The Unbearable Lightness of Scones (15 page)

And yet one could not ignore the nose, certainly if one was a painter. There were fine noses in Edinburgh – noses
which would have given Rembrandt much to think about, and which had certainly provided inspiration and amusement for John Kay, the late-eighteenth-century barber and engraver who had been such a sharp-eyed observer of the Edinburgh of his day. Kay’s subjects came from every sector of society: Highland grandees, Writers to the Signet, the wives of the common soldiery, the keelies of the toon. All were there, captured by his engraving pen, etched onto his plates with such delicacy and humour. And Kay, like Rembrandt, understood the importance of the nose, and what it could tell us about the soul within. In some of his drawing it is the nose itself that is the subject’s burden in life – a large protruberance attached to a small body; so prominent, in fact, that one might imagine the nose catching the wind on the North Bridge and spinning the person off course, turning him towards Holyrood rather than Leith, requiring that he tack his way rather than walk directly.

“Spirit of Kay,” thought Angus, “light up this city now …” Who had said that? Nobody, he thought; just Angus Lordie, painter and occasional poet. What had come to mind was that line of MacDiarmid: “Spirit of Lenin, light up this city now…” MacDiarmid was talking about Glasgow, of course, although he had no doubt thought that Edinburgh could have done with a dose of Lenin too, even more so than Glasgow. But what nonsense MacDiarmid wrote when he became overtly political, thought Angus; and he offended everybody in the process. Any extreme political creed brought only darkness in the long run; it lit up nothing. The best politics were those of caution, tolerance and moderation, Angus maintained, but such politics were, alas, also very dull, and certainly moved nobody to poetry.

He looked at his painting. His subject, he believed, had led a largely blameless life, had loved his wife, had served on committees, had helped the requisite number of good causes. There had been, he suspected, little passion in his life, and relatively few disappointments. He had lived in Barnton, a comfortable suburb in which nothing of note happened, and
he had loved the Forth Bridge, golf, Speyside whiskies, money, and going on the occasional summer cruise in northern waters – to Orkney and Shetland, to the Faroe Islands, and once, more adventurously, to Iceland. That was his life. And now here am I trying to capture this with a few strokes of my brush, to fix all this in oil paint on canvas; recording nothing very much with next to nothing.

This line of thought, connected with what Angus was doing, but only vaguely so, was now suddenly broken. The puppies, sequestered in a neighbouring room, had begun to yap again. Angus sighed. He would have to take them out again into Drummond Place; six frolicking, excited centres of canine consciousness, eager to get on with their own small lives. I am the owner of seven dogs, he reminded himself, utterly appalled.

It took some time to get a leash on six puppies. As he busied himself with one, another would bite playfully at his fingers, covering them with canine saliva, while another would worry away at his shoe-laces. Then, when the biter and its sibling
were safely clipped onto the end of their leashes, the worrier would roll over on his stomach in an attempt to elude capture, and so on until, after ten minutes of effort, there would be six small bundles of leashed fur, all tugging in different directions, all barking or growling in anticipation of their walk in the Drummond Place Gardens.

There was still a good deal of light in the sky when Angus emerged from his stairway door and crossed the street to the gardens. The puppies, sensing adventure, yelped with excitement, one of them executing a complete somersault, such was his enthusiasm. Angus had to smile; Cyril’s offspring were lively dogs, which was not surprising, as their father was a dog of noted character and had many friends in the human world.

He closed the gate behind him and bent down to release the puppies. They dashed off, falling over themselves in their eagerness. “Don’t go far, boys,” said Angus, but he was largely ignored: they had layer upon layer of smells to investigate and were setting to the task with relish, filing away the odours which make a dog’s world a riot of impressionist olfactory exuberance.

Angus stood on the pathway and watched them, with mixed feelings. In the past, surplus dogs – and surely these puppies were surplus – would be bundled into a sack and tossed into the canal. There was little sentiment for animal suffering in those days, and the few moments of spluttering terror under the water would not be thought about. Such things simply were, they happened. Now, of course, the circle of our moral concern had widened – and happily so. Animal suffering was not tolerated, even if we still had abbatoirs where bovine – and other – lives were brought to a sudden end. There was terror there, of course, in those last moments, and surely that meant suffering, but people did not think about that very much. We did not stroke cattle and sheep, or give them names and hug them; we did not encourage them to sleep at the foot of our bed; that was what seemed to count.

He looked up at the evening sky, a sky which, in this final
hour before darkness, was drained of colour. A vapour trail, bisecting it, had begun to transform itself into a wispy sweep of cloud, the tracks, he thought, of a group of people heading westward, each with business of his own, unaware that five miles below them all these little dramas were being enacted. I, a man with seven dogs, he muttered, stand here/Looking up at the line of your journey/Indifferent each to each other/But recognisably in the same metaphorical boat/Even with five miles of air between us …

He stopped himself. Fragments of poetry came to him with some regularity but were not always written down or remembered. And now, turning his head slightly, he became aware that a man had come up behind him and was standing watching the puppies at play.

“How many?” asked the man.

“Six, I’m afraid,” said Angus, sighing. “Six spirited, enthusiastic, hungry, incontinent, hybrid and utterly lovable dogs.”

The man laughed. “They are very beautiful, aren’t they?”

Angus raised an eyebrow. “They are hardly likely to win at Crufts,” he said. “Their mother was an extremely odd-looking dog. Very common. My own dog, their father, is by contrast a fairly handsome fellow. He’s got a gold tooth, you see, and a rather raffish grin. Great dog.”

“Tasty little things, though,” said the man. And then, after a few moments of hesitation, he went on to ask, “Have you got a home for them yet?”

Again Angus sighed. “That’s proving somewhat difficult,” he said. “I’ve been asking around my friends, but nobody seems interested. Precious little support in that quarter when the chips are down.”

The man shook his head in sympathy. “That must be very worrying for you. One or two puppies would be bad enough, but having six must be something of a nightmare!”

“You can say that again,” said Angus. “In fact, I have already had several bad dreams about these little chaps. I dreamed a few nights ago that I was in the Scottish Arts Club with them
and they were all over the other members. It was extremely embarrassing.”

The man looked at Angus, who noticed now his eyes, which were bright with enthusiasm.

“I like dogs,” said the man. “I might be able to help you out.”

Angus caught his breath. “You mean you’d take one off my hands?”

“I’ll take all six,” said the man. “If you’re happy to part with them.”

Angus felt a sudden, overwhelming euphoria wash over him. “Well, that’s very generous of you,” he began. “All six …”

“Certainly,” said the man. “I can take care of them for you. Willingly.”

Angus paused. The prospect was thrilling, of course, but he was a responsible dog-owner and one could hardly just hand six puppies over to a complete stranger. “I’m sorry to raise this,” he said, “but I’ve only just met you. I don’t really know anything about you.”

“Of course,” said the man, stretching out to shake Angus’s hand. “Of course. Well let me introduce myself.”

They shook hands, and Angus felt, quite unmistakably, the pressure on his knuckle. A Mason! Well that was all right. If one could not entrust a puppy – or even six puppies – to a member of a Masonic lodge, then to whom could one entrust him, or indeed them?

“Here’s my card,” said the man. “It has all my details on it.”

Angus took the card and slipped it into his pocket. For the first time since the puppies had arrived in his flat he felt a free man again. I am no longer the owner of seven dogs, he said to himself; I am the owner of one, which is just about right.

“Would you like to take them now?” he asked. “Or perhaps tomorrow morning?”

“Well, no time like the present,” said the man. “If you help me get them on the leash, I’ll take them off your hands.”

He and Angus began to marshal the puppies together. As they did so, Angus noticed that the man seemed to lift each one up as he put the leash on, as if to weigh it. How caring, thought Angus; a concern with birth weight and development.

When Matthew felt the first tug of the water – the one that led to his overbalancing – he thought nothing of it. His mind at the time was on something quite different: on the meal he had enjoyed in the restaurant overlooking the beach, and on the name of the West Australian wine they had so enjoyed. Cape something or other. Menthol? No, that was not it. Menotti? No, he was a composer. And hadn’t he lived out near Gifford somewhere? Yesterday House? No, that was not it. Yester … Yes, that was it. And he wrote that opera that …

So might our thoughts drift from one thing to another, by the loosest of associations, at precisely the time that imminent disaster threatens to engulf us. Before he fell into the water, the last thing in Matthew’s mind was the word “Amahl,” and then “Night Visitors.” Then the sudden, overwhelming embrace of the warm water, swiftly rising to his chest, lifted him off his feet, covering him entirely so that he spluttered and struggled for breath.

Now he felt the real tug, as the rip tide seized him and moved him swiftly from the shore. Within a few seconds the distance between him and Elspeth, whom he could still make out in the darkness, on the beach, had increased to twenty yards. Then again the tug and the sense of travelling really quite quickly, away from the beach, out into the deeper water. There were waves, of course, which gave him an up-and-down movement, a bobbing, but which seemed to take him nowhere nearer the beach. As the initial shock subsided, he thought, I can swim with the waves, into the beach, but the movement
of his arms seemed to make no difference at all to the direction in which he was travelling. His clothes seemed to be dragging him down; his feet were heavy. He kicked hard and remembered his shoes, abandoned on the sand, which made him think: How will I walk home now? Curiously, for one in such a plight, he wondered about the spare shoes in his suitcase. Or had he forgotten to pack them? And then he thought: I should not be thinking of these things at the moment.

Putting reflections on spare shoes out of his mind, he tried to remember what he had heard about rip tides. They took you out to sea, of course – he knew that; but there was something else, some bit of ancient knowledge that now he tried to bring to mind. Swim diagonally – across the tide – not against it. That was it. Then, when the power of the current was reduced, one could go in again. But now, far away from the beach, he found that the waves were confusing him. Where was the beach? In the direction of the lights, of course, but the lights seemed to come round again on both right and left. Perhaps the beach curved.

It was while he was puzzling over this that Matthew suddenly remembered the sharks. Coming from Scotland, where nature was, on the whole, benevolent, and where the most dangerous of creatures was the reclusive adder, or perhaps an aggressive Highland cow protecting her calf, he did not think of what might reasonably be expected to have an interest in stinging, biting or even eating him. And yet Australia was full of such creatures. The western taipan was the most dangerous of land-based snakes – and Australia had it. Then there were all those spiders, and the box jellyfish up in Queensland. Even the duck-billed platypus, so ostensibly lovable, had a poisonous spike concealed on its back legs and could cause a lot of damage. And then there were the Great White sharks, and this very beach was one on which attacks had occurred.

Matthew now remembered that one should never swim at night. Even the locals, braver than most, would never enter
the water at night. And here he was, in the sharks’ element, utterly at their mercy – although mercy was not a concept one associated with sharks. I am simply prey, he thought; a floating meal. Involuntarily, he drew his legs up to his chest in an attempt to make himself less of a target, but this served only to make him less buoyant and he had to kick downwards again to stay afloat. And with each kick, he thought, I’m sending a signal down through the water into the depths: here I am; this way.