Were you using it?”
The accusation made her feel indignant. Why should he imagine that she would use his hair gel? And why would he imagine that she would lie about it? “No,” she said. “I did not use it.
I was looking at it.”
“Is hair gel that interesting?”
“Not yours,” she snapped.
Bruce looked at her and wagged a finger. “Temper!” he said.
“Temper!”
Pat looked at him scornfully, and then turned and made her way back into her room slamming the door behind her. He was impossible; he was self-satisfied; he was smug. She could not live with him. She would have to move.
But if she moved, then it would be his victory. She could just imagine what he would say when he showed the next person her room. There was a girl here, but she didn’t stay long. Very immature type. Second gap year, you know.
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 64
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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 Dinner with Domenica
65
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 66
Dinner with Domenica
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.”