she said. “We can all make mistakes. We can all do things that we didn’t plan to do.”
Dr Fairbairn looked at her with gratitude. Here was absolu-tion – of a sort. “Yes,” he said. “We all do things that we didn’t plan to do. How right you are.” He paused, and stood up. Moving to the window behind his desk, he looked out over the Queen Street Gardens. “Yes, I have done many things I did not intend to do. That is the human condition.”
“Many things?” asked Irene.
“Yes,” said Dr Fairbairn, turning round again. “Such as . . .”
But then he stopped.
Irene waited for him to continue, but Dr Fairbairn had become silent. He looked up at the ceiling, and Irene followed
his gaze. But there was nothing to be seen there, and so they both lowered their eyes.
He is so unhappy, thought Irene. He is so unresolved.
Neither Matthew nor Pat said anything about the unfortunate incident in the bathroom, although neither of them was quick to forget it. Both learned something from the experience.
Matthew now knew to lock the door and to remember that he was no longer alone in the flat. This meant that he should be careful about breaking out into song – as he occasionally liked to do – or uttering the odd mild expletive if he stubbed his toe on the corner of the kitchen dresser or if he dropped part of an egg shell into the omelette mixture. For her part, Pat learned to assume that a closed door meant that the bathroom was not free, and she learned, too, that Matthew was a sensitive person, easily embarrassed and not always able to articu-late the causes of his embarrassment. And for both of them, there was also the lesson that living together, even merely as flatmates, was a process of discovery. For although we are at our most secure – in one sense – in our own homes, we are also at our most vulnerable, for the social persona, the one we carry with us out into the world, cannot be worn at home all the time. That is where resides the real self, the self that can be so easily hurt.
There were things about Matthew that Pat had not suspected.
She had not imagined that he was a member of the Scotch Malt Whisky Society and received its newsletters with all those curious descriptions of the flavour of whiskies. She had paged through one of these which she found lying on the kitchen table and had been astonished by the terms used by the tasting panel. One whisky was described as smelling of school jotters; another smelled like a doctor’s bag (or what doctor’s bags used to smell like). She had never seen Matthew drink whisky, but he later 250
explained to her that he had been given the membership by his father, who was an enthusiast of whisky.
And then she had never seen Matthew reading
“I’ve never been in,” he said to Pat. “Or never been in properly. My left shoulder was, once, when there was a photograph of a charity ball down in Ayrshire. I was standing just to the side of a group who were being photographed and you could see my shoulder. It was definitely me. I have a green formal kilt jacket, you see, and that was shown. It was quite clear, actually.”
“That was bad luck,” said Pat.
“Yes,” said Matthew. “You have to be somebody like Timothy Clifford to get into
Pat thought for a moment. “We could have an opening at the gallery. We could have a big event and ask all these people.
Then, when they came, the photographers could hardly cut you out of your own party.”
Matthew thought for a moment. “Yes, that’s quite a good idea.” He paused. “I hope that you don’t think I sit here and worry about not being in
“Of course you have,” said Pat. “But should we do that?
Should we have an opening?”
“Yes,” said Matthew. “We could call it An Evening of Scottish Art. Let’s start drawing up the guest list soon. Who should we have?”
“Well, we could invite Duncan Macmillan,” said Pat. “He’s written that book on Scottish art. He could come.”
“Good idea,” said Matthew. “He’s very interesting. And then there’s James Holloway from the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. He lives near here, you know. And Richard and Francesca Calvocoressi. And Roddy Martine. Are you writing this down, Pat?”
They spent the next half hour composing the guest list, which eventually included two hundred names. “They won’t all come,”
said Matthew, surveying the glittering list. “In fact, I bet that hardly anyone comes.”
Pat looked at Matthew. There was a certain defeatism about him, which came out at odd moments. Defeatism can be a frustrating, unattractive quality, but in Matthew she found it to be rather different. The fact that Matthew thought that his ventures were destined to fail made her feel protective of him. He was such a nice person, she thought.
He is never unkind; he never makes sharp comments about others. And there he is trying to be a bit more fashionable in that awful distressed-oatmeal cashmere sweater, and all the time he just misses it. Nobody wears distressed oatmeal, these days; it’s so . . . it’s so yesterday. It’s so golf club.
