“I’ve decided to go to Edinburgh University instead,” went on Pat. “I’ve been in touch with the people in George Square 8
Narcissism and Social Progress
and they say I can transfer my St Andrews place to them. So that’s what I’m going to do. Philosophy and English.”
For a moment Dr Macgregor said nothing. He looked down at his shoes and saw, as if for the first time, the pattern of the brogue. And then he looked up and glanced at his daughter, who was watching him, as if waiting for his reaction.
“You’re not cross with me, are you?” said Pat. “I know I’ve messed you around with the two gap years and now this change of plans. You aren’t cross with me?”
He reached out and placed his hand briefly on hers, and then moved his hand back.
“Cross is the last thing I am,” he said, and then burst out laughing. “Does that sound odd to you? Rather like the word order of a German or Yiddish speaker speaking English? They say things like, ‘Happy I’m not,’ don’t they? Remember the Katzenjammer Kids?”
Of course she didn’t. Nor did she know about Max und Morris nor Dagwood and Blondie, he suspected – those strange denizens of that curious nowhere world of the cartoon strips – although she did know about Oor Wullie and the Broons. Where exactly was that world, he wondered? Dundee and Glasgow respectively, perhaps, but not exactly.
Pat smiled. “I’m glad,” she said. “I just decided that I’m enjoying myself so much in Edinburgh that I should stay. Moving to St Andrews seemed to me to be an interruption in my life.
I’ve got friends here now . . .”
“And friends are so important,” interrupted her father, trying to think of which friends she had in mind, and trying all the time to control his wild, exuberant joy. There were school friends, of course; the people she had been with at the Academy during the last two years of her high school education. He knew that she kept in touch with them, but were those particular friendships strong enough to keep her in Edinburgh? Many of them had themselves gone off to university elsewhere, to Cambridge in one or two cases, or to Aberdeen or Glasgow.
Was there a boy, perhaps? There was that young man in the flat in Scotland Street, Bruce Anderson; she had obviously been keen Narcissism and Social Progress
9
on him but had thought better of it. What about Matthew, for whom she worked at the gallery? Was he the attraction? He might speculate, but any results of his speculation would not matter in the slightest. The important thing was that she was not going to Australia.
“Matthew says that I can continue to work part-time at his gallery,” Pat went on. “I can do some mornings for him and Saturdays too. He says . . .” She paused. Modesty might have prevented her from continuing, but she wanted to share with her father the compliment that Matthew had passed. “I hope you don’t think I’m boasting, but Matthew says that I have an eye for art and that the only way in which he thinks he can keep the gallery going is by having me there.”
“That’s good of him,” said her father, thinking, but not saying, dependence: weak male, looking for somebody to look after him.
“Mind you, I’m not surprised. You’ve always been good at art.
You’re good at everything, you know.”
She glanced at him sideways, reproving him for the compliment, which had been overheard at a neighbouring table and had led to suppressed smiles. “And I think that I’ll stay in Scotland Street,” she went on. “It’s an exciting place, you know.
There are all sorts of interesting people who live down there. I like it.”
“And you can put up with Bruce?”
“I can put up with him. He keeps to himself these days. He lost his job, you know, and he wants to do something else. He spends a lot of his time reading up about wine. I think he fancies himself as a wine merchant – or something of the sort.”
Dr Macgregor nodded. He had not met Bruce, and had no real interest in meeting him. He was accustomed to psychopaths, to those whose selfishness was so profound that they tipped over into a clinical category; he was patient with neurotics and depres-sives and those with schizoid disorders; but he could not abide narcissists. From what his daughter had told him of Bruce, he was a classic narcissist: the looking in mirrors, the preening, the delight in hair gel – all of this was pure narcissism. And the problem was that there was a positive epidemic of narcissism, 10
On the Way Back to Scotland Street encouraged by commercial manipulation and by the shallow values of Hollywood films. And interestingly enough, the real growth area was male narcissism. Young men were encouraged to dwell on themselves; to gaze at photographs of other young men, looking back at them as from the mirror. They loved this.
Edinburgh was full of them.
Hundreds of them, thousands, attended to by an army of hair-stylists, and outfitters. Yes, it was a profound social pathology. Reality television, which turned its eye on people who were doing nothing but being themselves, was the perfect expression of this trend. Let’s look at ourselves, it said. Aren’t we fascinating?
Dr Macgregor found himself thinking these thoughts, but stopped himself. It was true, of course, there was an abnormal level of narcissism in our society, but it did not do, he told himself, to spend too much time going on about it. Society changed. Narcissism was about love, ultimately, even if only love of self. And that was better than hate. By and large, Hate, of all the tempting gods, was the unhappiest today. He had his recruits, naturally, but they were relatively few, and vilified. Did it matter if young men thought of fashion and hair gel when, not all that many years ago, their thoughts had tended to turn to war and flags and the grim partisanship of the football terrace?
4. On the Way Back to Scotland Street Pat left the Canny Man’s and walked back up Morningside Road.
She was accompanied, as far as Church Hill Place, by her father, who said goodbye to her and turned off for home, elated by the news she had given him. She toyed with the idea of a bus, but it was a fine, late August afternoon and she decided to walk all the way back to Scotland Street. She was in no hurry to be anywhere. In fact it occurred to her that between then – Saturday afternoon – and the coming Monday morning, when she was On the Way Back to Scotland Street 11
due at the gallery, it made no difference at all where she was.
She had nothing planned. She was free.
It was the final week of the Festival, and of its burgeoning, undisciplined child, the Festival Fringe. In a corner of the Meadows, under the shadow of the University Library, a large tent had been pitched, hosting an itinerant Polish circus, the Great Circus of Krakow. A matinée performance was in progress and she heard a burst of applause from within the tent, and then laughter. As the laughter died down, a small brass band inside the tent struck up, playing at the frenzied pace that circus music seemed to like, a breathless, hurried march that accompanied what feats within? A troop of performing dogs? No longer allowed, she thought; frowned upon by protesters who had successfully lobbied the Council, although everybody knew that the one thing which dogs liked to do was to perform. Was it demeaning to dogs to be made to jump through hoops and stand on their hind legs and push prams? Making a lion jump through a hoop was one thing – that was undoubtedly cruel –
but could the objectors not see the distinction between a dog and a lion? Dogs are in on our human silliness; lions are not.
She paused, standing underneath a tree, watching the sides of the circus tent move slightly in the breeze. To its side stood a row of large motor caravans and a small catering van. A door suddenly opened in the side of one of the vans and a man tumbled out, as if pushed from within. Or so it seemed to Pat, who saw him fall, as if to regain his balance, and then convert the fall into the most extraordinary gymnastic display. He rolled forward, somersaulted, stood on his hands, his legs pointed skywards, and then flipped over onto his feet. The entire manoeuvre took less than a couple of seconds, and there he was, standing only a few yards away from her, facing her. He seemed as surprised to see her as she was him, and for a moment they stared at one another, speechless. She saw that he was wearing what must have been his performing outfit – a body-hugging stocking that covered him, shoulder to toe, in a glittery, red material.