44 Scotland Street 4ss-1

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Pat shook her head. Was it all that difficult to be a dog? Dogs had a rather pleasant existence, as far as she could make out.

  There were miserable dogs, of course: dogs owned by cruel and irresponsible people or dogs who were never taken for walks, but most dogs seemed contented enough, and often seemed rather happier than the humans attached to them.

  “It’s a remarkable book,” Angus Lordie continued, glancing down at Cyril, who was inserting his long pink tongue into the glass to get to the dregs of his beer. “It’s full of extraordinary snippets of information. For example, did you know that Descartes thought of dogs as machines? Outrageous. Wouldn’t you agree, Cyril?”

  Cyril looked up from his beer glass and stared at Angus Lordie for a few moments. Then he returned to his drink.

  “You think that he looked at me because he heard his name,”

  mused Angus Lordie. “But then it’s always possible that he looked at me because he heard the name Descartes.”

  “Descartes?” said Pat, raising her voice.

  244

  On the Subject of Dogs

  Cyril looked up and winked at her.

  “There you are,” said Angus Lordie. “Cyril has good taste.

  He has a low opinion of Descartes because of his views of animal-machines, and he has a correspondingly high view of Voltaire, who sided with the dogs against Descartes, and also, I might add, of Kant, who disposed of Descartes’ argument like that – pouf!

  – in a footnote. Kant said that dogs think in categories, and therefore aren’t machines.” He paused, and looked down at Cyril who looked back up at him, his gold tooth exposed. “Of course it’s typical of the Germans that they should argue in terms of categories of thought, whereas Bentham said that dogs weren’t machines because they were capable of suffering in the same way in which we do. The English are much more down to earth, you know.”

  Pat cast a glance at Matthew, who had a glazed expression.

  She was not sure what to do. It would not be easy to get rid of Angus Lordie, and yet she could understand how Matthew must feel. He could not compete with the older man, with his easy garrulousness and his tirade of facts about dogs.

  She tried to include Matthew in the conversation. “Do you have a dog, Matthew?”

  Matthew shook his head. “No dog,’ he muttered.

  “No dog?” asked Angus Lordie brightly. “No dog? Poor chap.

  I couldn’t live without a dog. I’ve had Cyril here ever since I rescued him from some crofters in Lochboisdale. I happened to be in the pub there and I heard two crofters talking about a dog who was no good with sheep. They were going to put him down the following day, as there was no point in keeping him.

  I overheard this, and I offered to take him off their hands. They agreed, and the next day was the beginning of Cyril’s life with me. He’s never looked back.”

  Pat wondered about his gold tooth, and asked Angus Lordie how this came about.

  “He bit another dog in the tail,” came the explanation. “And his tooth broke off. So I took him to my own dentist, who’s a drinking pal of mine. He was a bit unsure about treating a dog, but eventually agreed and put it in. Not on the National Health, On the Subject of Dogs

  245

  of course; I paid seventy quid to cover the cost of the gold and what-not. We had to do it at night, when there were no other patients around, as people might have objected to seeing a dog in the dental chair that they had to use. People are funny that way. There’s Cyril paying his full seventy quid and some would say that he would have no right to treatment. Amazing. But people aren’t entirely rational about these things.”

  Matthew suddenly rose to his feet. “I’m sorry,” he said, looking at Pat but not at Angus Lordie. “I’m sorry, but I have to go.”

  Angus Lordie looked at his watch. “How late is it? My goodness, the evening’s young. Can’t you stay?’

  Matthew ignored his question. Still addressing himself to Pat, he told her that she could have the following morning off, if she wished. “We haven’t really been able to celebrate,’ he went on.

  “So take the morning off.”

  “Please don’t go yet,” she said, glancing sideways at Angus Lordie as she spoke.

  Matthew shook his head. “No. Sorry. I have to be on my way.”

  He turned on his heels, and although he nodded cursorily at Angus Lordie, it was clearly not a warm farewell.

  “Sorry about that,” said Angus Lordie, lifting his glass of whisky. “I hope that I haven’t broken up your party.”

  Pat said nothing – she was watching Matthew leave the bar, sidling past the group of raucous drinkers who were effectively blocking the door. Her sympathy for Matthew had grown during the short time they had been in the bar. He was not like Angus Lordie, who had confidence, who had style. There was something vulnerable about Matthew, something soft and indecisive.

  He was the sort of person who would go through life never really knowing what he wanted to do. In that respect he was typical of many of the young men she had met in Edinburgh. That type grew up in comfortable homes with all the opportunities, but they lacked strength of character. Was that because they had never had to battle for anything? That must be it. And yet, thought Pat, have I had to fight for anything? Am I not just the same as them? The thought discomforted her and she left 246

  The Onion Memory

  it there, at the back of her mind – one of those doubts which could be profoundly disturbing if it were allowed to come to the fore.

  Reaching the door, Matthew turned back and looked in her direction. She caught his eye, and smiled at him, and he did return the smile as he disappeared through the doorway into the night. Pat stared at the doorway and was still staring when Bruce came in, together with Sally, laughing at some private joke. She had her arms about his shoulders and was whispering into his ear.

  87. The Onion Memory

  “Know them?” asked Angus Lordie, noticing the direction of Pat’s stare.

  For a moment Pat said nothing, and she watched Bruce and Sally squeeze past the knot of people at the doorway and go over to the bar. This manoeuvre brought them closer to the table at which she was sitting with Angus Lordie, and so she averted her gaze. She did not want Bruce to see her, and any meeting with that American girl would be awkward – after the incident with the dressing gown.

  “Do I know them?” she muttered, and then, turning back to face Angus Lordie, she replied: “Yes, I do. He’s my flatmate. He’s called Bruce Anderson.”

  “Terrific name,” said Angus Lordie. “You might play rugby for Scotland with a name like that. Cyril’s name – Cyril Lordie

  – would be useless for rugby, wouldn’t it? The selectors would choke on it and pass you by! You just can’t play rugby if you’re called Cyril, and that’s all there is to it. It’s got nothing to do with being a dog.”

  Pat said nothing to this. Of course Bruce’s name was wonderful: Bruce – a strong, virile, confident name. Bruce and Pat. Pat and Bruce. Yes. But then cruel reality intruded: Bruce and Sally.

  The Onion Memory

  247

  Pat looked at Angus, who smiled at her. His conversation was extraordinary. Many of the things he said seemed to come from nowhere, and seemed so eccentric; it appeared that he looked at things from an entirely different angle, which was fun, and exhilarating. He was the opposite of boring, the opposite of poor Matthew. And that, she thought, was why Matthew had felt obliged to leave. This man made him feel dull, which Matthew was, of course.

  Angus Lordie was looking towards the bar, where Bruce and Sally were standing, Bruce in the process of ordering drinks.

  “That girl,” he said. “His girlfriend, I take it? You know her?”

  Pat cast a glance at Bruce and Sally, and then looked quickly away. “Not very well,” she said. “In fact, I’ve only met her once.

  She’s American.”

  “American? Interesting.” Angus Lordie paused. “What do you think sh
e sees in him?”

  He waited for Pat to answer, and when she did not, he answered his own question. “He’s very good-looking, isn’t he?

  With that hair of his. He’s got something on it, hasn’t he? Yes.

  Well, I suppose that if I looked like that I’d have American girls hanging on my arm too.”

  Pat looked at Angus Lordie. Did he really still think like that

  – at the age of fifty, or whatever he was? It was sad to think that he still wanted to be in the company of girls like Sally because that would doom him to a life of yearning after people who inevitably would be interested in younger men and not in him.

  Mind you, he was good-looking himself, and if one did not know his real age he could pass for rather younger – forty perhaps.

  She suddenly stopped herself. It had occurred to her that Angus Lordie might actually be interested in her. He had smiled when he had seen her, and had made his way straight to their table. Did this mean that he . . . that he had designs on her, as her mother would put it? In her mother’s view of the world, men had designs, and it was the responsibility of women to detect these designs and, in most cases, to thwart them. It was different, of course, if designs were honourable; in that case, they ceased to be designs sensu stricto.

  248

  The Onion Memory

  Angus Lordie had stopped looking at Bruce and Sally. He sighed. “I knew an American girl once,” he said. “A lovely girl.

  It was rather a long time ago, when I lived up in Perthshire. I had left the Art College and had moved into an old mill house in our glen – yes, we had half a glen in those days – my father, I may as well tell you, was one of those Perthshire pocket lairds

  – and there I was, twenty whatever, thinking that the London galleries would come knocking at my door at any moment. I lived la vie bohème, Perthshire version, but in great comfort actually. I used to get up at eleven and paint until three or so. Then I’d go for a walk and have people round for dinner in the evening. Life was pretty good.

  “Then this American girl turned up. She was staying with some people in Comrie, wandering around Europe in general and had ended up there. She used to come over and see me and we would sit and talk for hours at the kitchen table. I made her mugs of tea in some wonderful old Sutherlandware mugs I had, beautiful things. And the air outside smelled of coconut from the broom in blossom and there were those long evenings when the light went on forever. And, I tell you, I could have conquered the world, conquered the world . . .”

  He broke off, looking up to the ceiling. His glass of whisky, half empty now, was in his hand. Pat was silent, and indeed it was as if the whole bar was silent, although it was not.

  After a moment, Angus Lordie looked at Pat. She noticed that his eyes were watery, as if he were on the verge of tears.

  “It is the onion memory that makes me cry,” he said quietly.

  “Do you know that line?”

  Pat replied gently. “No. But it’s a lovely image. The onion memory.”

  “Yes,” said Angus Lordie. “It is, isn’t it? I think it comes from a poem by Craig Raine. A fine poet. He talks about a love that was not to last, and thinking about it makes him cry. Such a good thing to do, you know – to cry. But forgive me, I shouldn’t talk like this. You have everything before you. There’s no reason for you to feel sad.”

  Pat hesitated. There was something about Angus Lordie that

  The Onion Memory

  249

  invited confidence; there was an intimacy in his manner that made one want to speak about things which mattered.

  “I do feel a bit sad,” she said, toying with her glass as she spoke. “I feel sad because that boy over there, Bruce . . . he’s with another girl, and . . .”

  Angus Lordie reached out and patted her on the arm. “My dear, you need say no more. I understand.” He glanced over at Bruce and Sally. “This must be very painful for you.”

  “It is.”

  “Of course it is.” He picked up his glass and downed the last of his whisky. “Let us leave this place. Let us leave this place and visit our dear friend, Domenica Macdonald. She is most hospitable and she is always, always, very good at driving away regrets of every sort. Cyril can wait outside, tied to a railing. He loves Scotland Street. It’s the smells, I think. So much smellier than Drummond Place.”

  88. Big Lou Receives a Phone Call

  As Angus Lordie was proposing to Pat that they leave the comfortable purlieus provided by the Cumberland Bar, Big Lou, coffee bar proprietrix and auto-didact, was standing in her flat in Canonmills, looking out of the window. She normally ate early, but that evening she had not felt hungry and was only now beginning to think of dinner. She had been reading, as she usually did when she returned from work, and was still immersed in Proust.

  The bulk of Big Lou’s library consisted of the volumes which she had acquired when she had purchased the second-hand bookstore out of which she had made her coffee bar. There were books, however, which she bought herself from the dealers in whose shops she had taken to browsing on Saturday afternoons, when the coffee bar was closed. There were several shops in the West Port which she now frequented, although the increasing number of rowdy and vulgar bars in the vicinity was beginning to distress her. Lothian Road, not far away, was now an open sewer as far as Big Lou was concerned – innocent enough during the day, but at night the haunt of bands of drunken young men and girls in impossibly short skirts and absurd high heels. And at the entrance to each of these bars stood threatening men with thick necks, shaved heads, and radio mikes clipped onto their ears. There had been nothing like that in Arbroath, and very little of it in Aberdeen. Mind you, she thought, Aberdeen is too cold to hang about on street corners. And those girls with their very short skirts would freeze quickly enough if they tried to wear them on Union Street in the winter. Was climate the reason why Scotland had always been so respectable?

  Big Lou was beginning to have doubts about Proust. She was proud of her edition, which was the Scott-Moncrieff translation, published in a pleasing format in the early Fifties (Big Lou liked books which felt good). She was now on volume six, and was reading about the Duchesse de Guermantes and her decision to travel to the Norwegian fjords at the height of the social season.

  Proust said that this had an effect on people which was similar Big Lou Receives a Phone Call

  251

  to the discovery, after reading Kant, that above the world of necessity there was a world of freedom. Was this not a slight exaggeration? Big Lou asked herself. But with whatever levity Proust invoked images of determinism, Big Lou herself took the subject seriously enough. She had several books on the subject in her collection, and after reading them – not with a great deal of enjoyment – she had come out in favour of free will. She was particularly persuaded by the argument that even if we cannot be shown to be free, we have to behave as if freedom of the will existed, because otherwise social life would be impossible. And that meant, in her view, that determinism was false, because it did not fit the facts of human life.

  There was no good in having a theory that bore no relation to reality as it was understood and acted upon by people. That is what she thought about determinism. But then she asked herself about God, and became confused. If it were the case that people thought that they needed a concept of God in order to get by in life, then would that mean that only those theories of reality which had a place for God would be defensible? This, she thought, was doubtful. Unless, of course, one made a sharp distinction between social theories – which need not be provable, but which must at least work for the purposes we require of them – and other theories, which can be true and correct but which we do not need to be able to apply to day-to-day life. That was it, she thought.

  The problem was that some people preached social philosophies that paid no attention to reality. Some French philosophers had a tendency to do this, Big Lou had noted: they did not care in the slightest if their theories could have disastro
us consequences

  – because they considered themselves to be above such consequences. It was perfectly possible to portray scientific knowledge as socially determined – and therefore not true in any real sense

  – when one was safe on the ground in Paris; but would you ask the same question in a jet aircraft at thirty-five thousand feet, when that same knowledge underpinned the very engineering that was keeping one up in the air? By the same token, French philosophers had been able to admire Mao and his works because 252

  Big Lou Receives a Phone Call

  they did not have to live in China at the time. And they knew, too, that what they preached would never be put into effect.

  Big Lou stood before her window and remembered the young man who had come into her coffee shop wearing a tee-shirt with a picture of Castro on it. She had served him his coffee and then pointed at the picture.

  “Do you really admire people who put others in prison for speaking their mind?” she had asked. “Would you wear that shirt if you lived under him?”

  The young man had looked at her and smiled. “You’re so naïve,” he had said, and taken his coffee to his table. And then, to follow this remark, he had turned to her and said: “Have you ever heard of false consciousness?”

  “Aye,” said Big Lou. “I have.”

  But the young man had laughed and turned to the reading of a magazine he had brought with him. Of course she had thought later of the things that she might have said to him, but she had remained silent and had merely gone to the door and locked it, discreetly. Ten minutes or so later, the young man had got up to leave – he was the only customer at the time – and had tried the handle of the door. When he realised it was locked, he had turned to her and demanded that she let him out, which she had done.