Love Over Scotland - Alexander Hanchett Smith [69]
there was a seagull hovering nearby, and he caught a slight smell of fish and bird.
The young man was undoing his lead. He was being dragged. He was confused. Was he being sent away? What had he done?
46. A Conversation about Angels etc
Inside the delicatessen, unaware of the drama being enacted outside, Angus Lordie carefully replaced on its shelf the bottle of olive oil he had been examining.
“That,” said a voice behind him, “is a particularly good oil. We’ve been selling it for some time now. Poggio Lamentano. It’s made from the Zyws’ olives. Gorgeous stuff. This is the new vintage, which has just arrived – you can taste it, if you like.”
Angus turned round and recognised Mary Contini. He had met her socially once or twice – and of course it was she who had written Dear Francesca –but he was not sure whether she remembered him. Her next comment, however, made it clear that she did. “You’re a painter, aren’t you? We met at . . .” She waved a hand in the air.
Angus nodded, although he, too, had forgotten the name of their host. He, too, waved a hand in the air – in the direction of the New Town. “It was somewhere over there,” he said, and laughed. Then there was a brief silence. “I’m cooking a meal,”
he said lamely, as if to explain his presence. It was rather a trite thing to say, of course, but she did not seem to mind.
“They’re a painting family too,” she said, pointing at the bottle of oil. “They had a studio down in the Dean Village, overlooking the Water of Leith. But they have this place in Tuscany and they produce the most beautiful oil. I’ve visited it. Wonderful place.”
“I would be very happy living in Italy,” said Angus. “Tuscany in particular.”
“What artist wouldn’t be?” asked Mary Contini. Angus gazed up at the ceiling. He knew of some artists who 144 A Conversation about Angels etc
would not like Italy; some artists, he thought, have no sense of the beautiful and would be ill at ease in a landscape like that. He was tempted to name them, but no, not amidst all this olive oil and Chianti. “In Tuscany, I have always thought one is in the presence of angels,” he said. “In fact, I am sure of it.”
Mary Contini looked intrigued. “Angels?” she said.
“Yes,” said Angus, warming to his theme. “Have you come across that marvellous poem by Alfred Alvarez? ‘Angels in Italy’. Written in Tuscany, of course, where Alvarez has a villa.”
Mary Contini thought for a moment, and then shook her head.
“He describes how he is standing in his vineyard and suddenly he sees a choir of angels – that is the collective term for angels, I believe – or shall I say a flight of angels? – somehow that seems more appropriate for angels in motion; choirs are more static, aren’t they? He sees this flight of angels crossing the sky, and it seems so natural, so right. Isn’t that marvellous? And there they are, flying across the Tuscan sky while below them everybody is just carrying on with their day-to-day business. Somebody is cutting wood with a buzz-saw. The leaves of the vines rattle like dice. And so on.”
“I can just see it,” said Mary Contini.
Angus smiled. “Of course, angels are an intrinsically interesting subject. Especially if one has little else to do with one’s time. Like those early practitioners of angelology who speculated about the number of angels who could stand on the head of a pin.”
“I’ve always thought of angels as being rather big,” said Mary Contini.
“Exactly,” said Angus. “Mind you, there are an awful lot of them, I believe. The fourteenth-century cabalists said that there were precisely 301,655,722. Quite how they worked that out, I have no idea. But there we are.” He sighed. He enjoyed a conversation of this sort – but ever since Domenica had gone away, there seemed to be so few people with whom to have it. And here he was taking up this busy person’s time with talk of angels and the Tuscan countryside. “I must get on,” he said. “One cannot stand about all day and talk about angels. Or olive oil, for that matter.”
A Conversation about Angels etc 145
She laughed. “I am always happy