Espresso Tales - Alexander Hanchett Smith [3]
– 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 4
Letting Go
poem about seeing people coming out of the NB Grill and getting into what he called a muckle great municipal RollsRoyce. 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.
Letting Go
5
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