44 Scotland Street: A moment of insight

Angus hesitated at the doorway, as if reluctant to enter the crowd of people, momentarily repelled by the wave of noise that greeted him. This was the sound of the conversations that were taking place across the room, each intelligible within a few feet of its occurrence but collectively a hubbub as opaque to the human ear as the sound of a flock of squabbling birds. Here and there a word or two achieved salience – shocked rigid, European Parliament, corruption, bare-faced lies, his birthday, drunk … tags, in a sense, to hinterlands of exchange covering the concerns and preoccupations of those present.

What daunted Angus was the fact that everybody in the room seemed already to have found old friends. In groups of three or four they stood about, seemingly completely at ease, listening, smiling, laughing, expostulating on this and that. He had never understood how this happened. How could it be that the one hundred and twenty people present in the room should appear to know if not everybody else then at least a fair number of them? He considered himself sociable, and had even been for a brief time on the social committee of the Scottish Arts Club in Rutland Square, but when it came to gatherings such as this he felt as one might feel in an unfamiliar town where everybody was a stranger.

Domenica, who was unusually sensitive to the moods of others, felt his unease. “It’s all right,” she whispered. “There are bound to be people you know.”

“There aren’t,” Angus replied. “There isn’t a single soul here. Not one.”

Her reply was brisk. “Nonsense, Angus. Look over there. There’s Richard Neville-Towle, the conductor. See, over there. You know him. And there’s James Holloway. And there’s …” As she ran her eye round the room she recognised and identified guest after guest. Tam Dalyell. David Steel. Edward and Maryla Green. Duncan Macmillan. She reeled off the names, and as she did so, Angus’s nervousness lifted like morning mist off a field.

“Oh well,” he said. “We’ll find somebody to talk to after all. What about a drink?”

“You go and find somebody,“ said Domenica. “I’ll get us each a glass of wine.”

Encouraged, Angus began to make his way through the throng that had developed at the door. On the other side of the room, from the windows facing north, a view of the city revealed itself: spiky rooftops, stone crenulations, angled expanses of dark-grey slate, all touched with gold by the evening sun. His artist’s eye caught the view and made him stop for a moment where he was, half-way across the room, and stare at what he saw. And for a moment he felt a strong sense of delight in belonging to this place, this city that vouchsafed to those who lived there, and to those who came in pilgrimage, sudden visions of such exquisite fragile beauty that the heart might feel it must stop. And it was his; it was his place, his home, and these people about him were no longer strangers but were bound to him in a brotherhood of place, sharers in the mystery celebrated there, right there, in the City Chambers on that summer evening.

Domenica returned with the glasses of wine.

“I bumped into the Lord Provost,” she said. “I thanked him for the invitation.”

“Good.”

She gave him a sideways glance. “Are you all right?”

He turned to her, raising his glass half in toast to her, half to take a sip of wine. “I had an extraordinary experience,” he said.

She frowned. “Right now? Here?”

He nodded. “I was walking over towards the window and my eye caught the view.”

She glanced towards the window. “Edinburgh.”

“Yes,” he said. “But it was more than that. It was more than just a view of the city from up here. It was … How shall I put it? I felt as if I was being filled with something. I felt an extraordinary current pass through me.”

He looked at her, embarrassed by what he had just said. But there was nothing mocking in her expression. “A mystical experience,” she said.

“I don’t know …”

She brushed aside his diffidence. “But of course it was, Angus. It was a moment of mystical insight.”

“I’m not sure …”

“It can happen at any time,” she went on. “We can be anywhere – out in the street, at home, climbing Ben Lawers, anywhere … and suddenly it comes to us, a sense of being at one with the world. Or it can be a sense of suddenly feeling a current of life that simply fills us with delight or warmth or … It can be anything, really.”

He took another sip of his wine. Had he felt that? Had he suddenly felt at one with the world?

He felt prosaic once more. If he had indeed experienced a feeling of unity with the world, then the feeling had not lasted. “Are you sure?”

“Absolutely,” she said. “You know that Auden had just such an experience? He uses it in his poem A Summer Night, but he described it later, in prose. It was when he was teaching at a school. He went to sit outside with a small group of colleagues, under the night sky, and suddenly he felt just what I think you felt a few moments ago. He had what amounted to a vision of agape, that pure disinterested love of one’s fellow man that so many of us would love to find, but never do. And he said that the glow of this stayed with him for some days. Imagine that, Angus, you’re sitting in a deck chair under the night sky and you suddenly realise that you love humanity. Imagine that.”

He could. Now he could.

“Those lovely lines,” said Domenica. “Those lines he wrote in that poem about those whom he loved lying down to rest.” She paused. “Why are people so unkind to one another, Angus?”

He looked into his glass. “Because they don’t open themselves to the feelings that banish unkindness. Because when a vision of agape comes to their door they keep it closed.”

“Yes,” she whispered. “Exactly.”

She might have said more, but was interrupted by the arrival at their side of a fellow guest.

“Duke of Johannesburg,” he said with a smile. Then turning to Angus he said, “You remember me, perhaps. Or perhaps not; it’s so easy to forget that although we’re at the centre of our own world we are often only on the periphery of the world of others.”

• Alexander McCall Smith welcomes comments from readers. Write to him c/o The Editor, The Scotsman, Level 7, Orchard Brae House, 30 Queensferry Road, Edinburgh, EH4 2HS or via e-mail at [email protected].