The Importance of Being Seven (8 page)

Ideas planted in the mind may be rejected, pooh-poohed, and then unexpectedly and insidiously return to disturb our equanimity. Lizzie had rejected out of hand her father’s barely veiled suggestion that Bruce may be a fortune-hunter. Her father knew nothing about it, that was clear; Bruce had asked her to marry him because he loved her, and she had accepted his proposal for the same reason. It may be that people married for money in the past – Jane Austen had something to say about that – but who did that nowadays? Surely nobody.

And yet her father’s words continued to haunt her, and she decided to raise the subject with her friend Diane, whom she met every Friday in a coffee bar near Holy Corner. Diane could spare the time for long coffee breaks – she was a freelance interior decorator with a largely empty diary, a diary that had potential, certainly, but not a potential that was being achieved. No matter; Diane was convinced that the big commission, the one that would change her life, would come in, and she would feature in
Scottish Home
or
House Beautiful
.

If Diane had time on her hands, so did Lizzie. Since graduating from Strathclyde, she had held down a number of temporary jobs, but nothing permanent. Again this did not matter unduly; if the worst came to the worst – and she was confident it would not – she could always work for a maternal uncle who ran a small chain of restaurants and had promised her work if she ever needed it. For the time being, though, there were plenty of jobs to be applied for and interviews to attend.

On this particular morning, Lizzie asked her friend if she thought that it was possible that people still married for what she described as ‘other reasons’. Diane was not sure what she meant, and looked puzzled. ‘Other reasons? You mean because they’re forced to? Or in a fit of absent-mindedness?’

No, that was not it. ‘For … well, I suppose you’d say for money. For somebody’s money.’

Diane shrugged. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘They used to do
that sort of thing back in … back in prehistoric times – the 1960s and so on.’

‘So you think it doesn’t happen today?’

Diane thought for a moment. ‘Maybe now and then. I suppose that money comes into the picture with arranged marriages, but otherwise … no, I don’t think so.’

‘So when you see a man of seventy marrying somebody of twenty, it’s nothing to do with the fact that he’s rich?’

Diane laughed. ‘No. Of course that’s all to do with money. What I meant is that when there’s nothing like that in the picture then people these days marry because they like the person.’ She paused. ‘Why do you ask? Has anybody said anything?’

Lizzie hesitated. She was loyal to her father, but she nonetheless felt that she needed to discuss this with somebody, and Diane was as close a friend as she had.

‘My dad said something,’ she confided. ‘He tried to be tactful about it but I could tell what he meant. He asked me whether I thought Bruce had asked me to marry him because of my money.’ Watching the effect of her remarks on her friend, she quickly added, ‘Not that I’ve got any.’

Diane smiled. ‘You must have. You must have something. There’s your flat. You own that outright, don’t you?’

‘It was my grandmother’s,’ said Lizzie apologetically. ‘She left it to me. So I didn’t have to pay anything for it.’

‘But it’s worth quite a bit, isn’t it? A three-bedroom flat in Morningside …’

‘Only two proper-size bedrooms,’ interjected Lizzie. ‘The third one’s really a boxroom.’

Diane ignored the objection. ‘Three hundred thousand pounds, at least,’ she said, a note of wistfulness in her voice. ‘Three hundred and fifty thousand, maybe. Even in this market.’

Lizzie looked out of the window again. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘The sun.’

But Diane was not to be so easily distracted. ‘And you inherited a whole bunch of shares, didn’t you? You told me that a long time ago. What are they worth now?’

‘Not all that much,’ muttered Lizzie.

‘How much?’

Lizzie did not feel that Diane had the right to know the value of her portfolio of shares that McInroy & Wood had so prudently nurtured for her. But having started this discussion, she could hardly drop it now, and so she mumbled a figure.

‘What?’ asked Diane. ‘How much?’

‘Four hundred,’ said Lizzie, looking away.

‘Four hundred pounds?’

‘Thousand.’

‘A thousand pounds?’

Lizzie was now virtually inaudible. ‘No, four hundred thousand.’

Diane sighed. ‘So that’s three-quarters of a million altogether. You realise that, I suppose? You’re almost a millionaire.’

Lizzie turned to her friend. ‘Please keep your voice down,’ she said. ‘I don’t want people thinking …’

‘So no wonder your father asked that question,’ said Diane. ‘I’d ask it too.’

Lizzie was silent for a while. It was one thing for her father to think such thoughts; it was quite another thing for her close friend to harbour similar doubts.

‘Does Bruce know?’ Diane suddenly asked. ‘Did you tell him?’

‘He knows that I’ve got my own flat,’ answered Lizzie. ‘Obviously he knows that.’

‘Does he know that you own it outright?’ asked Diane.

Lizzie thought for a moment. She remembered talking to Bruce about it once, but she did not think that they discussed mortgages. And as for the shares, she was sure that she had never mentioned … She stopped herself. He had said something once about a share tip that he had received and had told her that she should get her financial adviser to arrange for the purchase of some of the shares in question. ‘That is, if you have a financial adviser,’ he said casually. ‘Do you?’

And she had answered, equally casually, ‘Yes, I do.’ And had proceeded to mention McInroy & Wood.

Diane had been watching her. ‘He knows something, doesn’t he?’

Lizzie nodded. Suddenly she felt miserable, as if she had uncovered some unpleasant secret. And now she tried to tell herself that Diane was as little justified as her father in entertaining these doubts. They both had suspicious, uncharitable minds. They both had no reason to think that Bruce, of all people, would stoop so low.

‘But I don’t think there’s the remotest chance that he’s after my money,’ she said. ‘He just isn’t.’

Diane raised an eyebrow. ‘Prove it,’ she said. ‘Prove it to yourself.’

‘How?’ asked Lizzie.

Diane replied immediately. ‘A love test.’ She was clearly serious, even if she smiled as she spoke.

Lizzie was on the point of laughing. This was ridiculous. One did not have love tests in real life; they were the stuff of fiction – and unlikely fiction at that.

And yet fanciful fiction could reflect real life just as vividly as its more prosaic equivalent; she had read that somewhere, in a novel perhaps.

In a quite different coffee bar, on the other side of town, Big Lou was preparing to receive her morning regulars – Matthew, Angus Lordie and Angus Lordie’s dog, Cyril. Angus was generally unreliable, she thought, and might drop in any time between ten and ten-thirty, whereas Matthew was punctual to a degree. If the citizens of Königsberg had been able to set their watches by the sight of Immanuel Kant taking his morning walk, then the citizens of Edinburgh, or at least those who lived in Dundas Street, could do likewise with Matthew. He left his gallery on the other side of the road at exactly ten o’clock, and began his descent of Big Lou’s stairs precisely three minutes later. Marriage had not changed his habits in this respect at least, thought Big Lou – which was reassuring;
she liked Matthew and, although she would never say it, she would not want him to change.

Now it was exactly 10.03, and from her position behind her counter, where she was polishing the surfaces with a cloth, Big Lou could see Matthew’s legs at the top of her stairs; soon the rest of him would heave into sight, and she would be able to see whether he was still wearing that distressed-oatmeal sweater of his. That was one thing his new wife could do for him, thought Big Lou: the distressed-oatmeal sweater could go.

Matthew, in fact, was not wearing the distressed-oatmeal sweater, which had already fallen foul of Elspeth Harmony’s reorganisation of his wardrobe. In its place he had a light grey linen jacket that Elspeth had found for him somewhere on George Street. It was not ordinary linen, in that it had none of the vices that make linen such a contrary fabric; this was easily ironed linen that did not crumple excessively and did not look like Auden’s face, with all its lines and crevasses.

Complementing the jacket was a pair of black jeans – a garment that Elspeth had found in a drawer in Matthew’s (now their) room and of which she had expressed approval. Matthew had donned the jeans gingerly, as he had no idea where they came from. If they were in his flat, and in his drawer, then they must belong to him, but he had no recollection of either ever buying them, or even wearing them. They fitted, though, and even if he found a receipt in a pocket, indecipherably signed with a signature other than his own, the fact that they were his exact size was a prima facie indication of his ownership of them.

‘You look good in those,’ said Elspeth appreciatively. ‘They sort of hug your thighs. There. Look. Isn’t that nice?’

Matthew blushed, but at the same time he felt a strong sense of satisfaction that Elspeth appeared to find him attractive. Nobody had ever paid him that sort of compliment before, and he had assumed that this was because nobody thought of him in that way. He was just good old Matthew, as he always had been, even back in his teenage years. He had been the boy that people liked having about them, but not with them. Nobody had ever said to him that anything looked good on him; nobody.

‘So you like them?’ he said, smoothing down the side of the jeans with his open palms.

Elspeth nodded. ‘I like you,’ she said. ‘That’s what I like.’

He blushed again, but felt grateful, too, for what she bestowed on him, this gift of love, that had been so unexpected.

He was not thinking of her, though, as he began his cautious journey down Big Lou’s steps; he was thinking, rather, of what these steps had seen. He had heard from Big Lou, who had in turn learned it from people who knew the coffee bar in the days when it was still a second-hand bookshop, that it was down these very steps that the poet, Hugh MacDiarmid, had stumbled one day; stumbled, but recovered his footing and made it to the bottom alive and in a position to write more poetry – whereas poor Lard O’Connor, that well-known Glasgow informal businessman, had failed to recover and had toppled, as a great Norwegian pine might in its native forest fall to the axe. Matthew remembered the sense of sudden loss as the ambulance men shook their heads; and he remembered how they had asked him whether Lard was his friend and he had hesitated – just momentarily, and shamefully, before he had replied that he was.

That was some time ago – last summer – and he had almost forgotten about Lard O’Connor, although presumably there were people in Glasgow who remembered him – his victims, certainly, Matthew thought grimly; those people with scars and scowls, like the mourners at Lard’s funeral in that soft West of Scotland rain.

Now, as Matthew entered the coffee bar, Big Lou looked up from her task of polishing the counter and moved over to her coffee machine.

‘The usual?’ she asked over her shoulder. She required no reply; Matthew always had the usual, and even if he had wanted something different, there was very little choice in Big Lou’s coffee bar, with or without milk being the only options.

Matthew picked up a newspaper from the table near the door; a ten-day-old copy of the
Dundee Courier
, the paper that kept Big Lou informed about events at home. The articles and photographs in these stale papers, posted down to Lou from Arbroath, were
annotated by an ancient relative with little observations and reminders. ‘Remember him? The loon with glasses?’ Or, ‘He tells terrible lies. He always has.’ Or, ‘No surprise: he had it coming to him after what he did to Maggie’s tractor.’

The events of small-town Scotland, seemingly so local and irrelevant in the greater scheme of things, were in fact ciphers for the life of all humanity. These marginalia, penned in a crabbit hand, had an irrefutable profundity to them: so many people did indeed tell terrible lies, always had – and always will. So many people, in all sorts of places, have it coming to them, and fuel the Schadenfreude of the rest of us, who are secretly relieved that it is they, rather than we, to whom what was coming came.

Matthew glanced at the newspaper in his hand. Big Lou’s relative had underlined a sentence in an article and written beside it, in blue ink:
I kent his faither!

He looked at the subject of the article:
Local man comes second in national competition
. He smiled, and was seen by Big Lou as she poured her coffee grounds.

‘Something amusing you?’ asked Big Lou. She was sensitive about urban condescension in all its forms.

‘No,’ said Matthew. As he spoke, he imagined the unseen hand of an Arbroath body inscribing shaky letters in the air beside him:
liar
.

Barely had Big Lou served Matthew with his coffee when Angus Lordie and Cyril arrived. They had walked in a leisurely way from Drummond Place, stopping here and there for Cyril to investigate some intriguing scent either on the ground or in the air. His nose told him that a lot had been happening in Abercromby Place, where a farmer, having driven in from Kelso earlier that morning to consult his lawyer, had walked from his parked Land Rover – a cornucopia
of scents for a dog – along the north side of the street, leaving Cyril a trace of sheep, fried bacon (the farmer’s breakfast), cattle dip, and old copies of the
Scottish Farmer
. The farmer, attired in the suit that he kept for visits to Edinburgh, might have imagined that he smelled of good-quality Borders tweed, topped up with the sandalwood aftershave lotion that his daughter had given him for his birthday the previous week; but to Cyril, who picked those up too – although he had difficulty with the sandalwood – the story was far more complex than that. For him a smell was a biography: it told the story of what somebody did, and thus of who they were. Angus was a painter and, in Cyril’s nose, he was redolent of paint, varnish, the dust that accumulated in his studio, carpet, whisky and, occasionally, kippers; a motley collection of scents, but to Cyril it was the smell of God, as powerful an evocation of sanctity as incense is in Rome.

Other interesting things had happened in Abercromby Place that morning. Two police horses had been ridden down the road, quite recently, and Cyril looked up, half expecting to see them still there. But that was the problem with scents; they faded, they were overlaid by other, more recent clues, as a palimpsest will be built up of added layers; they became part of the background noise, like static on shortwave radio. Every so often a station comes through loud and clear, and then fades away in a noise that sounds like rain, or sausages frying, or wire wool being scratched across a surface.

Just outside the Open Eye Gallery, Cyril picked up the scent of a cat. This made him stop, stubbornly sitting down on the pavement in an indication to Angus that this was a matter that required to be investigated and could not be cut short by a sharp tug on the collar. Angus understood: he knew that Cyril had no choice but to attend to these scents; it was part of what he was; it was his duty as a dog. And it would only take a minute or two of sniffing around the pavement and the steps of the gallery to deal with the evidence.

Cyril applied his nose to the stone. The scent of cat was strong – frustratingly so – which meant that he had probably only just missed it. And the annoying thing about cats, or one of the annoying things – there were so many – was that they would often watch one from a place of safety while one looked for them. This cat,
whom Cyril recognised from his scent, was a particularly irritating creature. Large, smug, green-eyed, he positively invited dogs to pursue him. But, of course, none would ever succeed in bringing him to justice. Cyril knew that; with an aching wistfulness he knew that he would never come as close to this particular cat as he wished.

He dreamed about it, and Angus would smile at the sight of Cyril’s legs twitching in his sleep as the dream of pursuit and capture unfolded. Dogs regularly dream of such things but, of course, have no concept of dreams and so cannot distinguish between what happened in the dream and what happens in real life. So if a dog dreams that he has caught a rabbit, or a cat, or has found a particularly tasty morsel to eat, then that, from the dog’s point of view, is what happened. In Cyril’s case, he had caught whole legions of cats, because that is what had happened in his dreams; he had taught them a thing or two, filling his mouth with their fur and then spitting it out in triumph, exacting sweet revenge for all the insults that cats had heaped upon the canine world, going back such a long time. That had all happened, as far as Cyril was concerned, because he remembered it.

When they arrived at Big Lou’s, Matthew had finished his first cup of coffee and was waiting for Big Lou to serve his second. Angus Lordie greeted Matthew with a nod while he enquired after Big Lou’s health.

‘Can’t complain,’ said Big Lou. She said the same thing every day – can’t complain – and it was true. It was not in her nature to complain; she simply could not. Not once had she complained during the years when she had looked after her aged uncle, or when she worked as a care assistant in the Granite Nursing Home in Aberdeen. She came from a place where people did not complain, where it was understood – quite correctly – that moaning and groaning only made things worse. There was no word for self-pity in the language of the north-east of Scotland – the nearest being a word which is defined in the Scots dictionaries as being ‘a term used to express self-reproach on paying too much for something’.

Angus Lordie noticed that there was a book lying open behind the counter. Big Lou was a voracious reader and, having bought the remaining stock of the bookshop that had previously occupied the
coffee shop premises, she was slowly working her way through every volume. She had started with philosophy, with Hume, whom she had read with pleasure and a feeling of growing agreement. From there she had moved on to topography –
The Glens of Aberdeenshire
– and social history – Iain Thornber’s edition of
Morvern: A Highland Parish
– and now, it appeared, had arrived at memoirs.
Ten Years with the Pygmies of Ruanda-Urundi
, he read, upside down.

‘Interesting,’ said Angus. ‘Pygmies?’

Big Lou glanced at the book as she finished preparing Matthew’s coffee. ‘Aye,’ she said. ‘Pygmies.’