Matthew listened to this … this nonsense (in his view) with growing incredulity, only momentarily distracted by Angus’s mention of Campbell cattle – a term that made him picture cattle whose natural coats were of characteristic green tartan. “Angus,” he said at last, “I’m somewhat surprised by your view of all this. I would have thought that the proper thing for a Campbell to do about all this is to hang his head in shame, and a whole lot of other matters, including the persecution of Macgregors. After all, what actually happened? All those Campbells went to stay with those poor Macdonalds, as their guests.” He paused, allowing the word guests to hang heavily in the air. “They stayed with them and enjoyed their hospitality and then turned round and massacred them. That, I believe, is not in accordance with traditional Highland notions of hospitality – nor of traditional Scottish notions of hospitality, I might add. One simply doesn’t fall upon the people who have put you up. If that sort of thing were allowed, then just imagine how perilous it would be running a B and B up in the Highlands. Imagine.”
Angus laughed. “Oh really, Matthew, stop havering. All this happened when the whole country was pretty dangerous, especially up in the Highlands. They were all as bad as each other – plotting and scheming, raiding one another, left, right, and centre. Stealing cattle. Ignoring every health and safety consideration in the book.”
They both laughed.
“History,” mused Angus. “History doesn’t bear much thinking about.”
“We have to stand back from it,” said Matthew, remembering a teacher at the Academy who had made that point to him. “I remember being taught that it shouldn’t be used politically. It shouldn’t be used to make other people feel guilty about the past.” Or should it? he wondered. Should one not remember certain things in order to prevent their recurrence?: that was a familiar point, and one with much to recommend it. If we did not remember wrongs, then wrongs could so easily be committed again. Perhaps it was a question of not laying those wrongs at the door of those descended from the wrongdoers: that could be unjust in the extreme, and dangerous too. The world was full of historical hatreds that still had power, now and then, to complicate and poison relationships between people.
Angus moved across the room to retrieve his kilt. “A bit of a disaster, I’m afraid. I’ve discovered this large hole, right here in the front. There have been all these moths, you see.”
Matthew joined him to inspect the damage. It was extensive – a hole about the size of an extended hand had appeared in the cloth; rather too big for a moth, he thought, but the aetiology of the damage was not the point: the point was that this kilt could hardly be worn in its current state.
“You can’t wear this,” he said. “You’ll have to wear a suit. What about that grey suit of yours? The one with the chalk stripes?”
Angus shook his head. “Out of the question,” he said. “I must get married in the kilt.”
Matthew said that he understood that, but it clearly could not be that kilt. He wondered whether Angus could borrow a kilt from somebody. Was there a neighbour, perhaps?
“No,” said Angus. “I can’t think of anybody who can lend me a kilt. Not round here, anyway.”
They stood in silence. Matthew was aware that this was a situation that any book on wedding etiquette would unambiguously declare to be the responsibility of the best man. It was without question the best man’s role to get the groom to the church, in his wedding outfit, and in possession of the ring. That was not much to ask, really, and yet here he was, as best man to Angus, floundering at the first little hitch, even if this hitch was, to be fair, not all that little.
“We should fix it,” he said decisively.
Angus looked at him with interest. “How?”
Matthew frowned. What did one do with holes in cloth? The answer came to him immediately.
“We need a patch,” he said. “If we cut the edges of the hole – carefully – to make it regular, then we could get a patch and sew it on.”
“A Campbell tartan patch?”
“Yes,” said Matthew. “Have you got anything else in your tartan? A rug, maybe? A scarf?”
Angus shook his head. “I don’t drape myself in Campbelliana. Credit me with some taste, Matthew.”
Matthew looked thoughtful. He remembered when he had had his new kilt made up there had been a book of cloth samples – one of those floppy volumes that tailors have of which the generously sized pages are swatches of fabric.
“I think I have the solution,” he said.
He sounded so calm, so decisive – just as a best man should.
6. Subjects and Symbols in Art
Matthew managed to persuade Angus to don his chalk-stripe suit for what he called emergency cover. “I know you don’t want to wear it for the actual wedding,” he said, holding up a hand to forestall Angus’s incipient protest. “I know that, and, as I’ve said, I have a plan. But you need to be dressed accordingly in case my plan doesn’t work.” He paused, giving Angus the sort of warning look that he imagined a best man should give to a potentially recalcitrant groom. “And anyway, as everybody knows, nobody in the church will be looking at you. The groom plays a very minor part in a wedding. All eyes are on the bride. Fact.”
Angus nodded. What Matthew said was true, he thought, and now, as he cast his mind back to the last wedding he had attended – the wedding of an Arts Club friend’s daughter – he found that he could hardly even remember what the groom looked like, let alone what he wore; nor his name, for that matter. “I don’t think that weddings are for men,” he said. “I’m not sure if they actually enjoy them.”
Matthew was clear that they did not. “No man likes a wedding,” he said. “They pretend to, for the sake of women, but if you look at their faces you’ll see they have fixed grins. They look vaguely uncomfortable. Whereas the women guests … that’s quite another matter. The hats. The outfits. That’s what weddings are all about. And romance too, I suppose.”
“Which men don’t go in for?”
Matthew thought for a moment. “I’m not sure. Some men might, but generally they don’t. Men tend to be more … more prosaic.”
Angus retreated into his bedroom to find the chalk-stripe suit, but continued the conversation through the open door. “Of course, these are all very sweeping generalisations,” he called out. “Men can be every bit as feeling as women, every bit as sensitive … if they allow themselves.”
“But that’s the whole point,” replied Matthew. “If they allow themselves. And we don’t, do we? Especially in Scotland.”
Angus mumbled something from the bedroom that Matthew did not quite catch.
“So,” Matthew went on, “I know it’s the usual spiel – we’re all bound up in our masculinity, all afraid to cry, all trying to be strong, when we aren’t really. We’re every bit as weak as women. In fact, they’re actually rather stronger than we are. They don’t go round pretending to be strong, as we do, but all the time they’re tough as nails.”
“Yes,” shouted out Angus. “But what sort of tie should I wear?”
“Wear the tie you’re going to wear with your kilt.”
“That’s green.”
“That’s fine. But take another tie that will go with the suit. So if you need to wear the suit after all, then you can put that tie on.”
There was silence from within the bedroom. Matthew walked over to the window and looked out. The sky was still clear, although he could see that there was a breeze moving the tops of the trees in the Drummond Place Gardens. He thought about the conversation he had just had with Angus. Were there many best men who spoke to their friends about that sort of thing while they prepared for the wedding? Were there any men in Scotland who spoke to their friends about expectations of masculinity? Was that in itself the problem?
Angus emerged from the bedroom. The chalk-stripe suit was a bit crumpled but at least his white shirt seemed clean and the tie, although Matthew would not have worn it himself, was relatively inoffensiv
e.
“All right,” said Matthew, as breezily as he could (his best-man’s voice again, he thought). “All right: now I need the ring.”
Angus looked at him blankly. “What ring?”
Matthew gasped. “You’re getting married in …” he glanced at his watch, “in just over two and a half hours and … The wedding ring, Angus. The wedding ring.”
Angus grimaced. “You know, I’ve been so busy with all this … all this wedding stuff. I hadn’t really addressed the issue of a wedding ring. I suppose it’s important?”
Matthew sighed. “Of course it’s important, Angus. You have to put a ring on her finger and she has to put one on yours. It’s symbolic.”
Angus frowned. “Symbolism’s very interesting, isn’t it? I remember when we were at the Art College we had a marvellous talk from Robin Philipson, I think it was, about symbols. I rushed out and bought a secondhand copy of Hall’s Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art. Do you know it, Matthew? It’s a wonderful book.”
Matthew stared at Angus mutely. He had seen a book entitled A Guide for the Modern Best Man, although he had not bothered to buy it. He wondered now whether there was a chapter that dealt with a situation where the best man had to ask himself whether the groom was sufficiently grounded in reality to get married.
“If you look at early paintings,” Angus continued, “you’ll be astonished at the extent to which symbol and allegory are at work. Take a picture of a garden, for example. You may think it’s just a garden, but it’s doing much more work that that. It represents the taming of nature – the process of civilising. Or unicorns. If there’s a unicorn in a picture, then the artist clearly intends to say something about purity and chastity. And so on. Symbols were very important before there was widespread literacy. People might not have been able to read, but they could see all right …”
Matthew moved forward and seized the lapels of Angus’s jacket. The suit smelled dusty, he thought, and suddenly he found that he was remembering the smell of dusty cloth. But this was no time for a Proustian moment, and he steeled himself for the firm attitude that was now very clearly required. Angus was going on about symbolism in art because he was panicking – that was now obvious to Matthew. “Angus,” he hissed. “Get a grip! You say there’s no ring? Is that correct?”
Angus nodded miserably. “I feel really foolish. I should have thought about it.” But then he brightened. “Couldn’t we use some other sort of symbol?”
7. Matthew Is Sorely Tested
Matthew counted to ten, not overtly, not so that Angus could hear him, but mentally, in that inner region of contrived calm we create when we want to assert control over some emotion – anger, perhaps, or worse. It was an ancient trick he had been taught by his mother, that calm, collected woman who in the face of provocation never manifested any reaction beyond the mildest irritation. “Count to ten, Matthew,” she had said. “Count to ten and the world will look slightly different.” It was folk wisdom of the sort that mothers tend to espouse, and it was exactly the sort of thing that we reject out of hand when we are young (what self-respecting young person says, “You know something? My mother’s dead right”?). And yet with the passage of the years we realise, much to our growing chagrin, that mother was indeed right. And for that very small and privileged number of people who grow up in a household in which there is a nanny (a tiny number now), there is the additional necessity of recognising that not only was mother right, but so was nanny! And some people, mirabile dictu, would go so far as to say Mrs. Thatcher too! (Not that many concede that the last was right, on anything, even if subsequent prime ministers, of every stripe, appeared to have a sneaking admiration for their predecessor.)
But not in Scotland. No politician operating within a purely Scottish context could bring himself to make such an admission publicly, although it is widely said, sotto voce, that several Catholic politicians in Scotland have confessed as much to their priests, relying on the secrecy of the confessional box to unburden themselves of that fact. I must confess, Father, that I have reached the conclusion that some of the things Mrs. Thatcher did were in the best interests of the country. Silence. How often have you had these thoughts, my son? Slight hesitation. Once or twice a week, Father. Silence. My son, you must understand that these thoughts are impure and you must try to put them out of your mind if they occur to you. Imagine what your family, your friends, your political colleagues would think if they knew that this was what you were thinking. Flood of guilt; and the priest continues: Make an act of contrition and …
Matthew had, of course, laughed at his mother’s advice, but had secretly followed it, and discovered that it worked. Not only that, but he had extended its ambit to include counting up to fifteen before pressing the send button on an e-mail. That, he discovered, had been an invaluable way of preventing oneself from saying things that on reflection one would not really wish to say. Like all of us he had written e-mails that he regretted, and on one or two occasions had sent immediate countermanding messages. This second message, though, would inevitably be too late to limit the damage done by the first. Indeed, he had decided that if one sent an e-mail one regretted sending, it was probably better not to do anything at all, as there was always the chance that the recipient would simply ignore the first one, or perhaps read it in a hurry and not take the full insulting meaning from it. After all, not everybody opened every single e-mail they received, and not everybody paid much attention to those that did arrive. Unwise remarks, then, might simply fade into the general electronic noise that today surrounds the lives of most of us – a noise not unlike the screeching of cicadas in the forest, omnipresent, unremitting, and ultimately forgettable.
That morning, faced with Angus Lordie’s remarkable lack of preparation for his own wedding, Matthew reached ten rather more quickly than he had anticipated. He decided to continue to fifteen, in order to give himself more time to calm down. It was not the end of the world, he now told himself. There must have been other bridegrooms who had forgotten to buy a ring; there must have been other bridegrooms, now safely married, who had discovered at the last moment that there was a large hole in their kilt. These were small things, really, and like all small things could be remedied.
“Fifteen,” he muttered.
Angus looked at him in puzzlement. “Fifteen what?”
“I’ve just counted to fifteen,” he said. “I find it helps in moments of stress.”
Puzzlement was replaced by concern. “Are you feeling stressed by being best man?” Angus asked. Perhaps he should not have assumed that Matthew would find the role easy. Perhaps Matthew was one of those people who became acutely anxious if required to say anything in public; for such people being a best man could well be an excruciating experience.
But Matthew was not anxious – or certainly did not appear to be. “Let’s get going,” he said briskly. “We can walk up to Queen Street and then head west. There’s that pawnbroker on the edge of Frederick Street.”
Angus frowned. “What’s that got to do with it?”
“Rings, Angus. What do you see in the windows of these places? Rings. Wedding rings.”
Angus looked pained. “I see. Well, yes, of course. I should have bought one. I’m very sorry. It was a bit of an oversight.”
Matthew began to hustle him out of the flat. “We’ll be fine,” he said reassuringly. “Let’s just enjoy this. No need to worry about anything: it’s just a social ritual, after all.”
Angus smiled. “I’m not worried. I’m perfectly sanguine about all this.”
“Good,” said Matthew as they moved towards the door. “Now who’s going to look after Cyril?”
“Look after him? He’s coming.”
Matthew stopped in his tracks. “To the wedding? To the actual church?”
Angus had now fixed Cyril’s lead to his collar and was busy tying a small paisley scarf round the dog’s neck. Cyril, who appeared to enjoy being dressed in this way, looked up at his master appreciatively. r />
“But who’s going to hold him during the ceremony?”
Angus shrugged, as if the question was too obvious to require answering. “I thought the best man normally does that.”
This was too much for Matthew. He closed his eyes and began to count. Twenty? Twenty-five? Thirty?
8. Au Contraire
There were other people in Edinburgh getting ready for the wedding, although none of them in quite the same fraught atmosphere as the groom himself. One of these was Bertie Pollock (6), the son of Irene Pollock and her husband, Stuart, a statistician employed by the Scottish government to assemble figures and – although this part of the job was never explicitly referred to – to advise on how to portray these figures in the best possible light. Unemployment figures of, say, 10 per cent could always be described as employment figures of 90 per cent, and a 15 per cent increase in knife crime in the central belt of Scotland could always be disguised by making much of the complete lack of knife crime on, say, the island of St. Kilda. In this way, Dr. Pangloss’s famous precept might not only be put about as the truth but might also be believed because it was, in a strict sense, true.
Bertie had first become aware of the impending wedding when Irene had opened the invitation at the breakfast table. With one hand she was feeding Bertie’s younger brother, Ulysses, with mashed boiled egg, while with the other hand she was opening the envelope that had dropped through their door that morning.
“Hah!” she said as she read the printed white card the envelope had contained. “So that Macdonald woman has snared Angus Lordie at last. She’ll be rubbing her hands.” She paused, and passed the invitation over to Stuart. “See? And we’re invited, including you, Bertie.”
Bertie watched as his father read the invitation. “And what about Ulysses, Mummy? Will he be allowed to come?”
“Of course,” said Irene. “They haven’t put his name there because I’m not sure that they know he exists. But you can take babies anywhere you like, Bertie.” She glanced at Stuart. “See the wording?”