Love Over Scotland - Alexander Hanchett Smith [116]
He went into his hall to operate the buzzer that would open the door onto the street. Then, going out onto the landing, he looked down into the stairwell.
“Come on up!” he called out, and added: “Yoo hoo!” His voice echoed rather satisfactorily against the stone walls and stairway and so he decided to call out again. “Hoots toots!” he shouted, using the exact phrase which David Balfour’s uncle used 242 Angus Impresses Antonia
when he received his nephew in the House of Shaws. Would Antonia get the reference, he wondered? Did she know her Robert Louis Stevenson? Of course, this stair was considerably safer than that up which Balfour’s uncle had sent him; there were no voids here into which one might step. So Angus shouted out to Antonia as she began her climb up to his floor: “No voids!
Don’t worry! This is not the House of Shaws!” Unfortunately, his voice was slightly slurred and he ended up shouting something which sounded rather like “This is not a house of whores”. Or so it seemed to Antonia, who paused and looked up in puzzlement. Angus met her at his doorway. “Antonia, my dear,” he said, reaching out to kiss her on the cheek. “You are very welcome. Totally welcome.”
She glanced at him sideways as she took off her coat. “I hope that I’m not late,” she said.
“But not at all,” said Angus, taking the coat. “My mother had a coat like this, you know. Virtually identical. In fact, this could be the very coat. Remarkable. Hers was in slightly better condition, I believe, but otherwise pretty similar. Amazing. Shows that fashion doesn’t change, does it?” He paused. “My mother’s dead, you see.”
Antonia smiled, but said nothing.
“On y va,” said Angus. “Let’s go through to the drawing room. You’ve met Cyril, of course. He’s my dog. Got a gold tooth, you know. Do you mind dogs, Antonia? Because if you do, I can send him out. Or should I say: Do you mind men? Because if you do, I can be sent out and Cyril can stay! Hah!”
Antonia smiled again, but more weakly.
“By the way,” said Angus, “I saw you walking round the square. I didn’t know it was you. And you know what? – I thought you were a streetwalker. I really did! Shows how wrong one can be
– at a distance.”
78. The Third Person
“Purely a social call,” said Irene as she put her head round Dr Fairbairn’s door. “I was passing by, you see, and they said downstairs that you had no patients until twelve o’clock. So I thought . . .”
Dr Hugo Fairbairn, seated behind his desk and absorbed, until then, in an unbound copy of The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, greeted her warmly.
“But there’s no need to justify yourself,” he said. “Not that you entered apologetically, of course. You’re not one of those people who announces themselves with: ‘It’s only me’.”
Irene slipped, uninvited, into the chair in front of the psychotherapist’s desk. “But does anybody really say that?” she asked.
Dr Fairbairn nodded. “They certainly do. And it shows a fairly profound lack of self-esteem. If one says: ‘It’s me’, then one is merely stating a fact. It is, indeed, you. But if you qualify it by saying that it’s only you, then you’re saying that it could be somebody more significant. Wouldn’t you agree?”
Irene did agree. She agreed with most of Dr Fairbairn’s pronouncements, and wished, in fact, that she herself had made them.
“You see,” went on Dr Fairbairn, “how we announce ourselves is very revealing. J.M. Barrie, you know, used to enter his mother’s room saying: ‘It’s not him, it’s me’. He was referring, of course, to David, his brother who died. And that shaped, and indeed explained, everything about his later life. All the psychopathology. The creation of Peter Pan. Everything.”
“Very sad,” said Irene.