“Bad news, Cyril,” he said. “Look at this, boy. Bad news for us; bad news for dogs. We’re in it together, I’m afraid.”
Big Lou now came across with a cup of coffee for Angus and a dish of milk for Cyril. She laid the dish down on the ground, near Cyril’s snout, and he looked up at her with moist, appreciative eyes. Then she put the coffee in front of Angus.
“Lou . . .” Angus had noticed her strained expression and reached out to hold her forearm. “Lou? Are you . . .”
She tried to move away, but he tightened his grip.
“Lou, you sit down. You sit down right there.”
She tried to pull away again, but he resisted, and she sat down, opposite him, her head lowered.
“What is it?” he asked gently. “You’re greeting.” He used the Scots word for crying, instinctively, because that was the word that had been used with him as a child and it seemed to him that it was far more sympathetic. As a little boy, in Perthshire, there had been a girl from a neighbouring farm who had helped look after him. She had comforted him when he had cried, holding him to her, and he remembered how soft she had been, when all around him there was hardness – the hardness of the byre floor on which he had tripped and scraped his knee, the hardness of the shepherds and their smell of tar remedy and lanolin, the hardness of his remote father, with his smell of whisky and the fishing flies in his bonnet. And that girl had cuddled him and said: “Dinnae greet, Angus. Dinnae greet.”
268 Poor Lou
For a few moments she said nothing. Angus kept his hand on her arm, though, and she let him. He squeezed it gently.
“Lou? Come on, Lou. Tell me. It’s Eddie, isn’t it?”
She nodded, but did not speak.
“He’s not the right man for you, Lou,” said Angus gently. “He really isn’t. He’s . . .” He tailed off, and Lou looked up. Her voice was strained, her eyes still liquid with tears. “He’s what?”
“He’s just not a good enough man,” said Angus. “You know, other men can tell. Women don’t always see it, but men are the best judge of other men. Men know. I’m telling you, Lou. They know. I could tell that Eddie wasn’t right, Lou. I could just tell.
Matthew too.”
She frowned. “Matthew? Has he talked to you?”
Angus nodded. He and Matthew had spoken at length about Eddie one evening in the Cumberland Bar and they had been in complete agreement.
“He’s after Lou’s money,” Matthew had said. “It’s glaringly obvious. He’s got some stupid idea of a club. He needs her dough.”
And Angus had agreed, and added: “And then there’s the problem of girls. He goes for younger women. Traceys and Sharons galore. Eighteen-year-olds.”
He could not reveal that conversation to Big Lou, but he had been left in no doubt but that Matthew thought of Eddie in exactly the same way as he did.
“I thought that he loved me,” said Big Lou. “I really thought that he loved me.”
Angus squeezed her arm again. “I think he probably did, Lou. I think that he did – in his way. Because you’re well worth loving. Any man would love you. You’re a fine, fine woman, Lou. But . . .”
She looked at him, and he continued. “Some men just can’t help themselves, Lou. They just can’t help it. Eddie’s one. He’s not a one-woman man. That’s all there is to it.”
“And then there’s the money,” said Big Lou.
Angus grimaced. He had hoped that she had not actually paid over any money, but it seemed as if it might be too late. He A Letter to Edinburgh 269
knew that Lou had a bit of money, the legacy from the farmer she had nursed, but how much would have been left after the purchase of the flat and the coffee bar?
“How much, Lou?” he asked quietly. “How much did you give Eddie?”
“Thirty-four thousand pounds,” said Lou.
86. A Letter to Edinburgh
Domenica was fussy about the circumstances in which she wrote.
In Scotland Street, she would sit at her desk with a clean block of ruled foolscap paper in front of her and write on that, with a Conway Stewart fountain pen, in green ink. There were those who said that writing in green ink was a sign of mental insta-bility, but she had never understood the basis for this. Green ink was attractive, more restful on the eye than an intense black, and she persisted with it.
Such rituals of composition were impossible in that small village near Malacca.
There, she made do with a simple, rather rickety table, which provided a surface for her French moleskin notebook and for a rather less commodious writing paper. But there was still the Conway Stewart pen, and supplies of green ink, and it was with this pen that she now wrote a letter to James Holloway in Edinburgh.
“Dear James,” she began, “I know that you are familiar with the Far East and will be able to picture the scene here – the scene of me upon my veranda, at my table, with a frangipani tree directly in front of me.
“The tree is in flower, and its white blossoms have that gorgeous, slightly sickly smell which reminds me of something else, but which I cannot remember. Perhaps you will supply the allusion; I cannot.
“I have at last begun my researches. Ling, the young man who has been assigned to look after me, is proving very helpful, 270 A Letter to Edinburgh
even if he has a tendency to moodiness. I am not sure, though, of his reliability as an interpreter, as he has a strong contempt for everybody to whom we speak and he keeps arguing with them very loudly in dialect before he translates. This leads me to believe that he is distorting the answers and giving me a highly flavoured account of what is being said. Let me give you an example. The following is a transcript from my notebooks.
The informant, informant 3, is the wife of a minor pirate, a rather depressed-looking woman with six children, all of them under twelve. Her house is on the edge of the village.
“DM: ‘Please ask her to tell me how she pays for the family provisions.’
“Interpreter speaks in Chinese for four or five minutes.
Informant 3 is silent. Interpreter speaks again, raising his hand at one point as if to strike informant 3. Informant 3 speaks for two minutes, and then is silenced by a threatening look from interpreter, who translates: ‘My husband is a selfish man. He likes to keep the money he earns under his bed. There is a trunk there which is locked with a key which he keeps tucked away in his sarong. That is where the money is. He gives me a small amount each week on Monday and I go to the market to buy provisions. There is never quite enough, but if I ask him for money he shouts at me. People are always shouting at me.’
“Interpreter: ‘This is a very self-pitying woman. Her husband is a good man. It must be very difficult to be married to a woman like this. That is all she has to say.’
“DM: ‘Please thank her.’
“Interpreter: ‘That will not be necessary.’”
“So you will understand, James, how very difficult it is for me to get accurate information. However, I persist!
“But now let us move on from such matters to more intriguing issues. There are, I think, several mysteries here, and I find myself increasingly drawn to them. One of these is the question of what happened to the Belgian anthropologist who apparently preceded me here and whose doings, alas, remain obscure. Nobody seems willing to talk about him, and when I raised him with Ling I met a very unambiguous brick wall. The poor man died while doing A Letter to Edinburgh 271
his field work, and the other day I chanced upon his grave when I was walking down a path that led to the sea. I found myself in a clearing in the jungle and there, under a tree, was a rather poignant marker which simply said: HERE LIES AN ANT. I found this very puzzling. Why should he be so described?