She reached out and took his arm. “I’m sorry,” she blurted out. “I didn’t mean to say that.”
He tried to smile. “My sweater? This thing? It’s just an old . . .”
“I really didn’t mean it. I promise you. Look . . . there’s nothing wrong with it. There really isn’t. I like beige.”
Matthew bridled slightly. “Beige? It’s not beige. It’s distressed oatmeal.”
She thought: porridge. It’s a porridge-coloured sweater. They Leonie Talks
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must like porridge-coloured clothes in Scotland, and I’ve gone and hurt this really gentle, nice man with my stupid Australian tactlessness.
“I really didn’t mean . . .”
They had now reached the end of Cumberland Street and Matthew, who wanted to change the subject, pointed out St Vincent’s Church and the beginning of St Stephen’s Street. “And up on the corner there was where Madame Doubtfire had her shop,” he said. “She was a real person whose name was used by Anne Fine in her book. My father knew the original Madame Doubtfire. She was an old lady who kept a large number of cats and claimed that she ‘had danced before the Tsar’. That’s what she told everybody. Danced before the Tsar.”
“Who’s the Tsar?” asked Leonie.
Matthew hesitated. Was it possible that there were people who did not know who the Tsar was? He was about to explain, when Leonie said, “Oh him! The president of Russia.”
He burst out laughing, and immediately regretted it. The laughter had slipped out, as had her remark about his sweater.
It just slipped out, as the best laughter will always do, in spon-taneity, uncontrollable. He recovered himself quickly and looked grave. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to laugh. It’s just that the Tsar was not exactly a president.”
Leonie did not seem offended. “I never learned much history,”
she explained. “I was always drawing in history lessons. I drew houses – all the time.”
“And so you became an architect.”
“Yes.” She looked at him, and smiled. “What about you? I bet you knew that you were artistic when you were a little boy.
Did you draw things too?”
Matthew felt flattered. Am I artistic? I suppose I am. I own a gallery. I can talk about art. “Yes,” he said solemnly, “I knew.
I always knew.”
They continued their conversation easily. There was no further talk about sweaters or tsars. They moved on to the subject of where Leonie lived. She explained how she had a studio flat in a converted bonded warehouse in Leith. “It’s very fashionable to 86
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live in a bonded warehouse,” she said. “It’s the same as living in a loft in New York. All the really fashionable people live in lofts in New York. Bonded warehouses and lofts provide very flexible space. You can put in moveable room dividers. Tent walls. Living curtains.”
“What’s a living curtain?” Matthew asked.
“It’s a curtain you live behind,” answered Leonie. “Curtains are replacing walls. Take your flat, for example. Do you really need your walls?”
Matthew thought that he did, but he decided it sounded rather stuffy, rather conventional, to say that one needed walls. People who lived in Moray Place were welcome to walls – they clearly needed them. India Street was far less psychologically dependent on walls.
“No,” he said. “I’d like to get rid of some of my walls.”
“Great,” said Leonie. “When we get to your place, I’ll take a look around. I can do some sketches. We can work out what walls can come out.”
Matthew said nothing, but Leonie continued. “The thing about walls is that they hide things. Society is much more open now. Everything’s more open. The old culture of walls is finished.”
Matthew frowned. “But what about . . . what about bathrooms?”
“Open plan,” said Leonie, adding: “these days.”
28. The Boy in the Tree
Antonia Collie had settled into Domenica’s flat rather more quickly than she had imagined would be the case. Antonia did not consider herself a city person; she had been born and brought up in St Andrews, the daughter of a professor of anatomy, and apart from her student years in Edinburgh had lived the rest of her life in the country or in small towns. She had always felt vaguely uncomfortable in large cities; in a metropolis it felt to The Boy in the Tree
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her as if something unsettling was always on the point of happening, but never quite happened. She had spent two weeks in London once, researching in the British Library, and had felt confused and threatened by the crowds of people on the street (“All going somewhere,” she had complained. “Nobody actually staying where they are.”)
Antonia had married young. Her attractive looks and her amusing tongue had caught the attention of the son of a pros-perous East Perthshire farmer, a man who was regarded by his father as a hopeless prospect, by virtue of his complete lack of interest in crops and cattle, but who had, nonetheless, a talent for dealing in stocks and bonds by telephone. This young man, Harry Collie, found in Antonia an easy companion. They set up home in a converted mill at the edge of his father’s sprawling farm, and enjoyed the country life that such people might lead.
This was an existence dominated by a social round that both of them came to regard as ultimately rather pointless, although diverting enough at the time.
Harry encouraged Antonia to pursue her interest in history.
She enrolled for a Ph.D. at Edinburgh, and spent a great deal of time travelling to and from the National Library of Scotland and the Scottish Records Office. She found herself drawn ever deeper into the mysteries of medieval Scotland, and completing and submitting her doctoral thesis was, as she described it, like having, at last, a baby, which one then promptly gives away. Its publication by the Tuckwell Press was a matter of pride not only to her father, the now retired professor of anatomy, who had taken to writing monographs on silkworms, but also to her husband, who liked the idea that intellectual distinction might shine from a corner of Perthshire generally only associated with the cultivation of soft fruit.
Antonia and Harry had two children, a son and a daughter, Murdo and Antonia, known in the family as Little Antonia.
When the children were ten and eight respectively, Harry started to see a woman in Perth who owned and ran a dress shop.
Antonia became aware of this, and thought that his dalliance with this woman, whom she called the Dress Shop Assistant, 88
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would pass once he saw through what she imagined to be the other woman’s intellectual vacuity. She was wrong. Although he was not by nature fickle in his affections, what developed between Harry and the Dress Shop Assistant was a deep mutual dependence which neither was capable of defeating. Antonia suggested that Harry should move into Perth, but he refused.
His family had lived on that bit of land for several hundred years, and it was all he knew. So Antonia decided that she would move back to St Andrews, taking Murdo and Little Antonia with her, and would live in a corner of her father’s house.
Then disaster struck. When she explained to Murdo and Little Antonia that they would be coming to live with her in St Andrews, they refused to go. Murdo, in particular, had a deep affection for the farm, and said that he would simply run straight back if taken to St Andrews. Little Antonia wept copious tears and said that she would not touch a morsel of food until the decision had been rescinded. She was as good as her word. She simply stopped eating, and in admiration for his sister’s act of defiance, Murdo climbed a tree in the garden of the house and refused to come down.
“But if you stay here, then you’ll be staying just with Daddy,”
shouted Antonia into the foliage.