What people wanted was community, thought Domenica, and you did not have to be a social anthropologist, as she was, to work that out. They wanted to live somewhere definite, built on a human scale and with decency; they wanted to be relieved of want and uncertainty, insofar as was possible; they wanted to belong, to have an identity—to know who they were and where they were from. And throughout Scottish history there had been those who would take that away from them, or deny its possibility. There had been community, a long time ago, but land grabs and clearances had shattered that; then planners had disrupted people again, moving them to new towns; and now globalization was doing its work to destroy our remaining sense of the local. She sighed. There were no answers, it seemed; or no easy ones, at any rate. Those who came up with easy answers, the panaceas to all our problems, were naïve or mendacious.

  With the new clothes hidden, she returned to the kitchen, where Angus was making tea.

  “I saw Big Lou,” Domenica. “And there’s bad news, I’m afraid.”

  Angus looked up sharply. Bad news meant cancer.

  “Oh my God,” he said.

  “No, not a health thing,” Domenica said quickly. “But she’s sold the business.”

  Angus drew in his breath, aghast at what Domenica had said. Big Lou was a constant in everybody’s life. They loved her and everything she stood for. This simply could not be.

  43

  Unearned Happiness

  As he drove the car up the winding drive of his house at Nine Mile Burn, Matthew reflected on his good fortune. Here he was in his late twenties with a business of his own, an attractive wife, a house, and three boisterous, healthy sons—and he had earned it all by dint of…He stopped there. No, that was the whole point: he had not earned any of this, not really, with the exception, perhaps, of Elspeth and the boys, although he was not sure if it was appropriate to talk of earning, or deserving, one’s family.

  All you had to do to get a wife or a husband was to meet the other person, be reasonably nice to him or her, and then propose. For some, that might involve effort and concomitant achievement, but for others it was hardly a major battle. Effort would be most required, Matthew thought, if you had to work at being acceptable to the person you were hoping to marry; if you had major character defects, for instance, that you had to suppress in order to be thought suitable. You earned your partner in such circumstances by the effort of appearing to be nicer than you really were. But he had not had to do any of that—not that he was smug about how desirable he might be to anybody. He was nothing special—he knew that—but at least he was not unduly unpleasant in any conspicuous way. He was, he had always felt, pretty average.

  It was luck, Matthew thought, that had brought him Elspeth. He had met her at a difficult point in her life, when she had been suspended from her teaching position for pinching the ear of a supremely irritating child, Olive. There was no excuse for pinching a child’s ear, but in Elspeth’s case it was possible to see why a teacher might be pushed into pinching that particular ear. Olive, who was in the same class as Bertie, was, Matthew believed, a supremely bossy little girl who had tormented the poor boy by diagnosing him with her Junior Nurse Kit. Olive had somehow added a real syringe to the kit’s armamentarium, and had used this to take a blood sample from Bertie. It was on the basis of this blood sample that she had told him that he was suffering from leprosy.

  Elspeth had told Olive that the old test for leprosy was to see whether a person had lost sensation in the ear lobe. And at that point, in her anger over Olive’s sheer nastiness, she had pinched her ear to demonstrate the test. Her pleasure matched Olive’s discomfort; some ears just ask to be pinched, and Olive’s was one of them. But that was no excuse, of course, and the fact that Olive richly deserved this recrimination could not prevent the professional opprobrium into which Elspeth was plunged. Fortunately, Matthew was there to pick up the pieces—fortunately both for Elspeth and for him. They were happy together, and when the triplets arrived they were happier still, although busier, of course.

  As for the business and the house, neither of these could possibly be considered the result of Matthew’s own efforts. His father, who had extensive commercial interests, was a self-made man by any standards. He had started his career running a small building supplies firm and built it up through sheer hard work and business acumen. He could certainly say that he had earned everything, and would have preferred Matthew to be able to do the same. Unfortunately, Matthew’s business instincts were less acute than his father’s, and his earlier efforts had proved fruitless. Those failures had led to a resigned acceptance by his father that he should be given the chance to buy the gallery when it came on the market. To Matthew’s father, the gallery would provide Matthew with something to do without risking too much capital and without stretching his son’s very modest business talents too far. The result of this was that Matthew not only owned the business, but also the premises it occupied. There was, in addition, no debt, and a stash of working capital that made it possible to buy paintings at auction and sell them on at a suitable profit. It was not really a business model that could fail all that easily.

  Then there was the house. Most young couples were burdened with mortgages, and these arrangements would remain around their necks for the first twenty-five years of their marriage. Inflation might reduce the proportion of monthly income that went toward house repayments, but in times of low inflation that effect would be barely discernible. Matthew and Elspeth had none of that to consider: his father’s generosity had ensured that they owned the house at Nine Mile Burn outright. So here, once again, was something that Matthew could not say he had in any way earned.

  Even the car he drove down the drive that evening was a gift from his father, and would have been out of reach of most young men in their late twenties. This was a British-racing-green Range Rover, complete with heated seats and heated steering wheel. It was ideal for transporting triplets and the impedimenta that triplets required, but it was far more luxurious than the cars driven by any of their friends, who made do with much more modest vehicles.

  Matthew sighed. A less sensitive person might not have been bothered by any of this, but he was very much aware of the contrast between his life and the lives led by those without his advantages. He felt, too, that things you had not earned probably gave you less satisfaction than those for which you had needed to work hard. So he wondered whether there was something he had missed, and whether, in years to come, by not having had to scrimp and save he would feel that he had lost out on a valuable experience.

  These thoughts were in his mind as he parked the car in front of the house, but he had dispelled them by the time he walked in through the front door. He was looking forward to the evening that lay ahead. He would see the boys for bathtime, which was always a riotous time of shouts and splashing, and afterwards he would read a story to them. That was always a good time for him, as the bottle of warmed milk which each boy nursed while they cuddled up to him seemed to induce calm. The boys smelled good too then—of soap, of Johnson & Johnson’s Baby Shampoo, of warm milk and flannelette pajamas—and the world, such a harsh and unhappy place at times, seemed somehow less so. The blessing of evening, thought Matthew; of home, and family, and the love that came with these things.

  But when he went into the kitchen, he saw that Elspeth had been crying. She had evidently tried to conceal the fact, but there was smudged makeup, and smudged makeup spoke as eloquently as anything ever could of unhappiness beneath the veneer.

  44

  Being Simpatico

  Matthew had always found it difficult to cope with tears. Others might be able to endure the visible dissolution that tears involved—the misting over of the eyes, the quivering of the lips, the display of weakness and vulnerability that was our real human lot, no matter how we covered ourselves with the clothing of certainty and conviction. We were, when all was said and done, children lost in the wood, and to break into tears was the most understandable of reactions, the most quintessentially human one too.

  He went straight to Elspeth’s side. “Darling, you’ve been crying.”

  She shook her head. “No.”

  “But you have…you have.”

  She turned away, wiping at her eyes with the sleeve of her blouse. On the white linen there were now streaks of mascara; she rubbed at those, making them worse.

  Matthew put an arm about her. “Has something happened?”

  “No,” she said. And then, struggling to smile, she turned to face him. “And you? What about your day?”

  He shrugged. He knew, from past experience, that he would not be able to get out of her what it was that had brought on her tears. Elspeth was stoic in these matters, and the most he could hope for would be some hint, obliquely put, that would throw light on the cause of her distress. He had a vague idea that it was something to do with being stuck out at Nine Mile Burn all by herself—or, if not entirely alone, with the company only of three toddlers and a young au-pair boy who, even if charismatic, was still only nineteen. Elspeth had always liked having somebody to talk to, but there were limits to the topics one could discuss with the triplets; James was another matter, of course. He was prepared to listen, and had an ability, rare in one of his age, to relate to somebody older. He was simpatico, Elspeth had decided. That was the simplest way of putting it: simpatico.

  And Matthew was simpatico, too, she thought, even if not quite as simpatico as was James. Many men were completely non-simpatico, simply because they were masculine. Was that incompatible with being simpatico, she wondered; or was it unfair to men, who were inevitably masculine, to say that their basic classification, so to speak, was inherently non-simpatico? Why should masculinity be thoughtless or indifferent to the feelings of others? There were plenty of men, she felt, who did not want to be hard-hearted or unfeeling; there were plenty of men who felt the pain of others, who wanted to do something about it, who wanted to comfort those in need of comfort. Yet there were rather more, she suspected, who did not. Bruce Anderson, for example, with his preening and his view of women as playthings—he was definitely not simpatico. Nor was the man in the hardware store she sometimes went to, who spoke harshly to his wife; nor that man from Matthew’s year at the Academy who had become a fund manager and could talk only of money and the stock exchange and expensive German cars with loud exhaust systems. She called him Porsche, because it seemed so much more fitting a name for him than his real name; Porsche was not simpatico in any sense. He was masculine in a turbo-charged, V8 sort of way—if V8 engines still existed, which Elspeth was not sure about. That was a question that no simpatico man could be expected to answer; a man who knew whether V8 engines still existed would, by the very fact of that knowledge, not be simpatico. But no, she told herself, that’s not right—she had known a mechanic who was the most sympathetic of men, a faithful follower of Scottish Ballet who was as capable of being moved by the Dying Swan as he was by the sound of a finely tuned V8 engine—if such things still existed, of course.

  Now, having composed herself, she looked at her watch. “What time was Pat…”

  He did not allow her to complete her question. “I hope you don’t…”

  “Mind? Why should I mind?” Elspeth had read somewhere that you should never make your spouse feel guilty, as that would only exacerbate any underlying problems in the marriage.

  “It’s just that I thought you might…well, resent Pat in some way. You know how it is.”

  Elspeth looked away. “Why would I resent her?” Of course she resented Pat. What woman would not resent her husband’s one-time girlfriend, especially when she continued to work for him? Matthew and Pat talked, about art and heaven knows what else, while she sat out there at Nine Mile Burn and looked at the hills in the distance and made mashed potatoes for the triplets. Of course she would resent her.

  Matthew echoed her question. “Why would you resent her?” He shrugged. “I have no idea. It’s just that when I mention her, you seem to breathe differently.”

  Elspeth spun around. “Breathe differently? What do you mean—breathe differently?”

  “Your nostrils,” said Matthew. “They seem to be pinched. You pull them in somehow.”

  Elspeth glared at him. “And how exactly do you pull in your nostrils? Perhaps you could show me.”

  Matthew took a deep breath, and felt his nostrils constrict and close. “Like that,” he said.

  For a few moments Elspeth said nothing. Then, turning away once more, she said, “Matthew, what about your own nose? What about it?”

  He looked at her blankly. “My nose?”

  “Yes,” she said, clearly struggling to keep her voice even. “Your nose, Matthew. Have you ever stopped to consider it? I mean, really think about it?”

  Matthew’s hand went up to his nose. There had never been anything wrong with it, as far as he could tell. He had not thought about it very much, and now, for the first time, he felt doubts about it.

  “You should tell me what you mean,” he said. “You can’t just say to somebody that there’s something wrong with their nose and then leave it at that.”

  Elspeth shook her head. “But I didn’t say there was anything wrong with it. All I said was that you should perhaps think about it. That’s quite different, you know.”

  This conversation was interrupted by the sound of the doorbell. In the country, few people bothered with doorbells, and Matthew had even forgotten that they had one. So he said, “What’s that bell?”

  Elspeth dabbed again at her eyes with her handkerchief. “Your friend,” she said. “Your dinner guest.”

  Matthew sighed. “Do you know something, Elspeth?” he said. “Sometimes I wonder why we got married.”

  He gasped at his own words, which were so completely unexpected, even by him; and immediately he wanted to snatch them back from the air, where it seemed to him they were hanging, in all their unkindness, like bursts of aerial flak. But it was too late; some words, and usually the wrong ones, seem chiselled in stone the moment they are uttered. Elspeth turned away. “Do you?” she muttered.

  He pleaded with her. “No, my darling, no. No. I don’t think that at all. I don’t.”

  “Then why did you say it?”

  “Because I’m…because I’m all over the place, and I don’t think about what I’m saying and it just comes out. Just like that.”

  45

  A Gift of Kiwis

  There was no reason why Pat should have thought she was coming upon a scene of domestic disharmony when she arrived at the house in Nine Mile Burn. On the contrary, she was greeted at the door by a smiling Matthew, who ushered her into the rather untidy hall—it was, after all, a house inhabited by young triplets—where she hung her coat and put down the small holdall she had carried with her on the bus from Edinburgh.

  “Kiwi fruit,” she said, taking a brown paper bag out of the holdall. “I saw them in the greengrocer’s near the King’s Theatre. You know the one?”

  “I’ve walked past it,” said Matthew, peering into the bag.

  “He has all sorts of exotic fruit there,” said Pat. “And vegetables too—I mean, exotic vegetables—not that kiwi fruit are exotic any longer.”

  “We like them,” said Matthew. “Thank you. Elspeth will be really pleased. She often has one for breakfast.”

  “You can eat them as you’d eat a boiled egg,” said Pat. “You can take the top off and then use a spoon.”

  “I peel them,” said Matthew. “I don’t like the little hairs.”

  “Nobody likes hairy food,” said Pat.

  Matthew thought of globe artichokes. “What about artichokes—the aboveground ones? You know, the ones that look like thistles? They have all those hairs under the thick bit that you eat. Thousands of little hairs.”

  “But you’re not meant to eat that bit,” said Pat.

  “No, of course not. I was just wondering whether you’d describe them as hairy food, that’s all.”

  Pat frowned. “Possibly. But what about pork? Sometimes pork is a bit hairy. You know—the crackling bit has hairs on it.” She paused. “I used to love crackling. My father always gave me his, if we had pork for dinner. He would take his crackling and put it on my plate.”

  “Mine gave me his chicken skin,” said Matthew. “He knew I loved it.”

  For a moment, both of them were silent at their respective memories. Pork, thought Pat, and, for his part, Matthew thought: the act of nourishment. That most simple transaction between parent and child, into which so much love was poured, so simply, so unquestioningly. And then he remembered what he had said to Elspeth, and he felt a sharp stab of remorse.

  “I’ll take these through to Elspeth,” he said. “She’s in the kitchen. Do you want to go along and see the kids? They’re still up and about—somewhere down there.” He waved in the direction of the corridor that led to the boys’ rooms.

  Pat went off, and Matthew made his way back into the kitchen. Elspeth was looking for something in a cupboard, and she turned around, looked briefly at Matthew, and then continued with her search.