He took her refusal in good spirit. “God be with you,” he said, and jumped back into the van. The door closed, and the moment was lost. Pat thought, as she walked away: I shall never be invited again into the living quarters of a Polish circus performer, and she laughed at the idea. Had she gone, then her life might have been different. She might have gone off with the circus, and married him in a dark church in Krakow, and borne the children of the gymnast, tiny, lithe children who would have been taught to leap from her lap and turn somersaults in the bath. And what was more, she thought: I might have become a Catholic.
It took her forty minutes to reach Scotland Street, as there were other Fringe performers to watch as she made her way
down the hill. On the steps behind the National Gallery, she stopped for a moment while a group of students enacted a scene from
Lady Macbeth upbraided her husband, a tall young man with the residue of teenage acne about his chin. Pat watched for a few minutes, trapped in a small audience. But then her chance to leave came: she had spotted Domenica Macdonald, her neighbour from across the landing at Scotland Street, and she could slip away to join her. Domenica was on the edge of a growing crowd that was surrounding a man dressed as Punchinello and who was about to swallow a sword. The performer held the sword above his upturned mouth and it glinted in the afternoon sunlight.
“Domenica,” she whispered. “Is he really going to do that?”
Domenica turned and smiled warmly. “How nice to see you,”
she said.
“I have always loved a spectacle, and there are spectacles galore at the moment. Of course he’s going to swallow it. And then we shall all applaud. We are very vulgar at heart, you know.
We love this sort of thing. All of us. We can’t resist it. Behind us in the gallery are all the treasures of Western art, as assem-bled for us by Sir Timothy Clifford, and we choose instead to watch a man swallowing a sword. Isn’t that peculiar?”
Pat nodded. It was very peculiar; of course it was; she began to say this, and then she stopped. Wasn’t that Sir Timothy Clifford himself, on the other side of the crowd, watching the sword swallower? She nudged Domenica, who looked in the direction in which Pat was pointing, and inclined her head in affirmation.
“He appreciates a bit of a spectacle,” Domenica said. “And why not? He’s put on such wonderful shows in the gallery.
Besides, art is theatre, is it not – and theatre art?”
14
The sword was swallowed, and regurgitated, as had been expected. There were gasps, and then applause. Many of those present expressed the view that they would not like to try that
– no thank you! – and Sir Timothy was heard to mutter something about Titian before he retreated into his gallery.
Domenica, who had seen considerably more entertaining spectacles during her time in India, turned to Pat and said: “Such feats, without a religious dimension, are less impressive, I feel, than those that allude to the sacred. What’s the point of swallowing a sword if one gives the process no spiritual significance?”
Pat was puzzled by this remark, and as they crossed Princes Street to begin the walk back down the hill, she asked Domenica to explain.
“In India, we used to see such things from time to time,”
Domenica said. “We lived in Kerala, in the Christian south, but Hindu holy men used to pop down from time to time to remind us of the old gods. Some of these were fakirs, who would walk across beds of hot coals or swallow fire, or whatever. They did this to show that spirituality could conquer the body – could overcome the material world. And you could offer the whole thing up to the glory of the gods, which gave it a religious point.
But our sword swallower on the Mound won’t have any of that in mind, I’m afraid. Mere spectacle.”
Pat felt that she could add little to this. She had never been to India, and she knew nothing about Hinduism, or indeed about many of the other topics on which Domenica seemed to have a view. And yet she was open-minded enough to know that she did not know, and she was a listener. That was her gift.
The streets were crowded with Festival visitors, and their progress down Dundas Street was slow, interrupted by knots of people standing in the middle of the pavement, some, their eyes glazed, in a state of cultural indigestion, some consulting maps and programmes. Domenica gave directions to a puzzled Japanese couple and bowed politely at the end of her explanation, setting off a sequence of further bows and inclinations of the head.
15
“They find us so rude, in general,” she said. “A few bows here and there serve to redress matters.” She paused for a moment. “And we smell a little rancid to them, you know. They are so hygienic, with their steam baths and so on. However much we wash it seems we have this slight smell, I understand, even Edinburgh people, would you believe? Heaven knows what they think of those parts of the country where they aren’t too attentive to bathing requirements.”
Pat smiled. This was vintage Domenica. Nobody else of her acquaintance would speak like this, and she found it curiously refreshing. Her own generation was too timid – beaten into compliance with a set of imposed views.
She looked about her, almost furtively. “And which parts would those be?” she asked.
Domenica waved a hand in the air. “Oh, there are various parts of the country where people haven’t washed a great deal.
Probably because they didn’t have enough taps and baths in the houses. It’s all very well for the middle classes to go on about cleanliness, but people used to have a terrible battle.
