Love Over Scotland - Alexander Hanchett Smith [163]
Antonia raised an eyebrow. “Oh well,” she said. “Everybody will love him or her. I’m sure they will.”
“And then Daddy said we should call the new baby Hugo,”
went on Bertie.
“That’s a nice name!” said Antonia quickly.
“Because that’s the name of Mummy’s friend,” said Bertie.
“He’s called Dr Fairbairn. Dr Hugo Fairbairn.”
Antonia bit her lip. Oh goodness! One should not encourage this sort of thing, but she could not resist another question, just one more question.
“And Dr Fairbairn,” she asked. “What does he think of all this?”
“He’s mad,” said Bertie. “Really mad.”
“I see,” said Antonia. “Well I suppose that . . .” She tailed off. It was easy to imagine him being angry, he probably did not plan for things to work out this way.
Now Bertie, who was enjoying his conversation with Antonia, came up with a final piece of information. He had been told of his mother’s pregnancy one day in the Floatarium. Irene had been in her flotation chamber, speaking to Bertie, who was sitting outside, and that was where she had told him of the imminent arrival of a new sibling. Bertie, whose understanding of the facts of life was rudimentary, had misinterpreted her and had concluded that his mother had become pregnant in the flotation chamber itself.
“Mummy became pregnant in the Floatarium,” Bertie now explained. “That’s where it happened.”
Antonia picked up her shopping bag. This was wonderful. She had a great deal to tell Domenica when she came back. Why did she bother going to the Malacca Straits when all this 342 In the Ossian Chair
was going on downstairs? Anthropology, she thought, like charity, surely begins at home.
109. In the Ossian Chair
Antonia entered Domenica’s flat and thought about her encounter with Bertie on the stair. It had been a strange experience – amusing, of course, with all those innocent disclosures
– but there was something more to it, and that was puzzling her. At one level their conversation had been exactly the sort of talk that one might expect to have with a boy of – what was he?
six, at the most, she thought – and yet there had been another level to it altogether, and this had made her feel an extraordinary warmth towards him. Yes, that was it: the warmth. She made her way into the kitchen, dropped her shopping bag on the floor near the cooker, and sat down in the chair near the window. It was a high-ish chair, plain in its lines, and covered with a Macpherson tartan throw. Domenica was not a Macpherson, but a Macdonald. Why should she have a Macpherson throw? Was it the sheer prettiness of that particular tartan with its soft greys and wine-red stripe? But then it occurred to her that there was another reason. Domenica had many enthusiasms, but one of them, Antonia recalled, was for the works of Ossian, or, should one say, the works of James Macpherson. That must be it.
Antonia sat back in the Ossian chair and remembered. It had been right there – in that very spot – eight or nine years ago –
and she had been in Edinburgh to look something up in the National Library; something to do with early Scottish monastic practices, if she remembered correctly; but the memory of what it was, like the memory of the early Scottish monastic practices themselves, had faded. After her visit to the Library she had come here, to Scotland Street, to drink a cup of coffee with Domenica and to seek solace. Antonia’s marriage was not going well then and she had wanted to talk about that, but had not In the Ossian Chair 343
raised it in the end because Domenica had been in full flight about Ossian.
“In the scrap between Dr Johnson and Macpherson, I’m on Macpherson’s side,” pronounced Domenica. “He had seen the subjugation of his world. The burnings. The interdiction of the kilt, language, everything. All he wanted to do was to show that there was Gaelic culture that was capable of great art. And all those dry pedants in London could do was to say: where are the manuscripts?”
“Well, I suppose if one claims to have discovered