“I know what chinos are,” he said. “I saw a pair of chinos in a shop once. They were . . .” He trailed off. He had rather liked the chinos, he remembered, but he was not sure whether he should say so to Pat: there might be something deeply unfashionable about chinos which he did not yet know.
“Why are they called chinos?” Pat asked.
Matthew shrugged. “I have no idea,” he said. “I just haven’t really thought about it . . . until now.” He paused. “But why were you thinking of chinos?”
Pat hesitated. “I just saw a pair,” she said. “And . . . and of course Bruce used to wear them. Remember?”
Matthew had not liked Bruce, although he had tolerated his company on occasion in the Cumberland Bar. Matthew was a modest person, and Bruce’s constant bragging had annoyed him.
But he had also felt jealous of the way in which Bruce could capture Pat’s attention, even if it had become clear that she had eventually seen through him.
“Yes. He did wear them, didn’t he? Along with that stupid rugby jersey. He was such a . . .” He did not complete the 6
A Conversation with Matthew: Matthew Is Troubled by His Trousers sentence. There was really no word which was capable of capturing just the right mixture of egoism, hair gel, and preening self-satisfaction that made up Bruce’s personality.
Pat moved away from Matthew’s desk and gazed out of the window. “I think that I just saw Bruce,” she said. “I think he might be back.”
Matthew rose from his desk and joined her at the window.
“Now?” he said. “Out there?”
Pat shook her head. “No,” she said. “Farther up. I was on the bus and I saw him – I’m pretty sure I did.”
Matthew sniffed. “What was he doing?”
“Walking,” said Pat. “Wearing chinos and a rugby jersey. Just walking.”
“Well, I don’t care,” said Matthew. “He can come back if he likes. Makes no difference to me. He’s such a . . .” Again Matthew failed to find a word. He looked at Pat. There was something odd about her manner; it was as if she was thinking about something, and this raised a sudden presentiment in Matthew. What if Pat were to fall for Bruce again? Such things happened; people encountered one another after a long absence and fell right back in love. It was precisely the sort of thing that novelists liked to write about; there was something heroic, something of the epic, in doing a thing like that. And if she fell back in love with Bruce, then she would fall out of love with me, thought Matthew, if she ever loved me, that is.
He stuffed his papers into his briefcase and moved across to Pat’s side. She half-turned her cheek to him, and he planted a kiss on it, leaving a small speck of spittle, which Pat wiped off.
“I’m sorry,” he muttered.
“It’s nothing,” said Pat, adding, “Just spit.”
Matthew looked at her. He felt flushed, awkward. “I’ll be back later,” he said. “But if you need to go, then just shut up the shop. We probably won’t be very busy.”
Pat nodded.
Matthew tried to smile. “And then maybe . . . maybe we can go and see a film tonight. There’s something at the Famous Sons and Gothic Seasoning 7
Cameo, something Czech, I think. Something about a woman who . . .”
“Do you mind if we don’t?” said Pat. “I’ve got an essay to write and if I don’t do it soon, then Dr Fantouse will go on and on at me, and . . .”
“Of course,” said Matthew. “Dr Fantouse. All right. I’ll see you on . . .”
“Wednesday.”
“Yes. All right.” Matthew walked towards the door. Nobody writes essays on Saturday night – he was convinced of that, and this meant that she was planning to do something else; she would go to the Cumberland Bar in the hope of meeting Bruce – that was it.
Leaving the gallery, Matthew began to walk up Dundas Street.
Glancing to his side, he looked through the gallery window. Pat was still standing there, and he gave her a little wave with his left hand, but she did not respond. She didn’t see me, he thought.
She’s preoccupied.
3. Famous Sons and Gothic Seasoning Matthew was wrong about Pat. He had imagined that her claim to be writing an essay that Saturday night was probably false and that in reality she would be doing something quite different – something in which she did not want him to be involved. But although it is true that students very rarely do any work on Saturday evenings – except in extremis – in this case, Pat was telling the truth, as she always did. There really was an essay to be completed and it really did have to be handed in to Dr Fantouse the following Monday. And this indeed was the reason why she declined Matthew’s invitation to the Czech film at the Cameo cinema.
Pat closed the gallery shortly after three that afternoon.
Matthew had not returned and business was slack – nonexistent, 8
Famous Sons and Gothic Seasoning in fact, with not a single person coming in to look at the paintings. This is what, in the retail trade, is called light footfall, there being no commercial term – other than death – to describe the situation where absolutely nobody came in and nothing was sold. So Pat, having locked the cash-box in the safe and set the alarm, left the gallery and waited on the other side of the road for the 23 bus that would take her back to within a short walk of the parental home – once more her home too –
in the Grange, that well-set suburb on the south side of the Meadows.
Pat’s parents lived in Dick Place, a street which had prompted even the sombre prose of the great architectural historian John Gifford and his collaborators into striking adjectival saliences.
Dick Place, they write in their guide to the buildings of Edinburgh, is a street of “polite villas” – a description which may fairly be applied to vast swathes of Edinburgh suburbia.
But then they warn us of “Gothic seasoning,” mild in some cases and wild in others, and go on to observe how, in the case of one singled-out house, “tottering crowstepped porches and skeleton chimneys contrast with massive bald outshoots.” But Dick Place is not distinguished only by architectural exuberance; like so many streets in Edinburgh, it has its famous sons. At its junction with Findhorn Place is the house in which the inventor of the digestive biscuit once lived; not the only house in Edinburgh to be associated with baking distinction – in West Castle Road, in neighbouring Merchiston, there once lived the father of the modern Jaffa Cake, a confection which owes its name to the viscous orange jelly lurking under the upper coating of chocolate. No plaque reminds the passer-by of these glories, although there should be one; for those who invent biscuits bring great pleasure to many.
Pat’s father, a psychiatrist, found the location very convenient.
In the mornings, he could walk from his front door to the front gate of the Royal Edinburgh Hospital within fifteen minutes, and if he was consulting privately in Moray Place he could walk there in twenty-five minutes. The walk to Moray Place was Famous Sons and Gothic Seasoning 9
something of a paysage moralisé – easier on the way down than on the way back, when the cares of patients would have been deposited on his shoulders, making Frederick Street and the Mound seem so much steeper and Queen Street so much longer.
But apart from this undoubted convenience, what suited him about Dick Place was the leafy quiet of the garden that surrounded the house on all four sides. If they were to pass any comment on Dr Macgregor’s garden, John Gifford and his friends might be sniffy about the small stone conservatory and potting shed, with its fluted and rusticated mullions; they might even describe the whole thing as “an oddity,” but for Dr Macgregor it was his sanctuary, the place where he might in perfect and undisturbed peace sit and read the Journal of the Royal College of Psychiatry or the Journal of Neurology, Neuro-surgery, and Psychiatry.