And this flat I’m moving into, very bijou – I’ll be sharing with the girl who owns it. Her old man’s pretty well-off. He likes me, she says. And she’s got her views on that, too, if you know what I mean. She’s a stunner. English rose type. Long, blonde hair.
Job in PR. Who knows what lies ahead? Who knows?”
Pat nodded. “That’s very nice for you, Bruce.” She paused.
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“And thanks, Bruce, for everything you’ve done for me. Letting me live here and so on.”
Bruce rose to his feet. Taking a step forward, he reached out and placed both his arms lazily on her shoulders.
“You’re not a bad type, Pat,” he said. “And you know what?
I reckon I’m going to miss you a bit when I’m down there. And so . . .” He bent forward and then, to Pat’s astonishment, planted a kiss on her lips, not a gentle kiss, but one that was remarkably passionate, for Edinburgh.
Drawing back, he looked down at her and smiled. “There,”
he said. “That’s what you’ve been wanting for so long, isn’t it?”
Pat could not speak. Cloves, she thought. Now I smell of cloves.
“Porcini mushrooms,” intoned Domenica. “Place dried porcini mushrooms in a bowl of hot water and allow the mushrooms to reconstitute. Keep the liquid.”
“Why?” asked Pat. “What are we going to do with it?”
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“We are going to cook the Arborio rice in it,” explained Domenica. “In that way, the rice will absorb the taste of the mushrooms. It’s the same principle as in the old days when people in Scotland ate tatties and a pass. The pass was the passing of a bit of meat over the tatties. The father ate the meat and the children just got a whiff of it over their tatties.”
“Life was hard,” said Pat, slitting open the packet of mushrooms.
“Yes,” said Domenica. “And now here we are, descendants of those very people, opening packets of imported mushrooms.”
She looked out of the window, down onto Scotland Street, to the setts glistening after the light evening rain which had drifted over the town and was now drawing a white veil over Fife. “And to think,” she went on, “that the woman who lived in this house when it was first built probably had only one or two dresses.
That’s all. People had very few clothes, you know. Even the wives of well-to-do farmers – they might have had only one dress. Life was very different.”
“It’s hard to imagine,” said Pat.
“Yes,” said Domenica. “But we need to remind ourselves. We need to renew that bond between ourselves and them, our great-great-grandparents, or whatever they were. It’s what makes us a people. It’s the knowledge of what they went through, what they were, that brings us together. If we lost that, then we’d be just an odd collection of people living on the same little bit of land. And that would be my nightmare, Pat – it really would. If our sense of ourselves as a group, a nation, as Scots, were to disappear.”
Pat shrugged. “But nobody’s going to make that disappear,”
she said. “Why would they?”
Domenica spun round. “Oh, there are plenty of people who would be quite happy to see all that disappear. What do you think globalisation is all about? Who gains if we’re all reduced to compliant consumers, all with the same tastes, all prepared to accept decisions which are made at a distance, by people whom we can’t censure or control?
“I, for one, refuse to lie down in the face of all that,” went
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on Domenica. “I want to live in a community with an authentic culture. They may sound trite, but I can find no other words for it. I want to have a culture that is the product of where I am – that engages with the issues that concern me. It’s the difference between electronic music and real music. Between the pre-digested pap of Hollywood and real film. It’s that basic, Pat.”
Domenica reached for her recipe book. She sighed.
“I sometimes feel very discouraged,” she said. “You must forgive me. I look out at our world and I just get terribly discouraged. And if I ever turn on a television set, which I try to avoid if at all possible, it only gets worse. All that crudity, that dumbing-down. Inane, mindless game shows. People laughing at the humiliation and anger of others. The most basic, triumphalist materialism, too.
“And the crassness, the sheer crassness of the characters who are paraded across the national stage to be jeered at or applauded.
The vain celebrities, the foul-mouthed bullies. What a wonderful picture of our national life all this presents!
“And what voices are there in all this . . . all this noise? What voices are there to say something serious and intelligent? When the justice minister went to her own constituency to try to do something about the selling of alcohol to young teenagers, she was barracked and sworn at by teenage boys, and nothing was done to stop it. Did you see that? Did you see that shocking picture? That poor woman! Trying to do an impossible job as best she could, and that’s her reward.
