted her pen from the paper and looked at the sentence she had written. Was there something vaguely ridiculous about it? Would early saints have thought about one another in this way? Would they have harboured animosities? Of course they would. The point about the early saints–and possibly about all saints–is that they were human in their ways. They felt uncharitable thoughts in the same way as anybody else did. They had their moments of pettiness and their jealousies. Had not St Moluag and St Columcille been particularly at odds over who reached Lismore first? And had this not led to St Moluag cutting off his little finger and throwing it onto the land before St Columcille could reach the shore? By virtue of the fact that his flesh had touched the land first, then it was his–or so the story went. These tales were often apocryphal, but there must have been some ill-feeling for the legend to take root and persist as it had.

  Of course, part of the problem, thought Antonia, was that it was necessary to express the thoughts of the saints in English. If one were to put their thoughts into p-Celtic, or whatever it was they spoke (and Moluag was a sort of Pict, she thought, who probably spoke p-Celtic), then it would not sound so patently ridiculous. He would not have said “Oh dear,” for instance, nor would he have said “I’ve never really liked him.”

  No, that was not the problem. It was the mundane nature of the thought; it was the fact that the thought was one which an ordinary person would have entertained, and not a saint. So she scored out the line she had penned and wrote instead:

  “The tall man, his hodden skirts flapping about his legs in the wind from the sea, stood on the sand. Another man came towards him, a man familiar to him, a man with whom there had been strong words exchanged. And he reached out to this man, the wind about them, and he gave him his crook, his staff which he had brought with him from Whithorn. And the other man gave him his staff in exchange, and they embraced and then walked off together, and the tall man thought: We must not fight in these times of darkness; for if we fight, then the darkness comes into our hearts.”

  Antonia rose from her desk. She walked over to the window of Domenica’s study and looked out. Above the grey slated roofs, the clouds moved high across the sky, clouds from the west, from those airy islands, from the world which she had just been trying to evoke. Somewhere out there was machair, and wild flowers, and the same darkness of the spirit against which those brave, now largely forgotten men had battled. Their enemy had been very real. And ours? she thought.

  30. Schadenfreude

  When Stuart returned from work that evening, his o
ne thought was to finish the crossword which he had unwisely started in an idle moment at the office. Stuart was a skilled crossword solver, having cut his teeth on The Scotsman before progressing to the heady realms of the puzzles with which the Sunday newspapers tormented their readers. These crosswords relied on additional gimmicks to add a higher level of complexity. All the words might begin with a particular letter, for example, or, when lined up in reverse sequence might make up a perfect Shakespearian sonnet; there was nothing so simple as an ordinary clue. He conquers all, a nubile tram: Tamburlaine, of course, but far too simple for this sort of puzzle.

  Irene was in the sitting room when he returned, a half-finished cup of coffee on the table at her side, an open book on her lap. From within the flat somewhere, the sounds of a saxophone could be heard; a difficult scale, by the sounds of it, with numerous sharps. And then, abruptly, the scale stopped, and there could be heard the first notes of ‘Autumn Leaves’, Bertie’s new set-piece.

  Irene looked up when Stuart entered the room.

  “I’m reading an extremely interesting book on Schadenfreude,” she remarked. “It’s a very common emotion, you know–pleasure in the suffering of another.”

  Stuart glanced at the book on her lap. His mind was still on his unfinished crossword, and Schadenfreude was no more than a diversion. He wondered how one might conceal such a word in a crossword clue. It would lend itself to an anagram, of course; most German words were good candidates for that, and this was a gift: Freud had…No, that wouldn’t work. Sacred feud hen?…Sudden face her?

  “The question is this,” went on Irene. “Why do we feel pleasure in the suffering of others?”

  “Do we?” asked Stuart.

  “Yes we do,” snapped Irene. “Not you and I, of course. But ordinary people do. Look at the way they clap and cheer when somebody they don’t like gets his come-uppance. Remember how the papers crowed when that man, that annoying person, was sent to prison. They loved it. Loved it. You could more or less hear the church bells in London ringing out.”