‘You like books?’ He half-rose from his chair, eager, waiting for the slightest encouragement.
Charles gave it. ‘Yes.’
‘They’re not first editions or anything like that. Well, not many of them. Just good editions. I do hate this paperback business. Some of the Dickens are quite good. And that Vanity Fair is valuable…’
Charles wondered if he was about to receive a lecture on antiquarian books, but the danger passed. ‘… and this edition of Scott might be worth something. Though not to the modern reader. Nobody reads him nowadays. I wonder why. Could it be because he’s a dreary old bore? I think it must be. Even we Scots find him a bit of a penance.’ He laughed. A cosy-looking man; probably mid-fifties, with a fuzz of white hair and bushy black eyebrows.
Charles laughed, too. ‘I’ve read half of Ivanhoe. About seven times. Like Ulysses and the first volume of Proust. Never get any further.’ He relaxed into his chair. ‘It’s very comforting, all those books.’
‘Yes. “No furniture is so charming as books, even if you never open them or read a single word.” The Reverend Sydney Smith. Not a Scot himself, but for some time a significant luminary of Edinburgh society. Yes, my books are my life.’
Charles smiled. ‘Wasn’t it another Edinburgh luminary, Robert Louis Stevenson, who said, “Books are all very well in their way, but they’re a mighty bloodless substitute for real life”?’
James Milne chuckled with relish, which was a relief to Charles, who was not sure that he had got the quotation right. ‘Excellent, Charles, excellent, though the point is arguable. Let me give you a refill.’
It turned out that the Laird had been a schoolmaster at Kilbruce, a large public school just outside Edinburgh. ‘I retired from there some five years ago. No, no, I’m not as old as all that. But when my mother died I came into some money and property-this house, an estate called Glenloan on the West coast, a terrace of cottages. For the first time in my life I didn’t have to work. And I thought, why should I put up with the adolescent vagaries of inky boys when I much prefer books?’
‘And inky boys presumably don’t appreciate books?’
‘No. Some seemed to-appeared to be interested, but…’ He rose abruptly. ‘A bite to eat perhaps?’
Half a Stilton and Bath Olivers were produced. The evening passed pleasantly. They munched and drank, swapped quotations and examined the books. Their crossword minds clicked, and allusion and anecdote circled round each other. It was the sort of mild intellectual exercise that Charles had not indulged in since his undergraduate days. Very pleasant, floating on a cloud of malt whisky above everyday life. The book-lined room promised to be a welcome sanctuary from the earnest denim below.
Eventually Charles looked at his watch. Nearly one o’clock. ‘I must go down to the bear-pit.’
‘Don’t bother. I’ll make up the sofa for you here.’
‘No, no. Downstairs is the bed I have chosen, and I must lie on it.’
The bed he had chosen had been left vacant for good reason. At half-past three he woke to discover it had come adrift in the middle and was trying to fold him up like a book. He wrestled with it in the sweaty breathing dorm and then tottered along to the lavatory.
It was locked and a strange sound came from inside. As Charles took advantage of the washbasin in the adjacent bathroom, he identified the noise through a haze of malt. It was a man crying.
CHAPTER TWO
The very sky turns pale above;
The earth grows dark beneath;
The human Terror thrills with cold,
And draws a shorter breath An universal panic owns
The dread approach of Death!
THE EDINBURGH FREEMASONS’ revenue must shoot up during the Festival, because they seem to own practically every strange little hail in the city. Each year the gilded columns of these painted rooms witness the latest excesses of Fringe drama, and the gold-leaf names of Grand Masters gaze unmoved at satire, light-shows, nudity or God-rock, according to theatrical fashion.
On the Monday morning the Temple of the Masonic Hall, Lauriston Place, was undergoing A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare’s Immortal Comedy Revisualised by Stella Galpin-Lord. As Charles Paris slipped in, it was clear that the process of revisualisation had hit a snag. The snag was that Stella Galpin-Lord was having a directorial tantrum.
‘Where are those bloody fairies? Didn’t you hear your bloody cue? For Christ’s sake, concentrate! Bottom, get up off your backside.. ’
As she fulminated, it was clear to Charles that Stella Galpin-Lord was not a student. Far from it. The over-dramatic name fitted the over-dramatic figure. She was wearing rehearsal black, a polo-necked pullover tight over her presentable bosom, and clinging flared trousers less kind to her less presentable bottom. Honey-blonded hair was scraped back into a broad knotted scarf. The efforts of make-up-skilful pancake, elaborate eyes and a hard line of lipstick-drew attention to what they aimed to disguise. The slack skin of her face gave the impression of a badly erected tent, here and there pulled tight by misplaced guy-ropes. The tantrum and her twitchy manner with a cigarette spelt trouble to Charles. Neurotic middle-aged actresses are a hazard of the profession.
‘Well, don’t just amble on. You’re meant to be fairies, not navvies. For God’s sake! Amateurs! This show opens in less than a week and we don’t get in the hall again till Thursday. Good God, if you don’t know the lines now… Where is the prompter? Where is the bloody prompter!’
Charles, who had only come down to check the details of staging in the hall, decided it could wait and sidled out.
Back in Coates Gardens he looked for somewhere to work. In the men’s dormitory a youth was strumming a guitar with all the versatility of a metronome. Sounds from upstairs indicated a revue rehearsal in the girls’ room. Charles felt tempted to seek sanctuary with James Milne again, but decided it might be an imposition. He went down to the dining-room. Mercifully it was empty.
With a tattered script of So Much Comic, So Much Blood open on the table, he started thumbing through an ancient copy of Jerrold’s edition of Hood, looking for The Dundee Guide, an early poem which might add a little local interest for an Edinburgh audience. It was not there. He was perplexed for a moment, until he remembered that only a fragment of the work survived and was in the Memorials of Thomas Hood. He started thumbing through that.
So Much Comic, So Much Blood had begun life as a half-hour radio programme. Then Charles had added to the compilation and done the show for a British Council audience. Over the years he had inserted different poems, played up the comic element and dramatised some of the letters. The result was a good hour’s show and he was proud of it. He was also proud that its evolution predated the success of Roy Dotrice in John Aubrey’s Brief Lives, which had set every actor in the country ransacking literary history for one-man shows.
‘I’m going to make some coffee. Would you like some?’ Charles looked up at the girl in the photograph, Anna Duncan.
‘Please.’ She disappeared into the kitchen. He stared with less interest at the extant fragments of The Dundee Guide.
‘Here’s the coffee. Do carry on.’
‘Don’t worry. I like being disturbed. I’m Charles Paris.’
‘I know. Recognise you from the box. It’s very good of you to step into the breach.’
‘I gather you did more or less the same thing.’