strange experience – amusing, of course, with all those innocent disclosures
– but there was something more to it, and that was puzzling her. At one level their conversation had been exactly the sort of talk that one might expect to have with a boy of – what was he?
six, at the most, she thought – and yet there had been another level to it altogether, and this had made her feel an extraordinary warmth towards him. Yes, that was it: the warmth.
She made her way into the kitchen, dropped her shopping bag on the floor near the cooker, and sat down in the chair near the window. It was a high-ish chair, plain in its lines, and covered with a Macpherson tartan throw. Domenica was not a Macpherson, but a Macdonald. Why should she have a Macpherson throw? Was it the sheer prettiness of that particular tartan with its soft greys and wine-red stripe? But then it occurred to her that there was another reason. Domenica had many enthusiasms, but one of them, Antonia recalled, was for the works of Ossian, or, should one say, the works of James Macpherson. That must be it.
Antonia sat back in the Ossian chair and remembered. It had been right there – in that very spot – eight or nine years ago –
and she had been in Edinburgh to look something up in the National Library; something to do with early Scottish monastic practices, if she remembered correctly; but the memory of what it was, like the memory of the early Scottish monastic practices themselves, had faded. After her visit to the Library she had come here, to Scotland Street, to drink a cup of coffee with Domenica and to seek solace. Antonia’s marriage was not going well then and she had wanted to talk about that, but had not
raised it in the end because Domenica had been in full flight about Ossian.
“In the scrap between Dr Johnson and Macpherson, I’m on Macpherson’s side,” pronounced Domenica. “He had seen the subjugation of his world. The burnings. The interdiction of the kilt, language, everything. All he wanted to do was to show that there was Gaelic culture that was capable of great art. And all those dry pedants in London could do was to say: where are the manuscripts?”
“Well, I suppose if one claims to have discovered a Homer, it might be reasonable to ask . . .”
“Not a bit of it,” said Domenica. “The poetry was there, passed from mouth to mouth. Not everybody worships the written word, you know. And that Dr Johnson . . . Do you know what he said about the stick that he carried down in London?
He said that it was just in case he should bump into Macpherson and would have the chance to wallop him with it! What a thing to say! A typical Cockney bully.”
“Macpherson could look after himself. All that money he made . . .”
“No different from the money anybody else made. Better, in fact. Look at the fortunes that were to be made from slave-trading and Jamaican sugar plantations and all the rest.
Macpherson’s fortune was less tainted than the fortunes of many of those strutting Highland grandees. Why begrudge him his Adam mansion? And, anyway, even if he invented most of the Ossian stuff, it was great literature by any standards. Does it matter whose pen it came from?”
They had moved off the subject of Ossian and on to other controversial cases: to that of Grey Owl, the bogus Indian chief who was really only Archie Belaney from Sussex, or somewhere like that; to Lobsang Rampa who claimed to have been a Tibetan monk, but who was really a man called Cyril Hoskins, from Devon; to Budu Svanidze and his memoirs of his Uncle Joe (Joseph Stalin).
Such conversations! Hour after hour they had passed together
– Antonia and Domenica – and much of what had been said had been forgotten, or remembered only in part. When her friend 344
came back, as she shortly would, then they would doubtless have many more such discussions, especially as they would now be neighbours. And they usually agreed with one another in the end, even after great differences of opinion had been discovered.
She thought back to that little boy, to Bertie, and now she saw what it was about him that made him so appealing: he spoke the truth. Candour was so attractive because we were so accustomed now to obfuscation and deceit, to what they called spin. Everything about our world was becoming so superficial. All around us there were actors. Politicians were actors, keeping to a script, condescending to us with their brief sound-bites, employing all sorts of smoke and mirrors to prevent their ordinary failings from being exposed. And rather than say yes, things have gone wrong and let’s find out why, they would side-step and weave their way past the traps set for them by equally evasive opponents.
Light, clarity, integrity. Every so often one saw them, and in such surprising places. So she had seen it in that peculiar conversation with the little boy on the stair. She had seen candour and honesty and utter transparency. But you had to be a child to be like that today, because all about us was the most pervasive cynicism; a cynicism that eroded everything with its superficiality and its sneers. And a little child might remind us of what it is to be straightforward, to be filled with love, and with puzzlement.
She arose from the chair and looked out of the kitchen window. The sky was perfectly empty now, filled with light; the rooftops, grey-slated, sloping, pursued angles to each other, led the eye away. When Domenica came back, Antonia thought, I shall do something to show her how much I value our friendship. And Angus Lordie, too. He’s a lonely man, and a peculiar one, but I can show him friendship and consideration too. And could I go so far as to love him? She thought carefully. Women always do this, she said to herself. Men don’t know it, but we do. We think very carefully about a man, about his qualities, his behaviour, everything. And then we fall in love.
She thought about Angus Lordie, standing as she was in front of the window. And then, at exactly half past four, she came to her decision.
When Dilly Emslie went upstairs to the coffee room at Ottakars Bookshop, she was concerned that she might not find a seat, as it was busier than usual. What had brought people out on a Tuesday morning was not clear to her; the town seemed bustling, and even George Street was thronged with shoppers. But they were well-behaved shoppers, who did not push and shove, as shoppers did on Princes Street, but moved aside graciously to allow others to pass, lifting their hats where appropriate, making sure that nobody felt that he or she was about to be crowded off the pavement and into the road. Even the motorists, contending for the scarce parking places in the middle of the road, would concede a space if they saw another car about to turn in, gesturing with a friendly flick of the wrist for the other driver to go ahead. It was just as life in Edinburgh should be (
Dilly ordered a pot of coffee for two and found a table. She looked about her, glanced idly at a magazine which
