The Importance of Being Seven

by Alexander McCall Smith

  8. Domenica Has Coffee With Dilly

  As a private scholar, of course, Domenica’s only motivating factor was the intrinsic interest of her subject. In her position there were no considerations of promotion and the financial advantage it brought; there were no chairs to be won, no colleagues from whom to receive plaudits – her only gain was the satisfaction of finding something out, of shining a light upon some obscure passage in the human tapestry. That was reward enough, of course, and Domenica needed none other – but it did mean that if she wanted to do field work, she had to do it entirely off her own bat. And that was not always easy.

  She spoke to her friend, Dilly Emslie, about this, meeting her for coffee in the Patisserie Florentin in North West Circus Place. It was Dilly who had encouraged her to go to the Malacca Straits and had enthusiastically supported her project there. Now she looked again to her friend for guidance: should she start another piece of research, or should she hang up her … whatever it was that anthropologists hung up – their mosquito nets, perhaps? – and lead the life of a sometime private scholar?

  ‘You have to do something,’ said Dilly. ‘Sitting about is not an option for somebody like you, Domenica.’

  For a brief moment Domenica imagined what it would be like to be banned from sitting about. One might sink gratefully into a comfortable chair at the end of a demanding day, only to be urged up out of the chair and back onto one’s feet. No sitting about, please. Surely there came a point at which one was entitled to a bit of sitting about?

  ‘I suppose so,’ she said. ‘They do say, do they not, that one should keep one’s brain active.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Dilly. ‘And it would be such a waste if you stopped writing. I love your papers. That piece on the domestic economy of pirate households was very good indeed.’

  Domenica accepted the compliment gravely. ‘I was rather pleased with the way it worked out.’

  ‘Of course you were,’ said Dilly. ‘Now what?’

  Domenica reached for her cup of coffee and took a sip. ‘The difficulty with anthropology is the going away side of it. I’m not the sort of anthropologist who can work on museum collections. I have to get out into the field. And that takes a lot of planning.’

  ‘But surely you don’t have to go far,’ said Dilly. ‘What about that work you were talking about on Watsonians in Edinburgh? Weren’t you planning to do something on Watsonian social networks?’

  Domenica nodded. ‘I was. But I thought it might be a bit too dangerous. And I discovered that there’s somebody working on that at the moment. Somebody from St Andrews is already in the field.’

  Dilly wondered what the implications of being in that particular field would be. For a moment she pictured the field at Myreside, where Watsonians played rugby. Would it be dangerous for a researcher to position himself on the edge of that field? Would the Watsonians suddenly object to the presence of an anthropologist?

  ‘Of course, it’s complex research,’ went on Domenica. ‘It involves looking at a whole set of social practices and assumptions. How does one become a Watsonian? What are the enforcement mechanisms for the values they espouse? How are social practices and expectations passed on? There’s an awful lot there.’

  As she reeled off these questions, their answers occurred to Domenica. There was little mystery in the way in which one became a Watsonian: one was enrolled at Watson’s and taken there as a small child. But the interesting thing, of course, was the uniform, and the function it performed. This set one aside from other children, who belonged to different clans and social sub-sets: there was a badge, and this badge displayed the tribal totem of the Watsonians, a picture of a boat. That was very important, as Watsonians recognised the display of this boat as conferring membership of the group. Indeed, above Watsonian headquarters, a long, low, classical building on Colinton Road, an ironwork boat dominated a prominent weather-vane, thus signalling to any passing alumnus that this was a place of succour for Watsonians.

  As for Watsonian enforcement mechanisms, Domenica realised that there was a great deal of work to be done there. The main mechanism of this type, she thought, was the look. There were various sorts of looks in Edinburgh, the best known and most widely used being the general Edinburgh look, which was best described as slightly discouraging. It did not involve a narrowing of the eyes; rather it entailed keeping the eyes quite open, but sending forth a sort of steely air of disapproval mixed with feigned surprise at what was being surveyed – surprise, really, that the other person actually existed. This was quite a difficult thing to do, in fact, and not easily mastered by incomers. Years of practice were required, although this Edinburgh look was best passed down from generation to generation if it were to be practised at its highest level.

  The Watsonian look was not quite like this general Edinburgh look; it was not so disapproving, or discouraging. It said something quite different: its message, in essence, was this is how things are, and how they are meant to be, aren’t they nice, don’t you agree? That was quite a complicated message, with layers of social meaning, and would in itself require a major research project to be fully analysed. And that is something that Domenica felt she simply could not face. No, there might have been a time when she could take on field work among the Watsonians, but not now. Especially since she was a Watsonian herself.

  Her coffee with Dilly was enjoyable, though, as it always was. Dilly did not press her, but gently encouraged her to consider various possibilities. Voluntary work? There were plenty of good causes in Edinburgh. The Art Fund? The National Trust for Scotland? The Cockburn Association, that brave band of conservationists who fought such heroic and important battles against insensitive plans for the city? All of these would appreciate support, and Domenica was certainly willing to provide it, but she felt a certain restlessness that she feared voluntary work would not address.

  ‘Italy,’ she said to Dilly, as she drained the last coffee from her cup.

  ‘Italy?’

  Domenica nodded. For centuries Italy had provided balm for the troubled spirit. Even a small dose of Italy – a week or so – helped. And, as she contemplated this, she remembered that she had been invited to Italy by her neighbour, Antonia, who had been offered the loan of a villa in the Sienese hills. At the time, she had not paid much attention to the invitation, which had been a vague one, but now it seemed to her to be the perfect solution to her disquiet. And one never knew what minor research project might suggest itself as one sipped cappuccino in a piazza café. Peer group relationships among visitors to Italian art cities? A Room with a View! One might even get such accommodation; one never knew.

  9. The Grosseto Road

  It seemed to be a perfect plan. A couple of weeks in Italy – perhaps even a month – would be just the tonic that Domenica required. What could be better, she asked herself, than slipping into the routine of the Italian villa life in summer? A leisurely, late breakfast on the patio would be followed by a walk into the nearby village. There she would drink a lingering cup of coffee in the piazza, followed by the purchase of a few necessities for lunch: olives, prosciutto, a lump of pecorino, crisp rolls. Then back to the villa for a late morning read of the paper or some slow-moving summer novel, followed by lunch itself, and then a siesta through the heat of the early afternoon. By which time she would be ready for another walk, breathing in deeply the country air, with its tang of white dust and lavender and complex spices; oh, bliss, and bliss again.

  Antonia had not given many details of the villa when she issued the invitation. All she said was that it belonged to a distant cousin of hers, a woman who lived in London and had inherited it from her mother, a noted art historian of the 1950s who had known Berenson, she said, and Pope-Hennessy, and ‘all the others’. At this, Antonia had waved a hand airily, as if to encompass a host of art historians, milling about vaguely, attributing here and there, passing on vaguely scandalous stories about one another over agreeable lunches in the hills above Florence.

  The v
illa, she said, was called the Villa Oregano, and was halfway between Montalcino and Sant’Angelo in Colle, on the Grosseto Road. Antonia spoke as if Domenica should know the Grosseto Road, as one might be expected to know Lothian Road, or Princes Street, perhaps. This was a habit she had which mildly irritated Domenica. She would suddenly mention one of her obscure, undoubtedly non-existent Scottish saints, as if Domenica should be as familiar with him as she was with rather more historical figures of Scottish history, such as James VI or John Maclean.

  ‘The Grosseto Road?’

  Antonia nodded. ‘Yes. You know how it runs from Montalcino down to Grosseto?’

  ‘Actually, I don’t,’ said Domenica. ‘I’ve been to Tuscany once or twice, but only to the obvious places. Pisa. Florence.’

  ‘Ah, Firenze,’ said Antonia.

  Domenica stared at her. It was the height of pretension, she felt, to use a foreign name when there was an established English one. Not only was it pretentious, it was absurd, even if people insisted – ridiculously – on calling Peking Beijing. Did those same people refer to Roma or Köln when talking about Rome or Cologne? They did not.

  ‘Tell me about the Grosseto Road,’ Domenica said. ‘Has it got fine views?’

  She knew immediately that Antonia had never seen the Grosseto Road – her hesitation, slight though it was, was enough to make that quite obvious. She decided to press her advantage; Antonia must be helped to abandon her habits of affected intellectual superiority.

  ‘Does it give you good views of the marble quarries?’ Domenica asked. She had no idea if there were marble quarries in the area, but then neither, she felt, did Antonia.

  ‘Sometimes,’ said Antonia lightly. She spoke as if marble quarries were not the sort of thing she would deign to notice.

  Domenica insisted. ‘Of course Cardinal del Monte had a house down there, didn’t he? And Berenson’s villa, I Tatti, was near there, or a bit closer to Florence, I think.’ She paused. Antonia was looking uneasy. She decided to go in for the kill. ‘I Tatti is such a wonderful name for a house. It’s named after the nearby potato fields, I believe.’

  ‘Yes,’ muttered Antonia. She was not sure – did I Tatti have anything to do with tatties?

  Domenica looked at her friend through narrowed eyes. With any luck, that would be enough to stop too much further posturing about Italy. And Antonia was being kind to her, she reminded herself; no matter what flaws Antonia had – and they were legion – she had been kind enough to make this generous offer and it must be appreciated.

  But then Antonia delivered her bombshell. ‘I’ve asked Angus, of course. And I think he’s going to come.’

  Domenica could not conceal her surprise. ‘Angus Lordie?’

  Antonia nodded. ‘I was telling him about it the other day. He was walking that ridiculous dog of his in Drummond Place Gardens. I mentioned I had been offered a villa in Italy and he started going on about how he had gone to Italy on a travelling scholarship when he finished at the art college. He said that he’d love to go back and do some painting. So I asked him.’

  ‘I see,’ said Domenica.

  ‘And he was very keen on the idea,’ went on Antonia.

  Domenica was thinking quickly. Why had Antonia asked Angus to go to Italy? Only one explanation suggested itself: she was making a play for him. That was the only possible reason, and it infuriated Domenica just to think of it. Antonia was a notorious man-hunter – utterly incorrigible. Of course she frightened off any half-decent man, and ended up with people like that Polish builder whose only English word had been ‘brick’. That had been a most unfortunate affair, but Antonia, true to form, had simply dumped the builder, as an expert bricklayer will toss aside an imperfect brick. No, I should not pursue brick analogies, she told herself, but it was a bit like that.

  Domenica said nothing for a few moments. Angus was a free agent – he could go to Italy or not, as he wished. But unattached men were few and far between, and if Angus belonged to anybody, then he belonged to her, and not to the grasping Antonia. This meant that she could not possibly miss this trip; she would have to go and do everything within her power to stop Antonia from ensnaring poor Angus.

  Then a further thought occurred. What about Cyril?

  ‘And his dog?’ she asked Antonia. Angus would never be able to leave his dog behind; they were far too dependent on one another for that.

  ‘One of these new pet passports,’ replied Antonia. ‘Angus has obtained one for him. Photograph. Usual occupation. Name and address of next-of-kin. The lot.’

  10. The Return of Pat Macgregor

  Pat Macgregor, Matthew’s former assistant at the Something Special Gallery, former admirer of Bruce Anderson, surveyor and echt narcissist (now reformed, apparently), former classmate of the curiously named and somewhat hypnotic boy known as Wolf, former … There were so many respects in which Pat, even though only twenty-one, was a former something, but to list them all would give the impression that her best years were behind her and that she was now somewhat washed up; which was far from being the case. In fact, as she strode purposefully across Middle Meadow Walk, on her way back to her flat in Warrender Park Terrace, she would have appeared to any passer-by to be anything but finished. Indeed, such a passer-by would have thought that this person was not a student at all – given the usually leisurely gait of students walking across the Meadows – but a person with a sense of wanting to get somewhere, even if that somewhere was only Warrender Park Terrace.

  It was Friday afternoon, and Pat had been in the university library on George Square. It was late May, and the university examinations were all well out of the way, as were lectures and tutorials. Pat had worked hard throughout the year – she was extremely conscientious, even if some of the others in her tutorial group were less so, or were conscientious enough, but only in a very last moment way. In fact, towards the end of the semester, as examinations loomed, she had met classmates whom she had not seen for the entire year. Suddenly they appeared at lectures, looking slightly confused and worried, desperate to make up for a year of neglected studies. One of them, a young man with long blond hair and Raphaelesque features, to whom Pat found her gaze returning after he took the seat next to her in the lecture theatre, had even revealed that he had come to the wrong lecture altogether. He was a student of English literature who had attended so infrequently that he was unaware of where he was meant to be.

  ‘This is Art History,’ Pat whispered to him.

  The young man turned to her and fixed her with a gaze that was a mixture of regret and resignation. ‘I’ve had a rather busy year,’ he said.

  She wondered what his busy year had consisted of, and then decided. That could keep one busy, she supposed. ‘You could always repeat,’ Pat reassured him. ‘Plenty of people do.’

  ‘I don’t have the time,’ he said. ‘Tempus fugit, et cetera, et cetera. I must try and pass. It’s not difficult to scrape a few ideas together, you know.’

  Pat was not sure about that. She thought it was quite difficult, at least it was for her. She was getting reasonable marks – somewhere around a good upper second – and would end up, in two years’ time, with a respectable degree at about that level. It was always possible – just – that she might even get a first; one or two of her essays had been rated that highly by Dr Fantouse, in particular, who said that he ‘liked her insights’.

  That compliment had puzzled her. On occasion she had felt that something she had written was mildly original, but insight was a strong word and suggested so much more. Mere students, surely, did not have insights. They had ideas, scraped together perhaps, but those ideas were usually no more than a mish-mash of what they picked up through reading the books and articles of those who really did have insights, scholars at the Courtauld, for example, or people like Duncan Macmillan, who wrote such entertaining and forceful art criticism in the paper. Professor Macmillan no doubt woke up each morning with his head full of insights, whereas she woke up in the morning with her head f
ull of … well, she would have to say that it was not really full of anything at all first thing in the morning: thoughts of breakfast, perhaps, or thoughts of who would get to the bathroom first and take all the hot water before the others got up. So if any insights were to come her way, they would have to take their place in the queue of other concerns, most of which were really rather mundane and hardly insightful at all.

  As she walked along Middle Meadow Walk, she was, in fact, reflecting on the difficulty she was experiencing in marshalling insights for her honours dissertation. She had agonised over the choice of subject before coming up with what might prove to be a fertile source of insights, or might not. The idea had come to her when she was standing in front of Sir David Wilkie’s painting The Letter of Introduction in the National Gallery of Scotland. She knew the painting well, of course, having been first shown it when she was twelve, and had been taken round the Gallery on the Mound on a wet Saturday afternoon. Her father, who had been showing her round, had pointed out Wilkie’s painting and she had looked at it solemnly, a few drops of rain still making their way off her hair and coursing slowly down her cheeks. They had been caught in a shower and her hair had got thoroughly wet.

  ‘That,’ said Dr Macgregor, ‘is a very emotionally charged painting. Do you know what emotionally charged means?’

  She had looked up at the painting. A young man stood awkwardly by the side of an older, seated man. The older man was holding a letter that had been given to him and was looking up from it. His gaze was not directed at his visitor, but went somewhere off to the side, in annoyance and suspicion.

  ‘He doesn’t like him,’ she observed. ‘That man sitting down isn’t pleased that the other man has come to see him.’