“Now, as to my father,” Antonia went on. “His case is very simple. He thinks that numbers have colours. When you ask him what colour the number three is, without a moment’s hesitation he says: ‘Why it’s red, of course.’ And ten, he says, is a shade of melancholy blue.”
Domenica thought for a moment. “But blue is often melancholy, isn’t it? Or that’s what I’ve always thought. Does that make me a synaesthetic?”
Antonia hesitated briefly before replying: “No, I don’t think so. I think that is more a question of conditioning. We’re told that blue is melancholy and so we associate that emotion with it. Just as Christmas is red, and white, being the colour of snow and ice, is cold. In my father’s case, I suspect that when he was learning to read as a boy, he had a book which had the letters and numbers in different colours. The figure three was probably painted in red, and that association was made and stuck.
Our minds are like that, aren’t they? Things stick.
“The association between blue and melancholy,” Antonia continued, “is a cultural one. Somebody, a long time ago, a genuine synaesthetic perhaps, said: ‘I’m feeling blue,’ and the expression caught on.”
“The birth of the blues,” said Domenica.
“Precisely,” agreed Antonia. She took a sip of her coffee. “Of course there are so many associations in our minds that it’s not surprising that some get mixed up – wires get crossed. Whenever I hear certain pieces of music, I think of places, people, times.
That’s only natural.
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A Restoration in Prospect – and a New Suspicion
“People are always doing that with popular music. They remember where they were when they listened to something that made an impression on them.”
“If you’re going to San Francisco,” said Domenica suddenly,
“be sure to wear some flowers in your hair . . .”
Antonia stared at her.
“A song,” explained Domenica. “Round about the late sixties, 1967, maybe. It makes me think not of San Francisco, but Orkney, because that’s where I was when I listened to it. I loved it. And I can see Stromness, with its little streets, and the house I was staying in over the summer while I worked part-time in the hotel there. I was a student, and there was another student working there, a boy, and I suppose I was in love with him, although he never knew.”
Antonia was silent. She looked at Domenica. She had never thought of Domenica having a love life, but she must have, because we all fall in love, and some of us are sentenced to unre-quited love, talking about it over cups of coffee in flats like this, with friends just like this, oddly comforted by the process.
17. A Restoration in Prospect – and a New Suspicion Domenica looked about her. Antonia’s flat was a mirror image of hers in the arrangement of its rooms. But whereas the original features of her flat had been largely preserved, Antonia’s had suffered a bad 1970s experience. The original panelled doors, examples of which survived in Domenica’s flat, had either been taken down in Antonia’s and replaced with unpleasant frosted-glass doors – for what conceivable purpose? Domenica wondered
– or their panels had been tacked over with plywood to produce an unrelieved surface. That, one assumed, was the same aesthetic sense which had produced the St James Centre, a crude cluster of grey blocks at the end of the sadly mutilated Princes Street, or, at a slightly earlier stage, had sought the turning of Princes A Restoration in Prospect – and a New Suspicion 55
Street into an urban motorway and the conversion of the Princes Street Gardens into a car park.
One might not be surprised when some of these things were done by those with neither artistic sense nor training, but both the St James Centre and the plan to slice the city in two with a motorway had been the work of architects and planners. At a domestic level, these were the very same people who put in glass doors and took out old fireplaces.
“Yes,” said Antonia. “I will have to do something about all this.”
Domenica pretended surprise for a moment, but Antonia had intercepted her glances and knew what she was thinking.
“Don’t imagine for a moment that this is my taste,” Antonia warned. “I’m every bit as Georgian as you are.”
It was an amusing way of putting it, and they both laughed.
Not everyone in the New Town lived a Georgian lifestyle, but some did. And of course Antonia and Domenica would find such people amusing with their insistence on period authenticity in their houses, although they themselves were equally inclined to much the same aesthetic.
Domenica waved a hand about her. “What are you going to do?”
“Just about everything,” said Antonia. “Those doors over there.
The plywood will come off. Panels back. I’ll free the shutters.
Free the shutters – that’s a rallying call in these parts, you know.”
Domenica looked at her friend. But her own shutters had indeed been freed, she had to admit.
“And then I’m going to take all the light fittings out,” Antonia went on. “All this . . . this stuff.” She pointed up at the spiky, angular light that was hanging from the ceiling. “And the fireplaces, of course. I shall go to the architectural salvage yard and see what they have.”
“You’ll need a builder,” said Domenica, adding, with a smile,
“We are mere women, you know.”
“Oh, I’m ready for that. You know, people are so worried about builders. They seem to have such bad experiences with them.”
“Perhaps it’s that problem that builders have with their trousers,” Domenica mused. “You know that issue of . . .”
56
A Restoration in Prospect – and a New Suspicion Antonia was dismissive of that. “Low trousers have never been a problem for me,” she said. “Nihil humanum alienum mihi est.*
Although it is interesting – isn’t it? – how trousers are getting lower each year. Or is it our age?”
Domenica thought for a moment. “You mean on young men?
Young men’s trousers?”
“Yes,” said Antonia. “It’s now mandatory for them to show the top of their underpants above the trouser waist. And the trousers get lower and lower.”
As an anthropologist, there was little for Domenica to puzzle about in this. Male adornment occurred in all societies, although it took different forms. It was perfectly natural, she thought, for young men to display; the only question of interest was what limits society would put on it. And could one talk about society anymore when it came to clothing? T-shirts proclaimed the most intimate messages and nobody batted an eyelid. There were, she reflected, simply no arbiters.
Domenica decided that the issue of trousers had been explored enough. “And these builders,” she said. “Where will you get them?”
“My friend Clifford Reed is a builder,” Antonia said. “And a very good one, too. He’ll help me out. He said he will. He has a Pole he’s going to send over to take a look at what needs to be done, and then to do it. There are lots of Poles in Edinburgh now. All these builders and hotel porters and the like. All very hardworking. Staunch Catholics. Very reliable people.”
Domenica thought for a moment. “You’ll have to get a large mug to serve your Pole his tea in,” she said. “None of this Spode for him. He’ll want something more substantial.”
She watched Antonia as she spoke. It was a somewhat obvious thing for her to say, she thought, a bit unsubtle, in fact. But she watched to see its effect on Antonia. Of course the true psychopath would be unmoved; such people were quite capable of telling the coldest of lies, of remaining cool in the face of
*Lit: nothing about humanity is alien to me; a common Edinburgh way of saying: I’ve seen it all.