spoke to someone about your case? Just a hunch.’
‘August 14th. The Rankin Hotel, Bloomsbury. I have moved out of the house and Stella has asked for a divorce. Crazily, stupidly, I took a girl home, a waitress called Katerina, Russian, I think, or Ukrainian. I said she could stay, be our lodger, as we had plenty of spare rooms. Stella came back as she was inspecting the guest bedroom in the basement. I never laid a finger on her (I was planning to, of course). In the fight that followed it transpired that John-Jo had told Stella about finding me with Encarnacion. Stella was convinced I was mired in some miserable, middle-aged fit of satyriasis – she had been prepared to suffer it for a while, but not any more. I disgusted her, she bawled at me, how could I bring a girl into our house? What was she meant to do? She had some dignity left. She ordered me out of the house and I meekly went. Tomorrow I go to Edinburgh, perhaps it’s best I try to sort this out on my own.’
Part III. Edinburgh
Edinburgh in high summer was buffeted by gales and driving rain out of the north, interspersed with baffling periods of brilliant breezy sunshine, the wet streets drying before your eyes, umbrellas stowed, raincoats shrugged off, the terraced gardens beneath the dark, looming castle suddenly busy with half-naked sunbathers, before – inevitably – the slate-blue clouds gathered over Fife and the North Sea and bore down on the city again and the unrelenting drenching downpour resumed with all its former energy.
I had not been here for years and I had forgotten how the city in August surrendered itself to its annual invasion of Festival-goers, Princes Street and the Royal Mile loud with polyglot chatter, railings and billboards a patchwork collage of posters and advertisements. Yet beneath all this bright tat and cultural tourism, this cosmopolitan artfest, and the fizz and crackle in the atmosphere – almost palpable – of people set on indulging themselves, the old, dour, sooty reserve of the place appeared merely to be biding its time. These frivolous laughing folk will be gone in a week or so, seemed to be the message one read in the grim, impassive faces of the locals, and then we can get on with the serious business of living.
I was strongly conscious of this, of the old city and its implacable mores, as I walked along one of the gaunt, dark grey Georgian crescents of the New Town – the rain slanting down again, stinging my cheeks and brow – towards number 37 and noted the brass plaque (teared with icy drops) beside the bell-push which declared: ‘The Royal Scottish Institute of Hydrodynamic Engineering’, and, below that, the terse instruction, ‘Tradesmen report to the rear of the building’.
A tiny grey-haired woman with supernaturally bright eyes opened the door and directed me to a seat in the wide, penumbrous hall, where I was surveyed by numerous varnished portraits of engineering worthies from the nineteenth century. ‘Mr Auchinleck will be with you presently,’ she said and scurried back to her officefrom where I could shortly hear – a rarer and rarer sound this – the noise of a manual typewriter tapping rapidly away.
It had been Petra Fairbrother who had unwittingly sent me north from my mean hotel in Bloomsbury. She tracked me down there and informed me by telephone, excitement colouring her voice, that she thought she had a ‘lead’ – though she had no idea what exactly it would portend.
She had shown my pages of ‘automatic writing’, as she termed it, to a friend of hers, a mathematics don at Cambridge University. He thought the signs – the elongated x’s – were vaguely familiar and had promised to investigate. I fancifully imagined my pages being passed round the senior common rooms of various Cambridge colleges, grey heads nodding sagely at my hieroglyphs, learned speculation ensuing… But, whatever happened, he called back some few days later to say that the sign had been
‘August 14th. The Rankin Hotel, Bloomsbury. I have moved out of the house and Stella has asked for a divorce. Crazily, stupidly, I took a girl home, a waitress called Katerina, Russian, I think, or Ukrainian. I said she could stay, be our lodger, as we had plenty of spare rooms. Stella came back as she was inspecting the guest bedroom in the basement. I never laid a finger on her (I was planning to, of course). In the fight that followed it transpired that John-Jo had told Stella about finding me with Encarnacion. Stella was convinced I was mired in some miserable, middle-aged fit of satyriasis – she had been prepared to suffer it for a while, but not any more. I disgusted her, she bawled at me, how could I bring a girl into our house? What was she meant to do? She had some dignity left. She ordered me out of the house and I meekly went. Tomorrow I go to Edinburgh, perhaps it’s best I try to sort this out on my own.’
Part III. Edinburgh
Edinburgh in high summer was buffeted by gales and driving rain out of the north, interspersed with baffling periods of brilliant breezy sunshine, the wet streets drying before your eyes, umbrellas stowed, raincoats shrugged off, the terraced gardens beneath the dark, looming castle suddenly busy with half-naked sunbathers, before – inevitably – the slate-blue clouds gathered over Fife and the North Sea and bore down on the city again and the unrelenting drenching downpour resumed with all its former energy.
I had not been here for years and I had forgotten how the city in August surrendered itself to its annual invasion of Festival-goers, Princes Street and the Royal Mile loud with polyglot chatter, railings and billboards a patchwork collage of posters and advertisements. Yet beneath all this bright tat and cultural tourism, this cosmopolitan artfest, and the fizz and crackle in the atmosphere – almost palpable – of people set on indulging themselves, the old, dour, sooty reserve of the place appeared merely to be biding its time. These frivolous laughing folk will be gone in a week or so, seemed to be the message one read in the grim, impassive faces of the locals, and then we can get on with the serious business of living.
I was strongly conscious of this, of the old city and its implacable mores, as I walked along one of the gaunt, dark grey Georgian crescents of the New Town – the rain slanting down again, stinging my cheeks and brow – towards number 37 and noted the brass plaque (teared with icy drops) beside the bell-push which declared: ‘The Royal Scottish Institute of Hydrodynamic Engineering’, and, below that, the terse instruction, ‘Tradesmen report to the rear of the building’.
A tiny grey-haired woman with supernaturally bright eyes opened the door and directed me to a seat in the wide, penumbrous hall, where I was surveyed by numerous varnished portraits of engineering worthies from the nineteenth century. ‘Mr Auchinleck will be with you presently,’ she said and scurried back to her officefrom where I could shortly hear – a rarer and rarer sound this – the noise of a manual typewriter tapping rapidly away.
It had been Petra Fairbrother who had unwittingly sent me north from my mean hotel in Bloomsbury. She tracked me down there and informed me by telephone, excitement colouring her voice, that she thought she had a ‘lead’ – though she had no idea what exactly it would portend.
She had shown my pages of ‘automatic writing’, as she termed it, to a friend of hers, a mathematics don at Cambridge University. He thought the signs – the elongated x’s – were vaguely familiar and had promised to investigate. I fancifully imagined my pages being passed round the senior common rooms of various Cambridge colleges, grey heads nodding sagely at my hieroglyphs, learned speculation ensuing… But, whatever happened, he called back some few days later to say that the sign had been
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