194 Robert Garioch
Angus took a sip of his wine. His expression, thought Pat, was that of one who was about to produce the clinching argument.
“I’d like it to be true,” he said. “Moray Place and nudists.
Can’t you just see it?”
“No,” said Domenica. “I can’t.”
“Bob Sutherland would have loved it,” mused Angus. “My goodness, he would have loved it.”
Domenica looked puzzled. “Bob Sutherland?” she asked.
“Robert Garioch,” said Angus. “A great makar. And one of our neighbours, you know. He lived in Nelson Street. Lived.
Dead now, alas.”
“Garioch,” mused Domenica. “At Robert Fergusson’s Grave?”
“You’ll make me weep,” said Angus quietly.
59. Robert Garioch
“Yes,” said Angus. “At Robert Fergusson’s Grave. Such a wonderful poem. I could recite it to you, you know, all fourteen, heart-breaking lines. But I won’t do that.” He paused. “Tell me, Pat
. . . and Domenica, for that matter, how important is poetry to you?”
Pat thought for a moment. She had read some poets, but now that she came to think of it, who had they been? Chaucer had been forced on her at school – the respectable parts, of course
– and there had been Tennyson too, and MacDiarmid, although she could not remember which bits. And then Yeats: something about an Irish airman, and towers, and wild swans. But how important had that been to her? She had stopped reading it after she had left school, and had not gone back to it. “Not very important,” she said. “Although . . .”
Angus nodded. “I’m afraid I expected that answer,” he said.
He looked at Domenica.
“I find comfort in it,” she said. “But why bring up Garioch?
And why would he have been so amused by nudists in Moray Place?”
Robert Garioch
195
Angus laughed. “Because he had a fine sense of the contrast between grandeur on the one hand (not that I’m suggesting for a moment that Moray Place is overly grand) and the ordinary man in the street on the other. He’s the heir to Fergusson, you know. Just as Burns was. An awful lot of Burns is pure Fergusson, you know.”
“What a tragedy,” said Domenica. “Do you know how old Robert Fergusson was when he died, Pat? No, of course you don’t. Well, he was just a little bit older than you. Just a few years. Twenty-four.”
“And he died alone in his cell in the Bedlam,” said Angus.
“That bonny youth.”
“That seems to be the lot of so many poets,” said Domenica.
“To die young, that is. Rupert Brooke.” She glanced at Pat. The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke had been the ploy to bring Pat and Peter together – and where had that led? To an invitation to a nudist picnic in Moray Place.
“Don’t talk to me about Brooke,” said Angus dismissively.
“Or at least don’t talk to me about Brooke in the same breath as Fergusson. What a pain that young man was. Have you read his letters to Strachey? Ghastly egotistic diatribes. Full of upper-middle-class swooning and posturing. The Cambridge Apostles!
What a bunch of twerps – and so pleased with themselves. All deeply damaged by the English boarding school system, of course, but still . . .”
Domenica was more tolerant. “They were gilded youth,” she said. “One must allow gilded youth a certain leeway . . . And, anyway, they were all doomed, weren’t they? They knew that once they were sent to France they didn’t stand much of a chance.”
“Fergusson was the real thing,” Angus interrupted. “He had a real feeling for what was going on in the streets and taverns of Edinburgh. And he suffered. Brooke and his like are all too douce. That’s why their poetry is so bland.”
Domenica rose to her feet to refresh the glass which Angus was holding out to her. “I’m not sure where this is going,” she said mildly. “But then I never am with you, Angus. Your thoughts
. . . well, they do seem to drift a bit.”
196 Robert Garioch
“Along a very clear path,” said Angus. “I was speaking about Garioch and how he would have appreciated the contrast between the outward respectability of Moray Place and the desire of at least some of the inhabitants to practise nudism. That’s just the sort of thing that he liked to write about.
“He wrote a wonderful poem, you know, called ‘Glisk of the Great ’. The narrator sees a group of people coming out of the North British Grill, ‘lauchan fit to kill’. Then the party climbs into a ‘muckle big municipal Rolls Royce’ and disappears off towards the Calton Hill. The narrator thinks how grand this is, although the rest of us can’t join in. It gives the town some tone, you see.”
He paused. Pat and Domenica were looking at him expectantly. Cyril, who had raised his head, appeared to be listening too, one ear cocked towards his master. Cyril had no idea what was going on – which is the lot of dogs for most of the time.
But he did know that he had been enjoying a pleasant dream before his master’s voice disturbed him. In this dream he had been biting Matthew’s ankle, something he had wanted to do for a long time. And he was getting away with it too.
“Well,” said Domenica, after a few moments, “be that as it may. Robert Garioch is not here to write about this invitation of Pat’s. We have to decide – or, rather, Pat has to decide –
whether to go. And I would say certainly not.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Angus. “They’ll all be perfectly respectable. These nudists are a very tame lot, you know. They don’t practise nudism for any lascivious reasons. It’s all very pure and aboveboard.”
“That may be so,” said Domenica. “But doesn’t it strike you as a bit strange that this young man should have invited Pat, who is not currently a practising nudist, to join them?”
“They have to recruit somehow,” said Angus. “It’s like people inviting you to come along to a church service or an amateur orchestra. They’re hoping that you’ll join. People are recruiters at heart, you know. It makes them feel more comfortable to see the ranks of their particular enthusiasm swelling.”
Pat listened to this with interest. She had been intrigued by The Ramsey Dunbarton Story: Part IV – Legal Matters 197
what Angus had to say, but felt at heart that any advice he gave was bound to be wrong. Angus was harmless enough, she thought, but his view of things was such a strange one – almost a poetical turning upside-down of the world. Domenica, by contrast, seemed to understand things as they were, and if she were to listen to anybody, she should listen to her. Of course, there were other people she could ask. There was Matthew, but she sensed that he would be jealous and resentful if she even told him about Peter’s existence, let alone his bizarre invitation.
Then there was her father. He had a profound understanding of the world, but it would embarrass her to talk to him about something like this. Finally, she could make her mind up for herself; she could follow her instincts. But what were her instincts? She thought for a moment. She closed her eyes, trying to imagine the scene in the Moray Place Gardens. Then she opened them again. She wanted to go.
60. The Ramsey Dunbarton Story:
Part IV – Legal Matters
High above the city, in their house in the Braids, Ramsey Dunbarton was embarking on a second reading of excerpts from his memoirs to his wife Betty. They had finished with his account of their courtship and early years in Craiglea Drive before they moved to the Braids. Betty had enjoyed the reading, although she had detected a number of inaccuracies in her husband’s recollection of events. He had confused the place of their first meeting and had got his age at the time quite wrong. He had also mixed up the name of the late Duke of Atholl, whom he had described as Angus, but who had actually been called Iain. These were little things, of course, although the cumulative effect of a number of errors of that nature could make for a narrative which was perhaps less than reliable, but she had refrained from correcting him. Ramsey had many virtues, but he also had a slight tendency to become 198 The Ramsey Dunbarton Story: Part IV – Legal Matters peevish when it was pointed out to him that he was wrong about something. So Betty had remained silent in the face of these mistakes and had confined her reaction to nods of agreement and small exclamations of appreciation. And she reflected on the fact that nobody was ever likely to read Ramsey’s memoirs, even if he found somebody prepared to publish them. That was not because they were intrinsically irrelevant, but because these days people seemed to be interested only in reading about vulgar matters and violence. And there was no vulgarity or violence in Ramsey’s memoirs . . . at least so far. Betty sighed.