44 Scotland Street Read online

  She sat down on her bed and stared down at the bedside rug. There is no real reason to feel unhappy, she thought, but she did. She had a job, she had the place at St Andrews for next October, she had her supportive parents: she had everything to look forward to. But somehow her life seemed to be slow and pointless: it seemed to her that there was a gap in it, and she knew exactly what that gap was. She wanted a boyfriend. She wanted somebody to phone up, right then, and tell about what Bruce had said. And he would sympathise with her and ask her to meet him for dinner, and they would laugh about Bruce over dinner, and she would know that this other person – this boy – regarded her as special to him. But she had none of that. She just had this room, and this emptiness, and that sarcastic, self-absorbed young man out there, with that look of his, and his eyes, and his en brosse hair, and …

  She stopped herself thinking about that. Her father had once spoken to her about unwelcome thoughts; thoughts that came into one’s mind unbidden. They were often rather disturbing thoughts – thoughts about doing something outrageous or shocking – but this was not something to be too concerned about. The whole point about these thoughts was that they were never translated into action because they did not represent what one really wanted to do. So one never discarded one’s clothes and ran down the street, nor jumped over the waterfall, nor over the cliff for that matter, even if one thought how easy it would be to throw oneself over the edge, and to fall and fall down to the very bottom. So easy.

  25. Dinner with Domenica

  “Now,” said Domenica with a gesture that embraced the room. “This is where I work. I sit at that desk over there and look out over Scotland Street. And if I run out of ideas, I go and sit in that chair and wait.”

  “Until an idea comes along?”

  “In theory. But I might just fall asleep or become restless. You know how it is.”

  Yes, Pat did. She felt restless. The encounter with Bruce had unsettled her and her spirits had been low when she had knocked at Domenica’s door on the other side of the landing. Domenica, looking at her guest over her half-moon spectacles, could tell that something was wrong. So she asked Pat what it was, and Pat told her the story of the hair gel.

  Domenica smiled. “Hair gel! All over the floor? The best place for it, in my opinion!” But she saw that Pat was worried, and her tone became concerned. “That young man, you know, is a narcissist. It’s perfectly obvious. Clear as day. And the point about narcissists is that they just can’t see anything wrong with themselves. They’re perfect, you see. And they are also quite incapable of laughing at themselves. So he would never think it remotely funny that his hair gel had come to an unfortunate end.”

  “He didn’t make it easy for me,” said Pat.

  “Of course he wouldn’t. He expects you to admire him, and he’s annoyed that you don’t appear to be falling at his feet. So he’s a bit uncertain how to deal with you.”

  This discussion with an ally made Pat feel more cheerful and she put Bruce out of her mind. Domenica was far more interesting, she thought, with her sharp comments and her book-lined study. She wanted to find out more about her neighbour, and what she did. Did Domenica have a job? She kept odd hours, she had noticed, and when she had driven her off in the custard-coloured Mercedes-Benz that morning she had not appeared to be going to work. And if she sat at her desk waiting for ideas, what were these ideas about?

  “You’re wondering what I do,” said Domenica abruptly. “How rude of me. I know that you work in a gallery, so I have the advantage of you. And I have kept you guessing about me.”

  “Well,” admitted Pat, “I suppose I was wondering.”

  “I’m not gainfully employed,” said Domenica. “I’m a bit of a dilettante. I do this and that. Which doesn’t tell you very much. I produce the occasional article for obscure journals and I act as secretary for a society. And I write a great number of letters to people. And that, I suppose, is it.”

  “Your articles?” asked Pat.

  “Anthropological. I trained as an anthropologist, and I’ve dabbled in it on and off for years. But I’m not very professional about it and I imagine that the real anthropologists – the ones in institutes and universities – rather turn their noses up at me. Not that that ever bothered me in the slightest.”

  Domenica gestured to a chair and invited Pat to sit down. Fetching an empty glass, she poured a generous helping of sherry into it and offered it to her guest.

  “I take it that you drink,” she said. “This is a very dull sherry but it will have to do. It’s the sort of sherry that ministers serve in the manse. But let’s persist with it nonetheless, in the sure and certain knowledge that things will improve at dinner. I have a very nice bottle of something much less dull which we can drink at the table.”

  Pat raised her glass and they toasted one another. So Domenica was an anthropologist. She had expected her to be something exotic, and an anthropologist seemed about right. “I’ve never met an anthropologist,” she said hesitantly. “It sounds so …”

  Domenica interrupted her. “Sounds so, but isn’t. Anthropologists are really rather mundane people, for the most part. They used to be interesting in the days of Pitt-Rivers and Margaret Mead and all the others. But now it’s all very dry and technical. And of course they’ve run out of people to study. Everybody is more or less the same these days. I expect that if one went to New Guinea, for example, one would find that all those people who used to have a resident anthropologist attached to them are watching American television through their satellite dishes. No time for inter-group warfare or initiation rites when you have all that popular culture to absorb. So the anthropologists have a rather thin time of it.”

  “That’s rather sad,” remarked Pat. “Who wants everywhere to be the same?”

  Domenica shrugged. “The European Commission, I suppose. But back to anthropology. It used to be such fun when you chose your field work, back in the heyday of the subject. Everybody wanted to go to New Guinea, of course, and many did. But there were other places. Hill tribes in India were a good choice. Or the Bushmen of southern Africa. Everybody knew about them after Laurens van der Post wrote all his nonsense.”

  “Where did you go?” asked Pat.

  Domenica looked into her glass of sherry. “I went here and there,” she said. “Mostly in India, though. You see, I worked on feral children and I went to visit a number of communities where there were claims of feral children being found.”

  Pat was unsure of what she meant. “Feral children?”

  “You’ve heard of Romulus and Remus?” asked Domenica. “They were brought up by wolves. Well, they were feral. And there were many others. Wolves, monkeys, even gazelles. Animals can make very good parents, you know. And they tend not to be too pushy – unlike those people downstairs.”

  26. A Room, a Photograph, Love and Memory

  Pat looked around Domenica’s room. Two of the walls were covered with book shelves, towering up to the ceiling, and the others were liberally hung with framed photographs and paintings.

  “Yes,” remarked Domenica, noticing Pat’s interest. “It is a bit of a mess this room. That wall over there, with its photographs, is a bit like one of those Italian restaurants where they have pictures of the well-known people who have eaten there. Usually these days it’s Sean Connery, but I really can’t imagine that he’s spent all hours in those Italian restaurants. Where would he find the time to get on with being famous, poor man? And if you go to Italy, all the restaurants have photographs of Luciano Pavarotti, who also couldn’t possibly have been to all the places which claim him. It’s rather like the cult of saints and their bones. There are so many bits of the more popular saints that one could assemble several hundred skeletons of each of them. St Catherine of Siena for example – she of the miraculous water barrel – must have had numerous fingers. I’ve seen at least twenty in various churches in Tuscany. Quite miraculous!”

  Pat laughed. “I find those old bones a bit creepy,” she
said. “But I suppose that some people like them.”

  “Yes, I understand that Neapolitans and the like find great consolation in such things,” Domenica said. “But you are a most tolerant girl. Yours is a tolerant generation. The religious enthusiasms of others can be a bit trying, but they are important, don’t you think? They allow people to express their sense of the spiritual.”

  Domenica took a sip of her sherry. “I don’t mind a good-going religious ritual of the sort you see in India,” she continued. “You know, something with coloured smoke and elephants – though the Scottish Episcopal Church doesn’t go in for elephants very much, alas. I can see a bishop on an elephant, can’t you?”

  Pat had noticed the prints on the wall, and the metal candlestick on the table, in the shape of a three-headed cobra. And on Domenica’s desk, in a small porcelain pot, a bundle of joss sticks.

  “Yes,” said Domenica, who seemed to have an uncanny facility for guessing exactly what it was that Pat was going to ask. “Some mementoes from India. But actually I was born right here in Scotland Street.”

  “Right here? In this building?”

  Domenica nodded. “In those days people were born in places where people lived. Astonishing, but true. I came into this world, would you believe it, in this very room. It was my parents’ bedroom and their bed was over there, against that wall. I was born in that bed. Precisely sixty-one years ago next Friday afternoon. There was a war on, as you may recall, and I had been conceived when my father came back on home leave from convoy duty. He did not survive the North Atlantic, I’m afraid, and so I never knew him.” She pointed to a photograph above a small, corner fireplace. “That’s my father there.”

  Pat got up and crossed the room to stand before the photograph. A tall man was standing on what seemed to be a dune, the grass about his feet bending in the breeze. The face was an intelligent one, the mouth relaxed into a smile. His hair was ruffled, blown by the wind.

  “I loved him very much,” said Domenica. “Although I never knew him, I loved him very much. Does that sound odd to you? To love somebody you never knew?”

  Pat thought for a moment. “No, I don’t think so. People fall in love with all sorts of people. People write letters to one another and fall in love even if they never meet. That happens.”

  Domenica nodded. “It’s a special sort of love that one has for such a person. It’s an idealised love, I suppose. You’re in love with a memory, with an idea of somebody. And I suppose that for some people that’s all they have.”

  For a short while there was silence. Pat looked again at the picture of Domenica’s father and then returned to her seat. She had always imagined that the saddest fate for a child would be to have no parents. But perhaps it was sadder still to have parents who did not love you. At least, if you had no parents you could think that they would have loved you, if they had been there. But if you knew your parents did not love you, then you would be denied even that scrap of comfort.

  She looked at Domenica. “I’m sure he would have loved you,” she said. “I’m sure that he would have loved you a great deal.”

  “Yes. I think he would.”

  They said nothing for a moment. Then Domenica looked at her watch. “We must go through to the kitchen,” she said. “And then while I’m getting dinner ready, we can talk a little more. I don’t want to bore you, though. Sixty-one can be very boring for twenty whatever it is you are.”

  “Twenty. Just twenty.”

  “A good age to be,” said Domenica. “As is every age, I imagine, except for the years between fourteen and seventeen and a half. An awful time for everybody. Were you a dreadful teenager? I was, I think. In fact, I was exactly the sort of person I would not have liked to be. Does that make sense? Let’s think about it.”

  27. The Electricity Factory

  Domenica chopped the onions with a large-bladed knife, while her guest sat at the scrubbed-pine table and watched her.

  “When did you live in India?” Pat asked.

  Domenica tipped the onions into a saucepan. “I shall explain,” she said. “It will be simpler if you get the whole story. Reduced, of course, to five minutes. Time marched on, and it continued to do so until I was eighteen, when my mother suddenly decided that she wanted to go off to India. She had been offered the job of principal at a school for girls in south India. It was run by a Scottish charity, some people in Glasgow. I stayed behind – I was about to go to university – and she went off. When I had finished my degree, I went out to see her. You travelled by ship in those days – a tremendous thrill for me.

  “Her school was in the hills above Cochin, in Kerala. It’s a lovely state, Kerala – all that greenery and those waterways and those cool towns up in the Western Ghats. I fell in love with the place immediately, and begged her to let me stay with her, which I did. I had no idea what I was going to do at home, and Scotland was pretty dull, remember, in the early Sixties. I suppose we were still in the Fifties while everybody else had moved on.

  “So I stayed with my mother in the principal’s lodge at the school. It seemed very grand to be living in a lodge, but it was quite a modest house, really. There was a verandah which ran round two sides of the house and a garden with fire coral trees. There were pepper vines growing up these trees and we used to harvest our own pepper and let it dry on banana leaves on the ground.

  “I loved living there, as you can imagine, although I didn’t have all that much to do. I was taken on as a teacher, but I was not paid for this, and the duties were pretty light. But it was easy work, because the girls at the school were all very well-behaved and wouldn’t dream of being rude to the staff. Nobody was rude then. Rudeness was invented much later.

  “And that’s where I stayed for three years. Then, at a lunch party held by the manager of a tea company, I met the man who became my husband. He came from Cochin, where his father had owned a business – more of that in a moment. He was called Thomas, as many people are in that part of the world because, as you know, it’s a largely Christian state – Thomist Christians. Very ancient communities. In fact, you get all sorts of churches, including the Syrian Orthodox Church, which goes in for fireworks in a big way on important saints’ days. Quite wonderful.

  “Thomas asked me to marry him, and I said that I would. I had fallen for India, you see, and the idea of marrying into the country was a very exciting one. And Thomas was a good man – very quiet and thoughtful, and very kind. Of course, I hadn’t realised that I would have to put up with his mother too, who would live with us in our house in Cochin. But that’s what happens when you marry into an Indian family. You get the whole lot.

  “Thomas told me that he had a job in the business that his father had set up, but he didn’t explain what the business was. He would show me the factory, he said, and I would see. But before that, when I met his mother for the first time and I was drinking tea under her enquiring eye, I asked what the family factory made.

  “She looked at me in surprise, and then said: ‘Why, we make electricity. It’s an electricity factory. We make very fine electricity. Everybody knows that.’

  “I was surprised. I thought that power stations would belong to the government, or to very large companies, but, no, it seemed that there was a role for a few private generating companies, and we were one of them. Varghese Electricity was the name of the company and the factory, as they called it, was a large building to the east of Cochin. It had a railway line running into it, and the trains brought loads of coal into our private siding.

  “Thomas went to the factory every morning, but did not stay long, as there was nothing for him to do. He had an office there, but there never seemed to be any papers on the table and the whole place was run by very efficient managers. So he used to go off to his club and read the newspapers until it was time to come back for lunch. Then he would supervise the gardener in an orchid-house which we had at the back of the property, and after that he would go and sleep for an hour or so until the worst of the
afternoon heat was over.

  “That was our life, and I suddenly realised that this was what I was going to be doing for the rest of my days. Suddenly, India did not seem quite as beguiling and I began to wonder whether I had made the most awful mistake.”

  Domenica looked at Pat. “What would you have done in my circumstances? Married to a nice man who owned an electricity factory, but with a great emptiness of years stretching out ahead of you? What would you have done?

  28. Thomas Is Electrocuted

  “No, that’s unfair,” said Domenica Macdonald, withdrawing her own question. “Nobody really knows how they would react to hypothetical situations.”

  “I don’t know,” said Pat. “We can imagine what we would do. I think that if I found myself in your position, I would possibly have …”

  Domenica raised a hand. “You don’t know, though. You don’t really know what you would do. But I can tell you what I did. I left Thomas. I remained with him for five years, and then, shortly after my thirtieth birthday, I asked him what he would feel if I left him.

  “Of course he said that he would be very upset. My light would go out, is what I think he said. The whole family talked like that. They used the metaphors of electricity. I am a bit below my normal wattage. I feel like shorting out. That sort of thing.

  “That made me hesitate, but I persisted. I explained to him that I was not cut out for the sort of life that we were leading. I wanted to travel. I wanted to get to know people. I couldn’t face the prospect of sitting there on the verandah for the next goodness knows how many years, drinking afternoon tea with his mother while she went on and on about some complicated injustice that had been done to her family twenty years before. I just couldn’t face it.