Love Over Scotland (30 page)

86. A Letter to Edinburgh

Domenica was fussy about the circumstances in which she wrote. In Scotland Street, she would sit at her desk with a clean block of ruled foolscap paper in front of her and write on that, with a Conway Stewart fountain pen, in green ink. There were those who said that writing in green ink was a sign of mental instability, but she had never understood the basis for this. Green ink was attractive, more restful on the eye than an intense black, and she persisted with it.

Such rituals of composition were impossible in that small village near Malacca.

There, she made do with a simple, rather rickety table, which provided a surface for her French moleskin notebook and for a rather less commodious writing paper. But there was still the Conway Stewart pen, and supplies of green ink, and it was with this pen that she now wrote a letter to James Holloway in Edinburgh.

“Dear James,” she began, “I know that you are familiar with the Far East and will be able to picture the scene here–the scene of me upon my veranda, at my table, with a frangipani tree directly in front of me.

“The tree is in flower, and its white blossoms have that gorgeous, slightly sickly smell which reminds me of something else, but which I cannot remember. Perhaps you will supply the allusion; I cannot.

“I have at last begun my researches. Ling, the young man who has been assigned to look after me, is proving very helpful, even if he has a tendency to moodiness. I am not sure, though, of his reliability as an interpreter, as he has a strong contempt for everybody to whom we speak and he keeps arguing with them very loudly in dialect before he translates. This leads me to believe that he is distorting the answers and giving me a highly flavoured account of what is being said. Let me give you an example. The following is a transcript from my notebooks. The informant, informant 3, is the wife of a minor pirate, a rather depressed-looking woman with six children, all of them under twelve. Her house is on the edge of the village.

“DM: ‘Please ask her to tell me how she pays for the family provisions.’

“Interpreter speaks in Chinese for four or five minutes. Informant 3 is silent. Interpreter speaks again, raising his hand at one point as if to strike informant 3. Informant 3 speaks for two minutes, and then is silenced by a threatening look from interpreter, who translates: ‘My husband is a selfish man. He likes to keep the money he earns under his bed. There is a trunk there which is locked with a key which he keeps tucked away in his sarong. That is where the money is. He gives me a small amount each week on Monday and I go to the market to buy provisions. There is never quite enough, but if I ask him for money he shouts at me. People are always shouting at me.’

“Interpreter: ‘This is a very self-pitying woman. Her husband is a good man. It must be very difficult to be married to a woman like this. That is all she has to say.’

“DM: ‘Please thank her.’

“Interpreter: ‘That will not be necessary.’”

“So you will understand, James, how very difficult it is for me to get accurate information. However, I persist!

“But now let us move on from such matters to more intriguing issues. There are, I think, several mysteries here, and I find myself increasingly drawn to them. One of these is the question of what happened to the Belgian anthropologist who apparently preceded me here and whose doings, alas, remain obscure. Nobody seems willing to talk about him, and when I raised him with Ling I met a very unambiguous brick wall. The poor man died while doing his field work, and the other day I chanced upon his grave when I was walking down a path that led to the sea. I found myself in a clearing in the jungle and there, under a tree, was a rather poignant marker which simply said: HERE LIES AN ANT. I found this very puzzling. Why should he be so described?

“Then I had an idea, and yesterday I went down that path again. I had the feeling that there were eyes on me, and indeed at one point when I turned round I’m pretty sure that I saw a quick movement in the bush. I was frightened, I’ll admit, but not too frightened to abandon my mission. So I continued, still with that feeling that somebody was not far away. From time to time, I stopped and mopped my brow–the jungle is frightfully sticky, rather like the humid part of the hot house in the Royal Botanic Garden at Inverleith (Edinburgh references are so reassuring, James, when one is in the real jungle; it makes one feel that one could turn a corner and suddenly find Jenners there, which would be wonderful, but too much to ask for, alas!). Eventually, I reached the clearing and there was the grave and its rather sad little marker. So far from home, poor man; so far from everything that Belgians appreciate (whatever that is). Such a very poignant place.

“I sat down near the grave and, rather unexpectedly, the words of a hymn came into my mind. It was the hymn which dear Angus Lordie composed (you know how peculiar he is), and which he once sang at a dinner party in my flat in Scotland Street. If I remember correctly, he called it ‘God Looks Down on Belgium’ and the words went through my mind, there by that poor man’s grave. “God’s never heard of Belgium/But loves it just the same”…and so on.

“I was humming away to myself when I suddenly noticed a piece of wood lying by the grave. I picked it up and read what was painted on it: HROPOLOGIST.

“Hropologist? And then I realised, and that solved that mystery. Part of the marker had fallen off. No ant lay there.

“HERE LIES AN ANTHROPOLOGIST. What a touching tribute. If I don’t return from these parts, that is all I would wish for. That, and no more.

“Yours aye, Domenica.”

87. Stendhal Syndrome

Some of the members of the Edinburgh Teenage Orchestra had been to Paris before, while others, including Bertie, had not. In fact, Bertie had been nowhere before, except for the trip he had made to Glasgow with his father, and so to be here in the great city, sitting in a bus on his way to the hotel on the Boulevard Garibaldi, was seventh heaven indeed. And when the bus trundled across a bridge and they found themselves close to that great landmark, the Eiffel Tower, there was an excited buzz of conversation among the young musicians. For a few minutes they were lured out of the cultivated insouciance of adolescence into a state of frank delight, experiencing, for a moment, that thrill which comes when one sees, in the flesh, some great icon; as when one walks into the relevant room of the Uffizi and sees there, before one, Botticelli’s
Birth of Venus
; or in New York when, from the window of a cab that is indeed painted yellow, driven by a man who is indeed profoundly rude, one sees the approaching skyline of Manhattan; or when, arriving in Venice, one discovers that the streets are subtly different (as was found out by the late Robert Benchley, who then sent a telegram to Harold Ross, the editor of the
New Yorker
, in the following terms: STREETS FULL OF WATER. PLEASE ADVISE). Such experiences may become too much–and awaiting those who lay themselves open to cultural epiphany is that curious condition, Stendhal Syndrome. This afflicted Stendhal on his visit to Florence in 1817, and is brought about by seeing great works of art, there before one, and simply being overcome by their beauty. Shortness of breath, tachycardia, and delusions of persecution may result; in other words, a complicated swoon.

Bertie was not a candidate for Stendhal Syndrome. He was thrilled to be in Paris, and he stuck his nose to the window of the bus and gazed, open-mouthed, at the streets of the elegant city. But he was in no danger of swooning; he was merely absorbing and filing away in memory that which he saw: the old Citroën Traction parked by a small
boulangerie
; the white-gloved policeman standing on a traffic island; the buckets of flowers outside a florists; the crowded tables of a pavement café these were all sights that Bertie would remember.

And then they arrived at their hotel. This was one of those typical small Parisian hotels, occupying six narrow floors of a building overlooking a raised portion of the Metro. Bertie was put in a room on the second floor with Max, his companion from the flight, and from the window of this room he could look out onto the Metro track and see the trains rattle past. For Bertie, who had always been interested in trains, it was the best possible view, and, as he sat on the end of his bed, he thought of the immense good fortune that had brought him to this point in his life. Now he glimpsed what he had thought existed but which had always seemed to be out of his reach–a life in which he was not constantly being cajoled by his mother into doing something, but in which he was, to all intents and purposes, his own master. It was a heady feeling.

“What are we going to do now?” he asked Max, who was busy unpacking his suitcase into the small chest of drawers at the end of the room.

“Richard says that we have to meet downstairs in fifteen minutes and go for a rehearsal,” said Max. “That’s all we have to do today. But I’m going to go out tonight.”

Bertie looked at his shoes. What time would he have to go to bed? he wondered. Would they insist that he went earlier than everybody else, because he was the youngest, or would he be allowed to go out with Max?

“Go out?” he said timidly.

Max shut a drawer with a flourish. “Yes. Paris is a great place for night life. Didn’t you know that, Bertie?”

“Oh yes,” said Bertie quickly.

“So I thought I might go somewhere like the Moulin Rouge,” said Max casually. “And I’ve heard that the Folies Bergères is a great place too. Have you ever seen the can-can?”

Bertie was silent. He was unsure what the can-can was, but he was reluctant to appear ignorant–or too young. At least he had known who General de Gaulle was, and Max had not, but then Bertie sometimes wondered whether the things he knew–and he knew quite a lot–were up-to-date enough. He had a set of encyclopaedias in his room, but he had found out that these were published in 1968, and might not be as reliable as he thought. But there was time enough to think about that later. For the moment, there was the Moulin Rouge. Were you allowed to go to the Moulin Rouge if you were only six? he wondered. Or did you have to be at least ten?

“Would you like to come with me, Bertie?” asked Max. “I don’t mind if you come along. But you may have plans of your own.”

“I haven’t really made any plans yet,” said Bertie. “And I would like to come with you.” He paused. “Are we allowed?”

“Of course not,” said Max. “We’ll have to slip out the back. But I noticed a fire escape as we came up the stairs. You can get to it from out there, and we can shin down that and then catch the Metro. Easy.”

“All right,” said Bertie.

“Good,” said Max. “We’re going for dinner somewhere after the rehearsal and then we come back here. We’ll wait fifteen minutes until everyone has gone to bed, and then we’ll leave. Boy, are we going to have fun, Bertie!”

They went downstairs a few minutes later and then the whole orchestra was driven off in a bus to the hall where they were due to rehearse.

At the rehearsal, Bertie found it difficult to concentrate, but the small parts he had been given to play were simple and his distracted state did not show. He threw a glance at Max, sitting with the strings, and the other boy at one point winked at him, as if in confirmation of their conspiracy.

At the end of the rehearsal, as they were packing up their instruments, Bertie went to stand close to Max, so that he could sit next to him on the bus and discuss their outing.

“It’s very exciting,” whispered Bertie.

“Yes, sure,” said Max nonchalantly.

88. Girl Talk

They were taken from the rehearsal to the restaurant, which was a large, hall-like establishment, specialising in the feeding of school parties on visits to Paris. The menu, which was printed on laminated cards, was written in English, Italian and German. There was no French. The description of each course was helpfully accompanied by a small picture of what the dish looked like.

To Bertie’s disappointment, Max appeared to have found some new friends and sat with them, leaving him to sit with a small group of girls, who made a place for him and seemed to be quite happy with his company.

“You’re very sweet, you know,” said one of the girls.

Bertie blushed. He was not sure whether it was a good thing to be described as sweet, but he thought that it probably was not.

“How old are you?” said another. “Somebody said that you were only four. Is that true?”

Bertie looked down at his plate. “I’m going to be seven on my next birthday,” he said.

“Six!” exclaimed another girl.

Fortunately, the conversation soon moved on to another topic, and Bertie’s embarrassment subsided. The topic, it transpired, was the other members of the orchestra, particularly the boys.

“Have you seen that boy called Kevin?” asked one of the girls. “He plays the oboe, or thinks that he does.”

“He’s gross,” said another. “He thinks he’s so cool, but he’s really gross. Have you seen his ears? They stick out like this. It’s really gross.”

“He needs surgery,” said the first girl. “That’s his only chance.”

They laughed at this. Bertie, who could see Kevin sitting on the other side of the room, looked at his ears. They did not seem too large to him.

“And that boy in percussion,” one said. “I saw him looking in the mirror in the hotel. There’s this big mirror in the hall, see, and he was standing in front of it looking at his profile. It was really sad.

“He actually asked Linda out, you know. She couldn’t believe it. She said: ‘Are you mad or something?’ She said to me that she saw the seat he’d been sitting in on the plane and there was a large patch of hair gel where his head had been.

“And what about Max? Do you know him? He sits next to Tessa in the cellos. She says she can’t bear him. She says that he’s really stupid and that she has to do all the counting for him.”

Bertie opened his mouth to say something. Max was his friend, and he did not think he was stupid.

“He’s not stupid,” he said.

One of the girls glanced at him. “You said something, Bertie?”

Bertie tried to make his voice louder, and deeper. “I said: He’s not stupid. Max isn’t stupid.”

“All boys are stupid,” said one of the other girls, and laughed. “Except you, Bertie. You’re not stupid. You’re sweet.”

At the end of the meal, they returned to the hotel by bus and, after receiving instructions about the following day, when the concert was to be performed, they dispersed to their rooms. When Bertie got to his room, he found that Max was already there.

“I saw you sitting with those girls,” Max remarked. “What were they like?”

Bertie met his friend’s gaze. He was a truthful boy and he thought: would it be a fib, a real fib, not to tell Max what they had said about him? Was it a fib to say nothing when the effect of that would be exactly the same as if you had said something?

“They were quite…” Bertie began.

“I think one of them fancies me,” said Max casually. “You know that one with the fair hair? You know the one I mean?”

Bertie nodded. It was the girl who had passed on the comment about Max being stupid.

“She’s the one,” said Max. “Do you think I should ask her out, Bertie?”

Bertie looked doubtful. “I think she may be busy,” he said.

“I’ll think about it,” said Max. “Maybe I’ll give her a chance.”

Bertie looked out of the window. In the streets below, the cars moved slowly past and there was the sound of an approaching Metro train. “When are we going?” he asked Max.

Max lay back on the cover of his bed and looked at his watch. “It’s a bit late, Bertie,” he said. “And anyway, do you know the way?”

“To the Moulin Rouge?” asked Bertie.

“Yes,” said Max. “Because I don’t. And we can’t go if we don’t know the way.”

“I don’t,” said Bertie, looking crestfallen. “But maybe we could ask somebody in the street.”

Max laughed. “I can’t speak French,” he said. “We can’t ask if we don’t speak French. I do German, you see. And that’s no use in Paris.”

Bertie sighed. “So we can’t go?”

“Not this time,” said Max, slipping out of his shoes and throwing them onto a chair. “Next time we’re in Paris, boy will we have fun then!”

It took Bertie some time to get to sleep that night. He was disappointed by the cancellation of the visit to the Moulin Rouge, but he was looking forward to the concert tomorrow and they still had another night in Paris after that. He drifted off to sleep in a state of contentment and pride at being by himself–or almost–in Paris, fully accepted by a group of teenagers, more or less an honorary teenager. It was a fine state to be in.

He dreamed, and in his dream he was in the Moulin Rouge, which was a large room bearing an uncanny resemblance to the Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh. He was sitting at a table with one of the girls from the orchestra, who was talking to him, although Bertie did not hear anything that she said. And then, into the Moulin Rouge, came Dr Fairbairn.

It seemed to Bertie that Dr Fairbairn was looking for him, and he tried to hide under the table. But he had been spotted, and the psychotherapist came up to him and pulled him back onto his chair.

“What are you doing in the Moulin Rouge, Bertie?” asked Dr Fairbairn.

“I came here because…” Bertie started to reply.

“Because it’s a dream, Bertie?” interrupted Dr Fairbairn. “Is that why you’re here? Is that why any of us is here? Is that it, Bertie?”