The Importance of Being Seven by Alexander McCall Smith Read Free Book Online

throughout the year – she was extremely conscientious, even if some of the others in her tutorial group were less so, or were conscientious enough, but only in a very last moment way. In fact, towards the end of the semester, as examinations loomed, she had met classmates whom she had not seen for the entire year. Suddenly they appeared at lectures, looking slightly confused and worried, desperate to make up for a year of neglected studies. One of them, a young man with long blond hair and Raphaelesque features, to whom Pat found her gaze returning after he took the seat next to her in the lecture theatre, had even revealed that he had come to the wrong lecture altogether. He was a student of English literature who had attended so infrequently that he was unaware of where he was meant to be.
    ‘This is Art History,’ Pat whispered to him.
    The young man turned to her and fixed her with a gaze that was a mixture of regret and resignation. ‘I’ve had a rather busy year,’ he said.
    She wondered what his busy year had consisted of, and then decided. That could keep one busy, she supposed. ‘You could always repeat,’ Pat reassured him. ‘Plenty of people do.’
    ‘I don’t have the time,’ he said. ‘
Tempus fugit
, et cetera, et cetera. I must try and pass. It’s not difficult to scrape a few ideas together, you know.’
    Pat was not sure about that. She thought it was quite difficult, at least it was for her. She was getting reasonable marks – somewhere around a good upper second – and would end up, in two years’ time, with a respectable degree at about that level. It was always possible – just – that she might even get a first; one or two of her essays had been rated that highly by Dr Fantouse, in particular, who said that he ‘liked her insights’.
    That compliment had puzzled her. On occasion she had felt that something she had written was mildly original, but insight was a strong word and suggested so much more. Mere students, surely, did not have insights. They had ideas, scraped together perhaps, but those ideas were usually no more than a mish-mash of what they picked up through reading the books and articles of those who really did have insights, scholars at the Courtauld, for example, or people like Duncan Macmillan, who wrote such entertaining and forceful art criticism in the paper. Professor Macmillan no doubt woke up each morning with his head full of insights, whereas she woke up in the morning with her head full of … well, she would have to say that it was not really full of anything at all first thing in the morning: thoughts of breakfast, perhaps, or thoughts of who would get to the bathroom first and take all the hot water before the others got up. So if any insights were to come her way, they would have to take their place in the queue of other concerns, most of which were really rather mundane and hardly insightful at all.
    As she walked along Middle Meadow Walk, she was, in fact, reflecting on the difficulty she was experiencing in marshalling insights for her honours dissertation. She had agonised over the choice of subject before coming up with what might prove to be a fertile source of insights, or might not. The idea had come to her when she was standing in front of Sir David Wilkie’s painting
The Letter of Introduction
in the National Gallery of Scotland. She knew the painting well, of course, having been first shown it whenshe was twelve, and had been taken round the Gallery on the Mound on a wet Saturday afternoon. Her father, who had been showing her round, had pointed out Wilkie’s painting and she had looked at it solemnly, a few drops of rain still making their way off her hair and coursing slowly down her cheeks. They had been caught in a shower and her hair had got thoroughly wet.
    ‘That,’ said Dr Macgregor, ‘is a very emotionally charged painting. Do you know what emotionally charged means?’
    She had looked up at the painting. A young man stood