1. Semiotics, Pubs, Decisions
It was summer. The forward movement of the year, so tentative in the early months of spring, now seemed quite relentless. The longest day, which always seemed to arrive indecently early, had passed in a bluster of wind and light rain, but had been followed by a glorious burst of warmth that penetrated the very stones of Edinburgh.
Out on the pavements, small clusters of tables and chairs appeared here and there, populated by knots of people who could hardly believe that they were sitting outside, in Scotland, in late summer. All of them knew that this simply could not last. September was not far off, and after that, as was well-known to all but the most confused, was October - and darkness. And Scottish weather, true to its cultural traditions, made one thing abundantly clear: you paid for what you enjoyed, and you usually paid quite promptly. This was a principle which was inevitably observed by nature in Scotland. That vista of mountains and sea lochs was all very well, but what was that coming up behind you? A cloud of midges.
Pat Macgregor walked past just such café-hedonists on her way back to Scotland Street. She had crossed the town on foot earlier that day to have lunch with her father - her mother was still away, this time visiting another troublesome sister in Forfar - and her father had invited her for Saturday lunch in the Canny Man's on Morningside Road. This was a curious place, an Edinburgh institution, with its cluttered shelves of non-sequitur objects and its numerous pictures. And, like the trophies on the walls, the denizens of the place had more than passing historical or aesthetic interest about them. Here one might on a Saturday afternoon meet a well-known raconteur enjoying a glass of beer with an old friend, or, very occasionally, one might spot Ramsey Dunbarton, from the Braids, who many years ago had played the Duke of Plaza-Toro in The Gondoliers at the Church Hill Theatre (with such conspicuous success).
There was no such interest that day. A mousy-looking man in a blue suit sat silently in a corner with a woman companion; the silence that reigned between them being broken only by the occasional sigh by one or other of them. He looked steadfastly down at the menu of open sandwiches, as if defeated by the choice and by life; her gaze moved about - out of the window, at the small slice of sky between the Morningside Road tenements, at the barman polishing glasses, at the tiles on the floor.
As she waited for her father to arrive, Pat found herself wondering at the road which had brought them to this arid point - a lifetime of small talk, perhaps, that had simply run out of steam; or perhaps this is what came of being married. Surely not, she thought; her own parents were still able to look at one another and find at least something to say, although often there was a formality in their conversation that made her uncomfortable - as if they were talking a language, like court Japanese, that imposed heavily on them to be correct.
In Pat's company, her father seemed more comfortable. Leaning back in the bench seat at the Canny Man's while he perused the menu, his conversation took its usual course, moving, by easy association, from topic to topic.
"This is, of course, the Canny Man's," he observed. "You'll notice that the sign outside says something quite different. The Volunteer Arms. But everybody - or everybody in the know, that is - calls it the Canny Man's. And that pub down on the way to Slateford is called the Gravediggers, although the sign outside says Athletic Arms. These are verbal tests, you see. Designed to distinguish."
Pat looked at him blankly. Her father was intelligible, but not all the time.
"These tests are designed to exclude others from the discourse - just as the word discourse itself is designed to do. These words are intended to say to people: this is a group thing. If you don't understand what we're talking about, you're not a member of the group.
"So, if you call this place the Canny Man's it shows that you belong, that you know what's what in Edinburgh. And that, you know, is what everybody wants, underneath. We want to belong."
He laid the menu down on the table and looked at his daughter. "Do you know what the NB is?"
Pat shook her head and was about to reply that she did not; but he cut her short with a smile and a half-raised hand. "An unfair question," he said. "At least to somebody of your age. But anybody over forty would know that the NB is the North British Hotel, which is today called the Balmoral - that great pile down at the end of Princes Street. That was always the NB until they irritatingly started to call it the Balmoral. And if you really want to make a point - to tell somebody that you were here before they were - that it's your city - you can refer to it as the NB. Then at least some people won't know what you're talking about."
"But why would anybody want that?" she asked.
"Because we like our private references," he said. "And, as I've said, we want to feel that we belong. It's a simple matter of feelings of security . . ."
He smiled at his daughter. "Talking of the NB Hotel, there was a wonderful poet called Robert Garioch. He wrote poems about Edinburgh and about the city and its foibles. He wrote a poem about seeing people coming out of the NB Grill and getting into what he called a muckle great municipal Rolls-Royce. That said it all, you see. He said more about the city of his day in those few lines than many others would in fifty pages."
He paused. "But, my dear, you must be hungry. And you said that you have something to tell me. You said that you've made a momentous decision, and I'm going on about semiotics and the poetry of Robert Garioch. Is it a really important decision - really important?"
"It is," said Pat. "It really is. It's about my whole life, I think."
"You think?"
"Yes, I think so."
2. Letting Go
When his daughter had announced that she had made an important decision - an announcement casually dropped into the telephone conversation they had had before their lunch at the Canny Man's in Morningside Road - Dr Macgregor had experienced a distressingly familiar pang of dread. Ever since Pat had chosen to spend her gap year in Australia, he had been haunted by the possibility that she would leave Scotland and simply not return. Australia was a world away, and it was full of possibilities. Anybody might be forgiven for going to Melbourne or Sydney - or even to Perth - and discovering that life in those places was fuller than the one they had led before. There was more space in Australia, and more light - but it was also true that there was there an exhilarating freedom, precisely the sort of freedom that might appeal to a nineteen-year-old. And there were young men, too, who must have been an additional lure. She might meet one of these and stay forever, forgetful of the fact that vigorous Australian males within a few years mutated into homo Australiensis suburbis, into drinkers of beer and into addicts of televised footie, butterflies, thus, into caterpillars.
So he had spent an anxious ten months wondering whether she would come back to Scotland and upbraiding himself constantly about the harbouring of such fears. He knew that it was wrong for parents to think this way, and had told many of his own patients that they should stop worrying about their offspring and let go. "You must be able to let go," he had said, on countless occasions. "Your children must be allowed to lead their own lives." And even as he uttered the words he realised the awful banality of what he said; but it was difficult, was it not, to talk about letting go without sounding like a passage from Kahlil Gibran's
The Prophet, which had views on such matters. The trouble with
The Prophet was that it all sounded so profound when you first encountered it, and yet it was the sort of thing that one grew out of - just as one grew out of Jack Kerouac. It was entirely appropriate to have
The Prophet on one's shelves in one's early twenties, but not, he thought, in one's forties, or beyond. One must be prepared to let go of
The Prophet.
And although he gave this advice to people, he found it difficult - almost impossible, in fact - to practise it himself. He and his wife, Maureen, had only one child; she was their future, not only in the genetic sense, but in an emotional one too. In the case of Dr Macgregor himself, this was particularly true. He enjoyed cordial relations with Maureen, but there was a distance between them which he realised could never be bridged. It had been apparent from the earliest years of the marriage that they really shared very few interests, and had little to talk about. Her energies were focused on public causes and on her own, largely dysfunctional family. She had two difficult sisters and one difficult brother, and these siblings had duly spawned difficult and demanding children. So while she nominally lived in Edinburgh, in reality she spent a great deal of her time moving from relative to relative, coping with whatever crisis had freshly emerged. The sister in Angus - the one who drank - was particularly demanding. This manipulative sister really wanted Maureen to live with her, and to this end she longed for Maureen's widowhood, and said as much, which was tactless. There are many women whose lives would be immeasurably improved by widowhood, but one should not always point that out.
The absenteeism of his wife had its natural consequence. Pat became for him the focus of his family feeling; she was his best friend, and, to the extent that the father and daug...
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