‘We’ll have to move out of the house if Ulysses carries on being so smelly,’ he said to his mother. ‘We’ll have to go and live in a hotel.’

Bertie yearned to live in a hotel, or possibly a club. He had read that there were people who lived permanently in hotels and clubs, which seemed to him to be an impossibly wonderful existence. If only a boy could live there, all by himself, in his own room, away from his mother; if only.

7. Anthropological Issues

The flat immediately above the Pollocks’ flat in Scotland Street belonged to Domenica Macdonald, briefly Varghese and now Macdonald again. Varghese had been the name of her Indian husband, a man who showed patient, dogged devotion to Domenica, but had been accidentally electrocuted in his small private electricity generating station in Kerala. Widowhood, though, had suited Domenica, and she had returned to Scotland with some gratitude, ready to pursue her interests as a private scholar. This role – that of the private scholar – was one that very few people still claimed, although there had been a time when it was a fairly common one for people in whom both means and scholarly interest happily coincided.

The contribution of private scholars to knowledge was, of course, immense. In the past, virtually all scholars were private: Galileo was, as was Hume, and Darwin too. They could be: science then was on a scale that did not preclude private experiments in one’s kitchen and did not require a particle accelerator several miles long. Philosophy and anthropology – and a whole lot else besides – could be pursued without the assistance of public grants, forms, and the approval of research ethics committees.

The description of private scholar was one that Domenica had resurrected for herself and that enabled her to feel that she was doing something useful after she had left her small academic position in the department of anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. She had enjoyed that post, but it had been funded by grants that had eventually dried up. Anthropology was vaguely exotic, and spoke little of the everyday social reality with which the bureaucrats felt the social sciences should concern themselves. So while investigations into familial structures among the Nuer might be all very interesting – though not necessarily for the Nuer themselves, to whom all this was just the way they did things – in the eyes of those who dispensed academic largesse it was not quite as compelling as a study of job centre accessibility in Airdrie. The Nuer and the residents of Airdrie are indeed quite different – both groups have considerable merits, and rich traditions – but for Domenica the Nuer had the slight edge in terms of anthropological interest.