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88. The Eriskay Love Lilt

The sitting room into which Fiona took Pat was an intimate one, but big enough to accommodate a baby grand piano, along with two large mahogany bookcases. The wall behind the piano was painted red and was hung with small paintings – tiny landscapes, miniatures, two silhouetted heads facing one another. A low coffee table dominated the centre of the room, and on this were books and magazines, casually stacked, but arranged in such a way that they did not tower or threaten to topple. A large vaseline-glass bowl sat in the middle of the table, and this was filled with those painted wooden balls which Victorians and Edwardians liked to collect. The balls were speckled, like the eggs of some exotic fowl, and seemed to be, like other things in the room, seductively tactile.

Pat noticed that to the side of the room there was a small tea table, covered with a worked-linen tablecloth. On this was a tray, with a Minton teapot and cups and saucers. Then there was a cake– as Dr Fantouse had said there would be – a sponge of some sort, dusted with icing sugar, and a plate of sandwiches – white bread, neatly trimmed.

‘We sometimes have people for tea,’ said Fiona. ‘And so we keep an extra cup to hand.’

She sat herself beside the tea tray and asked Pat how she liked her tea. On the other side of the room, facing them, Dr Fantouse perched on a high-backed chair, smiling at Pat and his wife.

‘Miss Macgregor belongs to the coffee-house generation,’ he remarked. ‘Afternoon tea will not be her usual thing. Perhaps you would like coffee?’

‘I like tea,’ said Pat.

‘There are so many coffee houses,’ said Fiona. ‘And they are all full of people talking to one another. One wonders what they talk about?’

Both Dr Fantouse and his wife now looked at Pat, as if expecting an answer to what might otherwise have seemed a rhetorical question.

‘The usual things,’ said Pat. ‘What people normally talk about. Their friends, I suppose. Who’s doing what. That sort of thing.’

Dr Fantouse smiled at his wife. ‘More or less what we talk to our friends about,’ he said. ‘Nothing has changed, you see.’

The two Fantouses looked at one another with what seemed to Pat to be relief. There was silence. Fiona passed Pat a cup of tea and Dr Fantouse rose to his feet to cut slices of cake.

‘There’s something very calming about tea,’ remarked Fiona. ‘I sometimes think that if people drank more tea, they would be calmer.’

Pat looked at her. The Fantouses were very calm as it was; was this the effect of tea, or was it something more profound?

Fiona seemed to warm to her theme. ‘Coffee cultures can be excitable, don’t you think?’ she said. ‘Look at the Latins. They never talk about things in a quiet way. It’s all so passionate. Look at the difference between Edinburgh and Naples.’

There was a further silence. Then Dr Fantouse said: ‘I don’t know. Perhaps we might become a bit more . . .’

All eyes turned to him, but he did not expand on his comment, but lifted a piece of cake and popped it into his mouth. Fiona turned to Pat, as if expecting her to weigh in on her side and confirm the difference between Edinburgh and Naples, but she did not.

Dr Fantouse licked a bit of icing sugar off a finger. ‘Un po di musica, as Lucia would say. Would you care to play, my dear?’

Fiona put down her teacup and smiled at Pat. ‘It’s something of a ritual,’ she said. ‘I usually play for a few minutes after we’ve finished tea. Do you play yourself ? I would be very happy for you to play rather than . . .’

Pat shook her head. ‘I learned a bit, but never got very far. I’m hopeless.’

‘Surely not!’ said both Fantouses, in unison. But they did not put the matter to the test, as Fiona had now crossed the room and seated herself at the keyboard.

‘This is the Eriskay Love Lilt,’ she announced. ‘In a rather charming arrangement. It was Marjorie Kennedy Fraser, of course, who rescued it. And the words are so poignant, aren’t they? Vair me or ro van o / Vair me o ro ven ee