This is what it must be like to be affected by one of those illnesses which her psychiatrist father had told her about.
“People who are brewing a psychotic illness often have some degree of insight,” he had said to her. “They know that something strange is happening to them, even if the delusions are powerful and entirely credible once they are experienced.”
Perhaps this was what was happening to her; she had been overcome with a powerful delusional belief that Bruce was desirable, and even if she knew that this was a destructive belief, she still felt it – it still exercised its power over her. So may an addict feel when confronted with the substance of his addiction: well aware that the drug will harm him but unable to do anything about it. And so may an addict deprived feel when he realises that what he craves is not available to him; the emptiness, the panic that she now felt.
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Into Deep Morningside
Matthew, when he returned, was a welcome distraction from this discomfort.
“I’ve telephoned Mr Dunbarton,” said Pat.
Matthew looked at her with anticipation. “And?”
“He was very good about it,” she said.
Ramsey Dunbarton appeared to have been pleased to receive her call, having initially assumed that she was from Party Headquarters, and that she was enquiring about the success of the event.
“It was a very satisfactory evening,” he had said. “Nice of you to ask. The turnout was modest, perhaps, but that didn’t appear to dampen spirits. And we had some of the younger members there too. A charming fellow with . . . with hair, and that Todd girl, the one who was studying over in Glasgow but who’s now back in Edinburgh.
“My wife bumped into her, actually, a few times at the Colinton tennis courts. You know the ones just off the Colinton Road, just after that Mercedes garage. No, hold on, is it a bit before? – I find that bit of Colinton Road a bit confusing. I suppose it depends on whether you’re coming from the direction of town or from the other direction, you know, the road which goes up to Redford and to Merchiston Castle School.
“Funny that you should mention Merchiston. I was there, you know, a good time ago. We had a great time, although, my goodness, it was fairly Spartan in those days, I can tell you.
A bit like a prison camp, but that didn’t bother us boys. I see nothing wrong with communal showers, and some boys actually liked them. Why not? Things are very different now – much more comfortable, and a very good school altogether. But I hope that the boys don’t go too soft.
“My godson, Charlie Maclean, went there, along with his two brothers. Charlie had a splendid time and right at the end he went to a cadet camp in Iceland. There was a bit of a row there, and the master who was in charge of the cadets, who was some sort of captain or major, got into a terrible stramash with the boys.
Anyway, the long and the short of it was that there was a mutiny, led by Charlie. This master said: ‘Maclean, you’re expelled!’
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Whereupon Charlie said: ‘But I’ve just left school anyway. You can’t expel me!’ Whereupon this character shouted: ‘Then you’re forbidden to join the Old Merchistonian Association!’ What a hoot!”
It was at this point that Pat interrupted him, and explained what she was calling about. Ramsey Dunbarton listened, and then laughed.
“I would have been delighted to return it to you,” he said.
“Unfortunately, we’ve already given it away. I’m so sorry. It went down to a charity shop this morning. Betty knows the people who run it and they’re always looking for things like that. But you could go and see them, no doubt, and get it back. They’re the ones in Morningside Road. They’re not all that far down from the Churchhill Theatre. Do you know where that is? I used to take part in Gilbert and Sullivan there. The Gondoliers. Do you know The Gondoliers? I was the Duke of Plaza-Toro once. I was frightfully lucky to get the role as there was a very good baritone that year who was after it. Then I met the director outside the Edinburgh Bookshop and . . .”
78. Steps with Soul
At roughly the same time that Matthew returned to the gallery from his morning coffee, Domenica Macdonald was edging her custard-coloured Mercedes-Benz into a parking place at the foot of Scotland Street. She was observed by three pairs of eyes
– those of the taxi drivers who sat in their cabs at the bottom of the street and ate their early lunch before setting off for their next call. One of the taxi drivers knew her, as he had occasionally exchanged a few words with her in the street, and he smiled as he remembered a witty remark that Domenica had so casually and cleverly made, something about pigeons and local councillors; terribly funny, as he recalled it, although he could not remember the punchline, nor indeed how the story began. What 218
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would it be like to be married to a clever woman like that, he wondered. Could he take her to the taxi-drivers’ ball at the Royal Scot Hotel on the Glasgow Road? Hardly. The men talked about golf at the taxi-drivers’ ball, and the women inevitably talked about the pros and cons of self-catering accommodation in Tenerife. This woman would not want to talk about things like that – he could tell. There were those who had something to say about Tenerife, and those who did not.
Domenica brought the car to a halt and switched off the ignition. She had been for a drive around Holyrood Park
– exercise for the car, as she called it – and had been thinking as she drove. What, she had been wondering, would Edinburgh be like if it were not so beautiful? If Edinburgh looked, for instance
– well, one had to say it, like Glasgow? Would it be inhabited by the people who currently lived there – that is, by people of taste (there was no other expression for it – it just had to be said) – or would it be inhabited by the sort of people who lived in Glasgow
– that is by people who . . .? She stopped herself. No, this was not the sort of thought that one should allow oneself. Those sorts of attitudes – of condescension towards Glasgow – were decid-edly dated. When she was younger it had been perfectly acceptable for people to think that way about Glasgow – to turn up their metaphorical noses at it – but now it seemed that nobody thought like that any more. Edinburgh was different from Glasgow, it was true, but it was no longer considered helpful to remark on the differences to any great extent, even if here and there were to be heard faint echoes, very faint, of the old attitudes. Her aunt, for example, who was Edinburgh through-and-through, had even possessed a map which she had drawn as a schoolgirl in which Glasgow simply did not feature. It was not there. Dundee was marked, as was Aberdeen, but where Glasgow was there was simply a void. And the map had been marked by the geography teacher, who had placed a large red tick on the side, and had written underneath: A very fine map indeed. Well done.
Why, she asked herself, was Edinburgh so beautiful? The question had come to her as she rounded the corner on the high road, round the crumbling volcanic side of Arthur’s Seat, and saw Steps with Soul
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the Old Town spread out beneath her – the dome of the Old College with its torch-carrying Golden Boy; the domestic jumble of Old Town roofs, the spires of the various spiky kirks – such beauty, illuminated at that very moment by shafts of light from breaks in the cloud. This was beauty of the order encountered in Siena or Florence, beauty that caused a soaring of the spirit, a gasp of the soul.
It was a privilege to be a citizen of such a place, thought Domenica. The beauty of the New Town had been created by those who believed in the physical embodiment, in stone and glass and slate, of order, of reason, and this had found expression in architectural regularity. And yet surely it was more than a matter of mere proportion; for the regular features of the male film star, the broad forehead, the neatly-nicked chin, the equal eyebrows, are actually rather repulsive – or so at least Domenica thought. Those regularly-featured Hollywood males made her feel slightly nauseous; and the same could be said for their female equivalents, hardly intellectuals they. These people had regular features but were actually ugly because they tended to be so completely vacuous. Regularity without some metaphysical value behind it, some beauty of soul or character, was more disappointing – and indeed repulsive – than the honestly hap-hazard, the humanly messy. It was more disappointing because it promised something that was not there: it should engage the soul, but did not. It was shallow and meretricious. So Mother Teresa of Calcutta, with her weepy eyes and her lined face, was infinitely more beautiful than . . .? Than the current icons of feminine beauty? Than that woman who called herself Madonna (whoever she was)? Of course Mother Teresa was more beautiful – infinitely so. Only a culture with a thoroughly upside-down sense of values could think otherwise. And that, mused Domenica ruefully, is precisely the sort of culture we have become.