until they irritatingly started to call it the Balmoral. And if you really want to make a point – to tell somebody that you were here before they were – that it’s your city – you can refer to it as the NB. Then at least some people won’t know what you’re talking about.”
“But why would anybody want that?” she asked.
“Because we like our private references,” he said. “And, as I’ve said, we want to feel that we belong. It’s a simple matter of feelings of security . . .”
He smiled at his daughter. “Talking of the NB Hotel, there was a wonderful poet called Robert Garioch. He wrote poems about Edinburgh and about the city and its foibles. He wrote a 4
poem about seeing people coming out of the NB Grill and getting into what he called a muckle great municipal Rolls-Royce. That said it all, you see. He said more about the city of his day in those few lines than many others would in fifty pages.”
He paused. “But, my dear, you must be hungry. And you said that you have something to tell me. You said that you’ve made a momentous decision, and I’m going on about semiotics and the poetry of Robert Garioch. Is it a really important decision
– really important?”
“It is,” said Pat. “It really is. It’s about my whole life, I think.”
“You think?”
“Yes, I think so.”
When his daughter had announced that she had made an important decision – an announcement casually dropped into the telephone conversation they had had before their lunch at the Canny Man’s in Morningside Road – Dr Macgregor had experienced a distressingly familiar pang of dread. Ever since Pat had chosen to spend her gap year in Australia, he had been haunted by the possibility that she would leave Scotland and simply not return. Australia was a world away, and it was full of possibilities. Anybody might be forgiven for going to Melbourne or Sydney – or even to Perth – and discovering that life in those places was fuller than the one they had led before.
There was more space in Australia, and more light – but it was also true that there was there an exhilarating freedom, precisely the sort of freedom that might appeal to a nineteen-year-old.
And there were young men, too, who must have been an additional lure. She might meet one of these and stay forever, forgetful of the fact that vigorous Australian males within a few years mutated into
5
So he had spent an anxious ten months wondering whether she would come back to Scotland and upbraiding himself constantly about the harbouring of such fears. He knew that it was wrong for parents to think this way, and had told many of his own patients that they should stop worrying about their offspring and let go. “You must be able to let go,” he had said, on countless occasions. “Your children must be allowed to lead their own lives.” And even as he uttered the words he realised the awful banality of what he said; but it was difficult, was it not, to talk about letting go without sounding like a passage from Kahlil Gibran’s
And although he gave this advice to people, he found it difficult – almost impossible, in fact – to practise it himself. He and his wife, Maureen, had only one child; she was their future, not only in the genetic sense, but in an emotional one too. In the case of Dr Macgregor himself, this was particularly true. He enjoyed cordial relations with Maureen, but there was a distance between them which he realised could never be bridged. It had been apparent from the earliest years of the marriage that they really shared very few interests, and had little to talk about.
Her energies were focused on public causes and on her own, largely dysfunctional family. She had two difficult sisters and one difficult brother, and these siblings had duly spawned difficult and demanding children. So while she nominally lived in Edinburgh, in reality she spent a great deal of her time moving from relative to relative, coping with whatever crisis had freshly emerged. The sister in Angus – the one who drank – was particularly demanding. This manipulative sister really wanted Maureen to live with her, and to this end she longed for Maureen’s widowhood, and said as much, which was tactless.
There are many women whose lives would be immeasurably 6
improved by widowhood, but one should not always point that out.
The absenteeism of his wife had its natural consequence. Pat became for him the focus of his family feeling; she was his best friend, and, to the extent that the father and daughter relationship permitted, his confidante. Of course he knew of the dangers of this; that the investing of one’s entire world in a child was to give a powerful hostage to fortune, and that he should develop other friendships and ties. But he had somehow failed to do that. He was popular with his professional colleagues and he would have called many of these his friends, but there were limits to such friendships. People moved jobs; they went away; they developed new, outside friendships which were more absorbing than those of work. He should join a club, perhaps; but what clubs could he possibly take seriously? He had never had much interest in golf, and he was not sure whether he would approve of the ethos of a golf club, and what other clubs did people have in mind when they recommended membership as an antidote to loneliness? Perhaps they meant the Scottish Arts Club; he had walked past it one day and seen people having lunch in the dining room on the ground floor. He had stopped in his tracks and gazed in at the sight. A well-known journalist was holding court, it seemed, to an audience of antique dealers
– he knew one of them, a man with an exemplary moustache
– and portrait painters. They had full glasses of red wine before them and he saw, but could not hear, their laughter. For a moment he had been transfixed by this vision of fellowship and had thought: this is what I do not have. But although this sight had made him think that he might perhaps apply to join, he had done nothing about it,
