Dilly ordered a pot of coffee for two and found a table. She looked about her, glanced idly at a magazine which had been left behind by a previous customer, and began her wait. This was not long; barely five minutes later into the coffee room came Domenica Macdonald, smart in her newly-acquired Thai silk trouser-suit, her face and her forearms deeply tanned by exposure to the sun. Dilly rose to greet her long-absent but now-returned friend. She was not quite sure what to say. If she said, simply: “You’re back!” it would come out in a surprised tone, because she had half-expected Domenica not to return. And a simpler “Hallo” would clearly be inadequate to mark return after several months in the Malacca Straits. And of course she could not say: “You’ve caught the sun”, because that would be on the same level of triteness as the late President Nixon’s words on being taken to the Great Wall of China (“This surely is a great wall.”). So she said: “Domenica!”, which was just right for the circumstances.
When two friends meet for the first time in months, there is usually a fair amount to be discussed. How much more so if one of the friends has spent those months in a remote spot, the guest of pirates, living amongst them; and yet that was not the first topic of discussion. First there were books to be talked about: 346 Domenica talks to Dilly
what was new, what was worth reading, and what could safely be ignored.
Domenica confessed that she had read very little in the village.
“I had my Proust with me,” she said. “The Scott-Moncrieff translation, of course. But I must admit that I got as far as volume four and no further. I also had Anna Karenina in reserve, and of course I always take Seth’s A Suitable Boy with me in the hope that this will be the year that I actually read past page forty. But, alas, I did not. It’s a wonderful book, though, and I shall certainly read it one of these days. I carry it, you see, in optimism.”
“Rather like A Brief History of Time,” observed Dilly.
“Everybody has that on their bookshelves, but very few people have read it. Virtually nobody, I gather.”
The conversation continued in this vein for a while, and then Dilly, reaching forward to pour a fresh cup of coffee, said: “Now, what about the pirates?” She spoke hesitantly, as it was she who had urged Domenica to go out to the Malacca Straits in the first place and she felt a certain responsibility for the expedition. It was, in fact, a matter of great relief to her that her friend had returned safely to Edinburgh.
“Oh yes,” said Domenica. “The pirates. Well, they were very hospitable – in their way. And I certainly found out a great deal.”
Dilly waited expectantly. What exactly had Domenica seen, she wondered. And had it changed her?
“I spent a lot of time on their matrilineal succession patterns,”
said Domenica. “And I also unearthed some rather interesting information about domestic economy matters. Who does the shopping and matters like that.”
“It must have been fascinating,” said Dilly. “And the pirates themselves? What were they like?”
“Smallish, for the most part,” said Domenica dryly. “I was a bit taller than most of them. Small, wiry people, usually with tattoos. Their tattoos, by the way, would make an interesting study. They were mostly dragons and the like – more or less as one would expect – but then I came across quite a number with very interesting contemporary motifs. Fascinating, really.”
“Such as?” asked Dilly.
Domenica talks to Dilly 347
“Well, mostly pictures by Jack Vettriano,” said Domenica.
“The Singing Butler is very popular out there. The pirate chief had it on his back. I noticed it immediately.”
“How extraordinary,” remarked Dilly.
They were both silent as they thought about the implications of this. Then Domenica continued: “Right at the end of my stay I followed the pirates, you know. I followed them all the way to a little town down the coast. They tied up outside a warehouse, a sort of godown, as they call them out there.”
“And?” said Dilly.
Domenica smiled. “Well, I crept up the jetty and managed to find a small window I could look through. I had my friend, Henry, with me. He gave me a leg-up so that I could look through the window.”
There was now complete silence, not only at their table, but at neighbouring tables, where they had overheard the conversation.
“The window was rather dirty,” Domenica went on, “so I had to give it a wipe. But once I had done that, I could see perfectly well what was going on inside.”
348 Matthew Bears Gifts
Dilly held her breath.
The denouement came quickly. “It was a pirate CD factory,”
said Domenica. “That’s what they did, those pirates of mine.
They made pirate CDs.”
For a moment nobody said anything. Then Domenica began to laugh, and the laughter spread. “It was terribly funny,” she said. “I had imagined that they were still holding up ships and so on. But they’ve adapted really well to the new global economy.”
“And the CDs?” asked Dilly. “What sort of pirate CDs were they making?”
“Mostly Italian tenors,” said Domenica. “As far as I could see.
But I noticed some Scottish Chamber Orchestra recordings and one or two other things.” She paused. “I didn’t see The Pirates of Penzance . . .”
This was tremendously funny, and they both laughed, as did one or two people at neighbouring tables who had heard the joke and who were, strictly speaking, not entitled to laugh.
111. Matthew Bears Gifts
That afternoon, Matthew closed his gallery early – at two o’clock, in fact. He had sold two paintings at lunch time – one an early Tim Cockburn, painted during his Italian period, depicting an Umbrian pergola – and the other a luminous study of light and land by James Howie. He had felt almost reluctant to let the paintings go, as he had placed them on the wall immediately opposite his desk and had become very fond of them.
But they had been taken down, cosseted in bubble wrap, and passed on to their new owners. And then, looking out of the window, Matthew had decided that it was time to go shopping.
Matthew had done his arithmetic. The four million pounds which he had had invested on his behalf produced, as far as he could ascertain, a return of round about four per cent. That meant that his income – if one ignored the gallery – was, after tax had Matthew Bears Gifts 349
been taken off at forty per cent, ninety six thousand pounds per annum, or eight thousand pounds a month. Matthew had no mortgage, and no car; he had very few outgoings. With eight thousand pounds a month, he had an income of two hundred and fifty-eight pounds a day. On average, over the last few months, he had spent about seven pounds a day, apart from the occasion on which he had gone to the outfitters in Queen Street and bought his new coat and the distressed-oatmeal cashmere sweater, now languishing in a dark corner of his wardrobe. There had also been an expensive dinner to celebrate Scotland’s victory over England in the Calcutta Cup, an occasion on which Matthew paid for a celebratory meal for six new acquaintances he had met in the Cumberland Bar on the evening of that great rugby triumph. It was only after the dinner had been consumed that one of the guests inadvertently disclosed that they were in fact supporters of England rather than Scotland, but Matthew, with typical decency, had laughed at this and insisted that he had been happy to act as host to the opposition. At which point a further disclosure revealed that one of the party was actually Turkish, and had no idea what rugby was anyway – again a revelation that Matthew took handsomely in his stride. Turkey, he pointed out, might start to play rugby some day; if the Italians could do it, then there was no reason why the Turks should not at least have a try. The Turk agreed, and said that he thought that Turks would certainly be better rugby players than the Greeks. Matthew did not comment on this observation, and for a moment there had been silence.