The World According to Bertie - Alexander Hanchett Smith [25]
Antonia was silent. She looked at Domenica. She had never thought of Domenica having a love life, but she must have, because we all fall in love, and some of us are sentenced to unrequited love, talking about it over cups of coffee in flats like this, with friends just like this, oddly comforted by the process.
17. Nihil Humanum
Domenica looked about her. Antonia’s flat was a mirror image of hers in the arrangement of its rooms. But whereas the original features of her flat had been largely preserved, Antonia’s had suffered a bad 1970s experience. The original panelled doors, examples of which survived in Domenica’s flat, had either been taken down in Antonia’s and replaced with unpleasant frosted-glass doors – for what conceivable purpose? Domenica wondered – or their panels had been tacked over with plywood to produce an unrelieved surface. That, one assumed, was the same aesthetic sense which had produced the St James Centre, a crude cluster of grey blocks at the end of the sadly mutilated Princes Street, or, at a slightly earlier stage, had sought the turning of Princes Street into an urban motorway and the conversion of the Princes Street Gardens into a car park.
One might not be surprised when some of these things were done by those with neither artistic sense nor training, but both the St James Centre and the plan to slice the city in two with a motorway had been the work of architects and planners. At a domestic level, these were the very same people who put in glass doors and took out old fireplaces.
‘Yes,’ said Antonia. ‘I will have to do something about all this.’
Domenica pretended surprise for a moment; but Antonia had intercepted her glances and knew what she was thinking.
‘Don’t imagine for a moment that this is my taste,’ Antonia warned. ‘I’m every bit as Georgian as you are.’
It was an amusing way of putting it, and they both laughed. Not everyone in the New Town lived a Georgian lifestyle, but some did. And of course Antonia, and Domenica, would find such people amusing, with their insistence on period authenticity in their houses, although they themselves were equally inclined to much the same aesthetic.
Domenica waved a hand about her. ‘What are you going to do?’
‘Just about everything,’ said Antonia. ‘Those doors over there. The plywood will come off. Panels back. I’ll free the shutters. Free the shutters – that’s a rallying call in these parts, you know.’
Domenica looked at her friend. But her own shutters had indeed been freed, she had to admit.
‘And then I’m going to take all the light fittings out,’ Antonia went on. ‘All this . . . this stuff.’ She pointed up at the spiky, angular light that was hanging from the ceiling. ‘And the fireplaces, of course. I shall go to the architectural salvage yard and see what they have.’
‘You’ll need a builder,’ said Domenica, adding, with a smile: ‘We are mere women, you know.’
‘Oh, I’m ready for that. You know, people are so worried about builders. They seem to have such bad experiences with them.’
‘Perhaps it’s that problem that builders have with their trousers,’ Domenica mused. ‘You know that issue of . . .’
Antonia was dismissive of that. ‘Low trousers have never been a problem for me,’ she said. ‘Nihil humanum alienum mihi est.∗
Although it is interesting – isn’t it? – how trousers are getting lower each year. Or is it our age?’
Domenica thought for a moment. ‘You mean on young men? Young men’s trousers?’
‘Yes,’ said Antonia. ‘It’s now mandatory for them to show the top of their underpants above the trouser waist. And the trousers get lower and lower.’
As an anthropologist, there was little for Domenica to