The World According to Bertie

did a lot of work there. It all depended on an understanding of Edinburgh as a city of cultivated, outward respectability beneath which there lay of world of priapic indulgence. But was that still the reality? Perhaps it was. One had only to look at Moray Place, that most respectable of addresses and reflect on how many nudists lived there. That was very strange: Jekyll clothed, and then, after a quick disrobing, there was Hyde unclothed!

Domenica had agreed to meet her friend James Holloway for coffee at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, where he was the director. By the time she arrived at the Gothic Revival sandstone building on Queen Street, she had put out of her mind all thought of Antonia’s torrid affair – at least she assumed it was torrid and, anyway, she wondered if there was any point in having an affair which was not torrid. Now, as she sat in the coffee room, waiting for James to come down from his office upstairs, she looked up at the Bellany portraits on the wall above 182 It Did Not Do to Think About Sex on Heriot Row her table. Sean Connery looked out of one of them rather forbid-dingly, but then he was perhaps a touch disapproving, which was why people in Scotland were so proud of him. Scots heroes were not meant to be benign in their outlook; they needed to be at least a little bit cross about something, preferably an injustice committed against them, individually or nationally, some time ago. Sean Connery certainly looked rather cross about something. Perhaps he was cross at having his portrait painted, in the way in which such people often looked cross at having their photographs taken. Perhaps, thought Domenica, there were paparazzi portraitists, who lurked with their easels outside hotels and fashionable nightclubs and painted quick likenesses of well-known people as they left the building – absurd thought.

James arrived and fetched the coffee. “I need your advice,”

he said as he sat down. “We’ve been offered an exhibition of the photographs of famous anthropologists. Pitt Rivers, Mead, and the like. I’d like to show you the names. Some of them are unfamiliar to me. There’s one who spent some time among headhunters in the Philippines . . .”

“Probably R.F. Barton,” interjected Domenica. “He spent some time with head-hunting tribes there back in the nineteen-thirties, although there was an anthropologist who lived among headhunters as late as the late nineteen- sixties. That was Renato Rosaldo, if I remember correctly.”

“Did they come back?” asked James, adding, “In one piece?”

“Oh yes,” said Domenica. “The headhunters were usually very good hosts. They tended to go for heads belonging to their enemies, not their friends. Friends’ heads were left in situ, so to speak.”

James looked thoughtful. “I see,” he said. “I suppose this very gallery is full of heads. Pictures, of course, but heads nonetheless. Does that make us headhunters?”

“Virtual,” said Domenica. “Virtual headhunters. But enough of that, James, what about your travels?”

“Since I last saw you,” said James, “there’s been India. Again.”

“On your motorcycle?”

“Not my Ducati,” said James. “That stayed in Scotland. But

It Did Not Do to Think About Sex on Heriot Row 183

I got hold of a very nice hired bike. A Royal Enfield Bullet, 650cc. Made in Madras. I went up to the Himalayas and down into Rajasthan.”

Domenica frowned. “Is Madras still Madras? Isn’t it . . . ?”

“Chennai,” supplied James. “For some people it may be, and that’s fine, but we’re talking English, aren’t we? And we have English words for certain places. Those words exist irrespective of what the people who live in the place in question may call it. So why change the name?”

He paused. “Take Florence,” he said. “Would you ever say I’m off to Firenze? You would not, unless you were extremely pretentious, which you aren’t. Or Milan. Who goes to Milano? And the French have Edimbourg and Londres. Would you insist on their using Edinburgh and London? No, you wouldn’t. In fact, one can’t insist that the French do anything – everybody knows that.

“So I go to Bombay,” he continued, “rather than to Mumbai, and I must say that when I’m there I find that most people I talk to say Bombay rather than Mumbai.”

Domenica thought for a moment. There was a scrap of a poem coming back to her. What was it? Yes, that was it.

“Under Mr de Valera,” she ventured inconsequentially,

“Ireland changed herself to Eire / England didn’t change her name / And is still called England just the same.”

“What odd things one remembers,” said James.

55. What Can Be the Secret of the Tiny Stars?

“But don’t you think that it’s a question of respect?” asked Domenica. “We went round the world giving names to places that already had their own names. This is a gesture – a sign that we respect the real identity of the places we named incorrectly.”

James Holloway shook his head. “I don’t think it reveals any lack of respect to call Naples Naples rather than Napoli.”

Domenica looked up at the ceiling. There was a difference, she thought, but what exactly was it? “But we didn’t impose Naples on the Italians. The name Naples was for our use, not theirs. We imposed Bombay on India. Now we are saying: we’ll call you what you want us to call you. That’s a rather different attitude, I think.”

James picked up his coffee cup. “Of course, the names of whole peoples have been changed too. Remember the Hottentots? They’ve become the Khoi now, which means that the Germans will have to retire that wonderful word of theirs, Hottentotenpotentatenstantenattentater, which means, as you know, one who attacks the aunt of a Hottentot potentate.” He paused.

“But I’m uncomfortable with the deliberate manipulation of the language. I think that we have to be careful about that. It’s rather like rewriting history. We can’t go back and sanitise things.”

The subject now had to be changed. James wanted to show Domenica the list of anthropologists, and that would entail going up to his office above the coffee room. He suggested that they do this, and they left.

“Such a nice smell of cooking,” observed Domenica as they made their way up the small staircase that led to