So that’s how it came about. There are some pedants who claim that I shouldn’t call myself what I do, but I ignore them.
Pedants!”
He raised his glass. “Slàinte!”
45. Minimalism Is Not Confined to the Canvas But there were others in the room. Matthew and Pat had hardly noticed them, so engaged had they been by the flow of their host’s conversation. So that was the reason why there was no mention of a Duke of Johannesburg in Who’s Who in Scotland –
there was no such duke, at least not in the sense that one would be recognised by the Lord Lyon. Yet what did such recognition amount to? Matthew asked himself. All that it did was give a stamp of purely conventional authenticity, conventional in the sense of agreed, or settled, and ultimately that was merely a question of arbitrary social arrangements. There was no real difference between this duke and any other better-known duke, just as there was no real difference between a real duke and any one of Jock Tamson’s bairns. We were all just people who chose to call ourselves by curious things known as names, and the only
150 Minimalism Is Not Confined to the Canvas significant difference between any of us lay in what we did with our lives.
Matthew found himself drawn to the Duke of Johannesburg, with his easy-going conviviality and his cheerful demeanour.
This was a man, he thought, who dared and, like most men, Matthew admired men who dared. He himself did not exactly dare, but he would like to dare, if he dared.
“Yes,” said the Duke, looking around the room. “There are a couple of other guests. And I’m ignoring my social responsibilities by not introducing you. I shouldn’t go on about these old and irrelevant matters. Nobody’s interested in any of that.”
“Oh, but we are!” said a man standing near the fireplace.
“That’s where you’re mistaken, Johannesburg. We all like to hear about these things.”
“That’s my Greek chorus over there,” said the Duke, nodding in the direction of the man by the fireplace. “You must meet him.”
The Duke drew Matthew and Pat over to the other guest and made introductions.
“Humphrey Holmes,” said the Duke.
Matthew looked at Humphrey. He had seen him before – and heard of him – but he had never actually met him. He was a dapper man, wearing a black velvet jacket and bow tie.
Minimalism Is Not Confined to the Canvas 151
“I hear you sold Johannesburg a painting,” said Humphrey.
“He was telling me about it. Something very minimalist, I gather.”
Matthew laughed. “Very.” He glanced around the room, at the pictures on the walls. There were several family portraits –
a picture of three boys in kilts, in almost sepia tones, from a long time ago; one looked a bit like the Duke, but it was hard to tell. Then there was a powerful James Howie landscape, one of those glowing pictures that the artist scraped away at for years in order to get the light just as he wanted it to be. Matthew knew his work and sold it occasionally, when Howie, a perfec-tionist, could be persuaded to part with a painting.
“I was surprised when he said he’d bought something minimalist,” remarked Humphrey. “As you can see, this isn’t exactly a minimalist room.”
“Perhaps he’ll hang it somewhere else,” said Pat.
Humphrey turned to her and smiled politely. “Perhaps.
Perhaps there are minimalist things here already – it’s just that we can’t see them. But, tell me, do you like minimalism in music?”
Matthew looked down at his feet. “Well, I’m not sure . . .”
“You mean people like Glass and Adams?” Pat interjected.
“Yes,” said Humphrey. “Some people are very sniffy about them. I heard somebody say the other day that it’s amazing how people like Adams make so much out of three notes. Which isn’t exactly fair. There’s quite a lot there, you know, if you start to look at Pärt and people like that.”
“I like Pärt,” said Pat.
“Oh, so do I,” said Humphrey.
“And then there’s Max Richter,” said Pat. “Do you know that he lives in Edinburgh? His music’s wonderful. Really haunting.”
“I shall look out for him,” said Humphrey. “Johannesburg wouldn’t be interested, of course. He listens to the pipes mostly.
And some nineteenth-century stuff. Italian operas and so on.
One of his boys is shaping up to be quite a good piper. That’s him coming in now.”
152 Minimalism Is Not Confined to the Canvas They looked in the direction of a boy who had entered the room, holding a plate of smoked salmon on small squares of bread. From behind a blond fringe, the boy looked back at them.
“Will you play for us, East Lothian?” asked Humphrey.
“Yes,” answered the boy. “Later.”
“Good boy,” said Humphrey. “Johannesburg has three boys, you know. That lad’s East Lothian. Then there’s West Lothian and Midlothian. Real boys. And he’s taught them to do things that boys used to know how to do. How to make a sporran out of a badger you find run over on the road. How to repair a lobster creel. Things like that. I think . . .”
He was interrupted by the return of the Duke, who had gone out of the room once he had made the introductions.
“I have my cheque book,” said the Duke, holding up a rectan-gular green leather wallet. “If I don’t pay for the painting now, I shall forget. So . . .” He unfolded the wallet, and leaning it on Humphrey’s back, scribbled out a cheque, which he handed to Matthew with a flourish.
Matthew looked at the cheque. The Duke’s handwriting was firm and clear – strong, masculine downstrokes. Three hundred and twenty pounds.
Matthew’s expression gave it away.
“Something wrong?” asked the Duke. There was concern in his voice.
“I . . .” Matthew began.
Pat took the cheque from him and glanced at it. “Actually, the painting was thirty-two thousand pounds,” she said.
“Good heavens!” said the Duke. “I thought . . . Well I must have assumed that there was a decimal point before the last two zeros. Thirty-two thousand pounds! Sorry. The exchequer can’t rise to that.”
“This’ll do,” said Pat firmly. “Our mistake. This’ll do fine, won’t it, Matthew?”
Matthew glanced at Humphrey, who was smiling benignly.
Elsewhere in the room, there was silence, as other guests had He Wanted Her Only to Answer His Question 153
realised what was going on. It was easy to imagine a mistake of this nature being made. And three hundred and twenty pounds was quite enough for that particular painting, far too much, really.
“I shall be more careful in my labelling in future,” Matthew said magnanimously. “Of course that’s all right.”
The tension which had suffused the room now dissipated.
People began to talk again freely, and the Duke reached for a bottle of wine to refill glasses.
“That was good of you,” murmured Humphrey.
“It was nothing,” said Matthew. “It really was.”
“But it wasn’t,” protested Humphrey.
“I meant the painting was nothing,” said Matthew, which was true.
46. He Wanted Her Only to Answer His Question Later in the evening, Matthew, wanting, he said, to get some air, suggested that they go out into the garden. Pat nodded and followed him out through the hall. She had gone out into gardens with boys before this and knew what it meant. Boys were usually not very interested in gardens, except at night, when their interest sharpened. Outside, the evening was unusually warm for the time of the year, almost balmy; the air was still, the branches of the oak trees farther up the steeply sloping garden were motion-less.
For a few moments, they stood on the driveway. Matthew reached for Pat’s hand. “Look at that,” he said, gesturing up at the sky. “We don’t often see that in town, do we? All that?”