That was either the carelessness of the casual thief, or shamelessness of a high order. It was more likely, she decided, that 52
Presumably there were many thieves who did just that; who were so used to ill-gotten goods that they became blase about them.
And even worse criminals – murderers indeed – had been known to talk about their crimes in a casual way, as if nobody would sit up and take notice and report them. In a shameless age, when people readily revealed their most intimate secrets for the world to see, perhaps it was easy to imagine how the need for conceal-ment might be forgotten.
Domenica remembered how, some years previously, she had been invited for a picnic by some people who had quite casually mentioned that the rug upon which they were sitting had been lifted from an airline. It had astonished her to think that these people imagined that she would not be shocked, or at least disapproving. She had wanted to say: “But that’s theft!” but had lacked the courage to do that and had simply said: “Please pass me another sandwich.”
Later, when she had thought about it further, it occurred to her that the reason why they had been so open about their act of thievery was simply this: they did not consider it dishonest to steal from a large organisation. She remembered reading that people were only too willing to make false or exaggerated claims on insurance companies, on the grounds that they were big and would never notice it, nor were they slow to massage the figures of their expenses claims. All of this was simply theft, or its moral equivalent, and yet many of those who did it would probably never dream of stealing a wallet from somebody’s pocket, or slipping their hand into a shopkeeper’s till. What weighed with such people, it seemed to Domenica, was the extent to which the taking was personal.
Well, if that was the case – and it appeared to be so, in spite of the indefensibility of making such a distinction – then one would have thought that stealing one’s friend’s blue-and-white Spode cup was a supremely personal taking, especially when one’s friend had let one stay in her flat for virtually nothing.
That was the act of a true psychopath – one with no conscience whatsoever.
“Yes, synaesthesia,” said Antonia, pouring herself a cup of coffee into a plain white mug. “You know Edvard Munch’s famous picture
Munch said that he was taking a walk one evening and saw a very intense bloodred sky. He then had an overpowering feeling that all of nature was screaming – one great, big, natural howl of pain.
“Now, as to my father,” Antonia went on. “His case is very simple. He thinks that numbers have colours. When you ask him what colour the number three is, without a moment’s hesitation he says: ‘Why it’s red, of course.’ And ten, he says, is a shade of melancholy blue.”
Domenica thought for a moment. “But blue is often melancholy, isn’t it? Or that’s what I’ve always thought. Does that make me a synaesthetic?”
Antonia hesitated briefly before replying: “No, I don’t think so. I think that is more a question of conditioning. We’re told that blue is melancholy and so we associate that emotion with it. Just as Christmas is red, and white, being the colour of snow and ice, is cold. In my father’s case, I suspect that when he was learning to read as a boy, he had a book which had the letters and numbers in different colours. The figure three was probably painted in red, and that association was made and stuck.
Our minds are like that, aren’t they? Things stick.
“The association between blue and melancholy,” Antonia continued, “is a cultural one. Somebody, a long time ago, a genuine synaesthetic perhaps, said: ‘I’m feeling blue,’ and the expression caught on.”
“The birth of the blues,” said Domenica.
“Precisely,” agreed Antonia. She took a sip of her coffee. “Of course there are so many associations in our minds that it’s not surprising that some get mixed up – wires get crossed. Whenever I hear certain pieces of music, I think of places, people, times.
That’s only natural.
54
“People are always doing that with popular music. They remember where they were when they listened to something that made an impression on them.”
“If you’re going to San Francisco,” said Domenica suddenly,
“be sure to wear some flowers in your hair . . .”
Antonia stared at her.
“A song,” explained Domenica. “Round about the late sixties, 1967, maybe. It makes me think not of San Francisco, but Orkney, because that’s where I was when I listened to it. I loved it. And I can see Stromness, with its little streets, and the house I was staying in over the summer while I worked part-time in the hotel there. I was a student, and there was another student working there, a boy, and I suppose I was in love with him, although he never knew.”
Antonia was silent. She looked at Domenica. She had never thought of Domenica having a love life, but she must have, because we all fall in love, and some of us are sentenced to unre-quited love, talking about it over cups of coffee in flats like this, with friends just like this, oddly comforted by the process.
– or their panels had been tacked over with plywood to produce an unrelieved surface. That, one assumed, was the same aesthetic sense which had produced the St James Centre, a crude cluster of grey blocks at the end of the sadly mutilated Princes Street, or, at a slightly earlier stage, had sought the turning of Princes
