44 Scotland Street: Chapter 17 of Alexander Mccall Smith’s latest series
Stuart said to Katie, “You said you’d read me one of your poems.” “Yes, I did.”
He stroked her hand. “So? Will you?” She looked about her. “Here? In the pub?”
“Nobody’s paying any attention to us.” He gestured to the other people, none of whom seemed aware of their presence. “See?’
She reached into a bag she had brought with her. “As it happens …”
He grinned encouragingly. “Go on.” Katie took out a single sheet of paper. Stuart craned his neck to look at it, but she kept it to herself. “Remember, they’re sonnets.”
“You said that.”
“So that means fourteen lines,” she explained, “with twelve lines rhyming on an a,b,a,b scheme, and the last two lines rhyming a, a.” She paused. “Pentameters. More or less.”
Stuart nodded. He tried to remember what he knew about meter, but it had been forgotten. He had done Higher English, but that was a long time ago.
“I’ve imagined this first poem as some - thing that might have been written by James VI,” Katie said. “He was a very interesting figure, you know. Rather sad. He had a pretty stern tutor and very little joy in his life. His mother, after all, had her head chopped off. And then, along comes his cousin from France, Esmé Stuart, and James, as a boy falls in love with him. For the first time there is light in his life – until Esmé is sent back to France. So I imagined James writing this. It may sound a bit old-fashioned as a result.”
Stuart listened.
“Cousin you came into my life too late To be the one to teach me how to see How strange it is to be a slave of Fate, Even though men should subjects be to
me.
But what you taught me – that I’ll always
hold
More precious than the gifts of high
estate,
Those are base metal, while your words
are gold
Displayed in letters large at Heaven’s
gate;
A gentle look, a secret touch, a smile, Given free and by outsider’s hand
unbidden,
Will count for more than any trick or wile Or words in which a heart of ice is hidden.
Now you are gone, you have put out the
light
That bathed my days in sun, that
banished night.”
When she had finished, Stuart was silent. He looked at her and he looked back, unblinking.
She said, “The departure of Esmé Stuart brought his world to an end.”
He said, “Yes, it would, wouldn’t it?” “I have another one,” she said. “Another sonnet. Nothing to do with James. This is about the end of a love affair. One person has gone and the other reflects on the parting.”
He waited, and she began to read:
“When I felt lonely I would go around Lost in a crowd of those I did not know, Hoping to hear the once familiar sound The voice of one who claimed to love me
so;
But listened in vain, just as I listen still, For you to utter, to evoke my name, Knowing the ear’s a trickster and often
will
Contrive to make other people sound the
same;
You needed do no more than write to me, You needed do no more than make a call; Writing costs nothing, e-mail’s almost
free,
My sorrow, though, I think counts not at all.
An injured heart does not engender love, No sheltering tree will want a single
dove.”
He reached for her hand again. “Is that you speaking?” he asked. “Did that happen to you?”
She did not answer immediately, but then she said, “Hasn’t that happened to everybody? Hasn’t everybody loved somebody and not been loved back? Unreciprocated love?”
He thought about it. When he was sixteen he had fallen in love with a girl who was a year older than he was. His feeling for her had hit him like a jolt of electricity, as he had suddenly discovered the possibility of thinking about another person for a sustained period of time with pleasure. That was the real essence of love – that simply thinking about another, conjuring up the image of the object of your love, could fill you with such an extraordinary sense of excitement. It was like cradling a rare thing in your hands and staring at it in wonderment – the wonder being that this thing actually existed, that it was. How strange, how strange … and he had felt all that for that girl who had not even noticed him because he was a year younger than she was and at that age such an age difference can be fatal.
He answered Katie. “Yes, it probably has. It happened to me.”
He had not intended to say that, but he had, and now she asked, gently enough, but with an enquiring look, “Your wife?”
He shook his head. It had been quite different with Irene. He had always imagined that he had loved Irene – after all, he had married her – but now he was not at all sure. He had done his best to love her, because Stuart was duteous and it is expected of husbands and wives that they should at least try to love one another, but there had never been that … that … He searched his mind for the right word, and ended up with electricity. It was a somewhat hackneyed metaphor, but everybody knew what it meant in the context.
There had not been that electricity that went with love; it simply was not there.
Perhaps it was affection – perhaps that was what there had been, at least on his part. He was not at all sure, now, that Irene had ever even liked him. She had been so critical, so censorious, that he had wondered whether her first and greater loyalty was to some social or political project, some greater cause in which there was no place for the unbe - liever, the outsider.
He looked at Katie. “Your poem,” he said. “What were the last two lines of that second poem?”
She looked down at the piece of paper from which she had read the two sonnets.
“An injured heart does not engender love,” she read. “No sheltering tree will want a single dove.”
“What does that mean?” he asked. “I like the sound of it, but what does it actually mean?”
She folded the paper. “It means that it’s no good trying to get sympathy from the other person – the person who’s indifferent to you. He – or she – will never love you because you’re sad – just as a tree wants two doves that are happy rather than one that’s sad.”
He looked down at the floor. Yes. That was quite true. He had not thought of it before, but it was one of those observations that had always been there and that one suddenly stumbled across and knew that it was true.
Something occurred to him – a doubt. “There’s something you should know, though,” he said. “It’s this: those two little boys of mine – Bertie and his brother – I love them so much. They are more important than anything else. They’re my life, I suppose. They’re everything to me.”
She reached out to take his hand. “Of course, I understand that. Of course I do.”
‘This was the essence of love – that simply thinking about another, conjuring up the image of the object of your love, could fill you with such an extraordinary sense of excitement’