A Promise of Ankles

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “Did he disappear?” echoed the Duke. “Yes, I think he did. I thought he might turn up at a family funeral or wedding – you know, the sort of occasion that draws people out of other woodwork, but he never did.”

  “And what do you think? Do you think he really could be in Argentina?”

  The Duke looked thoughtful. “I think he may be. He was a great admirer of Cunninghame Graham, you know. He felt drawn towards the continent. And then…well, a couple of years ago somebody said they were at a polo match out there and they saw Cousin Basil. His boyfriend was playing, and he was watching from a vintage MG parked at the edge of the field. They said he was wearing Campbell trews.”

  “How very strange,” said Matthew.

  “Scotland is a strange country,” said the Duke. “You know, we try to convince people that we’re a rational place, but I’m afraid…”

  “You’re afraid we’re not?”

  The Duke shrugged. “I’m not sure that we even convince ourselves. The world is a strange place, Matthew. There are very rational, logical societies – one thinks of Sweden, for instance…”

  “And Germany, of course.”

  “Yes, Germany, but Germany has a broad streak of Romanticism, and of course is prone to the occasional bout of fanaticism. And then you have the rather more – how shall I put it? – passionate societies, such as any society that speaks Spanish. And then you have the odd nations. But I can tell you one thing – we’re not half as peculiar as the English, bless them.”

  21

  Men Don’t Send Birthday Cards

  Having negotiated the final loops of the crumbling drive, Matthew drew up at his front door. Getting out of the car, he became aware of three pairs of eyes watching him from a window on the first floor of the house. He waved, and his wave was quickly returned with excited gestures from the three boys, Rognvald, Fergus and Tobermory. They were joined by Elspeth, who hovered into sight behind them, and blew a kiss down to Matthew.

  By the time Matthew had opened the front door, with its peeling green paint, the triplets had tumbled downstairs and were clamouring to welcome him. They hugged his legs, one of them – Tobermory, he suspected – giving him a small bite on his calf: an affectionate bite, but not something one would encourage in a two-year-old.

  “Tobes,” Matthew scolded, “you mustn’t bite Daddy. Has Daddy ever bitten you?”

  Tobermory, blushing, deflected the criticism with earnest denial. “It was Rognvald,” he said. “Rognvald bit you, Daddy.”

  Rognvald responded by hitting Tobermory, who then pushed him backwards, causing his brother to knock over Fergus, who generally liked to keep out of trouble. This led to all three boys bursting into tears.

  Elspeth appeared. “Domestic bliss,” she said, trying to separate the boys from one another. She scolded the boys fondly, but with all the tired firmness of a mother of three. “There will be no ice cream tomorrow if you carry on like this,” she said.

  The effect was instantaneous, and calm was restored. Down below, amongst children, ice cream and chocolate are the bargaining chips supreme, as powerful as money and military force are amongst adults.

  James appeared from the door that led from the hall to the kitchen. “Shall I take them up?” he asked. He looked at his watch. “It’s that time of day, I think.”

  Elspeth answered with relief. “Thank you, James. They all need a bath.”

  “Tobermory smells,” said Rognvald.

  This was met with outraged denial.

  “Everybody smells,” said James. “There’s nothing wrong in having a smell.”

  Matthew grinned. “That’s what comes of having a relativist au pair,” he said to Elspeth.

  The triplets were corralled by James and led upstairs while Matthew and Elspeth made their way into the kitchen. As they entered, Matthew sniffed at the air appreciatively. “Talking of smells,” he said, “what’s that in the oven?”

  “Rack of lamb,” said Elspeth. “Your favourite.”

  Matthew rubbed his hands together. “Brilliant.” He noticed a pie dish. “And that?”

  “Apple pie,” said Elspeth. “What else?”

  “And mashed carrots done in cream with lots of black pepper on top?” asked Matthew.

  Elspeth smiled. “Yes. Everything you like, you see.”

  Matthew shook his head. “You’re wonderful, you know – you really are. Here I am, this completely average guy, and I get you, of all people. I get the absolute twenty-two carat, Good Housekeeping Institute Badge of Excellence, University of Edinburgh First-Class Honours best. The best.”

  Elspeth was looking at him quizzically. “Of course, I chose the meal specially for you.”

  Matthew nodded. “So it would seem. You chose everything I love.”

  Elspeth hesitated. “Because it is a special day, after all.”

  Matthew had picked up an unopened envelope from the kitchen table and had been about to open it. Now he stopped. “Today?”

  “Yes. It’s a rather special day in…”

  He waited.

  “In the calendar of our lives,” she continued. “A special day for us.” A further pause ensued before she continued, “That is, for you and me, in view of the fact that today is…”

  Matthew closed his eyes. “Oh, my God, oh…” He opened them. “Our anniversary. I…I should have…” His voice was strangled, and he left the sentence unfinished.

  “I thought you’d forgotten,” said Elspeth. “When you didn’t say anything this morning, I assumed you’d forgotten.”

  “Oh, my darling,” said Matthew. “I feel so bad. I really…I really hadn’t thought of what day it was. I didn’t look at my diary, you see, and then this morning I had a lot on my mind.” There had been Pat’s resignation. That was an excuse – of a sort – although it had come later on in the day and he should have remembered their anniversary in the morning.

  Elspeth made a gesture that said, don’t worry about it. Then she smiled at him. “I might at least get a kiss.”

  Matthew rushed forward. “A kiss for every year,” he said. “So…” He stopped. How many years was it? He had forgotten.

  Elspeth was looking at him tenderly. “Men,” she said. “You’re hopeless at these things – all of you.”

  “We try,” said Matthew.

  “I know you do. But it’s always women who send the birthday cards. To everyone – not just family. Have you ever had a birthday card from one of your male friends? From Angus Lordie? From that chap with the hair gel?”

  “Bruce?”

  “Yes. I doubt if he sends birthday cards.”

  “To himself, perhaps,” said Matthew. “Bruce is a narcissist, as everyone knows.” He paused. Birthday cards were a ruthlessly commercial business and you would imagine that amongst all the specialist cards – to uncle, to nephew, to a best friend and so on, the sentiment-purveyors of the birthday card industry would have tumbled to the need to offer cards for narcissists. You know something? The message might read. You’re truly terrific.

  But then he thought: I should not be uncharitable about Bruce, who was really no more than a casual acquaintance. He had Elspeth and the boys; Bruce had nobody. Mind you, did a narcissist want anybody other than himself? Perhaps not.

  Now he answered Elspeth’s question. “You’re right. I never get birthday cards from male friends. It’s not what men do.”

  “So sad,” said Elspeth. “Women are always giving their friends presents and sending cards. Women understand these things.”

  “Am I forgiven?” asked Matthew.

  “Of course you are. Of course.”

  He thanked her. “You’re so sweet,” he said. “Some women are so judgemental of their men.”

  “Let’s not talk about other people,” said Elspeth. “The important thing is that I have you and you have me.”
/>   “And we have our little boys.”

  Elspeth nodded. “And we have the boys. And this house. And…”

  “The rhododendrons.”

  Elspeth laughed. ‘Yes, those too. We have everything. And I think it’s important to remind oneself of one’s good fortune.”

  From upstairs, through the ceiling, they heard bumps and crashes. “The boys,” said Elspeth. “James is a wonder, you know. He handles them like…like a lion tamer handles a lion.”

  “With a chair?” asked Matthew.

  “Did lion tamers really use chairs – or was that just something you saw in cartoons?”

  Matthew did not answer her question. He nodded in the direction of upstairs. “Is James having dinner with us?”

  Elspeth replied that he was. “I couldn’t very well exclude him. He does live with us, after all. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Of course not,” said Matthew. “But perhaps you and I can go outside now – just for a few minutes. It’s so lovely and warm. We could have a glass of champagne together. Just us. To celebrate so many years…”

  How many was it? He would remember later on, he thought.

  They went outside. The sun was sinking over the hills to the west, out towards distant Lanark and the early reaches of the Clyde. Matthew shivered; it was not as warm as he had imagined, in spite of the sunlight.

  The hills were blue – soft and blue. He said, “Thank you for everything, Elspeth.”

  She raised her glass to his. “Remember Jamaica? That hotel?”

  He smiled. That was where they had spent their honeymoon.

  “How could I forget that hotel?” he said.

  Elspeth laughed, and as she laughed, she asked herself: how many people laugh when they remember their honeymoon? Not many, she thought.

  22

  A Very Strange Hotel

  The hotel had been recommended to them by Matthew’s father. “There’s a place in Jamaica,” he said. “I’ve never been there, but Uncle Charlie was there back in the late nineteen fifties, just before independence. He knew it quite well, because he used to go up there from Kingston.”

  Uncle Charlie was Matthew’s father’s godfather. Matthew was too young to have met him, but he was a figure so central to family history that he felt he knew him. He had been a well-known yachtsman on the Clyde in his early years, having been born in Rhu, and with yachting in his blood. He had graduated in economics from the University of Glasgow and then gone to Oxford, to Balliol, a nursery for talented Scots destined for the higher reaches of the civil service. He had opted to go into banking, though, choosing posts where he would be near the water and where he could sail. Being sent to Jamaica had suited him very well, and he had forgone promotions in order to stay there, ending up being responsible for a whole string of banks across the Caribbean. He stayed in Jamaica for six years after independence, having married a Jamaican – an “unacknowledged sprig of the plantocracy”, as Charlie had referred to her. He had then come back to Scotland, to spend his retirement sailing on the Clyde. His wife, though, had sickened in Scotland, which was too cold for her. “She never got warm,” said Matthew’s father. “Poor Matilda. She just shivered and shivered and eventually she went home. They had grown apart. She disliked the water and could get seasick simply looking at it. She died of eating unripe ackee. They love ackee over in Jamaica but you have to be careful. It’s like that poisonous fish the Japanese love to eat. You have to make sure you don’t eat the wrong bits.”

  Matthew had heard the story of Aunt Matilda and the unripe ackee as a young boy and had refused for years to eat any fruit with seeds. Uncle Charlie’s demise, too, had put him off sailing; he had fallen overboard while sailing up Loch Fyne in a gale. He had been wearing a safety line, but it was too long, and failed to keep him on board. His going overboard was noticed by his crew only ten minutes after it occurred, and by then it was too late and he had been dragged through the water at the end of the line for too long.

  “Uncle Charlie loved that part of the island,” Matthew’s father said. “He was a great fan of a hotel not far from Ochos Rios. He went up at weekends, from Kingston. He had lots of friends, and they used to go up there with him. It was quite a sociable set, I believe.

  “There was a hotel up there that he liked. It had a bar that was famous for its rum cocktails. They served rum with tonic water and Angostura bitters. Uncle Charlie drank there with some pretty exotic customers. Noël Coward was a regular. He had a villa called Firefly not far away, and would drop in on a Friday evening. They had a piano, but Uncle Charlie said that Coward never touched the piano in the Green Island. He didn’t like its tone, apparently, calling it ‘that soi-disant piano’. And Ian Fleming was seen there too. It was quite the place.” He paused. “The original owners sold it, I believe, but it’s still there. And I wondered whether you and Elspeth would care to spend your honeymoon there – I’ll pay, of course.”

  Matthew had accepted. There had been a time when he would have declined, but he had stopped doing that when he had realised that his father got such pleasure from buying him things. There was such a thing as gracious acceptance, Matthew thought. So he said, “That’s really generous, Dad,” and arrangements were made.

  They flew from Edinburgh to London, and then from there to Kingston. On the flight, as their plane soared over the clouds and the cabin filled with light, Matthew took Elspeth’s hand in his and pressed it. “Excited?” he asked.

  She smiled. He loved her smile. He loved it, and his heart soared. He could not believe his good fortune that he had found somebody as perfect as she was – a person completely without fault. But then, he thought, was that love speaking? Was love, as the Latin phrase would have it of anger, a furor brevis – a brief madness? And if one could fall in love suddenly – in just the same way as one catches a cold – then could one fall out of love equally quickly and equally unpredictably? He thought of a poem he had once picked up by chance: it was Betjeman, at whom his English teacher had sniffed, and he was talking about a couple in a restaurant; Eingang, they were in love again, and Ausgang they were out. Something like that, he thought. He knew, of course, what his English teacher had meant. He had talked of sentimentalism, and warned against it. “It cheapens real emotion,” he had said. “Real attachment. Real loss. Real love.” But then he had said – and Matthew remembered his precise words – “The problem is that Betjeman was popular. It’s a great sin to be popular.”

  Matthew had put up his hand. “But Scott was popular. Burns too. They were great writers, but they were popular.”

  The English teacher had gazed out of the window and stroked his chin. Matthew had noticed that he often seemed to cut himself when shaving in the morning. He treated the nicks with an old-fashioned remedy, a styptic pencil, which left a line of white where applied to the skin. Could the Edinburgh Academical Association not pass the hat round to buy the English Department an electric razor? They could leave it in the staff common room for general use. Matthew smiled at the memory. This was exactly what the same English teacher had meant when he talked to them about intertextuality, about how one piece of writing lives on in another; how one thought prompts another, until a tapestry of association and cross-reference results. That talk, of course, had been above the heads of most of the people in the class, and Matthew, closing his eyes briefly in that pressurised cabin above the Atlantic, could see them now. Tommy Maclean, who thought only about rugby, and who almost played for Scotland, but not quite; Bill Sullivan, who thought about the Red Hot Chili Peppers most of the time, and who spent hours cultivating what he described as a “cool way of walking”; Eleanor Mactavish, who spoke a lot about moisturiser and shampoo and who probably thought about them too – she had split ends, poor girl; and Bob Anderson, who thought about nothing at all, as far as anybody could ascertain. None of them would think about intertextuality on a plane, with a freshly poured gin and tonic in h
and, and on the way to a honeymoon in Jamaica.

  He turned to Elspeth, who smiled at him.

  “What were you thinking about?” she asked.

  “Too complicated,” said Matthew.

  Elspeth gave him a reproachful look. He could not work out whether it was playful or serious. “I’m married to you now,” she said. “I’m entitled to know.”

  Matthew hesitated. Was that true? Was that what marriage involved?

  23

  Not Your Average Hotel

  Their honeymoon hotel occupied a commanding position on a hill. The view to the front was of the coast, a short walk away through a thick growth of sea grape, coconut palm and Cuba bark trees. To the rear, the ground fell away sharply until it rose again in another hill, densely covered with the ubiquitous, dark green shrubs of the island. The hotel had been built as a private house in the early years of the twentieth century by an artist called Wilma Paterson. She was famous in Jamaica for painting only one scene – the view from the front veranda – to which she returned in canvas after canvas. “I shall get it right one day,” she said. “The sky keeps changing. It’s most vexing.”

  Wilma Paterson was American, the daughter of a professor of human anatomy at Harvard. She married Macfarlane Paterson, a wealthy dipsomaniac originally from Portland, Maine, and left him after five weeks. It was widely believed that he only became aware of her departure two years after she had gone; they had lived in separate wings of a large colonial-style house in Concord, and during the brief marriage they rarely saw one another, and when they did he was almost always drunk.

  The more-than-generous divorce settlement set Wilma up first in Key West and then in Jamaica. While the house was being built, she stayed in Kingston, in a house she rented from the French consul general. The consul general had a son called Hubert, who was a fascist. He was twenty-five, five years younger than Wilma, but she found him irresistible. She paid no attention to his political views – “I always thought he was joking,” she said – and took great pleasure in showing him off to her girlfriends. “Isn’t Hubert unspeakably handsome?” she used to ask them, and they all agreed. “Handsome and dangerous,” said one, but Wilma paid no attention to the warning, as is often the case with friends.