44 Scotland Street (37 page)

The problem was that some people preached social philosophies that paid no attention to reality. Some French philosophers had a tendency to do this, Big Lou had noted: they did not care in the slightest if their theories could have disastrous consequences – because they considered themselves to be above such consequences. It was perfectly possible to portray scientific knowledge as socially determined – and therefore not true in any real sense – when one was safe on the ground in Paris; but would you ask the same question in a jet aircraft at thirty-five thousand feet, when that same knowledge underpinned the very engineering that was keeping one up in the air? By the same token, French philosophers had been able to admire Mao and his works because they did not have to live in China at the time. And they knew, too, that what they preached would never be put into effect.

Big Lou stood before her window and remembered the young man who had come into her coffee shop wearing a tee-shirt with a picture of Castro on it. She had served him his coffee and then pointed at the picture.

“Do you really admire people who put others in prison for speaking their mind?” she had asked. “Would you wear that shirt if you lived under him?”

The young man had looked at her and smiled. “You’re so naïve,” he had said, and taken his coffee to his table. And then, to follow this remark, he had turned to her and said: “Have you ever heard of false consciousness?”

“Aye,” said Big Lou. “I have.”

But the young man had laughed and turned to the reading of a magazine he had brought with him. Of course she had thought later of the things that she might have said to him, but she had remained silent and had merely gone to the door and locked it, discreetly. Ten minutes or so later, the young man had got up to leave – he was the only customer at the time – and had tried the handle of the door. When he realised it was locked, he had turned to her and demanded that she let him out, which she had done.

He had looked indignant, as she had taken her time to walk to the door and unlock it. So might the jailer in a prison swagger to his task. And as she opened the door for him she said: “You’re a university student, aren’t you? I’ve never been that, you know. But don’t you think that I’ve just been able to teach you a lesson about freedom?”

She smiled at the memory – it had been a moment of gentle victory – and was smiling still when her telephone rang. She walked across the room to answer it and heard the voice of the man from Aberdeen, her chef, the man whose letter she kept in that special drawer, and whose voice she had not thought she would hear again.

“I’m in Edinburgh, Lou,” he said. “Can I take you out for dinner? Are you free?”

She thought of determinism. Of course she was free.

89. Big Lou Goes to Dinner

Eddie was the name of Big Lou’s friend from Aberdeen. He was waiting for her, as he promised he would be, in Sandy Bell’s Bar in Forrest Road. He was a tall man in his early forties, with dark, lank hair and an aquiline nose. She saw him immediately she entered the bar, and he smiled at her and nodded. For Big Lou this was a moment of great significance, as it always is when we see one whom we loved a long time ago, and might love still; it had been years, and she had thought of him often – if not each waking day, then almost every day; and now here he was, unchanged, it seemed, and standing there smiling at her as if they were friends who had not seen one another for a mere week or so.

She made her way over towards him, squeezing past a group of young men who were listening earnestly to something being said by one of their number. And in the far corner, sitting at a table, a fiddler worked his bow through a tune that could just be heard above the hubbub of conversation. The notes were jagged and quick, and she remembered that they had sat in a similar pub one evening in Aberdeen when a Shetland fiddler had been playing, and her heart gave a lurch and she wondered whether he would remember that too. Men did not remember these things; or they had their own memories.

When she reached him he put his glass down on the bar and leaned forward to kiss her lightly on the brow.

“Well,” he said. “It’s been a long time, hasn’t it, Lou?”

She nodded. She would not cry, she had determined, but there were tears to be fought back. Discreetly, unseen by Eddie, Big Lou bit her lip.

“Aye, it’s been a good long time. And now …”

“And now here we are,” said Eddie.

She said nothing and glanced at the bartender, who was hovering. Eddie ordered her a drink – “I remember that you like Pernod, Lou. Pernod! Yes, I remember that well.”

“I don’t drink it very much any more,” she said. “But thanks, Eddie.”

They looked at one another. She noticed that he had put on a bit of weight, but not much, and that there were a few grey hairs above his ears. His hair looked a bit neater, too, but that was because he had been in America, and people worried more about their grooming there.

“How are you doing, Eddie?” she asked. “Are you still in Galveston? In Texas, or wherever it is?”

He smiled, somewhat awkwardly, and looked down at his feet. “I meant to write to you again, Lou, and tell you. I’m not the best letter-writer, you know. You did get my letter, didn’t you?”

Big Lou reached for the glass which the bartender was offering. “Yes, I got your letter, Eddie.” If he knew, she thought; if he knew how many times I have read that letter, and how I have preserved it, a token, for there were no other tokens.

“I stayed in Galveston for a few years,” said Eddie. “Then I moved to Mobile, Alabama. Great place. That’s where I am now. You’d like it, you know.”

Big Lou listened carefully. He had said that she would not like Galveston, that she should not join him out there. Now he was saying that she would like Mobile. Did this mean that he wanted her to go back there with him; that he wanted her again? And why would he assume that she would be available? But of course he would know that; of course he would.

He asked her what she was doing, and she explained. He said that she would be good at running a coffee bar – he had always thought that she should be in the catering industry, he said – and she thanked him for that. And was he still cooking? He was, but not for oil men.

“I’m a real chef now,” he said. “Cooking in the oil industry is just industrial. Big helpings for these big guys. Lots of carbohydrates. No finesse.”

She imagined him again in his kitchen whites, with the cap that he liked to wear, which hid his greasy hair. She had given him a special shampoo once, which claimed that it would end greasy hair, but either it had not worked or he had stopped using it.

They finished their drink and then went over the road to the Café Sardi. He had booked a table there, and asked her whether

she knew it. She did not, but she liked it when she went in. She liked restaurants with pictures on the walls and there was something about Italian restaurants which was always welcoming.

They sat at a table near the wall. He looked at the menu and told her about some of the dishes that he cooked now. Americans had a sweet tooth, he said, and so he was obliged to sprinkle icing sugar on things which would be savoury in Scotland.

“Is it very different over there?” asked Big Lou. “Would I like it, do you think?”

He fiddled with the edge of the tablecloth. ‘It’s very different in some ways,” he said. “You have to look after yourself. If you’re down, you’re down. Nobody’s going to come and pick you up. But if you want to work, then it’s a great place to be.”

“Maybe I should come and see you,” said Big Lou. She spoke tentatively, because he had not invited her yet, in spite of his saying that she would like Mobile. What a strange name, she thought: Mobile, and he pronounced it
Mobeel
, which must be the right way to say it. Eddie was good on these details; he had always been like that.

“There’s something I should tell you, Lou,” said Eddie. “I’m married now. I married a girl I met there. We run a restaurant together.”

Big Lou said nothing. She started to speak, but said nothing. She looked down at the cutlery, at her side plate, at the single flower in the tiny vase, at the way the candle flame flickered in the draught.

90. Poetry of the Tang Dynasty

There are, said Auden (and Tolstoy), different types of unhappiness. For Big Lou, the revelation that Eddie had married a woman in Mobile, Alabama, made her unhappy. She had never had very much, and losing what little she had was at least a suffering to which she was fairly accustomed (Auden’s phrase about the poor). For Pat, who had been loved a great deal, and knew it, the sight of Bruce in the Cumberland Bar, his attention entirely given over to his American girlfriend, provided a new sort of unhappiness. This was the unhappiness of knowing that you simply cannot have what you want to have – an unhappiness which is a bitter discovery for the young. The young rarely believe that they will not be able to get what they want, because there is always an open future. I may not be beautiful today, but I shall be beautiful tomorrow. I may not have much money today, but that will all change. Not so.

As he escorted Pat out of the Cumberland Bar, Angus Lordie was aware that she was feeling miserable. One with less psychological insight than he might have attempted to cheer her up with distracting remarks, or with observations on the fact that there were plenty of other young men. But he knew what it was to love without hope, and knew that the only way to deal with that bleak state was to look one’s unhappiness in the face. And it was important, he thought, to understand that the last thing that the unhappy wish to be reminded of is the greater unhappiness of others. Telling a person with toothache that there are others with greater toothache than their own was no help at all.

So he said to Pat, as they left the Cumberland “Yes, it’s very uncomfortable, isn’t it? You want him and he doesn’t want you – because he’s got another girl. Oh yes. Very unfortunate. And, of course, even if he didn’t have her, he might not want you anyway.”

Pat did not consider this helpful and was about to tell him that she did not want to talk about it. But he continued. “I can understand what you see in him, you know. I can understand the attraction of male beauty. I’m an artist, and I know what beauty is all about. That beautiful young man has worked a spell on you. That’s what beauty does. We see it and it puts a spell on us. It’s most extraordinary. We want to merge ourselves with it. We want to possess it. We want to
be
it. You want to
be
that young man, you know. That’s what you want.”

Pat listened in astonishment as they made their way round Drummond Place towards the top of Scotland Street. As they walked past the house of the late Sydney Goodsir Smith, makar, Angus Lordie looked up at the empty windows and gave a salute.

“I like to acknowledge Sydney’s shade,” he said. “
Guidnicht, then, for the nou, Li Po/ In the Blythefu Hills of Tien-Mu.
” He turned to Pat. “Those lovely lines are by Sydney, God rest his great rambunctious soul. He wrote a lovely poem, addressed to the Chinese poet, Li Po, about an evening’s goings-on in an Edinburgh bar,
a cheerie howf
, peopled by a
crousi companie o’
philosophers and tinks
. What a marvellous picture! And all this going on
while the world in its daith-dance/ skudder and spun/ in the haar and wind o space and time
.”

He stopped and looked down at his dog. “Do you think this is awful nonsense, Cyril? Will you tell Pat that I don’t always go on like this, but that sometimes … well sometimes it just seems the right thing to do. Will you tell her that, Cyril?”

Cyril stared at his master and then turned to look up at Pat. He winked.

“There,” said Angus Lordie. “Cyril would have got on very well with Sydney. And he does like to hear about the Chinese poets too, although he knows that the Chinese eat dogs – a practice of which Cyril scarcely approves, tolerant though he is of most other human foibles. A dog has to draw a line.”

“Do you enjoy Chinese poetry, Pat? No. I suppose that you’ve never had the pleasure. You should try it, you know. The Arthur Waley translations. These Chinese poets wrote wonderful pieces about the pleasure of sitting on the shore of their rivers and waiting for boats to arrive. Nothing much else happens in Chinese poetry, but then does one want much to happen in poetry? I rather think not.”

They turned down Scotland Street, walking slowly in order to allow Cyril to sniff at every kerbstone and lamp-post.

“It’s really rather easy to write eighth-century Chinese poetry,” said Angus Lordie. “In English, of course. It requires little effort, I find.”

“Make one up now,” said Pat. “Go on. If you say it’s so easy.”

Angus Lordie stopped again. “Certainly. Well now, let us think.”

He paused. Then turning to face Pat, he addressed her gravely:

I look across this street of stone, This street which takes a country’s name,

To the house with lights, where a gentle companion Prepares her jug of wine, brings to mind
The hours that we have spent together
In that quiet room; each stair that lies
Between ourselves and her, will raise the heart a little, Will tidy the unhappiness from your courtyard,
Will make you smile again. My unhappy friend;
I tell you so; I tell you this is true.

He finished speaking, and bowed slightly to Pat. “My Chinese poem,” he said. “Not as good, perhaps, as that which might have been written by Li Po, if he were with us, which he is not, but capable perhaps of preparing you for an evening with Domenica and myself and conversation about things that really matter. And if, incidentally, this is balm for your undoubted unhappiness, then I shall consider myself to have done no more than any neighbour should do. N’est-ce-pas, Cyril?”