Angus was happy to oblige. He chose a large canvas and painted his subject standing at the edge of an airfield, with two Spitfires in the sky behind him, performing an aerial ballet. It was a good likeness, as even then Angus’s ability as a portrait painter was showing itself. Mrs Symanski looked at it and then leaned forwards and kissed the portrait, kissed the lips of the husband she had lost all those years ago, and wept.
“I think of him every day,” she said, wiping her eyes with her handkerchief. “Every day, I think of what my Anton might say to me, if he were still with me.”
“Of course you do,” said Angus. “Of course you do.”
“And now you have painted him so well. It will bring him back to me even more powerfully.”
“I’m glad,” said Angus.
“These days nobody knows what it was like,” she continued. “They don’t know what it was like for those brave boys – your age, Angus. They stared death in the face every single day, and they knew that they had not to care, or to pretend not to care, because if you started to think about it you would be unable to get on with what you had to do.”
“I can imagine,” said Angus.
She kissed him, in gratitude, as she had kissed the painting. After that, for the entire year he spent in that house, Angus was allowed a free bath every day, much to the annoyance of the other lodgers, whose egalitarian sentiments were somehow offended by this sign of favour. That reaction provided a lesson for Angus that subsequent experience proved time and time again: that most people were, at heart, envious of what others had, no matter how hard they tried to control their envy. That explained so much: from widespread willingness that more tax should be paid by everyone with an income greater than one’s own, to the satisfaction felt when those we know lose their money through misfortune. We love Nemesis when her radar picks up those in the public eye; we are, understandably, less enamoured of her when she turns to those such as ourselves, the innocent, the deserving.
47
Unauthorised Biting
That was long ago, and now the callow art student was an established portrait painter, in demand for portraits of husbands, commissioned by wives, of wives, commissioned by husbands, and of various public figures – the provosts of burghs, long-serving politicians, successful financiers, as well as those who had done nothing in particular with their lives but whose vanity was tickled by the thought of a portrait. Angus painted with moral attention: he did not conceal or distort, but he understood ordinary human sensitivities. So, undictated to by his sitter, he instinctively found his or her best side, minor imperfections were dealt with charitably or made to seem a badge of character, and noses, if necessary, were slightly straightened or made less prominent. All of this was done out of kindness, that quality that eclipses all the other virtues, and that of itself is a perfectly adequate guide to the living of a good life.
There may have been little progress made on Glenbucket’s portrait that Saturday, but on the following Monday Angus had arranged for his subject to come to the studio at ten in the morning for a two-hour sitting. This would allow for sustained work on the face, particularly on the brow – Glenbucket’s most prominent feature. His was a strong face, one quite capable of bearing several centuries of genealogy, even if the genealogy involved tenuous and unconfirmed connections. The eyes were piercing, hawk-like, thought Angus, and the generous moustache, of the sort sometimes referred to as a walrus moustache, could only be sported by one who was confident in who he was. If you passed Glenbucket in the street, you would certainly notice him, and speculate perhaps on who he was and what he did: he was a farmer, perhaps, or an army officer who had allowed himself to expand a bit in the mid-section, or a captain in the merchant navy, on shore leave.
You would not guess his provenance. You would not know from his clothes or his overall look that this was the joint owner, along with a French businessman, of a small distillery on Speyside. You would not guess that this was a man who had a pilot’s licence; who read Ronsard and Apollinaire; who had invented a hot pepper sauce that was stronger than Tabasco and was produced for export in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Nor would you guess that this was a man whose emotional life was dominated by a single consuming passion – not for another, but for a country, for Scotland.
Of course, his kilt, and the associated band of tartan draped across his shoulder, might have pointed in the direction of patriotism. And it was in this garb that he now stood before Angus, looking out, as instructed, past Angus, at a fixed point on the wall behind, where Cyril’s lead hung on a peg, along with the fob on which the key to Drummond Place Garden was secured.
Cyril himself lay on his studio blanket, feigning sleep but gazing, with a certain fascination, at the two sturdy, tartan hose-clad ankles that supported Glenbucket in all his Highland finery. Ankles, for Cyril, were a major moral challenge – perhaps the only moral challenge with which he had to wrestle. A dog is never tempted by the possibility of disloyalty or betrayal – such concepts are completely alien to the canine view of the world. A dog is never troubled by guilt if he succumbs to the temptation of discovered food, or if he chews on something that he knows he is not meant to chew upon. A dog may learn to expect punishment if he does any of those things, but he does not regard them as a moral issue. What is a moral issue, for a dog, though, is the question of when it is legitimate to bite a human. An authorised bite is one thing; an unauthorised one is quite another. Such a bite transgresses a term of the ancient compact between the canine and the human worlds, and dogs know it. And yet ankles for a dog are a target so tempting that it is sometimes impossible to do anything but break the terms of that old social contract and sink one’s teeth into an irresistible ankle. Cyril had done that from time to time in the past – particularly when confronted with Matthew’s ankles under the table at Big Lou’s coffee bar. The last time he had done that, giving Matthew a quick and hastily disengaged nip on the right ankle, he had been immediately punished by Angus – but it was worth it. The sheer pleasure of biting somebody’s ankle is something of which many dogs can only dream, but Cyril had done something to realise it, and he knew that it was every bit as satisfying as it might be imagined to be.
“Your dog,” said Glenbucket, “is watching me. I suppose I’m in his territory here, and he feels he has good reason to keep an eye on me.”
Angus glanced at Cyril from behind his canvas.
“I hope you don’t mind his being here,” he said. “He always keeps me company when I’m working in the studio. But I suppose I should ask people whether they mind.”
“I don’t mind in the slightest,” said Glenbucket. “I was raised with dogs. We had Dandie Dinmonts – you know those funny little dogs that Sir Walter Scott was so keen on. They were named after his character in Guy Mannering.”
“Of course,” said Angus. “One of Scott’s nicest characters, I think.”
“They’ve become quite rare,” said Glenbucket. “People are being encouraged to breed them in case they disappear altogether. My mother was very keen on them. She had four at one time, when we lived near Bridge of Earn. They were given to her by one of her lovers.”
Angus raised an eyebrow, but continued to paint.
“Your mother had lovers?” he asked, and then, realising this was an intrusive question, added, “Not that I should ask that sort of thing.”
“Oh, she had lovers all right,” said Glenbucket. “She was infinitely alluring to men. They took one look at her and became weak at the knees. I saw it happen time and time again.” He paused, and smiled at a memory. “I remember when she was stopped for speeding in Italy once, on the road out of Perugia. I was in the car with her – I was about fourteen at the time, and embarrassed, as all fourteen-year-olds are, by my parents. I knew she had lovers, you see – I called them uncles – and I realised that none of the mothers of any of my friends strayed from the straightest and narrowest of paths in that respect. But mine d
id, and barely tried to conceal the fact from me.
“The policeman flagged us down and came up to speak to my mother. He was wearing one of those Carabinieri uniforms – you know, dark blue jodhpurs and shining boots, mirror-like in their intensity of their polish – and a cap that peaked in a jaunty manner, sporting that Carabinieri symbol of a flaming torch.
“I imagined that all was lost and that a heavy fine would be imposed, or that my mother would be dragged off to some medieval Italian prison, full to the gunnels with Mafiosi and ferrety Sicilian pickpockets, sent from the South to pick the pockets of the North, but no, my mother simply smiled at the policeman and then complimented him on his uniform. He was clearly pleased, and they spent the next twenty minutes discussing the cut of his trousers and jacket, before he waved us on with a recommendation of a restaurant in Assisi, near the Basilica of Saint Francis, where Giotto portrays Saint Francis feeding the birds, in which the speciality of the house was, by unironic coincidence, roast partridge and various little birds – swallows and the like – done to a tee on the spit.”
48
Little Hans, the Wolf Man, etc.
Elspeth had wasted no time in putting into effect the plan upon which she and Matthew had agreed with James. The essence of the scheme was that James should be relieved of some, although not all, of his duties as an au pair, by the engagement of an assistant. The major part of these duties consisted of looking after Matthew and Elspeth’s energetic and highly demanding triplets, Fergus, Tobermory, and Rognvald. That was a job at which he had excelled, effortlessly managing these rambunctious toddlers, involving them in physical activities designed to use up their endless capacity for rushing around – although they never did completely deplete their stores of energy – and somehow marshalling them so that they could be clothed, fed, and washed, and then – twelve hours later – read a bedtime story before being returned to bed. In her more despairing moments, Elspeth reflected on how the whole regime seemed to be an exercise in containment aimed at stopping the boys from destroying too much, from climbing and then falling out of trees, from running off into the mists of the Pentland Hills, and of falling foul of the ill-tempered Highland cattle that grazed a field adjacent to their garden. It was a task that she felt, quite frankly, she was unable to perform unaided, and James had been a godsend. His rapport with the boys, established within minutes of his arrival, had meant that they listened to him and, for the most part, did his bidding. Neither parent knew, or even suspected, that although James had a natural ability to win over anybody, including small children, he had made it clear to the triplets that they were to obey him and cause no trouble. This he had done by whispering in the ear of each of them, “If you are naughty, you know what will happen? One of those Highland cows out there will come and bite you. Hard!”
It had worked perfectly. Whenever there was an outbreak of tantrums or even a surly refusal to do as bidden, James would simply mutter Highland cows! and the child in question would immediately comply with whatever was asked of him. James had not thought of the psychological consequences that can follow upon threatening a child with a vivid sanction, nor of the power that a fear of being bitten by an animal may hold. He was unfamiliar with the locus classicus of such a question, Freud’s extraordinary case of Little Hans, the small boy whose analysis at one remove – Little Hans’s father reported to Freud what his son said and asked his son the questions that Freud suggested he ask – was to become a landmark case in the Freudian movement. Little Hans was worried that the dray horses he saw in the street would bite him, a fear that Freud quite reasonably interpreted as being in reality a fear that his father would castrate him for desiring his mother. It is difficult, of course, to see what else the basis of such a fear could be, other than that horses are large creatures occasionally known to bite people. Such a naïve view, of course, ignores the glaring fact that the horse represented the father and the black hair around the horse’s mouth clearly stood for the father’s moustache.
Little Hans survived to become a successful producer of operas in Europe and America. He left his childhood phobias behind him and led a happy and constructive life. By contrast, Pankejeff, another of Freud’s famous patients, did not fare so well. Pankejeff became known in Freudian literature as the Wolf Man, a sobriquet derived from a very important dream he had in which he saw wolves sitting in trees. Freud decided that this dream was the result of the Wolf Man’s having witnessed, as a child, parental intimacy – known in Freudian terms as the primal scene. This is something best not seen by small children, or indeed by larger children, or by anybody else really. In Pankejeff’s case it led to six decades of psychoanalysis – one of the longest analyses on record. Freud had declared the Wolf Man to be cured, but this appeared not to be the case, and years later he might be seen standing in the street staring into a mirror, convinced that a doctor had drilled a hole in his nose. Most noses do, in fact, have two holes, but this, presumably, was a supernumerary one. Pankejeff wrote a memoir, The Wolf Man, in which he discussed his condition and his prolonged engagement with psychoanalysis; he was never very happy, and interminable analysis did little to relieve his angst.
Sixty years of analysis seem a long time during which to contemplate one’s psyche. In one case, though, the analysis might be seen as lasting for eternity. This is suggested by the history of psychoanalytical movement in Morocco, not the most receptive territory for Freudian ideas. Very few psychoanalysts have practised in Morocco, although for a brief period after the fall of the Vichy regime, French analysts who had been compromised by their association with a collaborationist school of analysis, retreated to Casablanca, where they opened a psychoanalytical institute. Their patients might have remained in France, but did not, such is the dependence that might develop between analyst and analysand. They accompanied their analysts into exile, and when, in due course, both patients and analysts died, they were buried side by side. So the patients lie for eternity, on an earthly couch, silent beside their equally silent analysts.
James thought of none of this when he discovered this convenient way of ensuring good behaviour on the triplets’ part. And it is entirely possible that the boys were unscarred by the whispered threat and developed no phobias relating to Highland cows. A Highland cow, after all, features on the wrapper of a well-known brand of Scottish toffee, and James was liberal in distributing sticks of this toffee to his young charges. The association of Highland cows with the pleasure of a mouthful of McCowan’s Highland Toffee probably outweighed any negative association, or any incipient Oedipal issues, and thereby avoided any need for future analysis. Toffee, of course, confers an additional benefit in child-rearing: a child whose teeth are stuck together with toffee for long periods is unlikely to girn or ask interminable questions, giving an exhausted mother a few moments of peace. Such a fix might help parents at the end of their tether, but is frowned upon in the enlightened circles in which Matthew and Elspeth certainly saw themselves moving. But there are many things disapproved of in enlightened circles that actually work rather well in the real, even if unenlightened, world.
49
Scandinavian Affairs
The whole point of relieving James of some of his responsibilities for the triplets was to allow him to spend the time so freed working with Big Lou in her coffee bar – a business in which Matthew now had a considerable financial stake. This suited James, who was a keen and exceptionally talented cook, as well as suiting Matthew, who felt that something had to be done to revitalise the coffee bar and attract a few more customers. Lou herself, of course, was indifferent to that objective. “If people want to come to my coffee bar, that’s up to them,” she said. “I don’t want to be pestering them.”
“It’s not a question of pestering, Lou,” Matthew had explained. “It’s a question of enticing them. If you have a good menu, people will flock to you. There’s quite good footfall going up and down Dundas Street.”
“Footfall?”
asked Lou. “You mean: people walking by – on their ain twa legs?”
Matthew smiled. “Footfall is a technical term that you hear in the retail sector, Lou.”
This brought another snort from Big Lou. “Retail sector? You mean shops, Matthew?”
Matthew grinned. “You’re right, Lou,” he conceded. “There’s a lot of circumlocution around.”
“You mean havering?” Like many Scots words, there was no English word that did quite the work of havering.
Matthew realised that although Lou had acquiesced to the broad shape of the plan – the freshening up of the coffee bar’s décor and the creation of a new menu – she was lukewarm about having James as her new assistant. “He’s just a laddie,” she said.
“We’ll see,” said Matthew, and then, becoming more formal, he added, “And remember, Lou, this place has a management board now, and I’m on it. In fact, I control it – not that I wanted to make much of that, but there you have it.”
Big Lou looked momentarily taken aback, but then she added, “I’m sure he’ll be fine – if he’s what you make him out to be.”
“He is,” Matthew reassured her. “You wait and see, Lou.”
Of course, before James could begin to work at the coffee bar, the new au pair had to be found, and that, Matthew was concerned, could take time. But then Elspeth found herself in the nearby village, West Linton, talking to a member of her National Childbirth Trust Mother and Toddler group. This woman mentioned that she had just visited a friend in the village whose husband, a helicopter pilot, was being sent by his company to Dubai, and would have to leave more or less immediately. His wife and two young children would be moving too, and the husband was keen that they should all go at the same time. They employed, however, an au pair who could not get a work permit in the UAE and who would therefore have to find another job in Scotland, or go elsewhere.
A Promise of Ankles Page 19
