A Time of Love and Tartan

by Alexander McCall Smith

  When Terry visited Bernice, which he did on most evenings, the two of them would sit in front of the television and watch endless pre-recorded programmes about home improvements. There would be no conversation, although Terry would occasionally make a comment about somebody’s choice of kitchen units or paint.

  “Can’t stand that colour,” he would say. Or, “I wouldn’t choose green, would you, Bernie?”

  And Bernice would say, “No, not green, Terry.”

  And then there would be silence until, some time later, Terry would remark again on some point of décor and say, “They’ll regret that, you know.”

  Pat could not stop herself from speculating about Bernice and Terry’s love life, and once or twice these thoughts came to her unbidden while the two of them were sitting watching their home improvement programmes. Unfortunately, the thought made her want to laugh, and there was an embarrassing moment – for Pat at least − when Bernice turned around and said, “What’s so funny, Pat?”

  Andrea was quite different. While Bernice was overweight and rather bovine in her manner, she was petite, and showed a lively interest in the world about her. What annoyed Pat about her, though, was the large social chip she carried on her shoulder. Andrea came from a large Catholic family in Airdrie, and she clearly resented what she saw as Pat’s privileged Edinburgh background.

  “It’s all very well for you,” she once said, “but you don’t really know what it’s like.”

  “Excuse me,” said Pat. “I don’t know what what is like?”

  “Real life,” said Andrea.

  “Why?”

  Andrea smiled condescendingly. “You live in Edinburgh. You went to that stuck-up school – no offence, but you did. You don’t know what it’s like to live in Airdrie.”

  Pat defended herself. “But what’s wrong with Airdrie?”

  “There you are,” said Andrea. “You don’t know.”

  The argument stopped there, but it left Pat angry. Nobody likes to be condescended to, and to be condescended to by Andrea, who had, after all, chosen to leave Airdrie and come to live in Edinburgh, was more than Pat could bear. She decided that she had had enough of this; she simply did not want to share any longer. And that meant that she must get rid of these flatmates and replace them with a man. She wanted a man. She wanted to come home to one person – one male person – and sit together and watch programmes that were not about home improvement. She wanted a man so desperately. I want a man, she thought. I really want a man.

  And that man was Bruce, for quite against her better judgment, she was falling for Bruce, again, and she knew that this was a disaster, even if she yearned for him terribly. She was aghast at what she was being drawn into by some weak, irrational part of her; yet she could not stop herself. That sort of attraction, anarchic in its effect, seemed irresistible, overcoming all intellectual reservations, all scruples.

  And here she was, standing by the window, waiting for him, because he had said that he would come and see her to discuss his project. Every minute weighed heavy upon her; every minute increased her desire.

  A Visit from Bruce

  When the doorbell rang, Pat stayed where she was at the window, counting backwards with painfully slow deliberation. It was something she had done since childhood, using the countdown to prolong the pleasure of anticipation of some treat. Counting down from fifty to one, and then to the zero of fulfilment, increased the pleasure of the reward; but now she did it so as not to appear too eager. She wanted to rush to the door, but would not – for all her eagerness to see Bruce, it would be better to give the impression that there were other things to do before admitting him to the flat.

  Now she stood on her side of the door, took a deep breath, brushed hair from her forehead, and then reached for the handle.

  “Br . . . ” She stopped herself just before the vowel would have given everything away.

  “I almost gave up,” said Dr. Macgregor. “You took so long to answer.”

  “Daddy . . . ”

  “Aren’t you going to invite me in?”

  She stepped aside, trying to hide her confusion. “Of course.”

  He entered the small hall that formed the heart of the flat. “I was walking past,” he said, putting his hat down on a chair on top of a half-opened bill. “I thought I might pop in for a quick cup of coffee – if you had the time.”

  She looked at her watch. “I was planning to go out.” She did not like lying to her father, and her voice sounded strained.

  “I won’t stay long,” he said. “Ten minutes or so. I wanted to talk to you about your grandmother’s pictures. I’ve been thinking we should do something about them.”

  She invited him into the kitchen, where he sat down in the chair that he always chose when he visited her. As with most of the furniture in the flat, it had come from the family house in the Grange, this one from his study. When he had given it to her, he told her that he had thought some of his best thoughts in that chair, and perhaps she would carry on thinking them for him.

  She filled the electric kettle with water. “Granny’s pictures?”

  “Yes, the ones in the attic. Remember, I showed them to you? Five or six of them. All gathering dust.”

  She nodded. “Yes. You said that you couldn’t find a place for them on the wall.”

  “Exactly. Unless I put them in that spare bedroom at the back – the one we never use.”

  “You could do that.” She glanced surreptitiously at her watch. Her father was the last person she wanted to have in the flat when Bruce called. His dislike of Bruce was intense and she knew that he would be dismayed if he knew that she was seeing him again. She loved her father deeply, and would never wish to hurt him, but her feelings for Bruce were . . . well, they were not her fault. That was it: they were not something she had chosen; they were like a bad cold or flu – they had simply happened. You don’t choose to have flu, and you don’t choose to fall for Bruce Anderson, or a man like him.

  Her father watched as she ladled coffee into the cafetière.

  “I don’t want to tuck them away where they’ll never be seen,” he said. “Your grandmother was very fond of them. She knew him, you see. She knew Adam Bruce Thompson, the man who painted them. I think that some of them were birthday presents from the artist.”

  “I see.”

  He fiddled with a place-mat on the table before him. There was a small yellow stain of congealed egg yolk on the mat, and Dr. Macgregor picked at it idly. That was Bernice, thought Pat; she had been making an omelette for Terry and she had spilled some of the mixture. Terry loved cheese omelettes, which had put Pat off them now.

  Dr. Macgregor abandoned the place-mat and looked across the room at Pat. “I’ve decided that it’s wrong to keep things like that in the attic. If you have something that other people might like, I think you have a duty to let them enjoy it.” He paused. “What do you think, Pat?”

  She had been thinking of what she would say if Bruce arrived while her father was still here. Could she express surprise, or would that be insulting to her father, who would see through the pretence? Or should she say to him, right now, Bruce is coming to see me. He has a scheme . . . She could tell him about Bruce’s scheme, but that would probably just make matters worse, as he would worry about her involvement in anything to do with him; after all, he had once said to her, “That young man is toxic to you, darling – toxic.”

  She struggled to answer his question. “What do I think about . . . about keeping things in the attic?”

  “Yes.”

  “I suppose it could be selfish. Yes, I suppose you’re right about that. We shouldn’t sit on things that other people might enjoy.”

  He nodded. “That’s my general view. But then, I’ve been trying to square that with the whole notion of private property. If you carry that sort of approach to its logical conclusion, then you would end up believing in a fairly radical redistribution of just about everything. I wouldn’t be allowed to live in my ho
use in the Grange, for example, because there’s just one of me and it could accommodate six people.” The example was as extreme as it was personal; but that, he thought, was where tyranny lay: a tyranny that would not allow people to live in their own houses.

  Pat shrugged. “It’s a question of degree, isn’t it? Really large discrepancies in what people have are wrong, but there’ll always be some. I don’t think you need to worry – not yourself. And Granny’s paintings, well, you could probably put those in an auction if you were feeling really guilty about them – which I don’t think you need to. It’s not as if you were a terrifically rich fat cat, Daddy, you’re just . . . ”

  The bell rang.

  “Are you expecting somebody?” asked Dr. Macgregor.

  Pat stood quite still. A way out had occurred to her. She could simply not answer. Bruce would ring again, no doubt, but after a while he would assume that she had forgotten he was coming and had gone out, or he might think he had got the time wrong.

  Her father was looking at her. “Aren’t you going to answer?”

  She made her decision, and she shook her head. “Mormons,” she said. “They came yesterday at about this time and I put them off. I said I couldn’t talk to them and they could come back some other time. That’s who it’ll be – and I just can’t face them right now. I can’t face saying no to those clean young guys and seeing them look disappointed and trudge off downstairs again. I just can’t.”

  Dr. Macgregor smiled. “They do tend to be very well-scrubbed, don’t they?”

  The bell rang again.

  “Do Mormons ring twice?” he asked.

  “Always,” said Pat. “It’s part of their training.”

  There was silence for a moment, followed by a brief hammering on the door.

  “Do the Mormons do that?”

  Pat’s gaze was fixed on the ceiling. “They can be persistent,” she said.

  An Invitation to an Encounter

  In his studio, a short walk from Scotland Street, Angus Lordie settled behind his easel, his palette on a table beside him, the paint upon it small extrusions of freshly squeezed colour. The smell of stand oil and turpentine hung in the air – a smell as suggestive as that which pervades a bakery or a coffee shop. If smells are redolent of place, then this one transported Angus back to those echoing studios at the Edinburgh College of Art where, as a student, he struggled with the frustration of not being able – yet – to achieve on canvas the effects he yearned for. It had all been so exciting in those days; the world lay before him with all its possibilities. He would use his Art College postgraduate scholarship to go to Paris, perhaps to Rome; his work would be fêted, dealers would lay siege to his studio; there would be glamorous women to accompany him to openings, hanging on his every word, basking in his reflected glory.

  He smiled at the thought. Every young man must think the same – must believe that something significant will happen to him, before slowly it dawns on him that life, after all, is going to be a routine, undistinguished affair. Not that Angus worried about that any more. He still entertained thoughts of painting the really great picture – the work that would be described as his masterpiece – but this painting steadfastly failed to materialise, and now, in moments of honesty, he knew it never would. If he was to make a statement about the world, then it would not be in the form of a painting, but in a few lines of the poetry that he wrote when the spirit moved him. People told him that his poems made them think – and few people said that about his paintings. Of course, portraits were not really expected to challenge; a portrait was intended to capture something rather than create it.

  His mahlstick with its leather-covered tip, an accoutrement as reassuring to a portrait-painter as a baton is to a conductor – or a field marshal – lay on the floor beside him, as yet unremarked upon by the man seated in the chair before him. Sitters were usually curious about the stick and its uses; Angus would demonstrate, although he used it to steady himself only relatively infrequently as he rarely experienced the muscular strain that could come from hours of holding a paint brush.

  He was seated directly in front of the canvas, but in such a position as to make it possible for him to see the sitter without craning his neck. The look of the portrait-painter is a very particular one; he gazes rather than glances – it is an unashamed assessment, a scrutiny, much like the stare of a doctor examining a patient for diagnostic clues.

  Angus had discovered that the portraitist’s gaze could be disconcerting; a few reacted by looking tense, others adopted a fixed expression – a mask of rectitude that betrayed the existence of guilty secrets. Still others, it seemed, coped by pretending that they were somewhere else altogether.

  Then there was the issue of conversation. Angus preferred not to talk too much, as the face of one involved in conversation was too volatile for portraiture. He wondered why few – if any – portraits show people in the act of talking, and had concluded that a portrait that showed the sitter speaking would be oddly unsettling – the viewer would be excluded from the other side of the conversation. This would kill the intimacy of the encounter between viewer and subject; none of us feels comfortable in the company of one whose attention is directed elsewhere.

  “A portrait should invite you into an encounter with the subject,” pronounced his tutor at Art College. “Let me repeat that, Mr. Lordie, because it may be the best piece of advice you’ll ever be given: a portrait is an invitation to an audience.”

  But now, with the canvas ready for his attentions, he looked at the man before him, and noticed the small scar on the side of his face. The sitter, a middle-aged man with thick, wavy hair, suddenly fingered his cheek. It was as if he had noticed the attention, and for a moment Angus felt embarrassed.

  “It happened a long time ago,” said the man. “When I was a student.”

  Angus dipped his brush into a small circle of paint on the palette. “You were at Heidelberg? A duelling scar?”

  The man laughed. “Heavens, no. Nothing dramatic, I’m afraid – a bicycle accident in Orkney, when I was a student – more than thirty years ago.”

  Angus painted a tentative line on the canvas. “Strange,” he said. “I was there as a student too – also about thirty years ago.”

  “I was working on an archaeological dig – as a volunteer,” the man said. “We were digging up a broch. I was staying in Stromness and I used to ride up from there to the dig. Coming back to Stromness – you know, on one of those summer evenings when it never really gets dark – I hit something in the road. It was a rock, I think; it had probably toppled off one of those stone dykes and then rolled down a bank. Not a big rock – something the size of a tennis ball, I think. Anyway, I went flying off the bike and ended up in a barbed wire fence.”

  Angus made a sympathetic noise. “Very painful.”

  “Oddly enough, it didn’t bother me too much. They took me into Kirkwall and stitched me up. It left my distinguished-looking scar, though.”

  “Of course.”

  “Which you mustn’t ignore.” He paused. “You don’t do improvements, I take it?”

  Angus laughed. “If asked. I’m happy enough to remove double chins. There’s a lot you can do with shadows.”

  “Not necessary. I’m not vain – or at least, I hope I’m not.” A pause. “Does anybody actually ask for a portrait for himself – I mean, does anybody actually commission a picture for his own glorification?”

  “You’d be surprised,” said Angus.

  The sitter reflected on this. Then he said, “What is it about Orkney?”

  Angus hesitated. “The rain?” he said. “The wind? The absence of trees?”

  “Fishermen with ploughs?”

  Angus drew his brush across the canvas; an almost transparent line of light brown paint. “The Italian Chapel,” he said suddenly, and remembered, so vividly, so powerfully, that he had to lower his brush.

  Send Him Hame, Send Him Hame

  He had gone there all those years ago w
ith his friend from the hotel, a student from St. Andrews, whom he had met on the ferry across from Scrabster. They had discovered they were both destined to spend the summer months working together and with the ease of youth had immediately become friends. For Angus, the job at the anglers’ hotel was just something that would help keep the wolf from the door; for David it was a chance to do the thing he liked above all else: catch trout. Even as a ghillie, a paid assistant of the anglers who made the pilgrimage to the lochs of Orkney, the thrill of the pursuit of trout was reward enough.

  “You sound as if you know what you’re doing,” said Angus, as they sat on the deck of the ferry as it made the short crossing to Stromness. It was a calm day, and the Pentland Firth, so often the wildest stretch of water in the north of Scotland, was touched with the gold of the afternoon sun.

  “Oh, not really,” said David. “I suppose I know a bit, but you could spend your whole life learning about fly-fishing.” He paused to smile. “And you? What’s the thing you love above all else?”

  Angus shrugged. “I like art, I suppose. I want to be able to paint like . . . Well, there are a whole lot of painters I’d love to be able to paint like. John Duncan Fergusson’s one. Have you heard of him?”

  David looked thoughtful. “He’s the one who painted those angular women?”

  “You could say that. And other things, too. And Bonnard. I’d love to be able to paint like Bonnard. Do you know his work?”

  David replied that he had difficulty remembering who was who. He was not sure about Bonnard.

  “He did interiors,” said Angus. “He liked painting women in the bath, or sitting reading – things like that.”

  “I envy you,” said David. “I envy you doing the thing you really love doing.”

  Angus looked at his new friend. “Aren’t you?”

  David explained that he was studying history. “I like it – to an extent,” he said. “It has its moments.”