Lauderdale. Francois Ravaillac was a French Catholic who in 1610 stabbed King Henri IV to death for supposedly betraying the faith. The pamphlet goes into some detail about this crime.’
‘Whit’s it got tae dae wi Weir?’
‘Well, Hickes was a propagandist. The pamphlet’s title was supposed to show that Ravaillac’s fanatical spirit was alive and, ah, kicking in Scotland, but at the opposite end of the religious spectrum, in the person of one James Mitchel. Mitchel was a Covenanter who’d tried to assassinate the Archbishop of St Andrews. Hickes’s pamphlet is a hatchet job, basically, linking Mitchel to the bestial Major Weir. That’s your connection. The two of them had once shared lodgings in the Cowgate, at the house of Grizel Whitford, and Royalists like Hickes were keen to rake up as much muck as possible about poor old Mitchel. Being associated with Weir would be like getting a reference for a teaching post from the Marquis de Sade.’
Carlin said, ‘It says Mitchel got a degree fae Edinburgh University. Like masel. Canna hae been aw bad then, eh?’
‘Well,’ said MacDonald, ‘it might not have meant quite the same thing in those days.’
Carlin went back to the shelves to try to find out more about the period. He felt ignorant and cheated because he had only a sketchy idea of what had happened in Scotland in the reign of Charles II. Or any of the Stewarts for that matter. He had gone through a four-year history degree at university without once having had to open a book about the history of his own country. He had studied American, Russian, British (meaning English, a gorgeous tapestry with a few Celtic fringes tacked on to stop it fraying), medieval and modern European, but Scottish history had not been considered a necessary ingredient to a well-rounded higher education. And then, when he unexpectedly got good results in his finals and the possibility of staying on as a postgraduate arose, he found he needed some distance, physical distance, from what he had been doing. And from Edinburgh too. He got out.
Years later, thought became important again. His mother had died after more than a decade fading away among her ever-growing collection of curios, and he was astonished to find that, in spite of her habit of accumulation, she had not spent all his father’s savings. The money that came to him meant that he had some freedom. He applied to go back to the university to do research. It seemed natural to go into more depth in one of the areas he had studied for Honours. He ended up with a vague proposal to study military strategy in the German spring offensive of 1918. After seven months he admitted defeat: history, which he had hoped would welcome him back, was tired of him and spat him out.
In retrospect he was glad, or at least not disappointed, that he had not finished his PhD. It would have taken him back into the past again, and that was not what he needed. The trouble was, between the present and himself there was virtually no rapport. He rolled around in it like a discarded coke bottle on the top deck of a bus. History had kicked him out, maybe for his own good, but it had left him stranded. And now he felt it pulling at him again, like a needy, wilful parent.
By the end of the afternoon Carlin had worked his way through all the sources supplied by Mr MacDonald, and a few others that these had led onto. He felt like a door had been opened for him. He certainly knew a lot more about Major Weir and the society he lived in than Hugh fucking Hardie did. In fact he reckoned he now knew as much about Weir as anyone, with the possible exception of MacDonald. Maybe he could compete on the last ever series of Mastermind, with The Life, Times and Sexual Deviations of Major Weir as a specialist subject. Carlin took the pile of books back to the desk.
MacDonald approached him from the lending stacks.
‘How did you get on, Mr Carlin?’
‘Awright. Ony chance I could keep a couple o these aside till tomorrow?’
‘Of course. You can keep them on reserve for up to six days. After that, if you’ve not been in, they just get reshelved.’
‘Thanks,’ said Carlin.
I was thinking about your request a little while ago. I’m sure there’s another reference to the Weirs somewhere – quite a detailed thing – but I can’t recall it. If I think of it before you’re in again I’ll put it aside as well.’
‘Ye’ve a guid memory,’ said Carlin. ‘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 yellow paint – 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 thought. He was