A Time of Love and Tartan Read online

  Domenica was not sure if she loved Angus. She was fond of him, of course, but fondness was not the same thing as love. Fondness never set the pulse racing; fondness never made you ache inside, hopelessly, sometimes deliriously, as love so effortlessly did. Yet if anybody were to ask her “Do you love your husband?” she would have replied, without hesitation, “Of course I do.” And that, more or less, was what she had publicly professed on that rather fraught day when she had stood with Angus in St. Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral and exchanged vows. She had promised to love him, because the wording of the 1929 marriage service had been explicit on that point. But how could one promise to love somebody? You might promise to treat him lovingly, which is something that anybody should be capable of, but you could not promise that the bird of love, that shy, elusive creature, would alight on your particular bough.

  And so far, she felt that she had kept her promise, and she thought he had too. They had treated one another with kindness and consideration. They had exchanged few angry words, and when they had, they had immediately regretted them. They made one another breakfast turn and turn about; they ironed each other’s clothes; they bought small presents that they presented to one another at odd times. She was contented, but could she say that she loved him? Possibly – as long as love was defined broadly enough, to include the comfortable friendship that comes with being in another’s company over time.

  She looked across the kitchen in Scotland Street. Angus was sitting on a rickety chair – one that had belonged to Domenica’s grandmother and had been taken from that distant croft on North Uist when she had died. In Domenica’s eyes, the chair was a link with that old Scottish past that seemed to be vanishing so quickly; an object that should have been in a museum somewhere but was, instead, here in her house.

  How unnoticed, and how speedily, might a whole culture slip away from a people . . . The Gaelic voices of Domenica’s youth had largely disappeared, those liquid vowels, that soft and entrancing language that could sound like the falling of rain; that had become almost rare, and been replaced by the very different tones of incomers, the flattened vowels of Yorkshire, the chirpy, half-swallowed patois of London. And with the withering of language had gone the stories and the attitudes, the unspoken understandings, the subtle references that had made up the distinctive life of Scotland.

  That might go slowly, its passage almost unnoticed, until suddenly you were reminded that the person to whom you were talking did not know what you meant.

  She smiled; she was remembering what had happened a few days ago when she had wanted to go to a concert at the Canongate Kirk and had telephoned to book a taxi to collect her. “I’d like to go to the Canongate Kirk,” she had said. The voice at the end of the line had hesitated, and then said, “Is that a restaurant?”

  Domenica had laughed – but it was a laugh that concealed a sudden twinge of despair. A voice on the telephone – a local voice – did not know the word kirk (anglice church) which was one of the very commonest Scots words.

  She looked at Angus. An important part of love was the sharing of some valued possession – a tune (Listen, they’re playing our tune!); children, perhaps; a fund of stories; a country ... They had all of that, she thought, but still . . . and now it came to her, that awful unsettling question. Did she want to stay with Angus for the rest of her life? If she did, then she knew that this would preclude any passionate involvement. Angus represented friendship and companionship, but was that all that she wanted?

  She gasped with shock at her own disloyalty. Angus looked up. He thought she had sneezed. “Bless you,” he muttered.

  She looked away, ashamed and perturbed in equal measure.

  Grateful for You

  For Angus, if there was an emotional key to his marriage it was gratitude. He had been a bachelor for longer than most – he and Domenica had married when they were both in their late forties – and he had felt the relief and gratitude that often accompanies a marriage at that time of life. The relief came from the assuaging of that niggling doubt that one of life’s milestones was yet to be passed – others, of course, being the driving test, the first session of root-canal treatment, the payment of the last instalment of the mortgage, the first colonoscopy, the marriage of one’s firstborn child, and the last examination that one will ever be obliged to take. With marriage came the feeling that one had answered an expectation that others had of one – even if that expectation was tactfully never articulated. One was expected to settle down, to forswear freedom, to assume a commitment to somebody else. All of this may have been watered down to an extent by the recognition of less formal arrangements, but it was still there.

  Angus fully understood that people wanted other people to find another person with whom to settle down. Why should they want this? One explanation was that those who were free of commitments of this sort were an affront to those who were encumbered: if people were going to have to knuckle under to the bringing up of children, with all it entails in terms of personal sacrifice, then why should some avoid this and continue to be free? Another, more generous, explanation, lay in the desire that people have for others to be happy. It was assumed that everybody without somebody would be happier if the situation were to be changed. This was a notion of completeness: that a moiety requires, by its very nature, to be united with its missing part.

  Angus had had his involvements, of course. As a young man there had been a succession of girlfriends, but they had drifted away when they sensed that he was just too preoccupied with his painting to give much thought to committing to any of them. He had treated them well, but it had been as if he were not entirely there in the relationship. And then, as the years went past, he became progressively more covered in paint, as if he were somehow stepping into one of his paintings. He took less trouble with his clothes, all of which were flecked with oil paint of various, sometimes non-matching, hues. It was not very romantic to be embraced by somebody who would leave patches of paint on one’s blouse, or who, when running his fingers appreciatively through one’s hair, would leave paint there as well.

  “My friends think I’ve been highlighting,” complained one girlfriend. “But it’s you, Angus – you leave paint on everything you touch, including my hair. A Midas of the pigments . . . ”

  “I have to paint,” said Angus. “It’s what I do.”

  Nor did women, by and large, find the smell of turpentine all that attractive, and when Angus adopted Cyril, who was by general repute one of the more malodorous dogs in Edinburgh, the flow of women callers to his studio dried to a trickle and then became a drought.

  He did not mind too much. He had a social circle that consisted of painters and sculptors. He was a regular at the Scottish Arts Club, which had passed a special bylaw to allow Cyril to enter the premises as an associate member; he had been elected a member of the Royal Scottish Academy; and he was on the committee of the Scottish Artists’ Benevolent Association, the body that distributed largesse (smallesse, as Angus called it, in view of the limited nature of the fund) to struggling artists. He had his routine, which included visits to Big Lou’s café during the day and to the Cumberland Bar in the early evening, where Cyril would be given a complimentary bowl of stout to drink under one of the tables. He could have continued with this life had it not been for his meeting Domenica and his appreciation of her conversation, of her wit, and of the sheer pleasure that he took in being in her company. When she agreed to marry him, he felt a gratitude more profound than any he had felt before. It took his breath away. (Me? She has consented to share her life with me?) It was a feeling that all modest people have when it suddenly dawns on them that somebody likes them.

  His happiness brought changes in his life. The paint-bespattered outfits were disposed of and an entire new wardrobe of clothes obtained from Stewart Christie & Co. in Queen Street: four pairs of moleskin trousers; two waistcoats, one olive green and another mustard; three jackets of Harris tweed in a cut far nattier than anything he had worn before; a
new pair of tartan trews in Macpherson tartan; a pair of Dubarry boots into which the legs of the moleskin trousers could be tucked to particularly dashing effect. Even Cyril benefited from this make-over, being fitted with a new collar and put on a course of charcoal pills to tackle his social issues. The transformation was complete and, in a strange way, liberating: familiar routines, old clothes, habits of the years can be like chains; cast them off and one’s step is lighter, nimbler, less restricted to the piste created by the past.

  “You’re a new man, Angus,” observed Matthew in the Cumberland Bar one evening. “Marriage obviously agrees with you.”

  “Oh, it does,” said Angus. “I’m happy, you see, Matthew.”

  Matthew nodded. He wondered how many people ever said to themselves I’m happy. And did it help to contemplate one’s own happiness?

  “Do you think,” he asked Angus, “that happiness is something you can create within yourself just by saying I’m happy?”

  Angus looked about the bar, at the familiar faces of the other patrons.

  “Do you like Hopper?” he asked Matthew. He was thinking of the picture of the people lined up at a counter.

  “Of course,” answered Matthew. “His paintings . . . ”

  Angus interrupted him. “Nighthawks?”

  Matthew nodded. “The people in the diner? The chef in the white hat?”

  “The most powerful portrayal of loneliness in art,” said Angus.

  “Yes,” said Matthew. “But the thing about Hopper’s paintings is that they provide us with the view that God must have of the scene. If he exists, of course.”

  “We can still talk about God even if he doesn’t exist,” said Angus. “God, as an idea, makes perfect sense. We can paint things, you know, that don’t exist. The wind, for example.”

  He looked at Matthew, as if to challenge him to deny that one might not depict the invisible through the effect that it has on the visible.

  Head-hunting

  Domenica put the disloyal thoughts out of her mind, at least for the moment: in due course they would return, and return more troublingly. For the present, though, she was more concerned with a letter she had received from the Department of Social Anthropology at the University. Domenica was not on the department’s staff, but organised occasional seminars for their postgraduate students or would lecture the undergraduate students if one of the full-time staff was on leave. Her lectures were popular, particularly one she would from time to time deliver on the subject of head-hunting in Papua New Guinea. Like so many anthropologists, Domenica had at an earlier stage of her career undertaken field work amongst remote tribes of the New Guinea Highlands. These people, who were so accustomed to anthropologists that they had a separate guest house in the village reserved for visiting professors, were generally hostile to their neighbours, against whom they had in the past conducted regular head-hunting raids. In a rough-hewn cabinet in the main meeting house, a low, dark building thatched with local reeds, there was a collection of small, shrunken objects, wizened with age. It was explained to the visiting anthropologists that these were human heads, and that each one represented a successful raid on a neighbouring tribe with whom there were ancient disputes, going back, the headman assured visitors, to the time before the earth had entirely cooled and the land taken its current shape.

  This tribal cosmology had greatly impressed visitors, particularly a succession of American anthropologists who came from the University of Louisiana in Baton Rouge, and their German counterparts from the Institut für Sozialanthropologie und Empirische Kulturwissenschaften in Hamburg. For her part, Domenica was sceptical and, in the six months she spent living with the group in question, had set out to examine in a more critical way the claims that were made in relation to head-hunting. Her suspicions were aroused by the difficulty she encountered in finding any member of the group who had actually engaged in a head-hunting raid. There were plenty of uncles – now safely deceased – who were said to have been accomplished head-hunters, and various cousins – since relocated to Port Moresby – who had a reputation for major hauls of heads. Death and distance prevented either of these categories from attesting to their exploits, but this had somehow been overlooked by previous anthropologists. Domenica thought that this might be because to have been exposed to head-hunting had a certain cachet that research in the libraries of North America or Germany simply did not confer.

  After being shown the preserved heads in the meeting house, Domenica had managed to pick the primitive lock that prevented access to the home-made display case in which they were stored. She did this privately, when nobody was around, and when her hosts imagined that she would be safely in bed. Shielding the beam of her torch with a cupped hand, she gingerly extracted the first of the heads, a tiny, shrivelled object the size of a large grapefruit or pineapple. A tuft of hair protruded from the top and it was by this that she held the head while she examined it more closely.

  There were two sockets where the eyes must have been and a short protuberance that would have been the victim’s nose. The ears were flattened against the side of the head; sad, dejected flaps of skin that must once have heard birdsong, the singing of children, the sound of waterfalls . . .

  She looked more closely. There was something odd about this head, and as she ran a hand down the back of it, she encountered unexpected ridges and something sharp that pricked at her finger. She almost dropped it, imagining the dormant viruses that might live on a shrunken head like this until a careless anthropologist came and picked it up. That was what had happened to those Egyptologists – was it not? – those unapologetic tomb raiders who had, with the blessing of Western scholarly academies, broken into dusty pyramid chambers and disturbed the rest of ancient pharaohs. They had all died in mysterious circumstances, some from unexplained diseases which could well have been triggered by microbes for which a millennium or two of seclusion was but nothing. These heads could similarly be host to such organisms . . . except . . . except that the ridges and the prickles gave it away. These were, in fact, shrunken pineapples, cleverly made up to appear like shrunken heads.

  This conclusion was borne out by examination of the other heads in the collection. Three were pineapples, one was a melon, and another a coconut. She waited until the right moment came to raise the subject with one of her informants in the village, the sister of the headman, who had been delegated to act as hostess to Domenica.

  She communicated with this woman in Pidgin, the lingua franca of the region.

  “This head,” she said, pointing to the painted coconut. “This head bilong coconut tree, not bilong man.”

  The woman looked shocked. “No,” she said. “This head bilong bad man bilong people bilong next door. Owner head bilong spirit world now bilong no-head people.”

  “No,” said Domenica. “Me bilong University of Edinburgh bilong Scotland bilong Scottish Enlightenment. Me too much clever; know coconut when I see one.”

  The woman stared at her for a moment. “All right, all right,” she said at last, switching to Australian-accented English. “There hasn’t been head-hunting for ages. But you know how men are – they love to boast about physical exploits.”

  “Oh, I know all about that,” said Domenica, also abandoning Pidgin. “We have rugby back in Scotland. It’s much the same thing.”

  “We should send one of our people over to do some fieldwork,” joked the woman.

  Domenica had laughed, but now, sitting in her kitchen with a letter in her hand, she remembered this conversation from all those years ago and experienced a certain sense of déjà vu.

  “Angus,” she said, “I really must tell you about a letter I’ve received from somebody up at the University.”

  Angus looked interested. “How nice that somebody still writes actual letters. What does it say?”

  Domenica unfolded it. “Apparently they’re getting visitors from Rwanda.”

  “Ah yes,” said Angus. He was good at maps, and he could picture Rwanda tuck
ed away under Uganda, with, beneath it . . . What exactly was beneath Rwanda?

  “Well,” continued Domenica. “Apparently Creative Scotland has given a grant to somebody to bring some Forest People over to Scotland for a visit.”

  “Forest People?” said Angus. “Who exactly would they be?”

  “They used to be called pygmies,” said Domenica. “These days they’re often called Forest People, but they themselves don’t object to the term pygmy, as long as it’s used with respect.”

  “I see,” said Angus. “And what has this got to do with us?”

  “They – that is, Creative Scotland – would like us to help to entertain them. I suppose it’s because they know I’m an anthropologist.”

  “How does one entertain Forest People?” asked Angus.

  Domenica frowned. “I’m sure they require little entertainment. Everything I’ve ever read about them suggests that they are charming, gentle people, who will make ideal guests.”

  “Oh, well,” said Angus. “They won’t take up much room, will they?”