The Unbearable Lightness of Scones (30 page)

“Look,” said Angus, nodding in Cyril’s direction. “Cyril’s interested.”

Domenica looked at Cyril and smiled. “Surely not,” she said. “Doesn’t he only see in one dimension?”

“Watch,” whispered Angus.

Cyril was now crouching in front of the painting, his ears down, staring fixedly at the portrait. Then he wagged his tail, a quick backwards and forwards movement, like the motion of windscreen wipers in a storm. Angus now moved forward and went down on his haunches, next to Cyril.

“That’s Robert Burns,” Domenica heard him say to the dog.
“Mr. Burns, this is Cyril. A gash an’ faithfu’ tyke/As ever lap a sheugh or dyke/His honest, sonsie, bawsn’t face/Ae gat him friends in ilka place/His breast was white, his touzie black/His gawsie tail wi upward curl/Hung owre his hurdies wi’ a swirl.”

Cyril looked up at Angus and smiled, as if acknowledging a compliment.

“Aye,” said Angus. “You liked dugs, Rabbie. And this dug here is your Luath, or as close to him as you’ll find these days. He’s a good enough dog, I think. He’s certainly been good enough for me.”

He placed a hand on Cyril’s head and ruffled his fur gently. Cyril looked up at his master in appreciation, and then returned his gaze to Robert Burns.

Angus addressed Domenica over his shoulder. “You’ll remember Caesar and Luath, won’t you, Domenica?”

Domenica did, but had not thought of the poem for years. But Burns was still there, engraved in her memory, drummed into her as a small child at school, in an age when children still learned poetry by heart, and took those lines as baggage, for comfort throughout their lives.

“I remember them,” she said.

“Caesar was the high-born dog,” Angus went on. “And Luath was a bit like Cyril here. Nothing grand. And they talked about the cares of men and whether the rich or the poor had the better time of it.”

Cyril now advanced slowly towards the painting. He was making a strange snuffling sound, a whimpering, looking up at Robert Burns, as if in some sort of supplication. Then, very slowly, as if expecting a rebuff, he touched the surface of the painting with his tongue.

“Did you see that?” Angus said over his shoulder. “That’s the biggest compliment a dog can pay. That’s his homage.”

Now Cyril had had enough; the moment was broken. With a final glance at Burns, he turned round and made his way back to his blanket on the other side of the room. And as he
crossed the floor, he smiled at Domenica, the sunlight from the high studio windows glinting off his single gold tooth.

“I think he knew,” said Angus, rising back up to his feet. “Don’t you think he sensed that this was somebody special?”

In normal circumstances, Domenica would have dismissed this as sheer anthropomorphism. A dog could not appreciate Burns; to say otherwise would be to give in to the weak sentimentalism that animal owners were so prone to and that she always found so ridiculous. But there was something infinitely touching about what she had observed. Cyril, the malodorous Cyril, who was just a dog, no more, had seen something in the painting and had been visibly affected by it. She could not be indifferent to that. She could not be.

“I think that Cyril has just authenticated this painting,” pronounced Angus.

They withdrew from the studio. Angus covered the Raeburn with an old blanket, a threadbare square of hodden grey, and called Cyril to heel. Then, with the studio door closed behind them, they made their way into the kitchen.

Domenica resisted the temptation to open a window. It is not generally considered polite, she reminded herself, to go into the house of another and open a window, there being an element of judgment in such an action. Nor, she thought, should one rearrange any of the items in a room, nor even turn on a light. She did not think that Angus would notice any of these things, but she had been strangely moved by what she had witnessed in the studio, and she did not want to compromise the almost mystical moment of insight that had been vouchsafed her.

And what precisely was that? It was difficult to be too specific – the whole point about a moment of insight is that it defies quotidian description – but she had suddenly appreciated the sheer otherness of Angus. Most of us go through life so absorbed in the cocoon of ourselves that we rarely stop to consider the other. Of course we think that we do; indeed we may pride ourselves on our capacity for empathy; we may be considerate and thoughtful in our dealings with others, but how often do we stand before them, so to speak, and experience what it is to be them? She asked herself this, and remembered, vaguely, something she had read somewhere, about the I-Thou encounter. Martin Buber? That sounded right, but now, in the kitchen of Angus Lordie’s flat, the recollection was vague, and the moment, already, was passing.

She looked at Angus, at his paint-bespattered corduroy trousers; at his somewhat battered Harris tweed jacket; at the Paisley handkerchief-cum-cravat that he had tied round his throat; at his shoes, old brown brogues which he obviously tended with care, for they were polished to a high shine. How often have I looked at him in this way? she asked herself. How often have I noticed or, indeed, listened to him? We talk, but do I actually listen, or is our conversation mainly a question of my waiting for him to stop and for it to be my turn to say something? For how many of us is that what conversation means – the setting up of our lines?

She looked at him as he moved over to the sink and filled
his ancient kettle with water. She looked at the sink itself, at the tottering pile of pots that surely could not be added to any further without collapse. She looked beyond the sink at the window behind it, in need of a clean on both sides. She looked at the notice-board he had created for himself from a large square of dark cork; at the photographs tacked onto it; the notes to self; the bills paid and unpaid. This was Angus. This was another. This was another life.

While he busied himself with the kettle and the ladling into a jug of several spoonfuls of coffee, Domenica moved over to the notice-board and bent down to examine the photographs. She had never seen them before. The notice-board was nothing new to the room, but she had never seen it before, and she felt ashamed, because Angus was her friend, one of her closest friends, and she had never even bothered to look at his notice-board.

“Do you mind?” she asked. “Do you mind if I take a look at these photographs?”

He half-turned from his position at the sink. “No,” he said. “I don’t mind. Of course you can look at them. I’ll tell you what they are, if you like.”

Domenica peered at the photographs. There were about a dozen of them, and they seemed to be of varying ages. Some, the older ones, had an almost sepia look to them, as if they had been taken from an old family album. Others were more vivid, the colours still there, even if fading slightly.

“I assume that’s you,” she said. “That’s you as a boy.”

Angus, who was fetching cups from a cupboard, glanced over his shoulder. “Yes. That’s me. And a friend of mine. He came from Mull. His dad was a doctor over there. The doctor drove a Lagonda. I remember it. Beautiful car. We were at school together. He was called Johnnie.”

Domenica looked more closely. Two boys, age twelve or so, stood in front of a dry-stane dyke, both wearing kilts and jerseys. She noticed that the shadows on the ground were long;
it was afternoon. Behind the dyke she could make out a field, a hillside, rising sharply to a high, empty sky. She closed her eyes, very briefly, and for some reason the words came into her mind, unexpected, unbidden, but from the region of the heart, from that very region: I love this country.

She became aware of Angus behind her. She heard his breathing.

“We had just started at Glenalmond,” he said. “Our first year there, I think. It was quite tough in those days – and they turned us out to roam the hills on a Sunday. In the summer term, at least. Johnnie and I used to go all over the Sma’ Glen. There was a farm called Connachan down towards Monzie where we used to go for tea when we were meant to be up at the top of the hill. The farmer had a couple of daughters our age and they’d tease us. We got on famously.

“And at the back of the farm,” Angus continued, “there was the River Almond. You probably know it. Well, further up, along the road to Auchnafree, the farmer had a wire cable across the river with a basket suspended from it. You could pull yourself across in the basket. He and his shepherds used to use this to get across the river without getting their feet wet. The sheep-dogs too. Dogs like Cyril. The dogs loved it. Dogs love anything like that.

“We used to swim in the river too. It was always freezing, even in summer. And then we’d eat sandwiches on the rocks. Bully beef sandwiches. Remember bully beef? Do you think anybody eats it now?”

He paused. “There are some lines,” he said quietly, “that come to me when I look at that photograph. We twa ha paidled in the burn/From morning sun til dine …”

“But seas between us braid hae roar’d…” Domenica supplied.

“Exactly,” said Angus. “Johnnie …”

He stopped. She waited for him to say something more, but he did not.

“Bingo!” thought Bruce. He was sitting in the small restaurant over the road from Nick McNair’s flat in Leith, into which he had just moved. Then he thought: Julia Donald! That dim, dumb … zero. Yes, that’s what she was. She was a zero, a minus quantity even. And to think that she had me believing that her baby – her stupid zero baby – was mine, when all the time she was seeing Watson Cooke, the Watsonian zero in that Clarence Street dump of his. Number Zero, Clarence Street, EHZero ZeroYS! What a narrow escape. And they deserved each other, just as they would deserve all those zero nappies for that dim baby of theirs. No thank you! Not
pour moi
!

Now, at the table in the restaurant, with seven of Nick’s friends, Bruce felt much happier. There was a bit of an unresolved issue over the fact that the advertising agency for which Nick was working was owned by Julia Donald’s father, but Bruce was beginning to think of a way out and he would deal with that later. There would be plenty of time. For the moment he would have to work out how to respond to the woman on the other side of the table who was looking at him. More than that; she was giving him the look. And that was when he said to himself, “Bingo!”

There was a slight problem, of course, and that was that Bruce had not caught her name when they had been introduced. Shelley? Sheila? It was something like that. Well, that was not a problem, really. If you don’t know somebody’s name, thought Bruce, then ask them. It was an excellent chat-up line, in fact. What’s your name? is seriously romantic, he thought. It works every time.

He leaned across the table. “What’s your name?” he asked.

The young woman on the other side of the table smiled. She was undoubtedly attractive, and when she smiled she became even more so. “Shauna,” she said. “And you?”

Bruce returned the smile. “Bruce. Just call me Bruce.”

There was no need to add the “just call me” part, but Bruce found that it was another thing that worked every time. I work every time, he thought. It’s not what I say, it’s me!

“Do you work with Nick?” Bruce asked.

Shauna nodded. “Yes,” she said. “Now and then. I do shoots with him.”

She looked down the table and waved at Nick, who was seated at the other end. Nick winked back at her.

Bruce smiled. “You’re in an agency?” Everybody surrounding Nick, he had decided, seemed to work in some agency or another.

“Yes,” said Shauna, “but I’m strictly advertising. Nick shoots for PR people. I’m very specialised. Just soaps, moisturisers, things like that. I do ads for the beauty industry.”

“Great,” said Bruce.

“You might have seen some of my work,” Shauna went on. “Do you read the mags?”

Bruce thought for a moment. What mags was she talking about? The sort of magazines that Julia liked to read – those vacuous glossies?

“Sometimes,” he said.

Shauna was looking at him. “Let me guess what you do,” she said, propping her chin on her hands in mock concentration. “You’re a model, right?”

Bruce sat back in his chair. “Well …”

“I knew,” said Shauna. “I could tell. You can always tell the clothes horses.”

Bruce was silent.

“No offence,” Shauna said. “Some of my best friends are clothes horses.” She laughed.

Bruce bit his lip and looked away from her. He muttered something to himself, something unrepeatable. But she, too, had turned away and was talking to the man beside her, a thin man with a pair of round wire-frame spectacles; not a clothes horse, thought Bruce.

He looked about him. There was a man to his left, who was
talking to somebody on his other side, but on his right was a woman, also attractive, but in a different way from Shauna. She, though, was engaged in animated conversation with the man on her right. Bruce looked down at his hands. He suddenly felt very lonely.

He rose to his feet and looked about the restaurant. A small sign at the far end of the room pointed the direction: a picture of a man’s hat and a pair of women’s gloves. Bruce crossed the room, leaving the noise behind him. He pushed open the door of the lavatory and stood in the small space before the basin. There was a mirror. He looked in it.