44 Scotland Street - Alexander McCall Smith [123]
As he escorted Pat out of the Cumberland Bar, Angus Lordie was aware that she was feeling miserable. One with less psychological insight than he might have attempted to cheer her up with distracting remarks, or with observations on the fact that there were plenty of other young men. But he knew what it was to love without hope, and knew that the only way to deal with that bleak state was to look one’s unhappiness in the face. And it was important, he thought, to understand that the last thing that the unhappy wish to be reminded of is the greater unhappiness of others. Telling a person with toothache that there are others with greater toothache than their own was no help at all.
So he said to Pat, as they left the Cumberland “Yes, it’s very uncomfortable, isn’t it? You want him and he doesn’t want you
– because he’s got another girl. Oh yes. Very unfortunate. And, of course, even if he didn’t have her, he might not want you anyway.”
Pat did not consider this helpful and was about to tell him that she did not want to talk about it. But he continued. “I can understand what you see in him, you know. I can understand the attraction of male beauty. I’m an artist, and I know what beauty is all about. That beautiful young man has worked a spell on you. That’s what beauty does. We see it and it puts a spell on us. It’s most extraordinary. We want to merge ourselves with it. We want to possess it. We want to be it. You want to be that young man, you know. That’s what you want.”
Pat listened in astonishment as they made their way round Poetry of the Tang Dynasty
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Drummond Place towards the top of Scotland Street. As they walked past the house of the late Sydney Goodsir Smith, makar, Angus Lordie looked up at the empty windows and gave a salute.
“I like to acknowledge Sydney’s shade,” he said. “Guidnicht, then, for the nou, Li Po/ In the Blythefu Hills of Tien-Mu. ” He turned to Pat. “Those lovely lines are by Sydney, God rest his great rambunctious soul. He wrote a lovely poem, addressed to the Chinese poet, Li Po, about an evening’s goings-on in an Edinburgh bar, a cheerie howf, peopled by a crousi companie o’
philosophers and tinks. What a marvellous picture! And all this going on while the world in its daith-dance/ skudder and spun/ in the haar and wind o space and time.”
He stopped and looked down at his dog. “Do you think this is awful nonsense, Cyril? Will you tell Pat that I don’t always go on like this, but that sometimes . . . well sometimes it just seems the right thing to do. Will you tell her that, Cyril?”
Cyril stared at his master and then turned to look up at Pat. He winked.
“There,” said Angus Lordie. “Cyril would have got on very well with Sydney. And he does like to hear about the Chinese poets too, although he knows that the Chinese eat dogs – a practice of which Cyril scarcely approves, tolerant though he is of most other human foibles. A dog has to draw a line.”
“Do you enjoy Chinese poetry, Pat? No. I suppose that you’ve never had the pleasure. You should try it, you know. The Arthur Waley translations. These Chinese poets wrote wonderful pieces about the pleasure of sitting on the shore of their rivers and waiting for boats to arrive. Nothing much else happens in Chinese poetry, but then does one want much to happen in poetry? I rather think not.”
They turned down Scotland Street, walking slowly in order to allow Cyril to sniff at every kerbstone and lamp-post.
“It’s really rather easy to write eighth-century Chinese poetry,”
said Angus Lordie. “In English, of course. It requires little effort, I find.”
“Make one up now,” said Pat. “Go on. If you say it’s so easy.”
Angus