Love Over Scotland - Alexander Hanchett Smith [113]
the spirit. If things were to change, then the culture itself must look in the mirror and see what rearrangement was required in its own psyche. It had to become more feminine. It had to look at the national disgrace of alcoholic over-indulgence. It had to stop the self-congratulation and the smugness. It had to realise that we had almost entirely squandered our moral capital, built up by generations of people who had striven to lead good lives; capital so quickly lost to selfishness and discourtesy. It had to admit that we had failed badly in education and that this could only be cured by restoring the respect due to teachers and cajoling parents into doing their part to discipline and educate their ill-mannered children. It had to think sideways, and up and down, and round the corner. It had to open its mind. This train of thought had started with Angus, who had re-issued his invitation for dinner for that evening. She had accepted, although she would rather have stayed at home and continued to write about her Scottish saints and their difficult lives. She did not think that the acquaintanceship with Angus would go anywhere. It was curious, was it not, that people expected those who were by themselves to be looking for somebody else. There were plenty of people – and she was one – who rather relished being on their own. If she met a man who interested her – and, thinking over the last year, she found it difficult to bring any such man to mind
– then she might be prepared to contemplate an affair, or should she call it an involvement? The word “affair” was an odd one. It had suggestions of the illicit about it. And it implied the existence of a terminus: affairs were not meant to last. That, she thought, was why Graham Greene was right in that title of his, The End of the Affair. There was a sad inevitability about that. Antonia turned away from the window and smiled. Graham Greene! That was Angus Lordie’s problem. He was a Graham Greene-ish character, just like that dentist who had run out of gas and went down to the jetty every day to see if the boat would bring him new supplies. Dentists on jetties; whisky priests; seedy colonial officials; and now a failed portrait painter in the unfashionable end of the Edinburgh New Town. C’est ça! Greeneland. 76. Brunello di Montalcino
Had he known that Antonia was mentally comparing him to a character from a Graham Greene novel, Angus Lordie’s existing dislike of his prospective guest would have doubled, or quadrupled perhaps. And had he known that a literary comparison was being made, he would himself have sought comparisons of his own. There she was, writing her novel in Domenica’s flat, not doing anything of importance really. And the novel – if it existed at all – might never be published anyway. Plenty of people were writing novels; in fact, if one did a survey in the street, half of Edinburgh was writing a novel, and this meant that there really weren’t enough characters to go round. Unless, of course, one wrote about people who were themselves writing novels. And what would the novels that these fictional characters were writing be about? Well, they would be novels about people writing novels. Angus Lordie stood in his kitchen, his blue and white striped apron tied about his waist, contemplating the appetising collection of ingredients he had bought from Valvona & Crolla. Even if he was not looking forward to receiving Antonia, he was certainly looking forward to the experience of cooking the meal. He glanced at his watch; it was now five o’clock, which meant that it would be roughly three hours before Antonia arrived (provided, he thought, that she knew that an invitation for seventhirty meant ten to eight). There were always people who did not understand this, and who arrived on time, but he did not think Antonia would be one of these. So he had his three hours to prepare the meal.
He had planned the menu carefully. They