Pat noticed that to the side of the room there was a small tea table, covered with a worked-linen tablecloth. On this was a tray, with a Minton teapot and cups and saucers. Then there was a cake – as Dr Fantouse had said there would be – a sponge of some sort, dusted with icing sugar, and a plate of sandwiches –
white bread, neatly trimmed.
“We sometimes have people for tea,” said Fiona. “And so we keep an extra cup to hand.”
She sat herself beside the tea tray and asked Pat how she liked her tea. On the other side of the room, facing them, Dr Some Tea and Decency with the Fantouses 299
Fantouse perched on a high-backed chair, smiling at Pat and his wife.
“Miss Macgregor belongs to the coffeehouse generation,” he remarked. “Afternoon tea will not be her usual thing. Perhaps you would like coffee?”
“I like tea,” said Pat.
“There are so many coffeehouses,” said Fiona. “And they are all full of people talking to one another. One wonders what they talk about?”
Both Dr Fantouse and his wife now looked at Pat, as if expecting an answer to what might otherwise have seemed a rhetorical question.
“The usual things,” said Pat. “What people normally talk about. Their friends, I suppose. Who’s doing what. That sort of thing.”
Dr Fantouse smiled at his wife. “More or less what we talk to our friends about,” he said. “Nothing has changed, you see.”
The two Fantouses looked at one another with what seemed to Pat to be relief. There was silence. Fiona passed Pat a cup of tea and Dr Fantouse rose to his feet to cut slices of cake.
“There’s something very calming about tea,” remarked Fiona.
“I sometimes think that if people drank more tea, they would be calmer.”
Pat looked at her. The Fantouses were very calm as it was; was this the effect of tea, or was it something more profound?
Fiona seemed to warm to her theme. “Coffee cultures can be excitable, don’t you think?” she said. “Look at the Latins. They never talk about things in a quiet way. It’s all so passionate. Look at the difference between Edinburgh and Naples.”
There was a further silence. Then Dr Fantouse said, “I don’t know. Perhaps we might become a bit more . . .”
All eyes turned to him, but he did not expand on his comment, but lifted a piece of cake and popped it into his mouth. Fiona turned to Pat, as if expecting her to weigh in on her side and 300 Some Tea and Decency with the Fantouses confirm the difference between Edinburgh and Naples, but she did not.
Dr Fantouse licked a bit of icing sugar off a finger. “Un po di musica, as Lucia would say. Would you care to play, my dear?”
Fiona put down her teacup and smiled at Pat. “It’s something of a ritual,” she said. “I usually play for a few minutes after we’ve finished tea. Do you play yourself? I would be very happy for you to play rather than . . .”
Pat shook her head. “I learned a bit, but never got very far.
I’m hopeless.”
“Surely not!” said both Fantouses in unison. But they did not put the matter to the test, as Fiona had now crossed the room and seated herself at the keyboard.
“This is the Eriskay Love Lilt,” she announced. “In a rather charming arrangement. It was Marjorie Kennedy Fraser, of course, who rescued it. And the words are so poignant, aren’t they? Vair me or ro van o / Vair me o ro ven ee / Vair me or ru o ho / Sad I am without thee.”
Pat found herself watching Dr Fantouse as his wife played.
He was watching her hands, as if transfixed. When she reached the end of the piece, he turned to Pat and smiled.
“We could have more,” he said, “but we ration ourselves.
People have so much music – don’t you think? – that they don’t bother to listen to half of it. Music should be arresting, should be something which makes one stop and listen. But we’re inun-dated with music. Everywhere we go. People are plugged into their iPods. Music is piped into shops, restaurants, everywhere.
A constant barrage of music.”
“But you will have more tea?” asked Fiona.
Pat shook her head. “I must get on,” she said. “You’ve been very kind.”
“You must come again,” said Fiona. “It’s been such fun.”
“Yes, it has,” said Dr Fantouse. “That’s the nice thing about Edinburgh. There are so many pleasant surprises.”
They saw Pat to the door, where Pat shook hands with both A Peculiar and Yet Harmless Enthusiasm 301
of them. She saw again the delicate eye makeup on Fiona’s eyes.
Who was it for? she wondered. For Dr Fantouse? Did he notice such things?
As she went downstairs, a boy of about eleven or twelve was coming up. He looked as if he had been playing football, his knees muddied, his hair dishevelled. She looked into his face, a face of freckles, and saw that he had grey eyes. For a moment, both stopped, as if they were about to say something to one another, but then the boy looked away and continued up the stairs. Pat felt uneasy. It was as if she had seen a fox.
She went out into the street and glanced up at the windows of the flat. Dr Fantouse was standing at the window, his wife beside him. They noticed Pat and waved. She waved back and thought: how many people in this city live like that? Or was this a caricature, an echo of what bourgeois Edinburgh once was like but was no more? Or, again, had what she seen that afternoon been simple, quiet decency, nothing more? As she walked up the narrow road that led past the Sick Kids Hospital, she remembered what she had once read somewhere, words of little comfort: for most of us, nothing very much happens; that is our life.
89. A Peculiar and Yet Harmless Enthusiasm
“So, Lou,” said Robbie Cromach. “Tuesday’s your birthday, and you and I are going somewhere special! You choose.”
Big Lou smiled at Robbie, her boyfriend of two months, the man whom she felt she knew rather well, but in a curious way did not know at all. He was a thoughtful man, and paid much more attention to Lou’s feelings than had any of her previous boyfriends. They had been a disaster – all of them – selfish, exploitative, weak; indeed, one or two of them all of these things at the same time. But Robbie was different; she was sure of that.
302 A Peculiar and Yet Harmless Enthusiasm
“Well, that’s really good of you, Robbie,” she said. “Only my birthday’s on Monday, not Tuesday and . . .”
She did not finish. Robbie was frowning. “Monday . . .” he began.
“Yes. So we’ll have no difficulty getting in anywhere.”
Robbie was still frowning, and Big Lou realised that he must have something on that evening. She had told him several times that her birthday was on Monday – he had asked her and she had told him. Now it appeared that he had made other arrangements for that night. She sighed, but she was used to this. Big Lou’s birthday had never been anybody else’s priority in the past, and it looked as if that would not change now; she had thought that it might be different with Robbie, but perhaps it was not.
“You’ve got something on?” The resignation showed in her voice. “You can’t change it?”
Robbie, who had called in on Big Lou’s coffee bar to accompany her to her flat on closing time, shifted his weight awkwardly from foot to foot.