‘It’ll come back tae ye.’
‘Yes, it will,’ said MacDonald. ‘I’ve been here forty years. You get a pretty good knowledge of the stock over that length of time. Especially the older items, the stuff that’s been here since before you arrived. It becomes like your own furniture.’
Carlin said nothing. He thought MacDonald had finished. He was turning to leave when the librarian rushed on unexpectedly.
‘Furniture’s to be used, that’s what I think. If not, chop it up for firewood – why not? Something like this happens – you coming in here – it starts a ball rolling, doesn’t it? A mechanism – cogs turn, balances shift. I’m always interested that other people are interested.’
‘Interested?’ Carlin said. ‘Whit in?’
‘That’s the thing – anything, anything at all. You never know what significance will be found in the utterly trivial. Otherwise’ – he made a sweeping gesture that seemed to incorporate not just the Scottish department but the entire library on all its floors – ‘what would be the point of all this? What would be the point?’
Carlin smiled. It was as if the man was justifying his existence.
‘I’ll be in again the morn,’ said Carlin.
‘Good,’ said MacDonald. ‘Ask for me if you need anything, won’t you?’
He had to go back to his flat in off-Bruntsfield to collect the wig and cloak for that evening’s performance. He left the library and walked along George IV Bridge, passing the bronze statue of Greyfriars’ Bobby beside which, even this early in the year, a couple of tourists were photographing each other. But the past – Carlin’s past – was there with them too; he could never go by that dog without seeing it coated in yellowpaint – some unsentimental person had once cowped a tin of the stuff over the statue and now he always saw it like that.
There had been a jeweller’s shop right beside it called Abbotts of Greyfriars, then it became a fruit-machine arcade, now it was a grocer’s. The arcade owners had economically removed the A and two Ts from the old fascia and rearranged the remaining letters to read BOBS OF GREYFRIARS: every time Carlin saw the shop-front now, with its fruit and veg stacked out onto the pavement from the windows, he glanced up and remembered that earlier transformation, and saw the flashing lights that had beckoned folk in to chance the coins in their pockets.
To his left, down Chambers Street, was the Museum, where, if he looked, he would catch the echo of someone he had once seen, a tiny lost lassie in a blue coat crouched on the steps. He kept going. Further along, in Forrest Road, was Sandy Bell’s pub, where he had once watched an old man share his pint with his dog and then order the beast outside when it failed to buy the next one: there was a thin, skeerie-looking mongrel hotching anxiously outside the door now as he passed.
On Middle Meadow Walk he observed to his left the backs of some of the few original buildings of George Square, including one once lived in by a young Walter Scott. The university had destroyed most of three sides of the square in the sixties and seventies and replaced the Georgian houses with concrete-slabbed office-blocks. Later, when he was a student, it was widely circulated that these buildings were themselves threatened with demolition owing to a fault in the concrete. ‘A result of material weakness in a false construction placed on the original premises,’ Carlin had once said to himself. And now that laboured witticism looped round in his head again: he couldn’t erase it. He would never get free of those wee lumps and craters of time.
Crossing the Meadows now was like watching a film of himself crossing the Meadows. He was nearly forty years old. It was twenty years since he’d first walked there. The light wind blew pink cherry blossom from the trees lining the path, as though a corridor of wedding guests were throwing confetti at him. He laughed out loud at the
‘Yes, it will,’ said MacDonald. ‘I’ve been here forty years. You get a pretty good knowledge of the stock over that length of time. Especially the older items, the stuff that’s been here since before you arrived. It becomes like your own furniture.’
Carlin said nothing. He thought MacDonald had finished. He was turning to leave when the librarian rushed on unexpectedly.
‘Furniture’s to be used, that’s what I think. If not, chop it up for firewood – why not? Something like this happens – you coming in here – it starts a ball rolling, doesn’t it? A mechanism – cogs turn, balances shift. I’m always interested that other people are interested.’
‘Interested?’ Carlin said. ‘Whit in?’
‘That’s the thing – anything, anything at all. You never know what significance will be found in the utterly trivial. Otherwise’ – he made a sweeping gesture that seemed to incorporate not just the Scottish department but the entire library on all its floors – ‘what would be the point of all this? What would be the point?’
Carlin smiled. It was as if the man was justifying his existence.
‘I’ll be in again the morn,’ said Carlin.
‘Good,’ said MacDonald. ‘Ask for me if you need anything, won’t you?’
He had to go back to his flat in off-Bruntsfield to collect the wig and cloak for that evening’s performance. He left the library and walked along George IV Bridge, passing the bronze statue of Greyfriars’ Bobby beside which, even this early in the year, a couple of tourists were photographing each other. But the past – Carlin’s past – was there with them too; he could never go by that dog without seeing it coated in yellowpaint – some unsentimental person had once cowped a tin of the stuff over the statue and now he always saw it like that.
There had been a jeweller’s shop right beside it called Abbotts of Greyfriars, then it became a fruit-machine arcade, now it was a grocer’s. The arcade owners had economically removed the A and two Ts from the old fascia and rearranged the remaining letters to read BOBS OF GREYFRIARS: every time Carlin saw the shop-front now, with its fruit and veg stacked out onto the pavement from the windows, he glanced up and remembered that earlier transformation, and saw the flashing lights that had beckoned folk in to chance the coins in their pockets.
To his left, down Chambers Street, was the Museum, where, if he looked, he would catch the echo of someone he had once seen, a tiny lost lassie in a blue coat crouched on the steps. He kept going. Further along, in Forrest Road, was Sandy Bell’s pub, where he had once watched an old man share his pint with his dog and then order the beast outside when it failed to buy the next one: there was a thin, skeerie-looking mongrel hotching anxiously outside the door now as he passed.
On Middle Meadow Walk he observed to his left the backs of some of the few original buildings of George Square, including one once lived in by a young Walter Scott. The university had destroyed most of three sides of the square in the sixties and seventies and replaced the Georgian houses with concrete-slabbed office-blocks. Later, when he was a student, it was widely circulated that these buildings were themselves threatened with demolition owing to a fault in the concrete. ‘A result of material weakness in a false construction placed on the original premises,’ Carlin had once said to himself. And now that laboured witticism looped round in his head again: he couldn’t erase it. He would never get free of those wee lumps and craters of time.
Crossing the Meadows now was like watching a film of himself crossing the Meadows. He was nearly forty years old. It was twenty years since he’d first walked there. The light wind blew pink cherry blossom from the trees lining the path, as though a corridor of wedding guests were throwing confetti at him. He laughed out loud at the
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