Debatable Land (18 page)

He had begun to act upon his curiosity, damaging his home and almost never gratifying himself beyond the first touch of new skin. The oath not sworn to Lorna, but held to, that he would be loyal, if not faithful, became a snake that coiled about his whole life, squeezing the air from it.

‘See that one for her straight back and hard profile,’ said Lorna. They were queuing with a jug at the Italian shop on the way down to Leith and the sea, to give lunch to his father. They would fill the jug with red wine and fill a basket with some of the foods the old man, very surprisingly, had taken to; long hard bread full of holes, cheeses like the soles of sandshoes, strange vegetables that lived in a tank of oil and were lifted out in tongs, dry yellow cake, and the wine, even. The shop had become part of the city’s growing cosmopolitan life. On Saturday mornings, people were starting to visit it the way that Europeans shopped, in order to find what was good on that day, or to pass time. For Edinburgh, it was new; a certain bohemianism had grown up around the Saturday queue. Alec recognised other painters, a woman weaver of Italian blood, a sculptor. The affinity between Scots and Poles, Scots and Italians, may have to do with the old religion; it is also concerned with food.

That day the sun lay as it can in Edinburgh so slanting and insinuating that even the grey stone of the terraces and the old paving stones were warmed. Women wore dresses and sandals, without stockings. The housewives at their doors had on aprons over blouses as they wiped off the Brasso at their doorbells. The city whose life was lived for the most part indoors was trying its own streets. Seagulls tramped along among the shoppers. At the docks a foghorn once in a while blared. Strangers fell into conversation, made bold by the oddness of being in a queue for food, a queue that they had chosen to be in.

Old men, the grandfathers of the two families of the shop, served food and conversed at a pace combining commercial and theatrical timing. They passed among the crowd, offering on small plates a piece of Parmesan (‘Cheese, it’s cheese, tell them’), some sugared violets, a plate of purple olives and pink tuna. The old men were attended by their dazzling grandsons, who climbed ladders to reach the top shelves of the narrow, high shop, and their granddaughters, gold hoops in their ears, who used lazy-tongs to bring down hard sacks of ground coffee or sachets of pink-and-white almonds. The third generation spoke pure Scots though they were entirely Italian; they interspersed their Edinburgh speech with fast-squashed Italian, falling into operatic Italian-English to flatter, wheedle, or declare large totals. Their upbringing had been strict; the grandfathers were bringing up the boys to be as shrewd and charming as they were, to carry on the bringing of oil and heat and flattery to the cool city and its evasive, bridling, seducible citizens.

‘Is she Italian herself, d’you think?’ Lorna asked.

The girl Lorna had pointed out was tall and narrow, straight-backed and somehow prancing, with heavy hair and the drooping, half-sneering, half-swooning profile of a Greek head. Her forehead, pale yellow like all her skin, as Alec knew, was edged with down such as grows on the calyx of some flowers that can tolerate a life near the sea. She banged her basket against her legs, this girl, puffing her skirt out each time behind as the basket hit the front of her calves. Each time the material returned to her legs it clung more, until it was creeping in a fold back through between, sucked by the basket and blown by the wind that is always passing down Leith Walk on the way to the sea. In a town the size of Edinburgh a man will identify the beautiful women who are resident over the years as he takes the gauge of the crowds he walks among; from among these he will eliminate some as being impossible. To others he will aspire, and he will dream of them. Some he may arrange to meet. A few he may come to know. One or two he may learn more of privately. Having seen this girl in the queue, Alec would have decided to course the streets for her, had he not already been spending afternoons with her in the dark, with the shutters folded to the window and oranges in a bowl by the bed.

When it came to the tall dark girl being served, one of the grandfathers deliberately beat the other to it.

‘And,
bella Signorina
, for you today?’

‘Butter, half a pound, unsalted, please.’

‘It is my pleasure. Isabella,
presto
.’ He kept the grandsons away with other errands, the decanting of capers, the measuring out of crystallized citron, the chiselling of
torrone
off its sticky block.

The granddaughter near the butter-barrel took a knife, cut out a wedge of butter, set it on a paddle, paddled it into a pat, and then stamped it with a wooden mould that she drew from a zinc bucket of iced water. With her hands covered over by a muslin cloth, she lifted the thistle-badged butter on to waxed paper and folded it up with attention, not too tight.

‘And
mortadella
, enough for two.’ The medieval woman had seen Alec and was tormenting him. He knew her husband liked the bland, oversized sausage. Or perhaps she really had not seen him and just wished for
mortadella
.

‘He is truly fortunate,’ the Italian grandfather began, as civility demanded, ‘who shares this meat with you.’

The people in the queue were enjoying the compliments themselves; it was a matter of national honour that such a beauty lived among them. Only a superb and heartless flatterer can achieve this effect of scattering his sweets.

‘Yes, now, and bread, half a long loaf, if you would.’

‘I myself will eat the other half, dear,’ said the old man, forgetting and becoming less exotic as his sentence ended.

‘Isabella, bring a little extra for the
Signorina
. You accept?’ he asked. It was clear that Isabella knew where to get the little extra; a store of small tokens, chillis, muscatel raisins on the branch, small wedges of
panforte
, sticks of Edinburgh rock, even, had been accurately measured and wrapped for timely spontaneity.

‘And I’d like a wine if I may. Bottle.’

‘What will you have today?’ He said ‘today’ often to his lady customers; they felt their presence marked. Newcomers believed themselves included. In these cold northern countries many women had become invisible by the time they reached the age of shopping for foods; he knew it from the vivacity that they learned to show him, their obedience, their willingness to learn. He was teaching the women of Edinburgh to shop, to eat, to cook to please their husbands and sons, in short he was teaching them how to be women, so he thought. He trained them.

‘
A
wine we do not say. The wine, or a type of wine. A wine is like to say,’ he became truly continental, ‘a true love. Love it exists, a great thing, like the wine. The true love, not true love. Is not something you can find, just like that.’

Lorna was shopping now, asking the other grandfather for her messages: ‘A loaf, a whole one, please, and three
tramezzini
.’

‘Certainly, dear. And?’

‘Parma ham.’ An inconvenient thing to ask for on a Saturday morning, thought the grandfather, motioning one of the young men to hook down a dry mighty haunch and impale it ready to be sliced by the whizzing malicious machine in the corner.

‘How much?’ asked the grandfather who was dealing with Lorna. ‘Nine slices, please,’ she said, unromantic, truthful, practical and precise.

Comparing the two women in whose beds he had been in the past week, who were now shopping before his eyes, Alec reflected how you might make a town impossible for yourself if you continued in this way. No human could surely endure the accruing interest on debts of guilt and systems of lies?

The wine had been chosen for the dark girl, wrapped in tissue, probed snug into a long brown paper bag with secure string handles anchored by metal barrels like cufflinks.

‘See you next Saturday. Ta Ta.
Arrivederci
,’ sang the grandfather who had served her. Set up by his encounter, he would be able to wheedle the next twenty women with flattery whose sincerity would be meant for the sinewy neck and white flat teeth of the tall dark girl.

She turned and, not knowing Lorna, saw Alec.

‘Alex,’ she said, ‘I should have thought it. Want a bit of
mortadella
?’

‘I don’t like it.’

Lorna had not turned when the name Alex had been called. She did not use that name for him. She was in the corner of the shop, being shown a postcard, apparently, by the man who was serving her. She had a bag of biscuits under her arm. On the shiny paper was a putto of about eight, Caravaggiesque, eating a biscuit of the type in the bag with an expression on his face expressing all the deadly sins but the one most easy to identify with biscuits. The temperament of the many Italians who had settled in Scotland after being prisoners of war, often staying on to wed and to fill the Scots with ice-cream, met and blended with the Scots nature as naturally as ice and sauce mixing in a bowl, the one just mutually chilled enough, the other just sufficiently intersweetened.

‘Such a lot I don’t know about you,’ said the girl, ‘but I mustn’t tell the world.’

At this, the queue fell quiet. Edinburgh is a city fond of hearsay.

Lorna continued to listen to the old man, who was indicating the shelves that bore tinned tomatoes, a panel of them three feet wide, twenty high.

Alec said, ‘I’ll be off, Maria-Fiona, it was good to see you.’

That could not but be true.

‘Paint me!’ Maria-Fiona cried out. ‘Paint me!’ The verb was passionately enunciated, lasciviously imperative.

He left the shop, noticing as he did so the incidence of brogues and expensive ladies’ pumps among the shoes of the customers of the shop. His own mother, not a slattern, had often enough gone over the road to fetch the messages in her bedroom slippers.

The little bags of silver balls and jellied citrus slices jangled as he left Valvona and Crolla. On the street some of the shoppers were looking after a dog that was not allowed inside, talking to it as though it too had decided to fetch some foreign foods into its life.

‘Is it the salammy you’re here for, then? Or would it be the baloney?’

Lorna emerged, smiling at the attempts to get across to the dog, which flopped its paws over each other and lowered its head on to them, looking at the changing queue tolerantly, though without interest. A gull ate chips from a bag outside the Deep Sea fish bar.

Alec was unpleasant to Lorna for a few minutes to punish her for behaving so naturally in the shop. Before meeting his father, though, by the boats at Leith Docks, he had adjusted his behaviour and with it his mood.

This small shift brought with it the customary spiritual relaxation as he allowed the chocks to be kicked away from under Maria-Fiona in his heart, and the woman herself to slide away down the slipway and away from him for good. The lightness he felt on each of these occasions, a lightness he could not confide, that Lorna would have hated for its coldness, was the most piercing pleasure he derived from his escapes from the rational home he had made for himself and herself.

Alec’s father was in his coat today, despite the sun. The coat moved and exasperated Alec. He remembered the times they had spread out the coat to sit on for picnics, and a day when Alec himself had hidden within it under a tree while his father watched birds in the bitter wind out at Duddingston Loch, standing in his pullover and shirtsleeves among the old frozen gooseshit, counting the ducks and envisaging the extraordinary migration of the absent geese to the heat of North Africa. The coat was too small for Alec now, too big for his father, and Alec was ashamed of the aggression he felt towards his father for shrinking. It was as if it were irresponsible of him to be growing older.

‘If you know what’s good for you,
do not die
,’ he wanted to say. Inside its coat, his father’s body was hiding from time, trying to be overlooked. Inside its shirt and wee knitted jerkin, the body was shrinking, everything pulling in so as to be closer to the heart.

They had the same conversations. Alec did not dare mention the sameness, that he loved, for fear his father did not realise it. His father did, and would have felt a change badly. These habits were like bridges to him between his memories of his own father and Alec’s future, a span of bridges resting upon himself. Any change would have terribly aged him since to acknowledge resistance to change is to acknowledge one’s own looming limit, the point in time beyond which it will be lonely to live, when every friend will be gone and one will be a slow-beating heart, alone.

‘The crags, will it be?’ asked his father.

‘Indeed, if that suits.’ It would be colder up there, but they could take a rug. They had always taken a rug. It would not be an admission of susceptibility, therefore.

‘Lorna’s a small meal for us.’

‘Something hot, then?’

‘No. A meal may be cold.’

‘The first I heard of it.’

This was a way of bringing Mairi and Jean, dead now of the same cancer, that has a taste for sisters, into the talk. They did not visit the graves over the once a year, since what was the point? Each time they visited, the bereaved father and his son hoped but never confided their hope to surprise Mairi and Jean sitting and talking, short legs crossed, hair permed afresh, under the rowan trees on a labelled bench, their graves ordinarily, unfrighteningly open in front of them, like the doors of a little car, a runabout.