The World According to Bertie - Alexander Hanchett Smith [82]
She was not sure how to take Markus. The question of having an affair with somebody with whom one could not communicate in language was an interesting one, and as she walked up Scotland Street, she turned this over in her mind. If one could not say anything to the other, and he could say nothing to you, what remained? All close relationships between people – unless they were purely instrumental – were based on some feeling for the other. That feeling required that one should know something about that person, and that one should be able to share experiences. If one could say nothing about the world to one another, then what precisely was the shared experience upon which the relationship was founded? Only the carnal, surely; or could there be spiritual and emotional sharing without language? Human vulnerability, human tenderness – the understanding of these required no words, but could be achieved through gestures, through looking, through mute empathy; a bit boring, though, Domenica thought, once the initial excitement of the physical side of the relationship wore off; if it was to wear off, and sometimes the pulse remained quickened, she understood, for years . . .
But that was another question altogether which she would have to come back to, as she had now reached the corner of Heriot Row, and it did not do to think about sex on Heriot Row. She smiled at the thought. It was another Barbara Pym moment. Of course, one could think about sex while walking along Heriot Row – these days. That tickled her, although not everybody, she thought, would be amused about that: the words ‘these days’ did a lot of work there. It all depended on an understanding of Edinburgh as a city of cultivated, outward respectability beneath which there lay of world of priapic indulgence. But was that still the reality? Perhaps it was. One had only to look at Moray Place, that most respectable of addresses, and reflect on how many nudists lived there. That was very strange: Jekyll clothed, and then, after a quick disrobing, there was Hyde unclothed!
Domenica had agreed to meet her friend, James Holloway, for coffee at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, where he was the director. By the time she arrived at the Gothic Revival sandstone building on Queen Street, she had put out of her mind all thought of Antonia’s torrid affair – at least she assumed it was torrid and, anyway, she wondered if there was any point in having an affair which was not torrid. Now, as she sat in the coffee room, waiting for James to come down from his office upstairs, she looked up at the Bellany portraits on the wall above her table. Sean Connery looked out of one of them rather forbiddingly, but then he was perhaps a touch disapproving, which was why people in Scotland were so proud of him. Scots heroes were not meant to be benign in their outlook; they needed to be at least a little bit cross about something, preferably an injustice committed against them, individually or nationally, some time ago. Sean Connery certainly looked rather cross about something. Perhaps he was cross at having his portrait painted, in the way in which such people often looked cross at having their photographs taken. Perhaps, thought Domenica, there were paparazzi portraitists, who lurked with their easels outside hotels and fashionable nightclubs and painted quick likenesses of well-known people as they left the building – absurd thought.
James arrived and fetched the coffee. ‘I need your advice,’ he said as he sat down.