Espresso Tales, Page 2

  So it was natural that he should feel trepidation about any decision that Pat should make, because that decision could always be to go back to Australia. That was what he dreaded above all else, because he knew that if she did that, he would lose her. He wanted her to stay in Edinburgh, or go to Glasgow at the most. Her choice of St Andrews University was perfect in his mind; that was just up the road and completely unthreatening.

  Now, in the cluttered surroundings of the Canny Man’s, he steeled himself for impending loss. “You said that you’d made a major decision?”

  Pat looked at her father. “Yes. I’ve decided not to go to St Andrews after all.”

  He caught his breath. She was returning to Australia. How few were the words needed to end a world.

  3. Narcissism and Social Progress

  Pat saw nothing in her father’s face of the hollow dread he felt. He was accomplished at concealing his feelings, of course, as all psychiatrists must be. He had heard such a range of human confessions that very little would cause him so much as to raise an eyebrow or to betray, with so much as a transitory frown, disapproval over what people did, or thought, or perhaps thought about doing. And even now, as he sat like a convicted man awaiting his sentence, he showed nothing of his emotion.

  “Yes,” said Pat. “I’ve written to St Andrews and told them that I don’t want the place next month. They’ve said that’s fine.”

  “Fine,” echoed Dr Macgregor faintly. But how could it be fine? How could she turn down the offer from that marvellous place, with all that fun and all that student nonsense, and Raisin Week and Kate Kennedy and all those things? To turn that down before one had even sampled it was surely to turn your back on happiness.

  “I’ve decided to go to Edinburgh University instead,” went on Pat. “I’ve been in touch with the people in George Square and they say I can transfer my St Andrews place to them. So that’s what I’m going to do. Philosophy and English.”

  For a moment Dr Macgregor said nothing. He looked down at his shoes and saw, as if for the first time, the pattern of the brogue. And then he looked up and glanced at his daughter, who was watching him, as if waiting for his reaction.

  “You’re not cross with me, are you?” said Pat. “I know I’ve messed you around with the two gap years and now this change of plans. You aren’t cross with me?”

  He reached out and placed his hand briefly on hers, and then moved his hand back.

  “Cross is the last thing I am,” he said, and then burst out laughing. “Does that sound odd to you? Rather like the word order of a German or Yiddish speaker speaking English? They say things like, ‘Happy I’m not,’ don’t they? Remember the Katzenjammer Kids?”

  Of course she didn’t. Nor did she know about Max und Morris nor Dagwood and Blondie, he suspected–those strange denizens of that curious nowhere world of the cartoon strips–although she did know about Oor Wullie and the Broons. Where exactly was that world, he wondered? Dundee and Glasgow respectively, perhaps, but not exactly.

  Pat smiled. “I’m glad,” she said. “I just decided that I’m enjoying myself so much in Edinburgh that I should stay. Moving to St Andrews seemed to me to be an interruption in my life. I’ve got friends here now…”

  “And friends are so important,” interrupted her father, trying to think of which friends she had in mind, and trying all the time to control his wild, exuberant joy. There were school friends, of course; the people she had been with at the Academy during the last two years of her high school education. He knew that she kept in touch with them, but were those particular friendships strong enough to keep her in Edinburgh? Many of them had themselves gone off to university elsewhere, to Cambridge in one or two cases, or to Aberdeen or Glasgow. Was there a boy, perhaps? There was that young man in the flat in Scotland Street, Bruce Anderson; she had obviously been keen on him but had thought better of it. What about Matthew, for whom she worked at the gallery? Was he the attraction? He might speculate, but any results of his speculation would not matter in the slightest. The important thing was that she was not going to Australia.

  “Matthew says that I can continue to work part-time at his gallery,” Pat went on. “I can do some mornings for him and Saturdays too. He says…” She paused. Modesty might have prevented her from continuing, but she wanted to share with her father the compliment that Matthew had passed. “I hope you don’t think I’m boasting, but Matthew says that I have an eye for art and that the only way in which he thinks he can keep the gallery going is by having me there.”

  “That’s good of him,” said her father, thinking, but not saying, dependence: weak male, looking for somebody to look after him. “Mind you, I’m not surprised. You’ve always been good at art. You’re good at everything, you know.”

  She glanced at him sideways, reproving him for the compliment, which had been overheard at a neighbouring table and had led to suppressed smiles. “And I think that I’ll stay in Scotland Street,” she went on. “It’s an exciting place, you know. There are all sorts of interesting people who live down there. I like it.”

  “And you can put up with Bruce?”

  “I can put up with him. He keeps to himself these days. He lost his job, you know, and he wants to do something else. He spends a lot of his time reading up about wine. I think he fancies himself as a wine merchant–or something of the sort.”

  Dr Macgregor nodded. He had not met Bruce, and had no real interest in meeting him. He was accustomed to psychopaths, to those whose selfishness was so profound that they tipped over into a clinical category; he was patient with neurotics and depressives and those with schizoid disorders; but he could not abide narcissists. From what his daughter had told him of Bruce, he was a classic narcissist: the looking in mirrors, the preening, the delight in hair gel–all of this was pure narcissism. And the problem was that there was a positive epidemic of narcissism, encouraged by commercial manipulation and by the shallow values of Hollywood films. And interestingly enough, the real growth area was male narcissism. Young men were encouraged to dwell on themselves; to gaze at photographs of other young men, looking back at them as from the mirror. They loved this. Edinburgh was full of them.

  Hundreds of them, thousands, attended to by an army of hair-stylists, and outfitters. Yes, it was a profound social pathology. Reality television, which turned its eye on people who were doing nothing but being themselves, was the perfect expression of this trend. Let’s look at ourselves, it said. Aren’t we fascinating?

  Dr Macgregor found himself thinking these thoughts, but stopped himself. It was true, of course, there was an abnormal level of narcissism in our society, but it did not do, he told himself, to spend too much time going on about it. Society changed. Narcissism was about love, ultimately, even if only love of self. And that was better than hate. By and large, Hate, of all the tempting gods, was the unhappiest today. He had his recruits, naturally, but they were relatively few, and vilified. Did it matter if young men thought of fashion and hair gel when, not all that many years ago, their thoughts had tended to turn to war and flags and the grim partisanship of the football terrace?

  4. On the Way Back to Scotland Street

  Pat left the Canny Man’s and walked back up Morningside Road. She was accompanied, as far as Church Hill Place, by her father, who said goodbye to her and turned off for home, elated by the news she had given him. She toyed with the idea of a bus, but it was a fine, late August afternoon and she decided to walk all the way back to Scotland Street. She was in no hurry to be anywhere. In fact it occurred to her that between then–Saturday afternoon–and the coming Monday morning, when she was due at the gallery, it made no difference at all where she was. She had nothing planned. She was free.

  It was the final week of the Festival, and of its burgeoning, undisciplined child, the Festival Fringe. In a corner of the Meadows, under the shadow of the University Library, a large tent had been pitched, hosting an itinerant Polish circus, the Great Circus of Krakow. A matinée performance was i
n progress and she heard a burst of applause from within the tent, and then laughter. As the laughter died down, a small brass band inside the tent struck up, playing at the frenzied pace that circus music seemed to like, a breathless, hurried march that accompanied what feats within? A troop of performing dogs? No longer allowed, she thought; frowned upon by protesters who had successfully lobbied the Council, although everybody knew that the one thing which dogs liked to do was to perform. Was it demeaning to dogs to be made to jump through hoops and stand on their hind legs and push prams? Making a lion jump through a hoop was one thing–that was undoubtedly cruel–but could the objectors not see the distinction between a dog and a lion? Dogs are in on our human silliness; lions are not.

  She paused, standing underneath a tree, watching the sides of the circus tent move slightly in the breeze. To its side stood a row of large motor caravans and a small catering van. A door suddenly opened in the side of one of the vans and a man tumbled out, as if pushed from within. Or so it seemed to Pat, who saw him fall, as if to regain his balance, and then convert the fall into the most extraordinary gymnastic display. He rolled forward, somersaulted, stood on his hands, his legs pointed skywards, and then flipped over onto his feet. The entire manoeuvre took less than a couple of seconds, and there he was, standing only a few yards away from her, facing her. He seemed as surprised to see her as she was him, and for a moment they stared at one another, speechless. She saw that he was wearing what must have been his performing outfit–a body-hugging stocking that covered him, shoulder to toe, in a glittery, red material.

  He smiled at her and she saw that he had perfectly regular teeth, polished high white. She was struck by this smile, and would have been less so had he opened his mouth to a vista of dental disaster. Somehow that was what one expected of the circus; external glitter, but decay and pain within.

  The performer took a few steps back, still looking at Pat and holding her gaze. Then, reaching behind him, but still facing her, he opened the door in the van which had slammed shut behind his undignified exit.

  “Please?” he said to her. “Coffee? Or maybe a glass of wine?”

  He gestured to the interior, which was lit, but only faintly. Pat made out a table and a rail of bright outfits similar to the one he was wearing. At the side of the table were a pair of high-heel boots and a small side-drum.

  He repeated his offer, bowing as he did so, the spandex outfit spreading obligingly to accommodate the rippling of muscles which the manoeuvre involved.

  Pat hesitated. He had recovered from his bow and was standing straight, but was slightly shorter than she was, and she noticed that he now raised himself on his toes for the extra height, effortlessly, as might a ballet dancer, but spotted by her, and it was this that broke the sudden hypnotic spell which had fallen upon her.

  She laughed. “No thank you,” she said, realising that the addition of the thank-you marked her out for what she was–and her Edinburgh origins.

  He took her refusal in good spirit. “God be with you,” he said, and jumped back into the van. The door closed, and the moment was lost. Pat thought, as she walked away: I shall never be invited again into the living quarters of a Polish circus performer, and she laughed at the idea. Had she gone, then her life might have been different. She might have gone off with the circus, and married him in a dark church in Krakow, and borne the children of the gymnast, tiny, lithe children who would have been taught to leap from her lap and turn somersaults in the bath. And what was more, she thought: I might have become a Catholic.

  It took her forty minutes to reach Scotland Street, as there were other Fringe performers to watch as she made her way down the hill. On the steps behind the National Gallery, she stopped for a moment while a group of students enacted a scene from Macbeth, a taster of their show that evening. There was an element of desperation in their performance, which suggested that they were at the end of an unrewarding stint on the Fringe. Lady Macbeth upbraided her husband, a tall young man with the residue of teenage acne about his chin. Pat watched for a few minutes, trapped in a small audience. But then her chance to leave came: she had spotted Domenica Macdonald, her neighbour from across the landing at Scotland Street, and she could slip away to join her. Domenica was on the edge of a growing crowd that was surrounding a man dressed as Punchinello and who was about to swallow a sword. The performer held the sword above his upturned mouth and it glinted in the afternoon sunlight.

  “Domenica,” she whispered. “Is he really going to do that?”

  Domenica turned and smiled warmly. “How nice to see you,” she said.

  “I have always loved a spectacle, and there are spectacles galore at the moment. Of course he’s going to swallow it. And then we shall all applaud. We are very vulgar at heart, you know. We love this sort of thing. All of us. We can’t resist it. Behind us in the gallery are all the treasures of Western art, as assembled for us by Sir Timothy Clifford, and we choose instead to watch a man swallowing a sword. Isn’t that peculiar?”

  Pat nodded. It was very peculiar; of course it was; she began to say this, and then she stopped. Wasn’t that Sir Timothy Clifford himself, on the other side of the crowd, watching the sword swallower? She nudged Domenica, who looked in the direction in which Pat was pointing, and inclined her head in affirmation.

  “He appreciates a bit of a spectacle,” Domenica said. “And why not? He’s put on such wonderful shows in the gallery. Besides, art is theatre, is it not–and theatre art?”

  5. All Downhill from Here

  The sword was swallowed, and regurgitated, as had been expected. There were gasps, and then applause. Many of those present expressed the view that they would not like to try that–no thank you!–and Sir Timothy was heard to mutter something about Titian before he retreated into his gallery. Domenica, who had seen considerably more entertaining spectacles during her time in India, turned to Pat and said: “Such feats, without a religious dimension, are less impressive, I feel, than those that allude to the sacred. What’s the point of swallowing a sword if one gives the process no spiritual significance?”

  Pat was puzzled by this remark, and as they crossed Princes Street to begin the walk back down the hill, she asked Domenica to explain.

  “In India, we used to see such things from time to time,” Domenica said. “We lived in Kerala, in the Christian south, but Hindu holy men used to pop down from time to time to remind us of the old gods. Some of these were fakirs, who would walk across beds of hot coals or swallow fire, or whatever. They did this to show that spirituality could conquer the body–could overcome the material world. And you could offer the whole thing up to the glory of the gods, which gave it a religious point. But our sword swallower on the Mound won’t have any of that in mind, I’m afraid. Mere spectacle.”

  Pat felt that she could add little to this. She had never been to India, and she knew nothing about Hinduism, or indeed about many of the other topics on which Domenica seemed to have a view. And yet she was open-minded enough to know that she did not know, and she was a listener. That was her gift.

  The streets were crowded with Festival visitors, and their progress down Dundas Street was slow, interrupted by knots of people standing in the middle of the pavement, some, their eyes glazed, in a state of cultural indigestion, some consulting maps and programmes. Domenica gave directions to a puzzled Japanese couple and bowed politely at the end of her explanation, setting off a sequence of further bows and inclinations of the head.

  “They find us so rude, in general,” she said. “A few bows here and there serve to redress matters.” She paused for a moment. “And we smell a little rancid to them, you know. They are so hygienic, with their steam baths and so on. However much we wash it seems we have this slight smell, I understand, even Edinburgh people, would you believe? Heaven knows what they think of those parts of the country where they aren’t too attentive to bathing requirements.”

  Pat smiled. This was vintage Domenica. Nobody else of her acquaintance would spe
ak like this, and she found it curiously refreshing. Her own generation was too timid–beaten into compliance with a set of imposed views.

  She looked about her, almost furtively. “And which parts would those be?” she asked.