Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.

    Greater fame than Dracula's crowned the career of another eccentric Edinburgh retailer, Madame Doubtfire, owner of a used-clothing shop on Great King Street in the New Town that doubled or tripled as a bookstore and general junk depot. Madame D., real name Annabella Coutts, was one of Edinburgh’s star turns. Bill and I laughed at her on our way home from the pub and she cackled back at us like an enormous dotty hen. She inspired the local writer Anne Fine to write a novel of the same name, which in turn led to the popular Robin Williams movie Mrs. Doubtfire, in which Mr. Williams is very much himself plus a ludicrous Scottish accent that was the only surviving feature of the original Madame D. we admired and reviled in equal measure. Not only was her accent ludicrous: she herself was, entirely. Madame: so she was styled, and so she styled herself, having pretensions to a glamorous past.

     “She was the mistress of the Duke of Sutherland,” said Bill who, Clydeside Marxist that he was, was fascinated by the doings of the royals. “But he threw her over for Princess Nigel of Surrey.”

      “Ballocks,” said I.

      Anyway, whatever glamour she may once have had had long faded. She was a cracked, wizened old crone, with ring-heavy fingers, puffing at a stubby clay pipe, huddled in all weathers in a multicolored garment like Joseph’s dream-coat. She limped and lurched through the vast piles of old clothes on the stairs and inside her basement shop. Books were haphazardly in evidence, tossed here and there, teetering atop piles of cardboard boxes containing socks, or paving the bottoms of milk crates. Tins of Bovril and Marmite jars clinked full of prewar coins such as farthings, ha’pennies, shillings, and florins, all of them strongly evocative, to me, of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, of Enid Blyton or E. Nesbit. But Madame D.’s specialty was theatrical clothing, some of which was good enough to fetch a handsome price at auction and thereby pay the rent on her digs; but most of it was just junk, cheap costume jewelry in sufficient quantities to adorn the entire cast of a provincial production of The Pirates of Penzance; capes, cloaks, and sou’westers that called to mind musty entrance-halls with muddy tile floors; walking sticks, canes, blackthorns and shillelaghs; imitation Ming vases suitable for bouquets of fake flowers; 1940s-style neo-Tiffany lamps; dogs stuffed and living, parrots idem.; a slew of old comic books, mostly Beano and Dennis the Menace (the British D. the M., not Hank Ketchum’s); bound piles of The Scotsman and The Tatler; men’s pre-war pajamas, striped, of the type once ritually removed by Somerset Maugham out East; age-dimmed oil paintings of the sub-Barbizon school depicting skiffs, water, trees, a straw-boatered fugitive from Seurat, his Renoirish maid reclining on the grass, a distant mill, spaniels; and, oddest artifact of all, Madame Doubtfire herself, wrapped in her multicolored rags, wringing her hands, gibbering and muttering and spewing cigarette smoke and delivering herself of occasional peals of loony laughter like a happy old werewolf. She died in 1979, aged 92, unaware of the posthumous Hollywood fame that awaited.

       In this short but merry amble down Memory Lane of Edinburgh’s eccentrics long dead and gone the last nut, but not the least,  must be Mr. Rennie, our landlord, who frequently shopped at Madame Doubtfire’s, judging by his wardrobe: heavily Holmesian, including deerstalker. He was stooped and tall, yet inclining to the loose jowls of old age. He had a pet anteater, Sid, who accompanied him on his rent-collecting rounds twice a month. Sid was harmless, and loyal as a dog, but his long snout and darting tongue were disconcerting first thing on a hungover morning, and his claws were vicious, and carved long thin striations on the stairs. Mr. Rennie spoke to him as Edgar Bergen did to Charlie McCarthy, and replied, in like vein, in a thin Sid-voice.

       “What did he say, Sid? Cannae pay the rent? No, Mr. Rennie, och no, he didnae say that, not Mr. Boylan,” as Sid’s tongue ranged over my bare feet. “Sorry, Sid, I’m a wee bit corn-beef, could ye speak up?” Mr. Rennie always said, tapping his left ear, whenever a faltering explanation for non-payment was forthcoming. “Och, he said he’ll have the rent for ye by teatime, Mr. Rennie. He did, did he, Sid? Och aye he did so he did. Right then. We’ll see ye round teatime, then, Mr. Boylan?”

    But his hearing was capable of dramatic improvement at times. One morning the night after Bill and I and some drunken soul mates had gone through a couple of Bill’s Charlie Parker LPs and pretty much all of Wagner’s Das Rheingold between eleven and three, Mr. Rennie, with Sid, stopped Bill on the stairs and said,

    “Eh, Mr. Thomson, Sid swears he heard old Charlie Parker blowing the alto sax at eh one a.m. in the morning or so last night, don’t ye, Sid? Aye, Mr. Rennie, so I did, and then about half-two I’d swear I heard him entering with the gods into Valhalla.”