Sunshine on Scotland Street

by Alexander McCall Smith

  The decoration of the walls of Pat’s room had been very much the same in each of the flats. She had three reproduction prints that she had arranged to have framed by a small picture-framing shop in Brunstfield: a picture by Cézanne of a statuette that the artist had kept in his studio, David Hockney’s Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, and Raeburn’s The Reverend Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch. The Cézanne and the Hockney had been approved of by her friends on her course. “Two giants,” said one of these, a boy called Tim, who was hoping to study at the Courtauld in London after graduation from Edinburgh. “But the Skating Minister? Pat, my dear, what were you thinking of? Bourgeois Edinburgh personified!”

  “But that’s what I am,” said Pat. “That’s where I come from.”

  Tim had raised an eyebrow, and shrugged. Then he moved his hand carelessly, half gesturing dismissively to what lay outside the window: Edinburgh, and a large slice of Scotland. “Well, at least you’re honest,” he said. “Not that that’s much compensation for being so ineffably respectable.”

  38. T. Eliot Top Bard …

  It was not a long walk from the flat in Warrender Park Terrace to Pat Macgregor’s father’s house in the Grange – ten or fifteen minutes at the most. In spite of this proximity, Pat found that she did not go home very often – something that made her feel vaguely guilty. There was no reason for this guilt, though: her father might have lived on his own but he gave no appearance of being lonely. And when she did call round at the house unannounced, he was often not there.

  “Where do you actually go?” she asked him once, after she had found him in on none of three consecutive calls.

  “Go?”

  “I come round and you’re not there. You must be somewhere.”

  He considered this. The logic behind it was impeccable. He was tempted to use the famous reply of the Orcadian who had suddenly left his home and his island without any explanation and been away for eight years. On his return to the house, when asked where he had been, he had simply said, “Oot” – which was true, of course, but was hardly revelatory. Not that one should always use more words than are necessary, as Dr. Macgregor had occasionally pointed out to his daughter.

  “But just how many words are necessary then?” she retorted.

  Dr. Macgregor, who had flirted with psychoanalysis, and in particular the Lacanian school, was interested in language. He had seen the frustration of many of his patients who had sought to say something to him but had failed because the words to express their distress were simply not there. “Take away the words,” he had said, “and the capacity to share goes. I’ve seen people sit and weep – just weep – because they can’t tell me what they feel inside.”

  Pat listened. She knew how her father helped people, and she was proud of him for it. He was a kind doctor – that most precious of people. And now, it seemed he wanted to talk.

  “How many words do you think you use in a day?” he asked.

  Pat shrugged. “Two thousand? Ten thousand? More? Some days, I suspect, there’s a lot to say; other days there’s … well, not quite so much.”

  Dr. Macgregor nodded. “Fair enough. The truth of the matter is that we can’t be sure. There are a lot of figures bandied about, but I’ve read that they’re all unsubstantiated guesses. And memes. This is particularly so when they claim that women use three times as many words a day as men. I simply don’t believe that. Where’s the evidence? Look at the figures. Some of them say twenty thousand as opposed to seven. Others say eight as opposed to four. It’s pure speculation.” He paused. “Except when it comes to teenagers, apparently.”

  “Teenagers?” Pat was close enough to her teens – having escaped from them only a few years previously – to feel threatened by the word.

  “Yes. Apparently there has been some very concrete research on the words used by teenagers.”

  “And the result?”

  “Grave,” said Dr. Macgregor, with a certain mock theatricality. “Some long-suffering professor of linguistics went through ten million words of speech transcription – teenage talk – and came up with the conclusion that the average teenager knows forty thousand words.”

  Pat said that she thought that was not bad at all. If one had forty thousand words, there was a lot one could say, other than LOL and :-)

  “Yes,” said Dr. Macgregor. “If one used forty thousand words one would sound like … Who would one sound like? T. S. Eliot?” He paused. “Was T. S. Eliot ever a teenager?”

  “Not a very convincing one,” said Pat.

  Dr. Macgregor smiled. “Mention of Eliot always makes me think of Auden’s palindrome. Do you remember my telling you about it? ‘T. Eliot, top bard, notes putrid tang emanating. Is sad. I’d assign it a name: gnat dirt upset on drab pot toilet.’ Yes, read it backwards and it says exactly the same thing. It’s a most remarkable achievement.”

  “Teenagers …”

  “Yes, the thing is this: although they know forty thousand words, they actually use very few – we’re told. Eight hundred a day.”

  “That sounds quite a lot …”

  “It isn’t. Think about it. This little conversation of ours has used … what? Six hundred words – something like that. Auden’s palindrome alone was twenty-something words. So, make up five long palindromes and you’ve already used one eighth of what you can say a day.”

  “Perhaps palindromes should count double,” suggested Pat. “Backwards and forwards.”

  “Perhaps. Like trams …” Dr. Macgregor became thoughtful, even melancholy.

  “Trams?” said Pat.

  “Let’s not go there,” said Dr. Macgregor. “The trams certainly aren’t.”

  “Aren’t what?

  “Aren’t going there.”

  “Eight hundred words …”

  “Yes. But here’s something else: of those eight hundred words, there are twenty that they use rather a lot. In fact, those twenty words make up one third of their daily speech. And these top twenty words include words like yeah, no, and but, as well as a few slang expressions. So it doesn’t leave much room for more … nuanced expressions, shall we say?”

  They were both silent for a moment. Then Dr. Macgregor continued, “I sound like a typical middle-aged grouch, don’t I?”

  Pat nodded. “Maybe. :-) But typical middle-aged grouches may have a point. The fact that the person who says something is middle-aged doesn’t mean that it’s rubbish. That’s as bad as condemning what teenagers say because they’re teenagers. LOL!”

  “You’re very kind,” said Dr. Macgregor.

  He looked at his daughter. They had been sitting in the kitchen of his house, waiting for the kettle to boil; and it had done so, but was ignored because they were talking about words and the decline of words. Now he rose to his feet and switched it on again. The kettle made a noise, an agitated noise, as the already-hot water steamed up again, like an argument, an old fight, that had been rekindled. Did middle-aged kettles huff and puff more than young kettles, he asked himself. Will I huff and puff as I grow older, sitting here in my house in the Grange, reading and thinking about how life leaks away?

  Eliot came back to him. T. Eliot top bard … But not the palindrome, rather the line about growing old and wearing the bottoms of one’s trousers rolled. He looked down. His trousers had turn-ups. J. Alfred Prufrock, he thought.

  39. The Caravaggio Within

  We go in – just as we always do, thought Dr. Macgregor as he led his daughter into the dining room of what John Gifford and his co-authors of The Buildings of Scotland would have described as a polite villa. That description had struck him forcibly when he had opened the copy of that work given to him by Pat as a birthday present some years earlier, and discovered that his house in Dick Place, along with others like it, was a polite villa. It was at the same time both dispiriting and reassuring; dispiriting in the sense that to live in a polite villa implied that one’s life was rather dull: the connection between building style and personality type may not be
a necessary one, but it nonetheless exists in many cases, whether as cause or effect – that might be difficult to tell. People who live in small, neat houses may be big-hearted and large-souled – few people can afford large houses, the sorts of houses in which high-ceilinged and spacious thoughts might be imagined to flourish; we may, after all, have to live in some small town in central Scotland rather than Paris but that does not mean that the inner Parisian cannot flourish wherever we are. The danger, of course, is that we spend time imagining that we would be happier elsewhere, and forget to cultivate happiness where fate has placed us. Auden’s image of the child, scolded in France, wishing he were crying on the Italian side of the Alps came to his mind, and he thought: we are all that scolded child.

  So while the size of one’s house said nothing about oneself – except in those cases where people buy ostentatiously large houses to impress others with their grandeur, and there are many of those – the state of living quarters spoke volumes about the one who lived there. Untidy people lived in a state of disorder, and this reflected their personality and their mental habits. Ordered people lived neatly: cut their hedges, did their washing-up regularly, made their beds in the morning. It was so obvious. Send me a picture of your room and I will tell you who you are. Somebody had said that once at a seminar Dr. Macgregor had attended at the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and some present had laughed at what they saw as an excessively simple aphorism; and yet sophisticated laughter, he thought, was so often misplaced.

  Physical untidiness and the untidy mind … were they always linked? Every proposition, it seemed, could look less than universal when subjected to close examination; every rule had those glaring exceptions that made it look much weaker. Auden was famously untidy; his suits were dishevelled, bore on their fabric soup stains, cigarette ash, detritus of indeterminate origin; his flat in New York was piled high with books and manuscripts and brim-full ash trays; he kept chocolate puddings on the bathroom floor as that was colder than the fridge; and so on. And yet of all twentieth-century poets he was the one who paid most attention to metre, and ran his life with great, almost obsessive attention to punctuality: Martini time was at the appointed hour itself, not five minutes early nor five minutes late. So order could exist in the midst of disorder, and people who lived in polite villas might not necessarily be timid or unadventurous, but could have lives full of passion and excitement, even if they were not necessarily … “Caravaggio,” he muttered.

  Pat, taking her accustomed seat opposite her father at the table, looked up with concern. If one’s father started to mutter Caravaggio à propos of nothing it was potentially worrying. “What was that?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “I was thinking,” he said. “I was thinking of the sort of life that I lead now and comparing it to the life of Caravaggio.”

  She looked at him wide-eyed. “But why would you compare yourself to Caravaggio? Surely chalk shouldn’t be compared with cheese.”

  He thought about this for a moment. While one would not want to be thought to be too similar to Caravaggio, it was not very flattering to be put at the absolutely opposite end of the Caravaggistian spectrum. Most men, if pushed, would like to be thought to have at least a little bit of Caravaggio within them …

  “No,” he admitted. “You’re right: I shouldn’t compare myself with Caravaggio.”

  Pat smiled. “Good. I like you just as you are, Dad. Solid, dependable, predictable …”

  She realised, as she spoke, that to be described as predictable was not necessarily complimentary. She apologised. “Sorry, Dad. I didn’t mean to say you’re predictable. I didn’t mean it. Not really.”

  He smiled back weakly. “My darling, maybe I am. Look at the table – look at what I’ve prepared for you. Do you even have to remove the covers from the dishes to see what it is? Do you think Caravaggio gave his guests the same dish every time?” He looked at her, and then said, “Don’t answer.”

  She stared down at her place mat. It was a picture of Stirling Castle. Their place mats had always been the Castles of Scotland, and when one set had eventually worn out, another set had miraculously appeared from somewhere with the same limitless munificence as that with which St. Catherine of Siena’s remarkable water barrel had filled and refilled itself. Who made place mats of the Castles of Scotland? Who stocked them? Who got them from the central warehouse where the Castles of Scotland were stored in their presumed thousands to all those polite villas where they were put into daily use? And what conversations took place over these pictures of the Castles of Scotland? What same things were said, by the same people, in the same tone, time and time again?

  “Stirling Castle,” she said, looking up from the mat.

  Her father nodded, and looked down at the place mat before him. “And I’ve got Balmoral.”

  He spoke as one might comment on an allocation of gifts by some generous donor: you shall have Stirling Castle; you shall have Balmoral; you shall have Glamis; and you, my dear, shall have a polite villa, no more.

  No, he would have to speak in a way that took them beyond all this.

  “Pat,” he said. “I’ve made a decision. It’s a big decision, my dear, and I want you to be the first to hear about it.”

  40. Ethics of Filming Giraffes … and People

  If Matthew’s recollection of exactly what he promised Bo was clouded – this being the result of a more than minimal dose of Laphroaig – then the same was not true of Bo’s own recollection of what was agreed. A few days after their first meeting and the enthusiastic conversation that it had entailed, Bo arrived at the flat in India Street bearing his filming equipment.

  Matthew and Elspeth had already discussed the matter over breakfast.

  “You could tell him that you’ve changed your mind,” Elspeth had suggested. “You don’t always have to do everything you agree to do.”

  Matthew shook his head. “I don’t like doing that,” he said. “And, anyway, it won’t be too bad.”

  Elspeth was incredulous. “Having a filmmaker follow us around all the time for a couple of weeks? Not too bad?”

  Matthew shrugged. “I don’t think it will. And if you like, he can spend most of his time with me.”

  They had left it at that. Nothing was specifically agreed, but the clear expectation was that Bo and his documentary film would be the principal responsibility of Matthew and, to an extent, Anna. It was Anna, after all, who had invited him to the flat and she should therefore bear some of the burden that his subsequent presence entailed.

  Now, opening the door to Bo, Matthew winced when he saw the camera case and the various bits of equipment that accompanied it.

  “Here I am!” said Bo brightly. “And what a good day it is outside for filming. Bright, but not too bright: just the conditions filmmakers like.”

  Matthew glanced up at the cupola above the stairs. Broad slabs of sunshine penetrated the glass and cut at an angle through the still air of the interior, illuminating floating specks of dust. “Yes,” he said flatly. “Of course.”

  “Well then,” said Bo. “I’ll set things up and then … well, then you can simply get on with your lives! You mustn’t mind me – that’s what you say in English, isn’t it? You mustn’t mind me?”

  Matthew stood aside to allow Bo to enter the hall. “I’ll be going to the gallery this morning,” he said. “You’re very welcome to come with me and film that.”

  Bo nodded enthusiastically. “That’s just the sort of thing I want,” he said. “I shall film you walking along Heriot Row and then down Dundas Street. That will be very interesting for people in Denmark.”

  Matthew managed a weak smile. “Do you really think so?”

  Bo did. “The whole point about a documentary film of this nature is that it involves what we call the uninterpreted recording of activities and events. If I started to select only those things that are more dramatic in your life, then I would be interpreting your life – I would be changing it. But I shall not do that. I shall m
erely show, and in that way the audience of the film will see your life in its natural context, for what it is.” He paused, and looked at Matthew, as if to confirm that he understood. “It is the same as making a wildlife documentary.”

  Matthew frowned. “Not very flattering …”

  Bo laughed. “Oh, I don’t mean to compare you to a giraffe or anything like that. But the analogy is appropriate. Making a wildlife film involves many ethical issues relating to observation. That man who chased the animals … what was he called? He did not follow these rules, I’m afraid.”

  “The one who …”

  “Yes, the one who went and ran after wild creatures. I saw a film of him chasing a black mamba in Africa. Chasing it! That was very unwise, not only because black mambas do not like to be chased and have the means of showing this disapproval, but also because you should never chase wild animals you’re filming. You should never stress them. It also encourages people who watch these things to go and chase creatures themselves. It is not very good.”

  Matthew agreed. He had seen that man in action and had been unhappy about the way he disturbed the creatures he filmed. “He meant well, no doubt,” said Matthew. “Perhaps he felt the end justified the means. Perhaps he thought it was the only way to get people to relate to wildlife.”

  Bo looked up from his task of screwing a lens into the body of his camera. “Perhaps. And I’m sorry about what happened.” He twisted the lens in further until there came a satisfying clicking sound. “There, that’s fixed. But of course there are many interesting issues in filming people. There is that very amusing man who pretends to be from somewhere remote and goes and speaks to all those people in America and gets them to say embarrassing things. I’m not happy about that, you know. They are simply being polite to him, and he takes advantage of that politeness. That is bad.”