A Promise of Ankles

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “And your slippers,” said James. “Quickly.”

  “Why…” the Duke began to ask, but Matthew was already pushing him across the room.

  “Later,” said James. “We can talk later.”

  A light was switched on outside the room. There, fully dressed, stood Pàdruig, his eyes narrowed, holding a golf club – a driver – in his right hand.

  The Duke looked at one driver, and then at the other. “Go away, MacCrimmon, or whatever your name is,” he shouted. “You can go back to Stornoway tomorrow.”

  Pàdruig glared at his employer. “But…” he lamented.

  Matthew shook a finger. “You heard him,” he said, and then added, “You’re a…” Matthew was not a vindictive man; he was moderate in his views and his language. And the vocabulary of the moderate may often fail to rise to an occasion of real challenge. And so he said, simply, “You’re a really…” Silence fell over the other three as they waited for his condemnation. And then it came: “Bad influence. You’re a really bad influence.”

  There might have been laughter, but instead there was a sharp intake of breath from Pàdruig.

  “Influence?” the driver growled. “Who are you calling an influence? Influence yourself!”

  The Duke tried to defuse the situation. “Now, that’s a bit steep, Matthew. He’s an enthusiast – that’s all.”

  The Duke looked almost apologetic as he continued: “And we must remember, Pàdruig comes from Stornoway and may look at things differently.”

  Matthew stared at the Duke. The realisation came to him suddenly, but with great clarity. Stockholm Syndrome, he thought.

  62

  Stockholm Syndrome

  They took the Duke back to the house at Nine Mile Burn where Elspeth had remained up, anxiously awaiting their return. Matthew had promised to telephone her once the mission was accomplished, but in the excitement of the rescue he had forgotten to do so. He might have thought of Theseus, who famously returned from Crete without replacing his black sail with a white one – a mistake that led King Aegeus to believe his son was dead, and to kill himself in his misery. But he did not, and he only remembered the promised call when he was minutes away from home, and it was too late. Elspeth half expected him to forget – men were like that, she thought – but she certainly felt growing concern until the lights of the car appeared through the rhododendrons to tell her that Matthew was safe.

  “We’re back,” announced Matthew, peeling off the balaclava that, in his excitement, he had failed to remove.

  Elspeth fussed about the Duke. She had prepared hot chocolate and cheese sandwiches, which she now offered to him.

  “The Duke is very tired,” said Matthew. “He needs to get to bed. He can take his hot chocolate and sandwiches with him.”

  James took his uncle to the spare bedroom where a bed for visitors was already made up.

  “We can talk tomorrow, Uncle,” James said. “You should get some sleep now.”

  The Duke nodded. He had said very little in the car on the way back, and James sensed that he was in no mood for conversation. James seemed tired, too, and so they decided that discussion of the night’s events could wait until tomorrow, when the light of day, and a chance to hear the Duke’s side of the story, might make everything clearer.

  Matthew and Elspeth slept in. It was Josefine’s turn to deal with the triplets, and they were already dressed and had left for their play group in West Linton. Elspeth had been relieved to discover that Josefine drove, as this meant she could do her share of taxi-ing the boys to and from the village hall where their play group met.

  James was also up and about, as was the Duke. James had made him breakfast, and the Duke was now finishing a slice of toast spread with Dundee thick-cut marmalade. He rose to his feet as Elspeth and Matthew came into the kitchen.

  “We jumped the gun for breakfast,” the Duke said. “James said you wouldn’t mind…”

  “Of course not,” Matthew reassured him. He noticed that the Duke was wearing clothes that he had seen on James, and he remembered that they had brought him to the house the previous evening clad in pyjamas and dressing gown.

  The Duke smiled. “My garb is unusually fashionable,” he said. “Cool, even. Thanks to James.”

  “Not everyone’s uncle could carry that sort of thing off,” said James.

  Elspeth busied herself with preparing boiled eggs while Matthew sat down at the table with James and the Duke. “Well,” Matthew began. “Here we are.”

  The Duke nodded. “Indeed.” He looked at James. “James, you might…”

  “We’ve had a chat,” said James. “Uncle has explained everything.”

  Matthew waited. Elspeth half turned, an egg in her hand, poised above the pot.

  “It was Gaelic immersion,” James went on. “Pàdruig was determined that Uncle should learn Gaelic.”

  “I wanted to,” said the Duke. “I’ve always liked the Gaelic language.”

  “Yes,” said James. “I know that. But he took it too far. He started to force you. And he had no right to lock you up.”

  “It was perhaps a bit extreme,” mused the Duke. “But language immersion is, by its very nature…”

  Elspeth interrupted him. “It was an outrage.”

  The Duke stared at the floor. He looked embarrassed, thought Matthew – rather like a person who has done something foolish and finds it hard to explain his actions. “I found it hard to resist,” he said. “Pàdruig is very persuasive.”

  “Stockholm Syndrome,” muttered Matthew.

  They all looked at him. “What?” asked James. “Stockholm?”

  Matthew hesitated. “It’s a condition,” he explained. “Not Stendhal Syndrome, of course. Different.”

  Elspeth remembered Matthew talking about Stendhal Syndrome after Angus had described to him Antonia Collie’s unfortunate episode in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. Surrounded by great art, she had begun to breathe heavily, feel flushed, and had eventually succumbed to artistic overload.

  “When I first heard about it, I found it hard to believe,” Elspeth said, “that Stendhal Syndrome actually existed. But it does, apparently. And this…this Stockholm Syndrome – what does it entail?”

  The Duke looked up, with the interested expression of a patient about to hear his diagnosis.

  “It’s identification with a captor,” said Matthew. He had not intended to air his suspicions in the Duke’s presence – his muttering had been unintentional. But now he could hardly refuse, and the Duke himself appeared to be interested.

  “I’m no expert,” he said.

  “Do go on,” the Duke encouraged. “I don’t mind in the slightest.”

  “Well,” Matthew continued, “I’ve read a little bit about it. I can’t remember where, but it piqued my interest, I suppose. It’s called Stockholm Syndrome because of an early case of it in Sweden. A bank robber took hostages, and the hostages eventually seemed to side with him. They declined to give evidence against him when he was eventually arrested.”

  The Duke’s eyes widened.

  “And then,” Matthew said, “there was Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army. She was kidnapped and then joined her captors, doing their bidding, signing up, effectively. That was Stockholm Syndrome, or so it seems.”

  The Duke continued to look thoughtful.

  “She was eventually pardoned by President Clinton,” said Matthew.

  The Duke looked up. “I didn’t do anything wrong,” he said.

  Elspeth looked at him with sympathy. “Of course you didn’t.”

  James agreed. “You were the victim, Uncle. You weren’t immersing anybody in Gaelic – you were immersed.”

  “I still want to learn the language,” said the Duke, looking miserable.

  “Quite right,” said Matthew. “It’s very important that Gaelic
is kept alive. It’s just that Pàdruig was trying to force you. He had no right to lock you up.”

  “He meant well,” said the Duke.

  “You’re free now,” said James. “You’re free to speak English or Gaelic – as you wish.”

  “I didn’t really make much progress,” said the Duke.

  Matthew smiled. “No harm done then.” But even as he reached this cheerful conclusion, he was wondering about the psychological implications. Discreetly, he switched on his phone and navigated to his music streaming programme. Kenneth McKellar – there he was. And there, too, was Jimmy Shand and His Band. He touched the screen and Jimmy Shand’s band sounded through the phone’s speakers – distant, tinny, but immediately recognisable.

  The Duke looked up. His lower lip quivered. He began to breathe deeply.

  Matthew glanced at Elspeth. “We need to get him to a doctor,” he whispered.

  63

  Widdershins or Deasil

  Angus was telephoned by Domenica while he was walking Cyril in Drummond Place Garden. It was Cyril’s second walk of the day, the first having taken place, as it always did, at eight-thirty in the morning and having led them up Dublin Street, along Abercromby Place, and then down Dundas Street to Big Lou’s café. It was, in a sense, a paysage moralisé, as charged with moral meaning as Piero di Cosimo’s The Discovery of Honey by Bacchus: Dublin Street, which rose sharply up towards Queen Street, represented an early challenge: reaching a summit requires effort whatever the nature of the elevation – Angus understood that, and he thought that Cyril grasped it too through the fog of limitation that swirled around the mind of a dog. Cyril knew that certain rewards had to be earned – that dog biscuits, enticing in their musty meatiness, the canine equivalent of Belgian chocolate truffles, were only obtained after you had done something: fetched a stick or a ball, pointlessly thrown, in the way in which humans, for unfathomable reasons, threw sticks and balls for dogs to retrieve; extended a paw for an unhygienic handshake (the namaste gesture was so difficult if you were a quadruped); or otherwise performed in a way that met with favour from your comptroller. (Edinburgh dogs do not have owners – too prosaic a term – they have comptrollers.)

  Turning right into Abercromby Place, the effort of ascending Dublin Street was rewarded with a pleasant meander, on the level, with more gardens opening up to the south. These gardens had their role in the paysage moralisé in that they revealed a terrain of trees and squirrels, a city as celestial as that glimpsed by Christian beyond Bunyan’s wicket gate. But, like Christian, Cyril was held back from entry at this stage; further temptations had to be overcome once they reached Big Lou’s. There, under the table, with its distinctive sub-tabular smells, Cyril’s self-restraint was frequently tested almost to breaking point as he contemplated the ankles that he might so easily and deliciously nip. He did not bite; lesser dogs did that; dogs brought up in ill-disciplined homes; dogs with comptrollers who did not care what their dogs should do, or who excused it on the grounds that dogs will be dogs. Such dogs might bite, rather than nip, and were responsible for much bad feeling in the functioning of the otherwise seamless social contract between dogs and man.

  That was the first walk of the day; the second walk had less variety, and was confined to the path that led round the internal perimeter of Drummond Place Garden. This walk took place widdershins or deasil, depending on the mood in which Angus found himself. There was no underlying reason for choosing between these two directions, although going widdershins – anti-clockwise – meant that the garden would always be kept on their left, the iron railings on the right. Around widdershins movement there hung a vague feeling of ill luck, and Angus knew that some users of the garden preferred to walk deasil because of intuitive preferences to having the open possibility – in this case the garden, rather than the railings – on one’s right. Such things can be mere superstitions, or can be based on some ancient memory of being able to deal with threats more easily if they emerged from the right side. For Angus, though, it was a question of mood: a positive mood naturally proposed the deasil alternative, while doubt or a plain lack of oomph predisposed one to the widdershins option. For Cyril, it made no difference: smells were what counted for him; they came at him in delicious, jostling profusion, from every direction, and the angle of shadows was a matter of complete indifference.

  On that particular morning they were halfway through a deasil walk when Angus’s mobile phone rang. Cyril’s ears perked up at the disturbance, but he was quickly distracted by a distant scent of squirrel – a cold trail, he knew, but one to which attention would have to be paid.

  It was Domenica.

  “I know you’ll be back soon,” she began, “but I just had to speak to you. There’s been a bit of drama.”

  The expression, a bit of drama, was used by Domenica to describe anything from Chernobyl to running out of Earl Grey tea, and so Angus was not alarmed by this portentous opening.

  “Government fallen?” he asked. “Market crashed? Electric toothbrush fused?”

  “Very droll,” said Domenica. “No, it’s news from Dr Colquohoun.”

  “Ah,” said Angus. “And what’s the verdict from Chambers Street? A genuine Neanderthal skull?”

  “No,” said Domenica. “Or, put it this way – that’s still a possibility.”

  Angus waited.

  “It’s rather unfortunate,” Domenica continued. “You may recall him saying that he was going to catch the 23 bus back up to George IV Bridge.”

  “Vaguely,” said Angus.

  “Well, he did. And he’s just phoned to confess that he left the skull on the bus.”

  Angus was silent. This was almost unbelievable. Then, after a few moments, he said, “You mean to say that he left our Neanderthal skull on the 23 bus? That he got off without it?”

  “That’s exactly what happened.”

  Angus groaned. “And?”

  “And he reported it to the lost property office of Lothian Buses. At first, they thought he was joking. They asked him if his father knew he was playing with the phone. But then they realised it was all deadly serious. They went off to check up whether any skulls had been handed in – they get all sorts of things. apparently, including, last week a set of false teeth and a first edition of MacDiarmid’s A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle. But no skull had been handed in. They asked him how to spell Neanderthal and then they suggested listing it as an item of household furniture, possibly an ashtray. He didn’t bother to disabuse them of the notion and let them put it down as ornamental skull (poor condition).”

  “Perhaps it’ll turn up,” said Angus.

  “The museum people very much hope so. I’ve been on to them since the call, and they are very apologetic. They said they had not lost anything for seventeen years, the last object to go missing being Prince Charles Edward Stuart’s toothbrush, which was of dubious authenticity anyway. That was eventually found in the staff washroom, where, judging from the traces of toothpaste on its bristles, it had been well used by a member of the museum’s curatorial staff.”

  They concluded the conversation, and Angus agreed to return home immediately in order to discuss this distressing development. As he left the garden, closing the gate behind him, he became aware of a figure approaching him. It was Sister Maria-Fiore dei Fiori di Montagna, and he was not at all sure that he had the energy to talk to the aphorism-coining Italian nun. But she clearly intended to speak to him, and so, with an inward sigh, Angus prepared himself for the encounter.

  64

  In Deepest Morningside

  Sister Maria-Fiore dei Fiori di Montagna had been shopping in George Street and had bought herself a new pair of sunglasses. She had dropped her last pair into the Water of Leith when on a walk with her friend and flatmate, Antonia Collie. Antonia had valiantly tried to retrieve them, but had failed, and had to be dissuaded from wading further into the water on her mission of
recovery.

  “A pair of sunglasses is nothing,” protested Sister Maria-Fiore. “A human life is of far greater value. There can be few who doubt that, I think.”

  Antonia had retorted that the Water of Leith, which was at its lowest level that year because of a prolonged dry period, was hardly a raging torrent, and could be crossed, bank to bank, without any risk of wetting anything above one’s ankles.

  Sister Maria-Fiore shook a risk-averse finger. “Most drownings occur in very shallow water,” she warned. “A puddle is enough in some cases. The Blessed Alberto degli Olivi Santi, rest his soul – a kinsman of mine, as it happens, on my late, sainted mother’s side – was drowned in a small basin of water when he fell forward into it in a transport of ecstasy. You cannot be too careful.” She paused. “He, of course, was reanimated through the direct intervention of the Holy Ghost, and was thereby granted a further fourteen years in which to do acts of exceptional goodness throughout Puglia.”

  Now, through the newly acquired glasses, her gaze fell on Angus and Cyril emerging from Drummond Place Garden, and she strode to meet them. She enjoyed Angus’s company, and never lost an opportunity to regale him with her views on a wide variety of subjects, theological, deontological and artistic. And now that she was on the Board of Trustees of the Scottish National Gallery there was so much more to opine upon. Angus was in no mood for this now: he wanted to get home to discuss with Domenica the dramatic news that the Neanderthal skull he – or rather Cyril – had found in the lower Moray Place Gardens had been lost by Dr Colquohoun.

  Poor man, he thought. He could just imagine the sense of horror he experienced when he arrived back at the museum and realised that the priceless relic he had been carrying was well on its way to the furthest point of the 23 bus route – deepest Morningside. Morningside would not be a place that one would expect to be in sympathy with Neanderthal items, and a local resident travelling on the bus might well consider the skull to be rather distasteful, unhygienic rubbish and dispose of it accordingly. One might remind such people of the fact that two per cent of our human genome was made up of Neanderthal genes, but Angus did not think that Morningside was the sort of place where such information would necessarily be welcomed. He imagined the reaction: “Neanderthal, you say? Aim not at all sure theat theat (sic) applies to all of us, if Ai may say so.”