The sky was a dark, black velvet, rich and deep, studded here and there with small points of starlight, one or two of which seemed to burn with great intensity.
“No,” she said. “All those yellow streetlights. Light pollu-tion.”
154 He Wanted Her Only to Answer His Question Matthew squeezed her hand. This time, she returned the pressure, did not let go of his hand.
“Whenever I look up there,” he said, “I think the same thing.
I think of how small we are and how all our concerns, our anxieties and all the rest of it, are so irrelevant, so tiny. Not that we think they are – but they are, aren’t they?”
She looked at him. “I suppose they are.”
“And I also think of how we make one another miserable by worrying about these small things, when we should really just hug one another and say thank you to somebody, to something, for the great privilege of being alive – when everything up there”
– he nodded in the direction of the sky – “when everything up there is cold and dead. Dead stars. Collapsing stars. Suns that are going out, dying.”
She was silent. She wanted to say to him: “I think so too.”
But she did not.
He began to walk over towards the byre, leading her gently by the hand. “You know, a long time ago, when I had just left school, I had a friendship with another boy. It was the most intense friendship I ever had. I really loved my friend. And why not? It was pure – it really was. Nothing happened. It was completely innocent. Do you understand about that?”
“Of course I do,” she replied. “Women are much easier about loving their friends. It’s only men who have difficulty with that.”
“Yes. Anyway, we were in Perthshire once, fishing, and we sat down on the rocks beside the river and I looked up at the sky, which was completely empty, and I suddenly had the feeling that I wasn’t alone anymore. I can’t explain it in any other way.
I suppose it was one of those moments that people sometimes call mystical. A moment of insight. And I never forgot it. I still think of it.”
They were outside the byre now. It had been converted and appeared to be used as some sort of office. A French window, framed by creepers, was open, and they could see into the room on the other side of the window.
He Wanted Her Only to Answer His Question 155
“Come,” said Matthew. “Come on, I don’t think they’ll mind.”
They pushed open one of the French windows and stepped inside the room. Through a large window in the roof there was enough light coming in from outside, from the glow that spilled out from the main house, from the light of the sky itself, to reveal a cluttered desk, a wall of bookshelves, and a sofa. In the far corner of the room, a squat, dark shape revealed the presence of a wood-burning stove. There was, about the room, an air of wood-smoke that had settled, a reassuring, comfortable smell that had also been present in the house, with its open fires.
“This looks like his study,” said Matthew. His voice was lowered, almost to a sepulchral whisper, although there was nobody about.
“It’s so quiet after the din back there,” Pat said.
They sat down on the sofa. Matthew felt his heart beating within him and knew that even if he had not made up his mind in a conscious sense, at the level of the subconscious there was certainty.
“I wanted to talk to you,” he whispered. “Just us. Without anybody else around. I wanted to ask you . . . to ask you whether you thought that we could . . . well, whether we could get engaged.”
He had said it, but he had said it in such a clumsy fashion.
Nobody said that anymore, he said to himself; nobody asks anybody else if they would like to be engaged. Like everything I do, he thought, it sounds awkward and old-fashioned.
For a few moments, Pat said nothing, and Matthew wondered if she had heard him. They were seated so close together that she must have been able to sense the agitated beating of his heart and must have known. At least she knew her presence excited him, made him catch his breath, made his heart go like that; one could not fake those symptoms of affection.
Then a square of light fell onto the driveway and lighted, too, the byre’s interior. The front door had been opened and somebody came out, footfall upon gravel.
156 The Statistical Lady Is Not for Smiling at She said: “Somebody’s coming.”
The steps came nearer and reached the French windows, a figure moving in the darkness, a shadow. Matthew wanted her only to answer his question – gauche though it may have been, it expressed everything that he now felt. Because I’m fed up, he thought, with being lonely and out of place and seeing everybody else in the company of somebody they love. That was why he wanted an answer to his question.
“Please tell me,” he said. “Please just think about it.”
She did not have the time to answer, or if she answered he could not hear. Young East Lothian, his pipes under his arm, was inflating the bag, his drones were beginning to wail; that protest of the pipes before they wrought their magic. He had gone out there to warm up, and now he began to play.
“‘Mist-covered Mountains,’” said Matthew. “Do you know it?”
“Yes,” said Pat. And then: “That question you just asked . . .”
“You don’t have to answer,” said Matthew. “I’m sorry.”
“But I want to . . .” she said, and his heart gave a great leap, then descent: “I want to think about it. Give me . . . give me a few weeks.”
“Of course.”
Outside, the “Mist-covered Mountains” continued; such a tune, expressing all the longing, the love, that we feel for country and place, and for people.
47. The Statistical Lady Is Not for Smiling at Stuart Pollock, statistician in the Scottish Executive (with special responsibility for the adjustment of forecasts), husband of Irene Pollock, father of Bertie (six) and Ulysses (four months); co-proprietor of the second flat (right) in 44 Scotland Street, Edinburgh; all of this is what Stuart was, and all of these descrip-tors he now mulled over as he walked home early, making his The Statistical Lady Is Not for Smiling at 157
way down Waterloo Place after a long and tedious meeting in the neo-Stalinist St Andrew’s House.
A life might be summed up within such short compass, thought Stuart. He saw actuaries do it in their assessments in which we were all so reduced to become, for instance, a single female, aged thirty-two, nonsmoker, resident of the Central Belt – so truncated a description of what that person probably was, about her life and its saliences, but useful for the purposes for which they made these abridgements. Such a person had an allotted span, which the actuaries might reel off in much the same way as a fairground fortune-teller might do from the lines of the hand or on the turn of the Tarot card. You have thirty years before the environmental risk of living in the Central Belt becomes significant. The fortune-teller was not so direct, and certainly less clinical, but it amounted to the same advice: beware.
It had been a long-drawn-out meeting, and a frustrating one, in which Stuart, together with four other colleagues and a couple of parliamentarians, had been looking at health statistics. The news from Scotland was bad, and the Executive was looking for ways of making it sound just a little bit better. Nobody liked to pick on Glasgow, a vigorous and entertaining city, but the inescapable fact was that everybody knew that it had the worst diet in Western Europe and the highest rate of heart disease.
Was there any way in which this information might be presented to the world in a slightly more positive way? “Such as?” Stuart had asked.
This question had not gone down well. The politicians had looked at one another, and then at Stuart. Did one have to restrict the area in question to Western Europe? Could one not compare the Glaswegian diet with, say, diets in countries where there was a similar penchant for high-fat, high-sodium, high-risk food? Such as parts of the United States, particularly those parts with the highest obesity rates? Yes, but although the United States has a similar fondness for pizza, they don’t actually fry it, as they do in Scotland. There’s a difference there.