Love Over Scotland - Alexander Hanchett Smith [33]
“Do you miss Domenica too?” Angus asked as he attached the lead to Cyril’s collar.
Cyril was silent. As a dog, he missed everything – intensely. He missed Lochboisdale. He missed favourite, remembered bones. He missed the tooth he had lost when he had bitten that other dog’s tail. Everything – Cyril missed everything. 22. An M.A. (Cantab.)
Angus returned from his walk round Drummond Place. There were people about, and one or two greeted him, but he barely noticed them, so absorbed was he in thoughts of Domenica’s letter. He began to compose his response mentally – he would tell her about Antonia and how he had let her in and how he had decided that she . . . no, he would not do that. He should remember that Antonia was, after all, Domenica’s friend. I must make more of an effort in that direction, he told himself. I shall persist. I shall give her the chance to prove that she is as charming and good company as Domenica herself. At the very least, I shall be civil; I shall do the neighbourly thing and invite her in for a drink some evening, although perhaps it might be wise to dilute her. And not just to dilute her with alcohol, which has the power to transform difficult company into good, but dilute her with other guests, perhaps Matthew and that engaging girl, Pat – if they would come.
Now entering his kitchen, into which the slanting rays of sun still shone, Angus made himself another cup of coffee and sat down to read the rest of Domenica’s letter.
“We eventually arrived in Malacca. I must confess that I had made no arrangements to speak of and had to find myself a hotel more or less on the spot. This proved to be remarkably easy and I was soon ensconced in a rather charming old building with a wide veranda and a garden full of frangipani trees. The hotel called itself the São Pedro and was run by a charming Malaccan Portuguese and his Indonesian-Dutch wife. They made me extremely comfortable, but were much alarmed when I disclosed that I proposed to find a pirate community in which to do anthropological observation. They felt, for some reason, that I had some kind of death-wish (the very thought!) and were completely unpersuaded by my attempts to reassure them. I told them that anthropologists were accustomed to putting themselves in dangerous situations. Look at the number of people who did their field work in New Guinea amongst people who still resorted to occasional head-hunting. Look at the people An M.A. (Cantab.)
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who did their research in the mountains of Corsica, which are pretty dangerous at the best of times. Very few anthropologists opt for the soft life when it comes to their field work. In fact, I know only two – one went to the Vatican to study the domestic economy of a male-dominated society, and the other went to Monaco to study sense of place and permanence amongst tax exiles. Both of these were rather condescended to by their peers later on – they were treated as if they had not really earned their spurs, so to speak, as anthropologists. There were sniffy remarks about doing one’s research in a meadow rather than a field –
that sort of thing. Not really funny, but very barbed.
“But do you think that my hosts would be reassured by any of this? They would not. Eventually, they shrugged their shoulders and said that if called upon they would be happy to identify my remains and have them shipped back to Scotland. I thanked them for this; the offer was genuinely meant.
“Of course, I had to find somebody who would give me the necessary introductions. The Royal Institute of Anthropology had given me the name of somebody who was in the business of arranging academic exchanges for students, and they said that this person had been very helpful to another anthropologist