“Blackcurrants,” said Bruce. “Heaps of fruit. Bang.”
Will nodded. “It’s a big wine,” he said.
“Huge,” said Bruce. “Muscular. A wine with pecs!”
Will said nothing for a moment. Then he asked Bruce about his plans.
“I’m fed up to here with surveying,” said Bruce. “So I thought I might try something in the wine trade. Something that will allow me to use my knowledge.”
Will looked thoughtful. “You have to work your way up,” he said. “It’s like any business.”
“Yes, yes,” said Bruce. “But I know the subject. I would have thought I could start somewhere in the middle and then get my MW in a year or so.”
“It’s not that simple,” said Will.
“Oh, I know,” said Bruce. “But I’m prepared to wait. A year, eighteen months, max.”
Will stared at Bruce. He was uncertain what to say.
101. Pat and Bruce: An Exchange
Bruce was quite pleased with the way in which the meeting with Will Lyons had gone. He had been able to set him right on one or two matters – including the primacy of New World wines – and he had also been able to change his mind, he was sure, about Chardonnay. It was strange, thought Bruce, that somebody like that should be prepared to drink Chardonnay when everybody else was getting thoroughly sick of it.
And the end result of all this was that Will had offered to speak to somebody and find out if there were any openings coming up in the wine trade. Bruce was confident that there would be such an opportunity, and had decided that he might as well hand in his resignation at Macaulay Holmes Richardson Black. He would probably have to work out a month or two of notice, but that would mean that he could take a holiday for a month or so before starting in the wine trade.
Todd would probably try to persuade him to stay, but he would refuse. He could just imagine the scene: Todd would talk about the training the firm had given him – “Does that mean nothing to you, Bruce? – and he would try to appeal to his better nature. But all that would be in vain.
“I’m very sorry,” he would say. “I’m very sorry, Mr Todd, but my mind is made up. I’ve got nothing against Macaulay Holmes and so on but I really feel that I need something more stimulating. Less dull.”
That would floor Todd – to hear his world described as dull. Bruce relished the thought. He might go on a bit, although he would not really want to rub it in. “Being a surveyor is all right for some,” he would say. “I’m sure that you’re happy enough doing it, but some of us need something which requires, how shall I put it, a little bit more flair.”
Poor Todd! He would have no answer to that. It would almost be cruel, but it needed to be said and it would make up for all the humiliation that Bruce had endured in having to listen to those penny-lectures from his employer. All that going on about professional ethics and obligation and good business practice and all the rest; no more of that for Bruce. And in its place would come wine-tastings and buying trips to California, and the opportunity to mix with those glamorous, leggy, upper-crust girls who tended to frequent the edges of the wine trade. What an invigorating thought! – and it was all so close. All that he needed to do was find the job.
It occurred to Bruce that it would be nice if he were to be interviewed for the job by a woman. Bruce knew that he could get women to do anything he wanted them to do, and if he could somehow engineer things that the job decision was to be made by a woman, then he was confident that he would walk into it.
He had returned to the flat and was sitting in the kitchen, thinking of this delicious future, when he heard the door open. That would be Pat, poor girl, coming home from a dull evening somewhere. He would be nice to her, he decided; he could afford to be generous, now that things were going so well for him.
When Pat came into the kitchen, Bruce gave her a smile.
“Cup of coffee?” he said. “I was going to make myself one.”
Pat blushed. She tried to stop herself, but she blushed, and he noticed, for he smiled again. Poor girl: she can’t look at me without blushing.
Bruce rose to his feet and went to the coffee grinder.
“I’ll make you something really nice,” he said. “Irish coffee. I learned how to do it in Dublin. We went over for a rugby tour once and one of the Irish guys taught me how to make Irish coffee. I’ll make you a cup.”
“I’m not sure,” said Pat, faltering. “I’m a bit tired.”
“Nonsense,” said Bruce. “Sit down. I won’t make it too strong.”
Pat sat down at the kitchen table and watched him going about the business of making the coffee. She could not help but stare at the shape of his back and the casual way he stood; at his arms, half-exposed by the rolled-up sleeves of his dark-blue rugby jersey; and she thought: I can’t help myself – I just can’t. I have to look at him.
He turned round suddenly and saw her staring at him. He lowered his eyes, as if in embarrassment, and then looked up again.
“It’s hard for you, isn’t it?” he said.
She bit her lip. She could not speak.
“Yes, it must be hard for you to deal with,” he went on. “Me and Sally. And there’s you. Hard.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Pat muttered, her face burning with shame.
Bruce took several steps forward and stood next to her. He touched her on the shoulder, and then moved his hand across to lay it gently against her cheek.
“You’re burning up,” he said. “Poor Pat. You’re burning up. Poor wee girl. You’re on fire.”
She moved a hand to brush him away from her cheek, but Bruce simply closed his hand about hers.
“Look,” he said. “Let’s be adult about this. I’m involved with this American girl, but not as involved as you might think. I’m not going to marry her after all. I’ll still go out with her, but it’s nothing permanent. So I can make you happy too. Why not? Share me.”
For a moment Pat said nothing. Then, as the meaning of his words became clear to her, she gasped, involuntarily, and pulled her hand away from his grasp. Then she pushed her chair back, knocking it over, and stumbled to her feet. She looked at him, and saw him quite clearly, more clearly than she would have believed possible. And she was filled with revulsion.
“I don’t believe it,” she whispered. “I don’t believe it.”
Bruce smiled, and then shrugged. “Offer’s on the table, Patsy girl. Think about it. My door is always open, as they say.”
102. Paternal Diagnosis
In her misery, she hardly remembered the journey across town by bus, or the walk from Churchhill to the family house in the Grange. Her father was alone in the house – her mother was in Perth for several days, visiting her sister – and he was waiting for her solicitously in the hall. She fumbled with her key and he opened the door to let her in, immediately putting his arm about her.
“My dear,” he said. “My dear.”
She looked up at him. He had realised from her telephone call that there was something wrong, and he was there, waiting for her, as he had always been. It had never been her mother who had comforted her over the bruises of childhood – she had seemed so distant, not intentionally, but because that was her way, the result of an inhibited, unhappy youth. Her father, though, had always been at hand to explain, to comfort, to sympathise.
They went through to the family living room. He had been reading, and there were several books and journals scattered across the coffee table. And there, near the chair, were his slippers – the leather slippers that she had bought him from Jenners for a birthday some years ago.
“I don’t think I even have to ask you,” he said. “It’s that young man, is it not? That young man in the flat.”
It did not surprise her that he should have guessed. He had always had an intuitive ability to work out what was happening, the ability to see what it was that was troubling people. She imagined that this came from years of experience with his patients, listenin
g to them, understanding their distress.
She nodded. “Yes.”
“And?”
“I thought I liked him. Now I don’t.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure. But I’m … I’m a bit upset.”
Her father took his arm from her shoulder. “Of course you’re upset. Falling out of love is every bit as painful as falling out of a tree – and the pain lasts far longer. Most of us have shed pints of tears about that.
“From what you told me about that young man, I would say that he has a narcissistic personality disorder. Such people are very interesting. They’re not necessarily malevolent people – not at all – but they can be very destructive in the way they treat others.”
Pat had discussed Bruce with her father, briefly, shortly after she had moved into the flat in Scotland Street. He had listened with apparent interest, but had said nothing.
“He’s just so pleased with himself,” she said. “He thinks that everyone, everyone, fancies him. He really does.”
Her father laughed. “Of course he does. And the reason for that is that he sees himself as being just perfect. There’s nothing wrong with him, in his mind. And he thinks that everybody else sees things the same way.”
Pat thought about this. By falling for Bruce – that embarrassing aberration on her part – she had behaved exactly as he had thought she would behave. It had been no surprise to him that she had done this; this was exactly what women did, what he expected them to do.
She turned to her father. “Is it his fault?”
Her father raised an eyebrow. “Fault? That’s interesting. What’s fault got to do with it?”
“Can he help himself?” Pat said. “Could he be anything other than what he is? Could he behave any differently?”
“I’m not sure if your personality is under your control,” said Pat’s father. “It’s the way you are, in a sense, rather like hair colour or stature. You can’t be blamed in any way for being short rather than tall, or having red hair.”
“So Bruce can’t be blamed for being a narcissist?”
Pat’s father thought for a moment. “Well, we have some control over defects in our characters. For example, if you know that you have a tendency to do something bad, then you might be able to do something about that. You could develop your faculty of self-control. You could avoid situations of temptation. You could try to make sure that you didn’t do what your desires prompted you to do. And of course we expect that of people, don’t we?”
“Do we?”
“Yes, we do. We expect people to control their greed, their avarice. We expect people who have a short temper at least to try to keep it under control.”
“So Bruce could behave less narcissistically if he tried?”
Her father walked to the window and looked out into the darkness of the garden. “He could improve a bit perhaps. If he were given some insight into his personality, then he might be able to act in a way which others found less offensive. That’s what we expect of psychopaths, isn’t it?”
Pat joined him at the window. She knew each shadow in the garden; the bench where her mother liked to sit and drink tea; the rockery which in recent years had grown wild; the place where she had dug a hole as a child which had never been filled in.
“Is it?” she asked.
He turned to her. She liked these talks with him. Human nature, sometimes frightening; evil, always frightening, seemed tamed under his gaze; like a stinging insect under glass – the object of scientific interest, understood.
“Yes,” he said. “Most people don’t understand psychopathy very well. They think of the psychopath as the Hitchcockian villain – staring eyes and all the rest – whereas they’re really rather mundane people, and there are rather more of them than we would imagine. Do you know anybody who’s consistently selfish? Do you know anybody who doesn’t seem to be troubled if he upsets somebody else – who’ll use other people? Cold inside? Do you know anybody like that?”
Pat thought. Bruce? But she did not say it.
“If you do,” her father went on. “Then it’s possible that that person is a psychopath. One shouldn’t simplify it, of course. Some people resort to a check list, Professor Hare’s test. It stresses anti-social behaviour that occurs in the teenage years and then continues into the late twenties. There are other criteria too.”
Pat’s father paused. “Tell me something, my dear. This young man – could you imagine him being cruel to an animal?”
Pat was hesitant at first, but then decided. No, he would not. One could not describe Bruce as cruel. Nor cold, for that matter.
“No,” she said. “I can’t see him being unkind in that way.”
“Not a psychopath,” said her father simply.
103. And Then
Pat went back to Scotland Street that night. Her father had asked her whether she wanted to stay at home, but she had already decided that she would go back. She could not go home every time something went wrong, and then, if she did not return, Bruce would have effectively driven her out. She could imagine what he would think – and say – about her: Far too immature – couldn’t cope. Fell head over heels for me and then disappeared. Typical! No, Bruce would not be allowed that victory; she would go back to the flat and face him. There would be no row; she would just be cool, and collected. And if he alluded in any way to what had happened she would simply say that she was no longer interested, which was the truth anyway. She would be strong. More than that; she would be indifferent.
She walked up the stair at 44 Scotland Street, up the cold, echoing stair. She walked past the Pollock door, with its anti-nuclear power sticker and she thought for a moment of Bertie, whom she had not seen for some time and whose saxophone seemed to have fallen silent. It was a week or more since she had heard him playing, and on that occasion the music had seemed remote and dispirited, almost sad. It was, she recalled, a version of Eric Satie’s Gymnopédie, a piece written for piano but playable on the saxophone by a dexterous player. It was haunting music, but in Bertie’s hands had seemed merely haunted. It was not surprising, of course, if that little boy was unhappy; anybody would be unhappy with Irene for a mother, or so she had been told by Domenica, who felt that Bertie was being prevented from being a little boy. How different had Pat’s own childhood been. She had been allowed to be whoever she wanted to be, and had taken full advantage of this, pretending for three weeks at the age of thirteen to be Austrian (trying for her parents) and then Californian (extremely trying). Mothers like Irene were bad enough for daughters, Pat thought, but were frequently lethal for boys. Daughters could survive a powerful mother, but boys found it almost impossible. Such boys were often severely damaged and spent the rest of their lives running away from their mothers, or from anybody who remotely reminded them of their mothers; either that, or they became their mothers, in a desperate, misguided act of psychological self-defence.
In spite of her determination to face up to Bruce, she found that her hand was trembling as she inserted her key into the front door of the flat. As she turned the key and began to push the door open, she felt that she was being watched, and spun round and looked behind her, at Domenica’s flat across the landing. That door was closed, but the tiny glass spy-hole positioned at eye-level above Domenica’s brass name plate suddenly changed from dark to light, as if somebody within, looking out onto the landing, had moved away from the door. Had Domenica been watching her? Pat turned away and then quickly looked over her shoulder again. The spy-hole was darkened again.
Pat closed the door behind her and switched on the light in the hall. It was eleven o’clock, and Bruce’s door was shut. There was no light coming from beneath the door and she was emboldened to move forward slowly and silently. She thought that she could hear music coming from his room, but it was very faint and she did not wish to go right up to the door; or did she? Treading softly, she returned to the light switch and turned off the hall light, and stood there in the darkness, her
heart beating violently within her. She closed her eyes. He was there, in that room, and he had said to her that his door was always open. But what did she feel about him? She had been overcome with revulsion by what he had said to her earlier that evening and she had gone away despising him, hating him. But she could not really hate him, not really. She could not be cross with him, however arrogant and annoying he was. She simply could not.
She slipped out of her shoes and crossed the hall again and stood directly outside his door. There was no music – that had been imagined or had drifted in from somewhere else. Now there was just silence, and the beating of her heart, and her breath that came in short bursts. Never before had she felt like this; never, and this in spite of everything that had been said to her by her father, all that clarity of mind and vision overcome by nothing more than mere concupiscence.
Very slowly, she reached for the handle of his door and began to turn it. The handle was silent, fortunately, and the door moved slightly ajar as she pushed at it. Hardly daring to breathe, astonished at what she was doing, at her brazen act, she moved slowly through the open door and stood there, just over the threshold, in Bruce’s room.
The room was not in complete darkness, as the curtains did not quite meet in the middle and some light came in from outside; light that fell, slanted, upon the bed near the window. Bruce lay there, half covered by a sheet, his dark hair a deep shadow on the pillow, one arm crooked under his head, and one foot and ankle protruding from the sheet at the foot of the bed.
Pat looked and saw the rise and fall of his chest and the flat of his midriff and she felt as if she would sway and stumble. She could reach out easily, so very easily, and touch him, touch this vision of beauty; she could lay her hand upon his shoulder, or upon his chest, but did not do so, and just stood there quietly, struggling with the temptation which was before her. And as she did so, she thought of something that Angus Lordie had said when he had quoted from Sydney Goodsir Smith, who talked of the earth spinning around in the emptiness. Yes, the earth spun in a great void in which our tiny issues and concerns were really nothing, and what small pleasure or meaning we could extract from this life we should surely clutch before our instant was over.