Signalling to Matthew to follow him, James walked quietly towards the door that linked the scullery to a corridor. Then he pointed to another door, at the end of the corridor. “That’s my uncle’s study,” he whispered to Matthew. “We should go and take a look.”
They made their way along the corridor. The study door was pulled to, but not closed, and James had simply to push gently to open it.
Matthew gave a start. There, seated in an armchair, his legs up on a table, holding an open book across his stomach, was Pàdruig, the Duke’s driver. As the door opened, he remained where he was, only moving his head slightly to stare at the two intruders.
“Well,” said Pàdruig. “So it’s yourselves.”
It was not a statement with which Matthew felt he could disagree. Nor could James.
James managed a smile. “I thought we’d give you a surprise, Pàdruig,” he said breezily. And then added, “Where’s my uncle?”
Pàdruig shrugged. “Out.”
James hesitated. He glanced at Matthew. “Out where?”
“Just out,” said Pàdruig. “He doesn’t always say, you know. He goes out.” He paused. “And then he comes back.”
James glanced at Matthew again. “Has he gone into Edinburgh?” he asked.
Pàdruig shrugged again. “Could be. Sometimes he goes in for lunch on a Saturday.”
“You don’t drive him?” asked Matthew.
Pàdruig had been looking at James; now he shifted his gaze to Matthew. “Sometimes he likes to drive himself. He takes his car.”
“But that’s parked outside,” said James. “I saw it.”
Pàdruig moved the book from his stomach to a nearby table and then rose to his feet. He was a large man with the colouring and bearing of an extra from one of those films of Highland warriors. A claymore, Matthew thought, would not be out of place. “I can tell him you were here,” he said, his tone businesslike. “When he comes back, I can tell him. I’m sure he’ll be sorry to have missed you.”
James bit his lip. “I’ve tried to phone him,” he said. “I’ve phoned twenty or thirty times. He always used to return my calls.”
“Perhaps his mobile’s battery is flat,” said Pàdruig. “I’m always telling him to recharge it, but he doesn’t, or doesn’t do it often enough, and then he can’t pick up calls. You know how it is.”
“But I’ve phoned him on the landline,” said James. “I get nowhere with that as well.”
Pàdruig affected nonchalance. “Your uncle’s a busy man. He has the estate to manage – and the cattle are always getting out. They lead him a merry dance, and he’s only got one stockman. I think things may get on top of him.”
James did not respond. He moved towards his uncle’s desk and looked at the papers on top of it. There were several envelopes, one of them lined in red and bearing the legend, Final Demand.
“There’s one thing you can never criticise my uncle for,” said James. “That is – paying his bills. He makes a point of paying on the nose always. The day he receives a bill, he pays it.”
Pàdruig tensed – and Matthew noticed that. He decided to take the initiative. “I think we should wait, James,” he said. “We should wait here until your uncle comes back.” He turned to Pàdruig and smiled politely. “You won’t have any problem with that, will you? You must have work to get on with.”
Pàdruig’s eyes narrowed. “He’s not coming back for a long time,” he said. “He’s often not in until eleven at night. I wouldn’t want you to wait that long.”
James looked uncertain, and so Matthew said, “We’ll come back tomorrow,” he said. “Sunday. I take it the Duke will be in then.”
Pàdruig smiled ingratiatingly. “That’s much better. But remember: phone beforehand to see if he’s in. I wouldn’t want you to waste your time.”
James nodded. “We’ll do that. But I’m very anxious to see my uncle. Please tell him we were here.”
Pàdruig nodded quickly. “Of course. Of course.”
They left, this time using a door rather than a window. Once outside, James looked over his shoulder, before saying to Matthew, “That was positively creepy.”
Matthew agreed. He was worried, but he wanted to be tactful. “Do you think something’s going on?”
James shook his head. “Who knows? I hope not, but I don’t think my uncle is in town. I think he’s…he’s…” He trailed off. He was not sure what he thought.
Matthew now made an important observation. “Did you notice,” he said, “that there were cardboard signs on some of the things in the study? On the bookcase (preasa), on the door (dorus) on the telephone (fòn), and so on? Cardboard signs with Gaelic on them. Gaelic names for the things?”
“As if somebody’s trying to teach my uncle Gaelic,” said James.
Matthew nodded. “That’s what I thought,” he said. “I assume that’s Pàdruig.”
“But my uncle never expressed any interest in learning Gaelic,” said James.
“That’s what makes it a bit suspicious,” said Matthew. He thought for a moment. “Do you think…Do you think he might be being held? Held, and made to learn Gaelic?”
It was a preposterous idea. This was the twenty-first century: why would anybody force anybody else to learn Gaelic, he wondered – useful though Gaelic would be. Matthew had often regretted not learning it at school, where it had been an optional subject. He liked Gaelic poetry, which he had read in translation; he liked Gaelic song; and he was all for the survival of threatened languages. But he was not sure why anybody should force anybody to learn a language. Surely it was impossible that the Duke was being held against his will – held in Gaelic immersion – at the behest of his driver? It was far more likely that he had been spirited away for reasons that would become apparent, but only when – and if – they found him.
45
Drawing and Grammar
That Saturday, Angus did not make the progress he had hoped to make with the Glenbucket portrait. He was working from photographs in-between live sittings, and he never felt entirely comfortable with that. It was good enough for minor passages in the painting – for work on the detail of cloth, or buttons, or for general background – but when it came to painting the human face, there was no substitute for a live encounter between artist and subject. That was not only to do with light, and its unpredictable vagaries, but it was a question of life itself – the presence that one detected in an animate object, the pulse, the breath, the soul: there were so many terms that could describe it. It was the atman and the jiva of the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads, the soul of Traherne and Eckhart; it was the same thing, and although most of us never stopped to think much about it, or even to find a name for it, let alone a theological structure, we could tell when it was there and when it was not. Angus remembered his father telling him of how he had been present at the death of an elderly relative, a sheep farmer from Lochaber, and of how he had known the precise moment when he had ceased to be. “The very transition was clear,” he said. “A light went out. There was nobody there any longer. It was, well, it was a passage.” That description had impressed itself upon him even though he was only ten at the time, an age when the whole issue of death is entirely academic, having nothing to do with oneself. The memory returned to him in life-drawing classes at art college, when the model sometimes lay in repose, and on a warm day might even drop off to sleep. The human body in sleep is not motionless: slight movements, brief flickers, proclaim personhood, reveal the presence of life; but it is not just these that tell you there is a soul within the physical envelope; it is something else altogether – an electromagnetic field perhaps – that is unmistakable.
Life-drawing classes…As he worked on the portrayal of a tablecloth behind his subject, he remembered those classes, compulsory in those days for all art students: drawing, it was believed, was a basic skill expected of any artist.
Drawing is to art as grammar is to language: you can speak without any knowledge of grammar, but do not expect to be understood, and certainly do not expect to become a poet. And as a poet, even equipped with grammar, you will be severely limited in the creation of poetry if you do not understand how a language is put together, how the flesh of sentences conceals a skeleton of rules underneath. You may not use techniques of stress and meter – you may write nothing but free verse – but if they are not there in the background, the music of language will not come; the prose will never ascend to the level of poetry. So Angus believed, and nothing he saw in contemporary conceptual art persuaded him otherwise. Without rigorous training in the fundamentals of the craft, a pedestrian, inarticulate banality prevailed.
At those life-drawing classes, starting three mornings a week at nine o’clock sharp – a punishing hour for the bohemian ranks of art students – they sat in the echoing, cavernous studios of the Art College, with the light flooding in from the North; the Castle their background, stern, forbidding, redolent of ancient conflicts, its ramparts and the sheer drop of the Castle Rock a reminder of the days when burning oil might be dropped on unwelcome visitors below – Scotland in those days was most decidedly a non-inclusive place; sitting there, slightly cold, surveying the goose-pimpled model – in spite of the two-bar radiator that the college thoughtfully provided for the naked – conversing occasionally, and sotto voce, so as not to disturb one’s fellow students, one’s thoughts might wander from the task in hand. But that was no bad thing: the aim, after all, was to develop such a facility in drawing that the movements of the hand holding the pencil became automatic, guided by inner brain pathways that were laid down by constant practice, habilitating themselves for our human demands, as are our everyday movements, our walking, our gestures, our ways of conducting ourselves as physical beings.
His thoughts wandered to the circumstances in which he found himself, a newly fledged art student, living in Edinburgh away from the confines of home – not that home was in any sense particularly confining, but it did represent a whole world from which Angus wanted to detach himself. That world might glibly have been described as a bourgeois milieu – and that was certainly how his fellow students spoke of their predominantly middle-class backgrounds, disparaging, even if with a degree of fondness and humour, the attitudes of their parents, their work ethic, their petty concerns over the avoidance of debt and noise and messy relationships – but that description of the world from which Angus had migrated to Edinburgh did not capture the essence of the Perthshire circle whose dust he had brushed off his heels in going to the Art College. Angus came from something different to bourgeois suburbia; he had been brought up in an extended family of substantial farmers, against a background of large, rambling houses, where a hazy romanticism rubbed shoulders with a feeling for a Scotland of the past, where people were known by the name of their lands, or their clan; where the rugs on which one picnicked were always tartan – though nobody’s tartan in particular – where the name of the whisky you drank was important, and where there was a bone-deep conviction, never articulated, that Scotland was a place to which everywhere else could only be compared adversely. England, Ireland, France were all very well, but they were not Scotland; the English were tolerated, but not necessarily loved; the Irish were amusing, but different in a subtle way; the French were admittedly good players of rugby and artistically and gastronomically admirable, but the Auld Alliance, wheeled out at sentimental dinners, was a long time ago, remembered in Scotland perhaps, but forgotten in France. From that world, with its quaint certainties, Angus had escaped at the age of eighteen, with his A grade in Higher Art, a portfolio of drawings and watercolours executed in the art department of Trinity College, Glenalmond, and a belief that he had embarked on a journey that would lead to his becoming not only an artist but a great artist. In that spirit, he arrived in Edinburgh and took up the accommodation arranged for him in digs run by a Mrs Anna Symanski, the seventy-year-old widow of a Polish airman who had escaped to Scotland at the age of twenty, had married within months, and survived numerous aerial engagements, only to fall from the skies over Germany a few months before the end of the war. His young widow, from Dunfermline, had spent a total of fourteen weeks with her husband, but never remarried. She learned Polish to honour his memory – they had never conversed in his native tongue – and converted to Catholicism for good measure: touching acts of homage to a brave and good man.
These digs were far from comfortable, but Angus reminded himself that art students traditionally lived in garrets, and that being in a Georgian house off Leith Walk was a distinct improvement, especially if one pretended that the other residents were not there.
46
An Art Student’s Digs
For long decades Mrs Symanski took students, and other lodgers, into the house she had inherited from an aunt, who, like her, was a widow; in the aunt’s case, of a Leith general practitioner. The aunt had gone off to live in Troon with her sister, and had made the house over to her niece to give her a livelihood. It was an act of great generosity, motivated not only by family affection, but by an awareness of what the country owed to the unsung heroes of the Polish air force, who lost their own country, but helped to save that of so many others.
“Take lodgers,” the aunt had said. “You have five rooms to let out. Put two students in each. That makes ten altogether. You could live quite comfortably on the income from that.”
Mrs Symanski had followed this advice. Although she had a preference for students, she also took in the occasional junior civil servant or struggling office worker. Sometimes men from the bonded warehouses of Leith came to stay for a few months when they were turned out of their homes by their wives; occasionally nurses from the Eastern General took a room while they were waiting for something better. There were rules that were strictly enforced: nobody was to come in at night later than eleven-thirty, at which time Mrs Symanski locked the front door against all comers; nobody was to consume alcohol in their bedrooms or in the bathroom; and guests of the opposite sex were to be entertained only in the front parlour, where a small television, permanently switched on, made conversation difficult; and finally, there was to be no shouting or swearing in any circumstances. A young man from Ayrshire, who had littered his conversation with profanity, had lasted one week before he was asked to go elsewhere, as Edinburgh, Mrs Symanski explained, was not a place in which such language was welcome. They were, in fact, in Leith, but the point still stood.
She was an astute businesswoman and did not hesitate to make maximum use of the space she had. A box room at the back of the house was converted to a single bedroom, even though it had no window and was large enough only for the shortest of available beds. In Angus’s time, that was occupied by the shortest of the house’s tenants, a young man from Dundee, who was barely five feet tall, a junior clerk in the offices of the City Council, whose main interest in life was yodelling. Mrs Symanski had been at school with this young man’s mother, and had made an exception to her rules to allow him to yodel in the house, but only in his room, and with the door closed. That did not prevent the yodelling to be heard elsewhere, and there were complaints, but they were never acted upon.
Behind the house there was a small garden. Somehow or other, Mrs Symanski had contrived to have a caravan placed in this garden, possibly by having it lifted by a crane from the lane behind the house and then deposited immediately outside the kitchen. Angus, and others, had asked her how the caravan got there, but she had never provided an answer, simply tapping the side of her nose and saying, “There are ways of doing anything if you know the right people.” This caravan, which had permanently flat tyres and a film of green algae growing up its side from where the rainwater dripped off the roof, had been procured to house an extra tenant. He was called Richard, and he worked as a draughtsman in a civil engineering firm. “I’m saving to go to Canada,” he said to Angus. “That’s why I endure the humiliation of l
iving in Mrs S.’s caravan. She charges me half of what you inside people pay. When I get the money, that’s me off to Toronto. Goodbye, caravan.”
Breakfast was provided by Mrs Symanski, as was an evening meal. These were served in the largest room in the house, which had been the doctor’s drawing room, and into which a four-leaf dining-room table had been moved. This managed to seat everybody, with a chair at one end being reserved for Mrs Symanski, although she rarely sat on it. She was busy in the kitchen, where, assisted by a maid, she prepared the food. Breakfast was an indeterminate cereal, cardboardy in consistency and taste, thin slices of toast, and fried egg, bacon and sausage. The evening meal was soup, followed by a fish or meat course served with mashed potatoes and a green vegetable, often cabbage, but sometimes spinach or tinned peas. For a surcharge added to your monthly rent, you could entitle yourself to a slice of cake at the end of the meal.
Baths were fifty pence, payable in advance, and booked with Mrs Symanski. “Hot water is very expensive,” she said. “I would like to make baths free, but that is not the world we live in.”
Mrs Symanski quickly took a shine to Angus.
“That boy has manners,” she said to a friend. “He’s a gentleman, you see. He’s trying to be an artist, but at heart he’s a gentleman.”
He showed her his work, including his life drawings. She raised an eyebrow at the nudes. “You wouldn’t see that sort of thing in Dunfermline,” she said.
She asked him whether he might paint a picture of her late husband. “I can show you photographs,” she said. “I can show you photographs of Anton in his air force uniform.”
A Promise of Ankles Page 18
