I could see that girl. She was wearing a long cotton skirt with the kind of bright pattern a peasant in a movie might wear. I could see the way she licked her tongue over her upper lip when she murmured ‘personally’.

Had the Professor told that story? Was that the kind of story he would tell?

I wasn’t sure.

Yet I could remember everything the Irish lecturer from Stirling had said. He had started just after the Professor finished. It had been a long speech, but he had delivered it with great gusto.

‘What size was Shakespeare’s London or Plato’s Athens?’ he had asked rhetorically in a rolling brogue. ‘Or take Kierkegaard who was followed by jeering children through the streets of Copenhagen. Isn’t it wonderful that a philosopher should be as public a figure as that? But it’s not astonishing if you get the scale right. Those places weren’t conurbations. They had nothing to do with the nightmare cities of twenty million inhabitants we’ll have by the end of the century. Why, Stirling at the moment has more of a population than Oslo had when Ibsen was scribbling. Yet I don’t expect to find some kilted Henry Gibson clutching a manuscript of A Doll’s Hoose when I drive back tonight. Not a hope, not the measliest little chance of it. Why? Because you need not just a town – although you do need that – a town with its human scale – but a town that’s also a capital with a capital’s sense of bearing a place in the scheme of things. The human scale Joyce going to George Russell’s door at midnight to knock and talk philosophy at him as an introduction. Or encountering Yeats – and Joyce, remember, young and unknown – and telling him, ‘You are too old. I have met you too late.’ Dublin in 1903, you see, was a small town. But it was a capital too – and that’s the point. In Europe’s eyes, a provincial town; but in the eyes of a sufficiency of its citizens, a place where a nation’s destiny was being reforged. In 1903 who would have imagined that Dublin might be of more significance than London or—’

At that, however, Jerry, who had given up showing people his copy of Cocksuck and grown morose, twanged loudly, ‘Talking of Dublin reminds me of a joke. Do you know what happened to the Irishman who tried to blow up a bus? Do you, eh? Anybody? He burned his mouth . . . on the exhaust pipe, do you see?’

‘In Ireland,’ the Irishman said, ‘we have Kerry jokes. If it’s joke time, I’ll tell you a Kerry joke. A Kerry man got on a boat and as they sailed across the blue blue sea there was a cry, “Man overboard! Man overboard!” And then the captain shouted, “Throw over a buoy!” So the Kerry man picked up a boy and threw him overboard. A two-legged boy that was, do you understand? a human boy. The captain rushed down from the bridge and shouted at him, “You damned fool, I meant a cork buoy!” “Alannah! captain dear,” said the Kerry man, “and how was I to know which part of Ireland he was from?” ’

He told the joke very slowly and in a flat monotone quite unlike the animation of his earlier manner, but when there was practically no response he didn’t seem at all disturbed. Only as the pause lengthened uncomfortably, at last a little smile broke at the corners of his mouth.

‘It is odd, isn’t it,’ Dennis Harland intervened, his Midshipman Ready blue eyes twinkling, ‘how every community chooses a butt for its jokes? From a little piece of research I did recently, I discovered that most of the jokes about Scotch meanness were originally jokes told by other Scots against the Aberdonians.’

‘Or the Poles in America,’ someone else said. It was the man hidden from me in the black leather chair. The deep soft voice had the same effect as before. Effortlessly, it made you pay attention. ‘The Irish joke and the Polish joke – when I was in America, I decided they were interchangeable.’

‘Goofy Newfies – that’s what they call us at home in Canada,’ a big red-faced character leaning against the wall said.

Since I didn’t recognise him, I took the excuse to lean forward and touch Margaret Briody on the arm. ‘Who is he?’

‘He’s from the Institute for Defence Studies in Aberdeen.’ Her voice though musical had a touch too much carefree volume. ‘He’s a friend of the Professor’s.’

I subsided as the Professor looked in our direction.

‘I’m not really per – persuaded by this seductive argument about Joyce and company,’ the Professor stammered dismissively. ‘It smacks more of ecology – of politics – “small is beautiful”, that kind of thing – rather than corresponding to any reality in the history of culture. As I recall, Joyce got out of Dublin as soon as the going was good, and Ibsen didn’t spend much time in Oslo, you know.’

‘I think that’s absolutely true,’ cried Dennis Harland loyally. ‘The Dublin that inspired Joyce wasn’t a capital, and since Southern Ireland has become independent I don’t think there’s been much cultural activity.’

‘I wouldn’t say that was entirely so,’ the Irishman said reasonably.

‘There are probably more writers and poets in Scotland just now,’ cried Dennis, warming to the job. ‘They don’t seem to be handicapped by being a region of a larger country. It suits them perhaps. It’s an interesting idea.’

This seemed to catch the Canadian’s attention. He levered his weight up from the wall. ‘I don’t pretend to know anything about culture,’ he said. ‘But I’ll tell you straight – the independence some people in Scotland claim to hanker after is just a no-go option from a strategic point of view. They want to forget about their poets and history and stuff and just get out a big map and catch up on the geography. This is a useful piece of real estate and if things hot up the Russians are going to grab it. And if they do, the Americans just aren’t going to have any option. They’re going to have to blow it away.’

Other people talked then, but that bit isn’t clear. I am almost sure that most of them had Scots accents, and that there was a kind of competition among them to take the point. They were very reasonable people. They could see how this idea of their country being independent must be unwise or unnecessary. Some of them provided their own reasons why it was probably immoral. Certainly, it seemed unlikely. I didn’t disagree with them. What the Canadian had said seemed sensible to me. It was just that, for some stupid reason, I felt embarrassed for them. They embarrassed me.

At that precise moment, in the way these things sometimes happen, everyone stopped talking. We looked at one another and listened to the silence. That is always a mistake; no one wants to be the one who breaks it. It was a relief when someone laughed.

‘I can’t think where else in the world I could enjoy such a conversation,’ remarked the deep soft voice of the man hidden in the depths of the black leather chair. ‘You don’t appreciate how unique you are.’ He chuckled. ‘The only comparison which comes to mind is of those unfortunate monks in the Middle Ages who took melancholy to the excess of desperation and committed suicide. The medieval Christians disapproved of that very much. Not just of the suicide – but of the despair. The theologians called it acedia, the despair of salvation. Some of them believed that this was what was meant by the sin against the Holy Ghost. Isn’t that right, Tom?’

Professor Gracemount nodded and laughed. In response, the man who had been sitting in the black leather chair got to his feet and, turning from the fire, stretched as casually as if he were in his own home.

‘Tell me,’ he asked holding us all in his glance, ‘do you think it possible for a nation to be guilty of that sin against the Holy Ghost?’

Now I saw him plainly, the man whom the Professor had called Brond: the deep chest, the one-sided stance as if his weight were taken on the left foot. It was the man I had seen on the bridge. I heard in the stillness the crack of sticks breaking.