“Well,” she said airily. “We can think about it later on. You don’t have to reach any decisions just yet.” She paused. A few words would be sufficient. “Do you mind if I make a telephone call, Matthew? I have to ring my boyfriend.”
She saw his expression change. The human face was so transparent, she thought, so revealing of the feelings below; in this case, there was just a loss of light, so subtle that one would never be able to pinpoint how it occurred; but there was less light.
“So,” he said. “You have a romance on the go.”
Pat did not like to lie, but there were times when the only kind thing to do with men was to lie to them. If one did not lie to men, then they suffered all the more. And she was not sure that what she was telling was a lie anyway. She had met Wolf, and had taken to him. What she had felt on that first encounter and in the subsequent conversation in the Elephant House had everything to do with romance, she would have thought; certainly the physiological signs had been present – the feeling of lightness in the stomach, the slight racing of the heart, the prickling of the skin. So she would not be lying at all.
“Yes,” she said, looking down at the ground. It is easier to lie to the ground, in general.
Matthew fiddled with the edge of his desk. His knuckles, she saw, were white.
“What’s he called?” he asked.
She hesitated. It was none of Matthew’s business to know the names of her friends, but she could not tell him this.
“Wolf,” she said.
He stared at her for a moment. Then he laughed. “You’re not serious! Wolf? Is he German by any chance? Wears leder-hosen?”
Pat shut her eyes. She had been too gentle with him. How dare he talk of Wolf like that; gentle, kind Wolf. She paused.
She knew nothing about Wolf. She had no idea whether he was gentle and kind, and there was at least some evidence that he 32
was not – and had he not mouthed the predatory words: hey there, little Red Riding-Hood? What sort of boy said that? Only a wolf, she thought.
If there had been change on the top floor of 44 Scotland Street, with the departure of Domenica and the arrival of Antonia, then there had been change, too, elsewhere in the building.
On the top landing, opposite Domenica’s flat, was the flat which had been owned by Bruce Anderson, who had now left Edinburgh to live in London, in the hope that Chelsea or Fulham might provide that which he felt to be missing from his life in Edinburgh.
Pat had been his tenant, but had left when Bruce had placed the flat on the market and eventually sold it to a young architect turned property developer. On the floor below, Irene and Stuart Pollock had not moved, thus providing the continuity required if a building is to have a collective memory. That was one of the features which made those Edinburgh streets so special; in contrast with so many other cities, where people may come and go and leave no memory, the streets and houses of the Edinburgh New Town bore an oral history that might survive, thirty, forty, even fifty years. People remembered who lived where, what they did, and where they went. People wanted to belong. They wanted to be part of something that had a local feel, a local face.
Irene Pollock was the mother of that most talented of six-year-olds, Bertie Pollock, now of the Steiner School in Merchiston and sometime pupil (suspended) at the East New Town Advanced Nursery. Bertie was still in therapy with Dr Hugo Fairbairn, author of that seminal work on child analysis,
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an interest in setting fire to things is accompanied by a tendency to be cruel to animals and to suffer from late bed-wetting. The literature in forensic psychiatry contains several reports on this curious combination of behaviours and symptoms, and any well-informed child psychiatrist encountering a youthful fire-raiser would do well to inquire along these lines. Dr Fairbairn, however, ruled this out immediately. Unlike Frederick in the
Bertie had accomplished a great deal since his early and distinguished toilet training. He had become reasonably fluent in Italian and a more than competent saxophonist. Both of these were skills which had been forced upon him by his mother, who, in the case of Italian lessons, had started these shortly after his third birthday.
While other children listened to tapes of nursery rhymes – almost all of which were, in Irene’s view, patriarchal nonsense – Bertie listened to the complete set of
After this, he graduated to listening with perfect understanding to Buzzati’s story of the invasion of Sicily by bears, a vaguely sinister story which was later to surface in his concerns over the possibility of encountering bears in the streets of Edinburgh.
