“May I?” he said, gesturing at the paintings.
“Of course,” said Pat. “If there’s anything you want to know . . .” She left the sentence unfinished. If there was something he wanted to know it was unlikely that she would be able to give him any information. She could call Matthew, of course, but then he appeared to know nothing as well.
The man smiled, looking about him as if deciding where to start. After a few moments he went up to a small still-life, a Glasgow jug into which a bunch of flowers had been stuffed at a drunken angle.
“Not the way to arrange flowers,” he said, and then added:
“Nor to paint them . . .”
Pat said nothing. It was an unpleasant, amateurish painting; he was quite right. But she said nothing; she felt vaguely protective of Matthew’s paintings, and it was not for customers to come in and criticise them, even if the criticism was deserved.
The man moved over to the painting which looked like a Peploe; school of Peploe perhaps. He stood in front of it for a few moments and then turned to address Pat.
“Very nice,” he said. “In a derivative sort of way. Peaceful.
Shore of Mull from Iona, or shore of Iona from Mull?”
Pat picked up the list from her desk and walked over to join him. “According to this, it’s Mull,” she said. “Mull, near Tobermory, by, and then there’s a question mark.”
28
“It’s not a Peploe,” the man said. “That’s pretty obvious. But it has its points. Look over there, that nice shading. Confident brush strokes.”
Pat looked. How can he be so sure it’s not a Peploe, she wondered. Particularly since there were the initials SP painted in the bottom right-hand corner. Then it occurred to her: SP –
School of Peploe.
Matthew felt that he was the discoverer of Big Lou’s coffee bar, although, like everything that is discovered (America or Lake Victoria being examples), it had always been there; or at least it had been there for the last three years or so. Before that it had been a second-hand bookshop, noted for its jumbled stock, that observed no known principle in the shelving of its collection.
Topography rubbed shoulders with poetry; books on fishing and country pursuits stood side-by-side with Hegel and Habermas; and nothing was too recondite to find a place, even if no purchaser.
Nobody wanted, it seemed, a guide to the walking paths of Calabria, to be found, quite fortuitously, next to an India-paper edition of
Only the proprietor loved these books, so fiercely and possessively, perhaps, that he discouraged purchasers. At length, as if crushed by the sheer weight of his duty and slow-moving stock, he died, and the shop was sold by his executors to Big Lou, together with its books. And then, in a gesture which was to change her life, she took all the books home to her flat in Canonmills and began to read them, one by one. She read the Norman Douglas, she read the guide to Calabrian walking paths, and she read the Hegel and the Habermas. And curiously enough, she remembered the contents of all these books.
Big Lou came from Arbroath, and that was all that anybody
29
knew about her. Questions about what she had done before she arrived in Edinburgh were ignored, as if they had not been asked, and as a result there was some speculation. She had been married to a sailor; no, she was a sailor herself, having gone to sea dressed as a man and never been unmasked; no, she had been a man, who had gone to Tangier for an operation and returned as a woman. None of this was correct. In fact, Big Lou had done very little with her life. In Arbroath she had looked after an aged uncle until she reached the age of thirty. Then she had left, but the leaving had been ill-starred. Having decided to go to Edinburgh on the death of the demanding uncle, she had shut up the house, handed the keys to a relative, and walked to the station with her suitcase. Arbroath Station is not complicated, but Big Lou had nonetheless mistaken the north-bound platform for the south-bound one, and had boarded a train to Aberdeen.
She had been tired; the carriage was warm, and she almost immediately went to sleep, to wake up shortly before the train reached Stonehaven. She alighted at Aberdeen Station and felt too discouraged to return immediately. Somehow, Aberdeen was less threatening than she suspected Edinburgh might be. Directly outside the station there was a small cafe, and in the window of this she saw a notice advertising a vacancy for care assistants at a nursing home. That, she thought, is what I am. I am a carer.
I care for others, which is exactly what she did for the next eight years in the Granite Nursing Home.
Although it was in some respects discouraging, this job ultimately proved to be extremely lucrative. One of the residents, a retired farmer from Buchan, had named her as the principal beneficiary in his will, and she had come into a substantial sum of money. This was the signal to stop caring for people in Aberdeen – in every sense – and to take the train that she had missed those eight years before. She was now in a position to buy the coffee bar and the flat in Canonmills, and to start a new life.
The coffee bar had been designed for her by a man she had met in a launderette. Like most of the things that had happened in Big Lou’s life, she was not properly consulted. Things happened to her; she did not initiate anything. And so she was never asked 30
whether she wanted the booths that this man designed and constructed for her; nor whether she approved of the large and expensive mahogany newspaper rack which he installed near the front door. This was all done without anything having been agreed, and she appeared to accept this, just as she had accepted that she should have devoted the early years of her adult life to looking after her uncle, while her friends from school had gone off to Glasgow or to London and had all led lives of their own making.
