James interrupted him. “Yes,” he said. “Yes. Count me in.”
“It would be part-time,” said Matthew. “You’d still do some looking after the boys. But we’d get you an assistant here, so to speak. We thought if we got an au pair girl from somewhere like Denmark, she could help Elspeth while you’re working at Big Lou’s. You’d divide your time.”
“Let’s get her tomorrow,” said James.
Matthew sat back in his chair. He was glad the conversation had gone so well. “I take it that’s a yes.”
“I already said yes,” said James. “In so many words. So take it as an underlining of the first yes.”
“Good,” said Matthew.
Then James said, “Actually, there was something I wanted to talk to you about. It’s my uncle. Something odd is going on.”
Mathew listened, and James told him. When the young man had finished, Elspeth, who had begun to carve the rack of lamb, put down her knife. “But that’s seriously worrying, James,” she said. “What are you going to do?”
James shrugged. “I’m only eighteen,” he said. “And when you’re eighteen, you sometimes run out of ideas.”
26
The Kelpie Cult
“Neanderthal man,” said Domenica. “Homo neanderthal-ensis.”
She was sitting in her kitchen in Scotland Street, paging through a recently delivered copy of Evolutionary Anthropology, one of the half dozen journals to which she subscribed. Evolutionary Anthropology tended to drop through the letter box ten days or so before The Literary Review, which she shared with Angus, and not long after the Australian Journal of Anthropology, on the advisory board of which she sat. That was not a particularly onerous role, one that she had been offered by a previous editor of the journal, with whom she had done fieldwork in New Guinea some time earlier. Their work on the Crocodile People of the Sepik River had been published by the Australian National University in Canberra as a small monograph, Crocodile Cosmology, and had been widely discussed. The cosmology in question, based on the notion that the people of the Sepik valley were the descendants of a young woman dragged into the river by a crocodile, was found to have its counterparts in creation myths of many other cultures, prompting the conclusion in the final chapter – indeed, in the final sentence of the book – that human notions of where we came from have the same deep structures whichever culture one chooses to examine. In Scotland, as Domenica pointed out, there are, of course, no crocodiles, and so Scottish mythical beasts are somewhat different in form, even if their tricks and devices are much the same. Kelpies, for example, are horse-like, but nonetheless sea-going, and nasty to boot. The Kelpie Cult still had its followers, she pointed out, who have raised two large Kelpie idols by the side of the road between Edinburgh and Stirling. The mysteries practised there at full moon were never reported in the Scottish press, but were rumoured to be both regular and colourful.
On the other side of the table, her husband, Angus, was prising flecks of paint from under his nails with the pick-end of a nail file. He made a habit of scrubbing his hands thoroughly at the end of each day in the studio, but inevitably traces of paint remained.
“If they ever fish me out of the canal,” he observed, “they will have no difficulty in identifying me from the paint under my nails.”
“What a morbid thought,” said Domenica.
Angus shrugged. “Well, we are mortal, aren’t we? As a man in a pub once said to me, à propos of nothing, Nobody gets out of this life alive. I remember thinking: what a profound observation, and how true.”
“Immortality is a very brief experience,” said Domenica. “We’re immortal until what age? Eight? Nine? When does it occur to us that we might actually die?”
“It’s a slow process,” said Angus. “You start with no conception at all of your end, and then gradually it dawns on you that the rules of mortality brook no exception. But then you think that it’s going to be so far away that it hardly needs to be thought about. Then you turn forty, and it becomes a bit more vivid. And so on, thereafter, until you realise that it’s more or less tomorrow.”
Domenica sighed. “Carpe diem. Gather ye rosebuds,” she said, and added “Et cetera, et cetera.”
“Actually,” said Angus, “I tend to think of one of Shakespeare’s sonnets when this sort of thing crops up. Sonnet Seventy-Three.”
“Refresh my memory,” Domenica said.
“It’s the one where he reflects on growing old. He wonders whether his lover will still feel anything for him and decided, somewhat optimistically, if you ask me, that he will, in spite of his physical decline.”
Domenica put down her copy of Evolutionary Anthropology. “And?”
“I used to know the whole thing off by heart,” Angus said. “No longer, I’m afraid. But it’s one of the most beautiful of the sonnets – at least I think it is. It starts off: That time of year thou mayst in me behold / When yellow leaves, or none or few, do hang / Upon those boughs which shake against the cold / Bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang…”
Domenica closed her eyes, as if in rapture. “Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang…How could that line ever be bettered – by anything?”
“It couldn’t,” said Angus.
“It’s sad, isn’t it? The whole tenor is sad.”
Angus put down his nail file. “Yes,” he said. “All those earlier sonnets are terribly sad, in a sense. You can see the way things are going to end. Poet falls for a much younger man. Writes wonderful poems addressed to him. Younger man inevitably finds something else to entertain himself with. Poet reflects on the nature of love and mortality.” He paused. “But why did you say Neanderthal man? Something in…” He squinted to read the title of the journal. “Something in Evolutionary Anthropology?”
Domenica picked up the journal again. “Yes. A paper by somebody I know, as it happens – a paleoanthropologist from Berlin. We met at a conference in Vienna. We visited Freud’s house in the same small group. Very disappointing, because all the furniture went to London.”
“One of those Professor Dr Drs the Germans go in for?”
“Yes. Just Professor Dr, in this case, although I once came across a Professor Dr Dr Dr.” Domenica paused. “And his wife was Frau Professor Dr Dr Dr. Of course, if she had her own doctorate she would be Dr Frau Professor Dr Dr Dr. It becomes complicated. But then German professors are inherently complicated. Look at Hegel. Even Hegel didn’t understand Hegelianism.” She paused for a moment, remembering something. “Kierkegaard said something terribly funny about Hegel, you know. He said, ‘If he’d only said after he had written his books, ‘It’s all a joke’, Hegel would have been a great man.’ ”
Angus smiled. The joke was the one thing that German professors often did not see. “Have there been any anthropological studies of German professors?” he asked.
“Not to my knowledge,” Domenica replied. “Academics like to study everybody else. They don’t like to look too closely in the mirror.” Even as she said this, it occurred to her that it would be a rather enjoyable project – with fieldwork possibilities in agreeable places like Heidelberg and Göttingen. Perhaps, after she had completed her long-awaited study of Watsonians – if she ever got round to starting that – she would move on to an anthropological study of the German professorial class. She heard the mood music: Carmina Burana, of course, the Gaudeamus, naturally, and Brahms’s Academic Overture.
Angus interrupted her reverie. “Neanderthal man?”
“Yes,” said Domenica. “It’s another rehabilitation of the Neanderthals. You remember how we used to regard them as very primitive? Low forehead types?”
“Well, they did have low foreheads.”
“Yes,” said Domenica, “but their skulls went quite a bit further back than ours do. They had a perfectly decent-sized brain.” She tapped the journal cover. “And this article is
all about their general level of sophistication. And their artistic abilities.”
Angus laughed. “Artistic abilities? Are you suggesting they went in for flower arranging?”
“Feathers,” said Domenica. “They probably used feathers as decoration.”
“Rather than wandering around with clubs?”
“They probably had clubs. But everybody did. Homo sapiens had clubs – still have, come to think of it. Big ones.”
“But what happened to them?” asked Angus. “If they were by no means stupid and if they were good at feather arranging – why would they disappear?”
“Nobody really knows,” Domenica replied.
27
Glenbucket
Angus looked at his watch.
“I would love to discuss Neanderthals at greater length, but look at the time.” He sighed, “If I’m to achieve anything today…”
“It’s Saturday,” Domenica pointed out. “You don’t need to drive yourself quite so hard, Angus. Your studio will still be there on Monday.” She added, “Deo volente.”
Angus raised an eyebrow. “Saying Deo volente is like warding off the evil eye. Throwing salt over one’s shoulder. That sort of thing.”
“Perhaps. But who amongst us is strong enough not to worry about tempting Providence?”
Angus glanced at his watch again. “I know I don’t have to, but I really would like to get some work done today. I’m at a crucial point in that portrait of…” He looked at her and smiled. “That portrait of our tartan-bedecked friend.” He looked at Domenica and uttered the name with relish: “Glenbucket. Robert Andrew Glenbucket of Glenbucket, the Glenbucket.”
Domenica rolled her eyes. “How do you keep a straight face? Is that what he actually calls himself?”
Angus nodded. “He’s absolutely serious. And he’s actually a rather charming man. Eccentrics often are, in my experience.” He paused. “Lord Monboddo, for example. Nicholas Fairbairn. Hugh Macdonald, who opined on the world from Kay’s Bar in India Place and who could complete the Times crossword puzzle in under seven minutes. David Bogie, who was once overheard carrying on a lengthy conversation with the pygmy hippo in Edinburgh Zoo. All of these were wonderful people.”
Domenica smiled. “They added a certain something to Scotland, I agree. But your man sounds obsessed, quite frankly. He’s spent ages – not to say a fortune – working on genealogy, hasn’t he?”
“People do,” said Angus. “It’s an extraordinary human preoccupation.”
Domenica frowned. “Do you have the slightest interest in who your forebears were? I don’t. It’s not that I’m indifferent to them – I’m certainly not ashamed of them – all those faceless Macdonalds who came before me – it’s just that…” She shrugged. “It’s just that I don’t see the point.”
“I know what you mean,” said Angus. “My Lordie ancestors were a very dull bunch. None of them is recorded as having done anything, or gone anywhere. They hung about Pitlochry for generations. One or two of them went to Dundee, but didn’t stay long and headed back to Pitlochry. That’s it.”
“But then this person you’re painting, this…”
Angus smiled. “Glenbucket.”
“This Glenbucket: why does it mean so much to him?”
“He’s half American,” said Angus. “Americans like to know who they are. And who can blame them? They have that vast country with goodness knows how many people. That means a mass culture, and they want texture in their lives.” He paused. “And texture, I suppose, requires rootedness, requires history.”
Domenica looked thoughtful. “Does it?”
Angus did not hesitate. “Yes, it does. If you don’t know how you started, your story is somehow incomplete. And we all want a story, don’t we?” He asked the question rhetorically, but now that he had posed it, he was genuinely uncertain as to what the answer might be.
Domenica, though, was struck by something else. “Those who have no history seem to acquire it,” she said. “While those who have it seem to want to divest themselves of it.”
He looked at her quizzically. “Meaning?”
“Well, we have rather too much history that we’re uncomfortable about. We’re keen to unburden ourselves of it, aren’t we?”
“Scotland has too much history?”
Domenica hesitated. “A bit. A lot of people in Scotland would like to get rid of the last few hundred years,” she said. “Roughly the period after the Union. The British Empire. We were part of that, remember. And now we’re embarrassed and like to say that it was a purely English enterprise. And the historical burden, therefore, is theirs, not ours.”
Angus saw her point, but then if you had something imposed on you, was it part of your story in quite the same way as if you had been the imposer? “Well,” he said, “nobody asked the people of Scotland whether they wanted a Union in the first place. And it wasn’t all of us who did the Empire thing. It wasn’t the crofters in the Highlands. It wasn’t the men who went out in the fishing boats, or the shepherds, or the riveters on the Clyde, or the men who went down the pits in West Lothian, or…”
Domenica shook her head. “A class analysis gets everybody off the hook – everywhere. It puts the blame on a small number of people and exculpates everybody else. I don’t think that will work. They rallied under the same flag, you know.” But then a thought occurred to her: did such an approach let off all the women? So much of history was men’s history. They did the plotting and fighting and land grabbing. Women weren’t allowed to vote, nor occupy crucial positions, and so none of what happened was their fault. That was tempting. And yet women, surely, condoned the things that men did; they egged them on and enjoyed the proceeds. It was a different sort of historical guilt, perhaps – the guilt of an accessory – but it was still guilt.
Domenica toyed with her copy of Evolutionary Anthropology. It was easier – far easier – to think about Neanderthals, rather than the eighteenth or the nineteenth centuries. Or to think about Glenbucket, and his desire to establish himself in some creaky and highly romantic vision of Scottish history. She looked at Angus. “Does your man have a claim to be whom he wants to be?”
Angus looked thoughtful. “I suppose he does. He’s gone into it very closely, and he says he’s found he’s descended from Old Glenbucket – through one of his sons, who went off to Jamaica. He had a mistress there, apparently – a Frenchwoman from Martinique – and he says that he’s found a direct link between himself and the product of that liaison. Wrong side of the blanket, of course, but most of these interesting connections are.”
Domenica admitted this was colourful enough. “Rather more interesting than my standard Macdonalds in their crofts on Skye. Or your Pitlochry people, for that matter.”
Angus agreed. “But, look, I’d better go. I’ll take Cyril.”
“And will Glenbucket be sitting?”
“Not today. I have photographic references for his outfit. I’ll be working on those. Painting tartan is quite complicated – as you can imagine.” At every level, he thought. It was complicated because it was symbolic of such a complex story. A cloth of sorrow, he thought.
He looked down at Cyril, who sensed that a walk was imminent, but was not sure. The dog looked back up at him and Angus saw in his eyes that burning longing that was so characteristic of canine eyes. But a longing for what? What did dogs want that made them look so needy, so plaintive? Love? Like the rest of us? Was it as simple as that?
28
Our Inner Neanderthal
After Angus had left for his studio, taking Cyril with him, Domenica decided to have another cup of coffee and a further slice of toast. Her main breakfast was over: two boiled eggs, a single slice of toast, thinly spread with Dundee marmalade, and a modest slice of Loch Fyne smoked salmon. Toast was an important element in her breakfast, but was strictly controlled on carbohydrate grounds.
The world was full of carbohydrates, paraded before weak humanity in the guise of things that most of us found so hard to resist: Danish pastries, marzipan, Dundee cakes, croissants, pain au chocolat, all the various varieties of pasta, potato crisps dusted with sea salt and cracked black pepper, chocolate unapologetic for its mere thirty per cent of cocoa solids – the list went on and on, and the weaker brethren (in which category most of us are numbered) fell for the enticement as eagerly as a lazy trout takes the fly. There were no carbohydrates in boiled eggs, nor in salmon, but toast, and the marmalade that accompanied it, was a different matter. Yet every now and then – and Saturday, surely, was a now-and-then day – she would allow herself a second slice, washed down by a cup of milky coffee. And if that could be accompanied by a leisurely read or a glance at the Scotsman crossword, then she felt content. It was not exactly nirvana, but, in an imperfect world, it was happiness of a rather profound sort. And it was, she thought, what so many women wanted: to get their man out of the way for the day and to have the house to themselves.
The slice of bread entrusted to the toaster, she pressed the button on her automatic coffee machine and heard the satisfactory grinding of the beans preceding the disgorging of the coffee. Then, sitting back, she picked up Evolutionary Anthropology and returned to the article she had been reading. The entire issue of the journal had been devoted to Neanderthal matters, and for a few moments Domenica considered what was on offer. There was the piece by her friend from Berlin, Neanderthal Art: A New Hypothesis. Neanderthal art? Domenica was surprised. She thought there had been only a handful of Neanderthal cave paintings discovered, which was hardly a school of art, let alone a retrospective Renaissance. Then there was an article on animal bone sites around Neanderthal settlements – that could wait, perhaps. But then her eye fell on an article entitled Neanderthal and Homo Sapiens: Liminal Spaces, Interbreeding and Its Consequences for the Genome of Modern Man.
A Promise of Ankles Page 11
