The Importance of Being Seven (26 page)

‘So,’ said Big Lou, as she directed a jet of steam through the milk for Matthew’s mid-morning coffee. ‘So – Moray Place it is, then. Going up in the world, I see.’

Matthew laughed. ‘India Street to Moray Place is not going up in the world at all,’ he said. ‘Sideways, perhaps. But not going up.’

Big Lou, of course, had no time for the games of Edinburgh society. She lived in Canonmills, at the bottom of the hill, and would be very unlikely to move, she thought, upwards, downwards or even sideways. She knew her neighbours, and liked them. Everybody on her stair was helpful, fulfilling their duties on the cleaning rota, and there were never any noisy parties. In fact, there were never any quiet parties either, but that suited Big Lou, and all the other neighbours, very well.

‘I’m really happy with the flat,’ said Matthew. ‘And there’s a garden, Lou. A really nice garden. You should come and see it.’

‘What are you going to grow?’ asked Lou. ‘Tatties?’

Matthew shook his head. ‘They don’t go in for tatties in Moray Place,’ he said solemnly. ‘Flowers, I suppose. And some bushes, perhaps we’ll plant some …’ He trailed off; he had never gardened.

‘Aye?’ said Big Lou. ‘Some what?’

‘Some ground cover,’ said Matthew quickly. He had seen the expression somewhere and it had stuck. Ground cover was definitely the thing.

‘Was it expensive?’ asked Big Lou. ‘Fifty thousand?’

Matthew stared at her in disbelief.

‘More than that?’ asked Big Lou. ‘Sixty?’

‘A bit more, Lou,’ he said, adding, ‘Quite a bit more.’

Big Lou handed him his coffee. ‘It’s nonsense,’ she said. ‘This town’s becoming far too expensive for its own good. For fifty thousand you could get a really good place in Arbroath.’

‘I doubt it,’ said Matthew. ‘Not today.’

Big Lou shrugged. ‘Maybe I’m a bit out of date.’

Matthew raised an eyebrow. ‘You could be. Just a bit.’

Big Lou changed the subject. ‘That’s Angus away,’ she said. ‘Dog and all.’

‘I envy him going to Italy,’ said Matthew. ‘It’s the spiritual home of all us artists.’

Big Lou looked at him. ‘You’re not an artist.’

‘Or those concerned with buying and selling art,’ added Matthew sheepishly.

Big Lou was not convinced. ‘To be an artist you have to be able to paint or make sculpture or do something like that.’

‘No you don’t,’ said Matthew. ‘Not any more. The artists who do well these days are precisely those who can’t paint. And as for sculpture, that’s very old-fashioned, Lou. Installations are the thing now.’ Matthew looked around the room. ‘Take your coffee machine, for example. That has two prices: the price you pay for it if you buy it in a kitchen equipment shop, and the price you’d get for it if you put it on a plinth in a gallery and labelled it
Age of Steam
or
Chrome III
.’

‘Oh yes?’

Matthew nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘So if I put it in your gallery I’d get a large price?’

‘No,’ said Matthew. ‘Not you. It would have to be put in by somebody who had been recognised by the cognoscenti as conferring artistic validity to the object. That would mean that you would have to be chosen by the people who create the market. If they chose you – if some big collector said Big Lou is eminently collectable – then that would confer that status upon you. You’d be anointed, so to speak. Thereafter anything you presented as art would be ipso facto art.’

Matthew drew breath. ‘And another thing. It couldn’t be my gallery because I can’t confer validity. It would have to be one of the galleries that are accepted as being the sort of place where coffee makers – or anything, for that matter – can be sold as art. I’m not in that line of apostolic succession, so to speak.’

Big Lou was thinking. ‘The Dutch tulip affair,’ she said. ‘I was reading a funny wee book about social hysteria – about how folk get things into their heads and go mad for a while. There was something about witchcraft.’

‘Moral panic,’ prompted Matthew.

‘Yes. That sort of thing. Didn’t the Dutch go mad about tulips back in the – when was it – 1600s? Didn’t they pay terrific prices for tulip bulbs? And these bulbs got more and more expensive and people fought to have the rarest ones they could get hold of. Sheer stupidity.’

‘Yes,’ said Matthew. ‘And then suddenly somebody said, “Hold on, it’s just tulip bulbs, and tulip bulbs aren’t really worth the price of a house.” ’

‘And everything collapsed. Yes. Do you think that people in the art business know about the tulip disaster?’

Matthew smiled. ‘I suspect that they know only too well. But the problem is, they can’t do anything but keep up the entire pretence and carry on buying these banal conceits because if they didn’t their collections would be worthless. Who would want to buy a shark in a tank of formaldehyde? Especially if the shark started to decay and fall to bits? You have to pretend that it’s still important, still worth keeping, because if you didn’t you’d lose millions of pounds.’

A silence ensued as the two of them contemplated the creation of value in the valueless.

‘Pat,’ said Matthew suddenly, looking at his watch.

Big Lou frowned. ‘I haven’t seen her for an awful long time.’

‘Well, you’re about to see her,’ said Matthew. ‘She’s coming in this morning. About now.’

‘Why?’

‘I’m taking her on in the gallery again,’ explained Matthew. ‘I’ve got my move coming up and I need to help Elspeth get everything ready. So I’ll need two helpers, rather than one.’

Big Lou absorbed this information. She liked Pat, and she was pleased that she would be seeing her again. She was worried, though, that Pat would not approve of Matthew’s new assistant, Kirsty. Certainly, Big Lou had not taken to her, even if she could not put her finger on the exact reason. Too glamorous? Possibly. But there was something more to it than that. Big Lou did not trust Kirsty – that was it; trust – a concept so hard to define and yet, in its absence, so unmistakable.

‘It won’t work,’ she said to Matthew.

‘Why?’

Big Lou shrugged. It would not be easy to explain it to Matthew, because he was a man and men often did not understand these nuances. No point in trying, she decided, but at least he might understand folk wisdom. ‘We used to say in Arbroath,’ she pronounced, ‘that you can’t have two women in the same kitchen.’

It was as Matthew was crossing the road on his way back from Big Lou’s that he saw Pat walking down the hill towards him. From the safety of the pavement he stood and waved. She waved back before quickening her pace.

‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ she said as she reached him. ‘It took longer than I thought.’

Matthew smiled. ‘You don’t have to apologise. I was talking to Big Lou and I suddenly remembered that I’d arranged to meet you.’

They had not shaken hands, nor embraced, as long-lost friends
might do. Between them there was that strange half-intimacy of former lovers, a feeling that can so easily become awkwardness, but which, in their case, had not. It was fondness, really; that fondness that comes, in Rupert Brooke’s words, from having done one’s best and worst and parted. Now, in the moments after a rather stiff beginning, Pat suddenly leaned forward and gave Matthew a kiss on his cheek. He moved, though, surprised, and she ended up kissing him on the lips. He reached out and put a hand upon her shoulder; she did the same.

And then he recoiled; a social kiss, as meaningless and often less warm than a shaking of the hands, had become something else. He had felt within him, around where he imagined his heart to be, although it could have been anywhere within his chest, a physical sensation that signalled desire.

She looked concerned. ‘What is it?’

He did not meet her gaze but looked away; the 23 bus, lumbering down the hill, passed within yards, and he saw for a moment his reflection in the windows, fluid, as on water.

‘What?’

She reached out to touch him. ‘Is something wrong?’

He shook his head. The social self reasserted itself: he was married again; there was nothing between him and Pat; they were in the street, in broad daylight, about to have what amounted to no more than a discussion between employer and part-time employee.

‘I’ve got a lot on my mind,’ he said. ‘Let’s get back to the gallery.’

They began to walk. ‘I’m sorry I’ve been out of touch,’ said Pat. ‘I’ve been working rather hard. And I’ve moved, you know. I’m in Warrender Park Terrace. A flat right up at the top.’

He could see it. ‘One of those big flats?’

‘Yes. I’ve got a round room, because it’s under the tower.’

He smiled at her. And then, unbidden, there came into his mind an image of Pat in her room looking out towards the crown spire of St Giles and to the Castle, like a ship, its ramparts protection against waves that were the clouds, and he saw her at her window and then as she walked, unclothed, across the room. It was a vision sent by Eros, who does not ask our permission for his whisperings.

He almost stumbled.

‘Careful,’ she said. And then, seeing his expression and noting the sudden high colour, she asked, ‘Are you sure you’re all right, Matthew?’

He sought to reassure her, but even as he did so, the vision returned and took his hand, and …

‘Oh,’ he muttered.

‘Matthew?’

He forced himself to think of something else, a trick mastered by every schoolboy troubled by wandering thoughts in mathematics lessons. In his case he had always thought of the Forth Bridge, and of its painting; a subject sufficiently devoid of emotional significance to distract one from the temptation of fantasy.

‘What are you thinking of?’ asked Pat.

The question, posed in innocence, could hardly be ignored. For a moment he was tempted to tell her, to say that he was picturing her in her flat in Warrender Park Terrace, but he could not do that, and so, without thinking, he answered, ‘The Forth Bridge.’

She frowned. ‘Odd. Why are you thinking of the Forth Bridge?’

‘I sometimes do,’ he said lamely. ‘The old bridge, that is. The railway bridge.’

‘Matthew, are you sure you’re all right?’

They were nearing the gallery, but she had stopped and laid a hand gently on his arm. She looked at him searchingly, and he realised then why he had always been so attracted to her: her eyes. And then he thought: how ridiculous that one can feel for a person on such slender, inconsequential grounds.

‘I’ve been under a lot of strain,’ he said. ‘Elspeth is having triplets.’

Pat gasped. ‘Three?’

‘Yes.’

‘It must have been …’

‘A shock,’ he supplied. ‘Yes, it was. But we’ve adjusted to it. And we’ve got a move on top of it. We’re going to Moray Place.’

‘Moray Place?’ She was silent for a few moments, remembering the invitation that she had received to the nudist picnic there.

‘Yes, it’s a really nice flat. With its own garden.’

The discussion of Moray Place had brought him back from the territory that had so surprised and appalled him. He was back to being Matthew, the husband of Elspeth, and father of triplets. The moment of danger, it seemed, had passed.

‘But let’s not talk about all that,’ he said. ‘I’m really pleased that you can work for me again.’

They had reached the gallery and were standing in front of the glass door at the front. Pat looked in, through the door, and saw, at the back, the figure of Kirsty, who was bending down, looking in one of the print drawers. ‘Matthew?’ Pat began hesitantly.

‘Yes?’

‘That’s her, is it? The other girl working here?’

Matthew glanced into the gallery. ‘Yes, that’s Kirsty.’

Pat suddenly drew Matthew away. ‘I’m not going in,’ she said.

‘Why? What’s wrong?’

‘I know her,’ said Pat. ‘I know that girl.’

‘So?’

‘I can’t work with her. I just can’t.’ She paused. ‘And you can’t either.’

‘What do you mean I can’t work with her? I’ve been working with her for the last two months.’

Pat shook her head. ‘Matthew, listen to me. Do you know who she is? Clearly not. Kirsty is a big figure in a group called Woman’s Revenge.’

He savoured the name of the organisation: Woman’s Revenge. It spoke to its purpose, he decided; it was not an organisation that really needed a mission statement to clarify anything.

‘They punish men,’ whispered Pat. ‘They’re dangerous.’

‘Then I’m going to have to get rid of her,’ he said. ‘Where’s the problem?’

‘That’s the one thing you can’t do,’ said Pat. ‘Remember? Woman’s Revenge.’