“Well,” she began, “I think it’s a good idea to let go. Scotland used to have Stuarts – now it doesn’t. And the Hanoverians used to be Germans, now they aren’t. They’re British. So what’s the point of looking for some ridiculous Pretender? Haven’t your friends got anything better to do?”
Robbie shook his head in dismay. “You’re talking about people who are prepared to do anything for Scotland,” he said. “To die, even.”
Big Lou dropped her dusting cloth. “To die? Are you serious, Robbie?”
Robbie looked straight back at her. “Aye, Lou. Dead serious.”
She laughed. “That wee boy, Jimmy. He’s drinking all this in from Michael, with his posh voice and his fancy clothes. Die for the cause? Does Scotland need all this nonsense, or does it need something done about its real problems? About teenage binge drinking? About all those folk who get by on next to nothing?
About that sort of thing?”
Robbie reached out to touch Big Lou on the arm, but she withdrew. “Answer my question, Robbie Cromach,” she snapped.
Lou’s man looked at his hands. The hands of a plasterer, they
were cracked from exposure to lime and grit. “All right,” he said. “I’ll answer you, Lou.” He looked up at her, and she saw the features that had attracted her so much, the high cheek-bones, the boyish vulnerability.
“I know that there’s a lot wrong with this country of ours,”
he said. “I know fine that there are folk who can’t earn a decent wage, no matter how hard they work. I know that there’s a very rich company in this city, for instance, that pays its cleaners a pittance while it rakes in the profits big-time. Shame on them.
Shame on them. I know that there are places where the kids are all fuelled up on Buckie and pills and where the fathers are not there or are drunk or otherwise out of it. I know that we’ve got a wee parliament that makes lots and lots of grand-sounding bodies and is full of high heid-yins and tsars. I know all that, Lou. But all of this goes back, you see. It goes back to things not being right with ourselves. And until we get that right –
until we take back what was taken away from us right back there when they took our kings away from us, then the rest is going to be wrong. That’s what I believe, Lou. God’s truth – that’s what I believe.”
Robbie stopped. He looked at Big Lou almost imploringly, as if he was willing her to see the situation as he saw it.
“I understand all that, Robbie,” she said quietly. “It’s just that I think that sounding off about something as old as that is not very helpful. It was all very romantic – I give you that – when Charlie landed and when it looked like he was going to get his kingdom back. But for what? What sort of rulers had those people been? And anyway, it makes no difference, surely. It’s old, old business, Robbie. Surely you can see that?”
Big Lou waited for Robbie’s response. It was slow, but at last he said something: “No. I don’t see that, Lou. Sorry, I don’t.”
Big Lou sighed. Why was it her lot in life, she wondered, to find men who had something odd about them? Every time, every single time, she had been involved with a man, there had been something strange about him. There had been that man in Aberdeen who had been obsessed with billiards and who had 204
Which was worse?
There was no doubt in Big Lou’s mind. “Oh well, Robbie,”
she said at last. “Whatever makes you happy.”
Robbie leaned forward and kissed Big Lou on the cheek.
“You’re a trouper, Lou,” he said. “One of the best. Just like Flora MacDonald.”
This was not through any lack of inclination to do so, but it was rather because of the crowded timetable which Irene prepared for Bertie. Not only was there a saxophone lesson each week –
complemented by a daily practice session of at least half an hour (scales, arpeggios, and set pieces) – but there was also Bertie’s yoga in Stockbridge, which took at least two hours, and Italian structured
It was an extremely full life for a little boy, and there was more to come: Irene had planned a book group for Bertie, in which five or six children from the New Town would meet regularly in each other’s flats and discuss a book that they had read.
The model for this was, in Irene’s mind, her own Kleinian book group, which had flourished for several months before it had been sabotaged by one of the members. This still rankled with Irene, who had resisted this other member’s attempts to
introduce works of fiction into the group’s programme. This had effectively split the group and left such a sour taste in the mouths of Irene and her allies that the group’s meetings had fizzled out and never restarted.
“The whole point about our group,” Irene had complained to a friend, “is that we are not one of those awful groups of middle-class ladies who meet and talk about the latest vapid imaginings of some novelist. That we are not.”
