Chance Developments: Unexpected Love Stories

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “No, I’m glad you did. I’m very ashamed, you see…” He broke off.

  The cousin lowered his voice. “Don’t be embarrassed,” he said. “Look, both of us have seen enough in the last two months to teach us not to be awkward about things. Enough death, I mean. I’ve had my men roasted before my eyes, their tanks an oven. My God, if you’ve seen that, then you’re not going to worry about something like this. A small thing. A very small thing.”

  He felt his eyes begin to fill with tears. I can’t cry. Not here, in Shepheard’s Hotel. I can’t cry.

  The cousin saw what was happening. “Look, she’s fine. She’s absolutely fine. She had the baby…”

  “What was it?”

  The cousin smiled. “It was a girl.”

  He almost asked about the adoption, but thought there was no point. “And Jenny herself?”

  “You didn’t hear about her marriage?”

  He felt himself reeling. “I was forbidden to try to contact her. Her father and mine agreed. I was not to see her.”

  The cousin managed a weak smile. “I think she knew that. I don’t think she thought you were deliberately cold-shouldering her. She was told the same thing, I understand. Her mother came down on her like a ton of bricks. You were to be off-limits.”

  He wanted to know about the marriage.

  “A fellow from Glasgow,” said the cousin. “They’re a shipbuilding family. He’s a naval architect and so they’ve left him where he is. They’ve recently built a corvette. I saw pictures of the launch. They’re doing well, of course, with the need for shipping.”

  He nodded.

  The cousin continued. “He’s a perfectly decent type. He’s a bit older than she is—thirty-five, thirty-six.”

  “And children? Do they have children?”

  “None since…” He tailed off.

  Harry looked down at his drink. “Are you in touch with her?”

  “Yes, of course. I haven’t seen her for a long time, of course, but I had a letter the other day. We occasionally write to one another. In fact, she was the one who told me that I might bump into you. I don’t know where she’d heard you were here, but she seemed to know.”

  Harry hesitated. “Will you pass on a message from me?”

  A shadow passed over the cousin’s face. “She’s happily married, you know…”

  “Of course, of course.”

  “So I’m not sure that you should write to her.”

  “Which is precisely why I’m asking you to pass on a message.”

  “Yes, all right.”

  But now he was unsure what to say. He heard the words of the song, the words that everyone knew. Will you please say hello to the folks that I know…They’ll be happy to know that as you saw me go, I was singing this song…

  People took comfort in that; in the folksy optimism of it. But he did not want to pass on a cliché. So he said, “Tell her that I’m terribly sorry.”

  The cousin inclined his head. “I’ll write to her,” he said. “I’ll say that.” He paused. “We all have something to be sorry about. Every one of us. And we often don’t have the chance to say anything about it because we’re…because we’re ashamed. Then it’s too late. Your tank gets it. You tread on a mine. A sniper lines you up in his sights, and it’s too late.”

  “Oh well…”

  The cousin seemed to want to continue. There were many conversations like this in wartime, thought Harry. Things that had not been said, were said; people felt liberated, released from their normal inhibitions, by the possibility of imminent death.

  “It’s not a girl with me,” said the cousin. “It’s a boy.”

  Harry said nothing.

  “And now it’s too late.”

  “The War?”

  “Yes.”

  Harry met his eyes. “I’m very sorry.”

  “Thank you. Nobody knows.”

  “I can understand that,” said Harry. “But you don’t have to worry about telling me.”

  “You’re an artist…”

  “Exactly. And anyway, I’ve felt the same thing myself, on occasion. So you’re not alone. You may think you are, but that’s just because others are afraid of honesty.”

  “But…”

  “But there are all sorts of possibilities. Love can occur in so many different ways, if we let it. Nothing is as clear-cut as people would like to think it is.”

  6

  For some years after the War he painted very little. He took a job teaching art in a school; it was unchallenging, but he found that he enjoyed it rather more than he had anticipated. He drifted into a relationship with a woman who taught history at the same school, and they lived together for almost ten years, before they parted, without acrimony and slightly regretfully. After his father died, he decided to sell the house in Argyll. He had spent very little time there, anyway—no more than a few weeks every summer. He went back to the waterfall, though, every visit, and on each occasion he found himself moved by the experience. The places that loom large in our lives, the places where things have happened that we cannot forget, can retain their power over us for as long as memory persists. Here I was sad; here I saw you for the last time; here I realised I was in love: these private thoughts can be attached to a place, as inseparable from it in our minds as its prevailing weather.

  The history teacher said to him, “You’re in love with somebody else, you know. Who is she? Can’t you tell me?”

  He frowned. “I wouldn’t deceive you.”

  “Oh, I’m not talking about that. I’m not accusing you of having another lover—not right now, not somebody you’re seeing.”

  He somehow knew that her words signalled the end of their affair. Ten years could be brought to an end with a few words of reproach, or, as in this case, of truth. But he did not want to admit it. “Then what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that there’s somebody you’ve never got over—somebody you’re never going to forget.”

  He had been silent.

  “I’m right, aren’t I?” she said.

  He did not answer.

  She sighed. “There are some people who hold a candle for somebody else—a first love, perhaps. They hold it all their lives, in some cases until they die.” She looked away. “Don’t you think that sad?”

  He nodded.

  There was no recrimination in her tone. “To spend your life with the wrong person…That must be a terrible thing, you know. You’re with one person and you want to be with another. And you know that we only have one shot at life, one chance, and that you’ve wasted yours.”

  A month after this conversation, they went their separate ways. With the sale of the estate, he was able to resign from the school and return to painting. He surprised himself. He had not imagined that there was so much that he wanted to say and that it could come so urgently, so effortlessly. He submitted a painting to an open competition, and it was not only accepted for display, but won an award. A friend urged him to work for a show. There was an exhibition in Edinburgh and one, for his fortieth birthday, in London. He was taken on by an influential gallery and his paintings were bought by collectors. He attracted press attention; being described in one review as a successor to Nash and Ravilious. Another said he was a neo-classical answer to the excesses of modernism, an afterthought to a movement that was far from finished. His friends found this amusing. “How does it feel to be an afterthought?”

  “Strange. Not entirely unsatisfactory.”

  “Like a footnote to history?”

  He laughed. “A bit like that, perhaps.”

  He drafted a letter to Jenny. He said, “I know that I shouldn’t be writing to you. I know that you are married now and that everything that happened between us is a long time ago. I know all that, but I still didn’t want to die—as we all must—I didn’t want to go to my grave without telling you that I wish that things had turned out differently. I have had a lifetime to regret what happened and what didn’t happen. That’s all I wa
nt so say.”

  He read what he had written. He tore the letter up, oddly aware, even as he did so, that he was making a further mistake to add to those that had gone before.

  As his reputation as a painter grew, he attracted the attention of wealthy patrons. Berenson invited him to I Tatti and suggested a lecture in Florence. “I have little to say,” he remarked. “I draw.”

  “And how!” said Berenson.

  While at I Tatti he was invited to lunch by a woman from Pittsburgh, the wife of a steel manufacturer. She had a villa in the hills near Fiesole and she gave lunch parties that were often mentioned in the press. Her salon hosted Blunt, Auden and Britten, as well as Hemingway, whom she was said not to like.

  He went to the lunch, at which there were over twenty guests. They were served what was described as a simple Tuscan lunch, but which ran to six courses. Just before they sat down, the last of the guests arrived.

  He saw that it was Jenny.

  —

  He manoeuvred himself away from the seat he was about to take. Leaning down, he whispered into the ear of the man who was to be seated next to Jenny. “Would you mind terribly? We’re very old friends…”

  The man looked up at him resentfully and was about to refuse when Jenny leaned over too. “Please,” she said. “It’s very important.”

  The other guest agreed, but with very bad grace.

  “What a horrible man,” Jenny whispered.

  “People are selfish,” he whispered back.

  Then they looked at one another. It was 1968, and they were both coming up for their forty-eighth birthday. They had not seen one another for thirty-two years.

  He said, “I don’t know where to begin.”

  “I’ve followed your career,” she said. “I know about most of it.”

  “You always did. You knew more about me, I thought, than I did myself.”

  She smiled. “I heard from Angus.”

  He looked blank.

  “My cousin. He wrote to me just before he was killed.”

  “I didn’t know…”

  “He died in a stupid way. That happened to so many people. They survived those horrendous battles and then they fell down stairs or something like that. Angus choked on an olive.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “He was a complex man. There was something that made him unhappy—I never worked it out.” She paused. “Did you have any idea? Did you hear anything?”

  He shook his head. The dead may still wish their confidences to be respected.

  “He passed on my message?”

  She reached for a glass of water. “He did. And you had nothing to apologise for, you know.”

  On the other side of the table another guest was holding forth, to the amusement of the general company. Harry and Jenny took it as cover.

  He spoke with urgency, as if he might suddenly be silenced, and lose his chance to say what he had to say. “There hasn’t been a day—not one single day—when I haven’t thought of you. You know that? Not one day.”

  If she was surprised, she did not show it.

  “And I’ve thought of your baby…our baby, and what it must have meant to you to go through with it all and then have the baby taken away from you.”

  She looked down at her hands. Then she raised her eyes. “But she wasn’t,” she said. “I kept the baby. We were discreet about it. My mother raised her for the first few years. Then I married when I was just twenty. I was very young, but remember it was wartime, and people did.”

  He struggled with the revelation. “You kept her?”

  Jenny nodded. “Noel—he was my husband—was perfectly happy to be stepfather. He was a wonderful stepfather, by the way.”

  His mouth felt dry. “Was…”

  “Noel died. He had a heart problem that nobody knew anything about. It was one of these hidden things. He died eight years ago.” She took a sip of water. “His family had a villa in southern Tuscany. I started to use it more and more, and now I’m there most of the year. Julie comes often, even if only for a week or two. Her husband can’t get away all that much. He’s a psychiatrist.”

  He sat quite still.

  “She’s here at present. I’ve left her down at San Casciano with her two little ones.”

  “Julie…”

  She looked at him. “Our daughter,” she said.

  He looked up at the painted ceiling. A line of cypress trees crossed a Tuscan hillside. Angels, della Robbia in appearance, crossed a clear blue sky.

  It came back to him. “Do you remember that we once talked about angels? Do you remember that?”

  She toyed with her fork. “I think I do.”

  He pointed to the ceiling. “There,” he said. “Look up there.”

  It was while she was looking up that he said, “Do you think that you might marry me? After all this time?”

  She did not answer immediately. After thirty-two years, she thought, what was a minute or two, even five?

  1

  In any photograph of the land, there is the land and the person who takes the photograph. In any photograph of two people there are three people: the two in the picture, in this case the man sitting on the woman’s lap, and then there is the person behind the camera. We see the two people, smiling over something, pleased that they are there rather than somewhere else, pleased, we assume, that they are who they are rather than being somebody else. We do not see the young man who has pressed the lever to open the shutter. We do not see that he is twenty-two, that his hair is cut short, that he is wearing working trousers, that when he has taken this photograph he steps forward and shakes the man’s hand, and that the woman then stands up, dusts down her skirt, and says to him: “Thank you, Eddie.”

  Sometimes we can tell what the person behind the camera is thinking. Sometimes the choice of subject is so striking that it can only be the work of an attentive and sympathetic eye, attuned to the moment. In those famous photographs of men and women caught up in war—that poor girl running naked from the napalm, for instance—it is the photographer’s understanding of what is happening, his feeling for the sorrow or terror of what he sees, that gives the photograph its impact, that makes it every bit as powerful as a painting by Titian, say, or Picasso’s great indictment in Guernica.

  Often we have no idea of who the photographer was, or what he was thinking at the time. He may have been a passer-by, asked to take a photograph with the subject’s own camera; he may have been a professional photographer just doing a job, not caring very much about the people he is photographing; he may even have been one who would have wished for some reason to be in the photograph himself. What if Eddie, who took this photograph, secretly imagined that it was he, rather than Frank, who was sitting on Ruby’s lap? A photograph may speak to the photographer’s envy or disappointment just as much as it may reveal his anger or disapproval. And even if a photograph records a joyous occasion, behind it there may still be more than a small measure of heartbreak on the part of the photographer. A small measure of heartbreak? One might think such a thing impossible—if your heart is broken, then surely it is broken completely. Yet the truth is that we can live with a minor fault-line in the heart—most of us do, in one way or another.

  —

  Eddie, as the woman addressed him, was Edward Orpheus Beaulieu, who was born in Kingston, Ontario, on an unusually hot afternoon exactly seven months into the twentieth century. His mother, Hope, was from Toronto, a member of a family who owned a successful grocery store; his father, Aristide, had been a fur trapper in Quebec, but had grown tired of the loneliness and discomfort involved in trapping. Having taken a course in bookkeeping, he established a small office in Kingston and set about gathering clients. He discovered a talent for making up figures for traders who had been lax in keeping a note of money-in and money-out. He did this as honestly as he could, hoping that the entries he made reflected what had actually happened. If anything, he erred on the side of caution, with the result that many of
his clients paid slightly more tax than they were required to pay, but, as he pointed out to any who objected, “At least you can sleep easily in your bed if you’ve paid the government too much.”

  Eddie was an only son, although he had two sisters, Martine and Joan, both of whom married early—Martine at seventeen and Joan at nineteen. Martine moved with her husband, a glazier, to Buffalo, New York, while Joan married a farmer from Guelph. The Beaulieu parents were proud of their two girls, and of the sound marriages they had made. They were quickly rewarded with grandchildren, including a set of twins.

  “Our girls know where they’re going,” confided Hope to a close friend. “Unfortunately, Eddie doesn’t have quite the same sense of who he is and what he wants to be.”

  The friend sympathised. She did not know that Hope Beaulieu was completely wrong. Sometimes the reason why parents think their offspring have no idea of what they want to do is that they simply cannot accept their child’s real wishes. Eddie knew exactly what he wanted to do: he wanted to be a showman, and, in particular, a fortune-teller.

  This ambition showed itself at an early stage when, as a schoolboy of twelve, he was found to be reading palms in the school playground for two cents a time.

  “You’re going to be very rich,” he would tell the boys. “You won’t be rich until you’re very old—probably about thirty—but then you’ll be one of the richest men in Canada. It’s here in the lines on your hand. See? That one there. You only have that shape of line if you’re destined to be rich.”

  That went down very well. But there was more.

  “You’re going to marry a woman with very big breasts. See those bumps in your palm—right there—see those? That’s the sign. You’ll marry her—but only if you want. If you do, then you’re going to have five sons, and all of them are going to be great hockey players—real champs. You’re going to die when you are just short of one hundred. You’ll have only four teeth left by then—two on the top and two on the bottom. But you’re going to be real happy.”

  That was a typical fortune for a boy, although there were considerable variations, depending on whether Eddie liked or disliked the boy consulting him. Those whom he disliked were often warned of impending disaster, sometimes in fairly vivid terms. “Be careful that you don’t go out in really cold weather,” he might say. “This line here tells me that your nose is going to get frostbite one of these days—I can’t tell when—but when it happens, you’re going to lose half of it. Sorry about that, but I have to mention bad things as well as good.”