Sunshine on Scotland Street

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “About getting married?”

  “Yes. I just don’t know …”

  Big Lou laid a hand on her shoulder. “Haud your wheesht! It’s fine getting married at your age, for goodness’ sake. You’re still a spring chicken compared with some.”

  Spring chicken, thought Domenica: another meat metaphor. So much of our language is still based on the things we used to do – like knowing where food came from. It was good of Big Lou, of course, but the fact remained: this was a late wedding.

  “Everything’s changed when it comes to age,” Big Lou went on reassuringly. “Remember how people used to give up early? Remember how our parents’ generation behaved? They put on carpet slippers when they were in their fifties. They did, you know.”

  “I was going to agree,” said Domenica. “I was thinking of my father. He retired from the Bank of Scotland when he was fifty-six and he stopped driving at the same time. He said he was too old. Whereas today …”

  “People run marathons at seventy.”

  Domenica nodded, inadvertently loosening the fascinator. “Exactly.”

  “Keep your head still,” muttered Big Lou. “I’m going to have to do it again.”

  “And they climb Everest, or try to, in their seventies.”

  “That’s going too far,” said Big Lou. “But you can certainly take fifteen years off everything these days.” She paused. “But you can’t take height off a mountain.”

  “So forty is the new …”

  “Twenty-five. And fifty is the new thirty-five. It’s all a question of attitude.”

  Domenica smiled. “So I shouldn’t feel embarrassed about getting married at … at the age I am?”

  Big Lou finished with the fascinator. “No. And that bunnet, if you can call it that – that wee bawbee’s worth of over-priced feathers isn’t going to move now.”

  Domenica felt at the delicate construction: it seemed firmly embedded. “Thank you, Lou. And thank you for being my bridesmaid.”

  “Two auld hens together,” said Big Lou.

  Domenica stood up and allowed Lou to smooth out her dress. She had chosen silver-grey Thai silk that had been made into a strikingly smart suit. Grey T-bar high-heel shoes completed the picture of elegance.

  She looked at Lou. “Do you think I’m doing the right thing?”

  “Marrying Angus? Of course I do. I wouldn’t have agreed to be bridesmaid if I didn’t.”

  “I suppose not,” mused Domenica. “Can you imagine a bridesmaid who fundamentally disapproved of the groom? She’d have to stand there and shake her head ominously as the service went ahead. And perhaps the occasional glance at the congregation to say, Not my doing, any of this.”

  Big Lou smiled. “Well, I have no reservations in this case. Except maybe …” She stopped herself, but it was too late.

  Domenica looked at her anxiously. “Except what, Lou?”

  Lou shook her head. “Nothing.”

  “Come on, Lou, you can’t say ‘except that’ and then leave it at that.”

  Big Lou looked down at the floor. “Well, it’s just that … well, about a year or so ago when Angus was in the coffee bar, he left his briefcase behind. You know that leather thing he carries … Well, he left it and I took it behind the counter to look after it for him and an envelope fell out.” She stared at Domenica. “There was a typed name and address on it and I couldn’t help but notice it as I picked it up.”

  Domenica held her breath. “Go on.”

  Big Lou lowered her voice. “The envelope was addressed to Mrs. A. Lordie. That’s what it said. Mrs. A. Lordie, and it had his address on it. Drummond Place.”

  Domenica stood quite still. She said nothing.

  “So I thought: is Angus already married?”

  Domenica sat down heavily. The fascinator fell off; the feathers came into their own and it floated gently to the floor, where it lay, a small insubstantial thing, a vanity.

  “Of course,” Big Lou went on quickly, “it’s very unlikely, isn’t it? So I never mentioned it to you, and I’m sorry I did now. Really sorry.”

  3. Buildings, Bridges, Whisky

  Drummond Place, where Angus Lordie lived, and where, like Domenica, he was now dressing for his wedding, was at the top of Scotland Street. The flat that Angus occupied also served as his studio, and was on the opposite side of the square from the Scotland Street entrance; not that Drummond Place was really a square – parts of it looked as if they belonged to a square, while others were semicircular. It was, he thought, a circle that had run out of architectural room, and had been obliged to draw in its skirts and become a sort of U-topped semi-rectangle; either that, or it had been the work of two architects, one starting at one end in the belief that they were to build a square, and another starting at the other end under the firm impression Drummond Place was to be a circle, or circus. If that is what happened – and of course that was just a fantasy – then Angus imagined the moment of the meeting of the two sides, a moment of trigonometrical tension, no doubt.

  Of course buildings can be made to join together without too much difficulty – a bit more stone here and there and one has the necessary coming together; how much more difficult it must be for those builders of bridges who start on opposite banks simultaneously. These must meet in the middle, and meet exactly: even a few inches can be a problem, and to miss by yards would be disastrous: no bridge should have a traffic circle or junction in the middle. And as for tunnels: how fortunate it was that the builders of the Channel Tunnel got it right and met, as planned, in the middle.

  The studio in Drummond Place occupied the top two floors of a section of the handsome Georgian sweep. Its position was important: no artist likes to live and work in a basement, or even on the ground floor; such as are obliged through circumstance to do that find their paintings are starved of light and become gloomy: they paint a world of shadows and dim, overcast skies. By contrast, those, such as Angus, who occupy the natural realm of artists, further up, in garrets – the traditional abode of artists – have studios, and paintings, flooded with light. And his light, too, was of exactly the right quality: he faced north, looking out over the rooftops towards distant Trinity and beyond that the Firth of Forth and the hills of Fife – that strange kingdom beyond the Forth, as Angus sometimes called it. This northern light was clearer than the light to be had on the other side of the flat: southern light, Angus felt, seemed buttery by comparison; an impasto light, thick, greasy, torpid.

  Facing north meant, too, that he could look across the gardens in the middle of Drummond Place to what he called the literary side, where two houses boasted commemorative plaques: one to mark the house of the poet Sydney Goodsir Smith, and the other to remind the passerby that this was the house of Sir Compton Mackenzie, novelist, former spy, president of the UK Siamese Cat Association, and founder of the Gramophone magazine. Commemorative plaques are helpful but often commit an unintended solecism: they say something to the effect that So-and-So, author, or painter or composer (or whatever) lived here, and that is it. But did they live there alone? Usually not. What about their spouse, the mute inglorious husband or wife who might not have been a distinguished practitioner of the arts, might not have invented something or stolen somebody else’s territory, or done anything of that nature, and moreover is ignored? Such spouses or partners may not be of great public interest, but surely should not be viewed as if they never existed.

  So, in the case of Compton Mackenzie, there was Faith, his first wife, and then his loyal housekeeper, Chrissie McSween from the island of Barra, whom he married, and, after her death, her sister Lillian, whom he also married. They all lived there, and perhaps should be remembered too in wording such as Compton Mackenzie, author, lived here with his three wives. That could be misunderstood, of course, but it would seem pedantic to provide further explanation by inserting additional wording at the end, possibly such as one after the other of course or seriatim. The last word, being Latin, might cause further confusion although not,
obviously, to Edinburgh people, whose command of Latin is usually quite adequate for everyday purposes such as reading plaques, translating Cicero, and so on.

  Compton Mackenzie, of course, was the author of that rollicking tale, Whisky Galore. Angus had read this book as a boy but did not remember much about it other than that it was about islanders in the Hebrides who discover a cargo of whisky washed up on their shores: a Scotsman’s liquid dream, so to speak. Walking past Compton Mackenzie’s house one day had given him an idea: the finding of a cargo of whisky was, in a sense, like the finding by the Israelites of manna in the wilderness. And that brought to mind Poussin’s painting of that exact subject in the Louvre, and that … Yes, yes! The subject he had been looking for for some time: the discovery by a group of early Scots (much earlier than Compton Mackenzie’s islanders) of a cargo of whisky washed up on the shores of Ardnamurchan. It would be a large-scale painting – as large as the Titians in the National Gallery of Scotland – and every bit as powerful, as emotionally arresting, but painted with the same cool palate as Poussin used in his later works. It would be the great Scottish painting, perhaps – dare one even imagine such a thing? – as great a painting as produced by any Scottish artist before him; as haunting as Cowie’s Portrait Group, as whimsical as Raeburn’s The Reverend Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch, as geographically rooted as any view of Mull from Iona, or indeed Iona from Mull, by Peploe or Cadell.

  He thought of this as he stood at the top of the stairs and waited for Matthew, his best man. Matthew was late, but they still had plenty of time to get ready, although there was a rather awkward issue to be addressed – and that was the large hole that Angus had discovered in the kilt he was proposing to wear. It had not been there the last time he had worn it, but it was there now, the result of the attention of moths. Matthew might have an idea what to do – or might not; but the point about having a best man was that he would be available to deal with crises, of which this undoubtedly was one.

  4. How We See the World, and Scotland

  “Angus,” panted Matthew, “I’m so sorry I’m late. It was the boys, you see. Tobermory had been sick over Rognvald and Elspeth was just at her wits’ end. You know that stuff you give children, that Calpol stuff, it’s pink, and you give it to them when their temperature goes up; that stuff, well we couldn’t find it and so I had to run down to the chemist in Stockbridge and buy some and it was only when I was standing in the queue in the chemist’s that I realised that Tobermory had been sick over me too …”

  Angus, opening the door to his best man, laughed reassuringly. “We’ve got plenty of time – plenty. Look, it’s three hours at least before we have to be there.”

  Matthew glanced at his watch. “I know, but still, it’s going to take us twenty minutes to walk over to Palmerston Place and you have to speak to the minister and so on.”

  “The Provost,” said Angus. “It’s a Piskie cathedral.”

  “Well you have to speak to him,” said Angus.

  Angus ushered Matthew into the flat, placing an arm around his shoulder to calm him down. “There’s nothing to worry about. We’ve got hours.”

  They went into the drawing room, a shabby, faded room furnished with ancient, chintzy chairs, a cocktail cabinet of obscure provenance, and a writing bureau stuffed with letters. Angus had inherited this bureau from an uncle in Broughty Ferry, and the correspondence had nothing to do with him, but related to the affairs of an earlier generation: personal letters postmarked 1952; bills from long-departed traders for sums that seemed so tiny now (three pounds for a new central heating radiator, for instance; one pound ten shillings for a jacket from Forsyth’s); an invitation to attend a Highland Ball in Inverness, and so on. They should all have been thrown away, and Angus had occasionally steeled himself to do just that, but had cavilled at the idea every time: to throw all this away seemed to him to be throwing away the memory of a life. Nobody could be interested in these minutiae of his uncle’s existence, but they were the physical remnants of a life, and somehow they bound Angus to one who had been fond of him, and who had proved generous.

  Matthew, having regained his breath from running up the stairs, moved over to the window and looked out at the sky. “It’s a great day for a wedding, Angus,” he said. “Look at that sky. Not a cloud in sight. Not one. Blue, all the way up.”

  Angus joined him at the window. “Good,” he said. “Domenica will be so pleased.”

  Matthew turned to him. “That’s a very significant thing you said, you know.”

  Angus looked puzzled. “What?”

  Matthew explained. “You said that Domenica would like this weather. That shows that you’re looking at the world from her perspective. And that’s a good omen for the marriage.”

  Angus was embarrassed. “Oh really …”

  “No,” Matthew went on. “I mean it. I haven’t been married all that long …”

  Long enough, thought Angus, to become a family of five.

  “I haven’t been married all that long,” Matthew went on, “but one thing I’ve learned is this: you have to look at things from your spouse’s point of view. You have to get used to seeing the world through four eyes rather than two.”

  Angus frowned. “A peculiar sort of vision, surely.”

  “You may scoff, Angus, but it’s true. What I really mean to say is that if your first thought is for her – and you’ve just shown that by thinking of how Domenica will feel about the weather – then that shows that you’re already thinking in the way I said you should.”

  Angus looked at his friend. Dear Matthew; so serious at times, so … so vulnerable, standing there in his Macgregor kilt with that curious buttonhole in his jacket – white heather? The White Heather Club: his aunt – the wife of the uncle in Broughty Ferry – had gone on about that when as a small boy Angus had visited them for weekends. It was all tied up with Andy Stewart and country dancing and shortbread and all those … all those Broughty Ferry things, as he thought of them. He smiled at the memory. And yet, that was what Scotland – or a bit of it – was all about. It was about that mawkish sentimentalism just as much as it was about the hard life of bleak high-rises or dank tenements; “Grey over Riddrie the clouds piled up” – that haunting line of Edwin Morgan’s that somehow summed up the hard-faced countenance of Scottish deprivation and defeat, that landscape of blighted and disappointed lives that we had to do something about but that we inevitably failed to heal.

  He mused on this, and would have liked to talk to Matthew about it. He would have liked to say to him, “What can we do, Matthew? It seems that everything we try in this country fails. We know what we want Scotland to be, don’t we? We know that we want it to be a place where there’s justice and freedom from want. We know that we want people to be … well, we want them to be warm, don’t we? We want them to have decent health. We want them to feel that …” But he could not speak to Matthew about all this now, as they stood at his window, only hours from his marriage.

  He looked at Matthew. How often, he wondered, do we look at our friends, really look at them; because to look at somebody, to stare at them intently, makes one aware of their humanity, their being – exactly that thing that he, as a portrait painter, tried to capture; their life, really; their vitality, their essence.

  Matthew looked back at him. “Is there anything wrong?” he asked.

  Angus nodded.

  Matthew’s alarm showed on his face. “Oh no,” he groaned. “You’re not going to tell me you’ve changed your mind. It’s that, isn’t it?”

  Angus shook his head. “No, no. I still want to get married, and I want it to be this afternoon, but it’s just that … well, you see my kilt …”

  He pointed across the room, to where the kilt was draped over the back of a chair.

  Matthew’s gaze moved to the kilt, and he gave a start. “My God, Angus. You’re a Campbell.”

  5. The Misunderstanding of Glencoe

  Angus was surprised by Matthew’s observa
tion on the identity of the tartan – his mind had been fixed firmly on the problem of the hole in the kilt rather than its pattern of dark green squares.

  “Well, yes, I am,” he said. “The Lordies have always worn the Campbell tartan; I think they are a sept of the Campbells. And my mother was a Campbell too: that was her surname. So I’ve got a double dose of Campbell blood.”

  Matthew was smiling. “And you’re marrying a Macdonald. Not that these things count for anything, but that’s why I was surprised to see the kilt.”

  “I see no reason for anybody to pass comment on that,” said Angus, slightly huffily.

  “No, of course not,” agreed Matthew. “It’s ancient business. The Massacre of Glencoe was an awful long time ago.”

  “1692, to be precise,” said Angus. “And if I may correct you, Matthew, it was not a massacre – or rather, that’s not the word we should use any longer to refer to it. The correct term nowadays is the Misunderstanding of Glencoe.”

  “The Misunderstanding of Glencoe!” exclaimed Matthew. “That’s rich, it really is! Let me remind you, Angus, what actually happened. There was …”

  He did not finish. “No,” interjected Angus. “Let me remind you. William and Mary were the legitimate monarchs. James was ousted and should have accepted it. The Highland chieftains were given plenty of time, Matthew, to take the oath of allegiance.” He looked at Matthew balefully, as if he, Matthew, was somehow condoning Jacobite insurrection, positively encouraging people not to take oaths of allegiance.

  “And certain Macdonalds,” Angus continued, “certain assorted Macdonalds who had earlier stolen cattle – Campbell cattle, remember …” And here Angus looked reproachful, as if Matthew, and any other Macdonald apologist, could not be trusted with cattle. “These Macdonalds dragged their feet in reporting to take their oath and can hardly complain if they came to be treated as outlaws.”