44 Scotland Street - Alexander McCall Smith [105]
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the Old Town spread out beneath her – the dome of the Old College with its torch-carrying Golden Boy; the domestic jumble of Old Town roofs, the spires of the various spiky kirks – such beauty, illuminated at that very moment by shafts of light from breaks in the cloud. This was beauty of the order encountered in Siena or Florence, beauty that caused a soaring of the spirit, a gasp of the soul.
It was a privilege to be a citizen of such a place, thought Domenica. The beauty of the New Town had been created by those who believed in the physical embodiment, in stone and glass and slate, of order, of reason, and this had found expression in architectural regularity. And yet surely it was more than a matter of mere proportion; for the regular features of the male film star, the broad forehead, the neatly-nicked chin, the equal eyebrows, are actually rather repulsive – or so at least Domenica thought. Those regularly-featured Hollywood males made her feel slightly nauseous; and the same could be said for their female equivalents, hardly intellectuals they. These people had regular features but were actually ugly because they tended to be so completely vacuous. Regularity without some metaphysical value behind it, some beauty of soul or character, was more disappointing – and indeed repulsive – than the honestly haphazard, the humanly messy. It was more disappointing because it promised something that was not there: it should engage the soul, but did not. It was shallow and meretricious. So Mother Teresa of Calcutta, with her weepy eyes and her lined face, was infinitely more beautiful than . . .? Than the current icons of feminine beauty? Than that woman who called herself Madonna (whoever she was)? Of course Mother Teresa was more beautiful – infinitely so. Only a culture with a thoroughly upside-down sense of values could think otherwise. And that, mused Domenica ruefully, is precisely the sort of culture we have become. Now that girl, Pat, her new neighbour whom she was getting to know rather better; she had harmonious features, a reasonably pretty face one might say, but was far more beautiful than girls who might appear to be more attractive. That was because Pat had character, had a depth of moral personality that ostensibly more 220
A Meeting on the Stair
glamorous girls almost always lacked. And Bruce? Domenica herself had described him as beautiful in her recent conversation with Pat, but was that strictly true? Did Bruce have anything of substance behind his Greek-god features? That was difficult to say. He was not vacuous; he was irritating. So at least there was something there. Domenica stepped out of her car and began to make her way along the pavement to the door of No. 44. The subject of beauty would be shelved for the time being, she decided, as she now had to think about lunch. There was some mozzarella in the fridge, and that would go rather nicely with tomatoes. But did she have any basil? Probably not, but then basil was not essential. There were some who lived entirely without basil, she reflected; some who had never heard of it; and smiled at the thought, absurd though it was, like a line from the pen of Barbara Pym. She opened the front door and began to climb up the stone steps. They were well-trodden steps, and the stone had been worn away in the middle so that the treads were uneven. This did not matter, of course, because these