Lou did not immediately leave her job as a nurse’s assistant, as many might do on benefiting from such a generous legacy, but continued for a good six months before handing in her resignation.
“Ah, Lou,” said the Matron, “I was hoping against hope that you’d stay, but you’ve deserved this – every penny of it. Now what?”
“Back to the farm for a while, Matron,” said Lou. “There’s work to be done.”
Matron smiled. “Yes, there’s always work to be done, isn’t there, Lou? And you’ll always do it, won’t you – nae complaint, nae bither.”
“And then I thought maybe I’d try Edinburgh for a while.”
The Matron’s eyes lit up. “Edinburgh! You know, I lived in Edinburgh once – for a year or two. I stayed in the Nurses’ Home at the Royal Infirmary. Oh, we had a grand time, so we did. You had to work hard enough and you had to be signed back in to the home by ten o’clock, but you were allowed to go to the dances in the University Union. They called them the Union Palais and you could meet some awfie nice young men there – medical students often enough. We had a wonderful time back then.” She paused. “I could write to somebody, Lou. I know a man down there who has a nursing home in a good part of town. He’s always looking for reliable staff. I could write to him, if you liked. He’s called Jimmy Watson and I think his mother was from somewhere down your way, from Arbroath, or maybe it was Montrose. There were plenty of Watsons in Montrose, but they weren’t all related, you know . . . One of them had a haulage business that he’d advertise each week in the P and J. It was called Watson’s Trucks, I mind. You saw them on the road all the time – muckle trucks that took cattle off to the sales and so on.”
Lou listened. Although disinclined to complain, this was exactly what she wanted to get away from – this sense of being trapped in a world where everyone was somehow connected, where people knew where others came from and who their parents and grandparents had been. Lou wanted to see the world and to achieve something. She had spent her entire life thus far in doing things for others – now she wanted to create something that would be hers.
“I think I’ll start a café,” she said to Matron. “I’ll use the money to buy a café in Edinburgh.”
The idea had just occurred to her then and there, but it seemed to be the right thing to do.
“Oh, you’ll have the time of your life in Edinburgh,” said Matron. “Start a café. You might meet a young man from Arbroath – they go down there, you know.”
“I’ll see,” said Lou. “You never know.”
“You could try the Union Palais,” said Matron. But then, on second thoughts, added, “Well, maybe not.”
You Are the Sun
When Big Lou arrived in Edinburgh she used almost the entire legacy to buy a two-bedroomed flat in Canonmills, overlooking a bend in the Water of Leith, and a former bookshop in Dundas Street. The bookshop, known for its associations with figures of the twentieth century Scottish Literary Renaissance, had been frequented by poets such as Norman MacCaig, C. M. Grieve, and Sydney Goodsir Smith. The proprietor’s executors sold the shop with all its stock, which meant that Big Lou became the owner of a library of several thousand books on just about every subject. Big Lou moved the books lock, stock and barrel to the flat in Canonmills, where the motley collection became her private library, to be worked through, title by title, over the years that followed.
Big Lou had left school at sixteen – a decision that was made for her by her parents without her views being sought. They felt that by that age she would be vested with sufficient skills to enter the workplace for a few years before, in due course, she married the son of a local farmer. What would count thereafter would not be skill in mathematics, a knowledge of geography, or even an ability to understand basic French, but familiarity with the cleaning of a milking parlour, the ability to help ewes to lamb, and an understanding of the running of a farmhouse kitchen.
At first her lack of formal education did not trouble Big Lou too much, but as the years passed she became increasingly aware that there was a great deal she simply did not know. She started to read while she was working in Aberdeen, taking up authors who had something to say about the world she knew. Sunset Song struck her as being utterly and completely true – she knew those people – and The House with the Green Shutters shocked her with its accurate portrayal of meanness and greed in a rural setting.
The acquisition of so large a library might have daunted many, but not Big Lou. She decided she would at least start every one of the titles in her new library even if she would not persist with those that she found uninteresting or out-of-date. She started with philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment – she read Smith, Hume and Hutcheson, along with commentaries on the works of all three of these. She moved on to George Davie’s The Democratic Intellect, and to Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good, which she appreciated greatly. Next was The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus and Martin Buber’s I and Thou, first courses for a prolonged meal of continental philosophy that included the words of Spinoza, whom Big Lou rather liked, and Schopenhauer, whom she liked rather less.
These studious pursuits, along with the hard work involved in setting up and running her coffee bar, might have been expected to leave little time for socialising, but Big Lou was determined to take advantage of what Edinburgh offered. She met and became involved with a series of men, including a chef, a Jacobite plasterer and an obsessive Elvis impersonator; none of the men she met was anything but a disappointment to her, with the result that she gradually came to accept that she was unlikely to meet the sort of man she would so dearly love to find: a man who would be intelligent, empathetic, and witty company – somebody like Angus (without the dog and the tendency to wear clothes spotted with paint) or Matthew (without his cardigan in distressed oatmeal or his trousers of mitigated beige), but not at all like the narcissistic Bruce Anderson, with his hair gel and constant gazing at himself in any nearby polished surface (Big Lou had caught him admiring his reflection on the front of her Gaggia coffee maker, “preening himself,” she said).
Now she was reconciled to remaining single, or at least to accepting the possibility that she would not find a suitable partner. She would have been content enough with that – men, she had decided, were, on balance, somewhat overrated – and anyway somebody had come into her life who was already transforming it in ways she would never have thought possible. This was the young boy, Finlay, who had been allocated to her by the Social Welfare Department after Big Lou had offered to act as a foster parent. Finlay, who was seven – the same age as Bertie Pollock – had had a difficult start in life. At first, the traumas of his earlier years had made him suspicious and silent, but as he settled in, these defences were gradually lowered. Big Lou was a woman of infinite patience; she knew what it was to nurse an orphaned or rejected lamb back to health – she had done just that so many times in the lambing season, coaxing a tiny confused creature, unsteady on its spindly legs, to take the teat of the milk bottle, encouraging strength and vitality drop by drop. Now she did the equivalent of that with this strange, freckled little boy who had come into her life, bringing him round to an acceptance of the love she offered him. He responded willingly, taking her hand in his when they walked down the street, clutching it to him as if frightened that the world of warmth and security she had created for him might suddenly be snatched away.
He thrived at school, no longer the shy and withdrawn child his teachers had earlier observed, but now the life and soul of the classroom, popular with the other children and appreciated for his winning smile.
He drew a picture that was passed on to Big Lou by his class teacher. “I thought you might like to see this,” said the teacher. “Finlay has drawn a picture.”
She gave Big Lou a typical child’s drawing – a house, some trees, a sky in which a sun, human-featured and smiling, beamed down on a woman and a dog, stick-figures both. The woman was wearing a dress on which a large letter L had been drawn.
/> “That’s you,” said the teacher, smiling. “Finlay explained it all to me.”
But what made the drawing unusual was that the woman in the foreground – clearly Big Lou – was surrounded by exactly the same radiant beams that emanated from the sun above her.
Big Lou caught her breath. “Me?”
“Yes,” said the teacher. “And if I were you, I’d be very touched by that. He thinks of you as the sun.”
Big Lou felt the tears well up in her eyes. “Pair wee bairn,” she whispered.
As Much Said as Was Unsaid
Each morning Big Lou accompanied Finlay to Stockbridge Primary School before walking back along Raeburn Place, across the bridge over the Water of Leith, and up the gentle slope towards the gardens of Royal Circus Place. She followed the same route each day, as people so often do, crossing streets at precisely the same point each time, finding satisfaction in the routine. And it was not just familiar places that she saw – the same shop-fronts, the same street furniture, the same cracks in the pavement – she also encountered the same people, all following their familiar routine, treading a path that they would follow month after month, year after year, until they no longer had to go to an office, or a workshop, or wherever it was that they earned their living. Sometimes it seemed to Lou that the world was something of a treadmill – a giant treadmill on which we all tramped for our allotted span, covering much the same ground, with much the same view.
She found herself wondering about the people she encountered on this daily trip. There was that man, for instance, who emerged from St. Stephen Street and paused before crossing the road opposite the Floatarium. He always stood there for a few minutes before making his way to the other side, as if uncertain as to what to do. She saw him look at his watch, then check it again before he crossed the road, reluctant to cross until exactly the right moment – whatever that was – had arrived; Immanuel Kant, thought Big Lou – Immanuel Kant. She had just read a biography of Kant, extracted from her shelf of old bookshop stock, in which Kant’s famous regularity had been explored at length. And if the citizens of Königsberg could set their watches according to the appearance of the philosopher on his daily walk, then Big Lou could do much the same thing with this man.
Further up the hill, she sometimes found herself walking towards a man strolling down the road towards her – a man she thought of as the poet Hugh MacDiarmid because he was on the short side, somewhat bowdy-leggit, and sometimes in a kilt. Big Lou liked the kilt, but had views on those who should wear it and those who should seek some other means of making that particular cultural statement. In general, she felt that the kilt was for taller men, who could carry it off with the dignity that the garment required. Those who were of average height could wear it too, but had to be careful about their swagger. Those who were portly, or vertically challenged needed to exercise discretion, and those who were bandy – or bowdy-leggit, as Big Lou put it – had to think long and hard about wearing it at all if they wished to avoid looking too much like Harry Lauder. There is much to be said for the late Harry Lauder and his couthy songs, but whether he would recommend himself as a style icon was another matter.
Over a period of months, this particular man had progressed from stranger to acquaintance. It had started with eye contact, and this, after a suitable interval, had led to a slight nodding of the head. A few weeks later, this had been supplemented with a smile, and finally words had converted the relationship into a speaking one.
“Aye, aye,” the man had muttered one morning as they passed one another on the pavement.
“Aye,” responded Lou.
That had sufficed for a further week. Although few words were used, such exchanges can be emotionally expressive. The adding of a sigh to the aye, for instance, can say so much about the world and its problems; the addition of two sighs can express utter despair at the state of human affairs; just as prefacing the first aye with an oh can express nuanced emotions ranging from slight doubt to sophisticated cynicism, as in this exchange, where the translations are parenthesised:
Aye, aye (Good morning.)
Aye (Good morning.)
Aye? (Is everything all right? Any news?)
Aye (the tone descending slightly at the end) (I give up; I really do.)
Aye? (the tone rising at the end) (What’s wrong? The usual issues?)
AYE (emphatic) (Yes, the same old stuff.)
Oh, Aye (resigned) (Here we go again. It’s someone else’s fault – as per usual. You’d think that people would . . . )
Then on to Great King Street, where she saw the same lawyer, an advocate, emerging from his door with its professional brass plate and then beginning to walk up to Parliament House, his formal clothes contrasting with the everyday working dress of most others on their way to work. She came across this lawyer’s photograph in the Scotsman one day, and read that he had been given a public appointment. Thereafter, when she saw him, she noticed how stooped he looked, his shoulders bent under the increased burdens of office and the cares that came with it.
Big Lou wondered whether it was much different from life in Arbroath or in any of the other small towns up and down Scotland. There were more people in the cities, of course, but within the urban centres, for all their crowds and complexities, the same small units of human activity – the villages – persisted. Out of the throngs they saw about them, people created small communities of one or two hundred, ignoring the rest. In a sense, all the others were extras, as in a film: they were there, crossing the scene, going about their business, but what really mattered was the people you actually saw, the people whose faces were familiar, whose background you understood, the people who knew the people you knew.
She thought about this as she crossed Dundas Street to her coffee bar. She thought about it further as she unlocked the door and turned on the lights. As she switched on the coffee machine and gave the counter its first rub-down of the day, she wondered whether she had ever really left Arbroath and Snell Mains, or whether she carried them still within her, and made a new Arbroath and Snell Mains right here in Edinburgh, amidst these tenements and cobbled streets, amidst all this finance and business and decision-making.
Her first customer of the day came in. It was a young man who worked, she recalled, for the Royal Bank of Scotland. He was training for a marathon and had told her all about it, and the exercise, he said, justified the bacon roll she made him every morning.
She prepared a roll; the bacon sizzled in the frying pan. He sniffed at the air appreciatively. The roll was one of her special butteries, of the sort her aunts had been so good at making. This was what Scotland was all about, thought Lou. It was about butteries and people who liked butteries. It was about conversations where as much was said as was unsaid. It was about special ways of breaking the heart.
At Big Lou’s
When Matthew went over to Big Lou’s for his morning coffee, he either left Pat in charge of the gallery – if it was one of her days to be there – or he locked the door behind him, putting up a note that said Back in fifteen minutes – or thereabouts, depending.
This wording had always amused Pat. “It’s a bit odd to say depending,” she remarked. “People will think you’re indecisive. Not that you are, of course – you aren’t, if you see what I mean.”
“But it’s true,” replied Matthew. “What it says is true. What we think will happen always depends on all sorts of things. And we can’t be sure whether those things will happen – or not happen, if you see what I mean.”
Pat thought about this. Yes, human affairs were uncertain. Yes, matters did not always work out as we hoped they would work out, but surely we could not go through life qualifying everything like this. “So should an airline say the flight to wherever will leave at 3pm or whatever depending?”
“Yes,” said Matthew. “Because it does depend. And that, if I may say so, Pat, is a good example: the departure of any plane often does depend on all sorts of things. Whether there’s a plane, for a
start. You know how airlines cancel flights if they don’t have a plane available. They do that, you know. It really does depend. They call it operational reasons. No plane – operational reasons. No pilot to fly it – operational reasons.”
“But that’s implicit.”
Matthew shook his head. “No, it’s not. People think that 3pm means 3pm. They’re funny that way.”
Pat laughed. “I’d never call you a pedant, Matthew, but . . . ”
He looked injured.
“I’m sorry.”
“No need to apologise,” he said. “It’s just that I think people should be . . . well, a bit more honest. We don’t like being told half-truths. Or being lied to . . . People can tell, you know. They know when they’re being lied to. Politicians find that out – eventually.”
He looked at Pat. Matthew liked to read history; he liked to watch television programmes about the Second World War. He was interested in Churchill, but he was not sure whether Pat would know anything about all that. There were plenty of people who seemed to have only the vaguest idea about the Second World War, and Pat, for all he knew, might be one of them. She knew about Giotto, of course, and Raphael and Bonnard and Vuillard and so on, but did she know much about Churchill?
“Churchill told the truth,” he said. “He told people what lay ahead. He said that he had nothing to offer them but blood, sweat and tears. He was a politician! Can you think of any politician – any – who would say that to people these days. I’ve got bad news for you: you’re going to have to work harder, for longer, and have less money to spend. Who would say that? Name one!”