Espresso Tales 4ss-2

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Matthew’s Situation

  the assault perpetrated on him by the poor, doomed Tofu. Could Olive be right that he was starving to death? Were people allowed to starve to death these days, now that the Labour Party was in power? Surely not.

  Irene was lost in her thoughts too. The bus had stopped near a bank cash machine, and she noticed a young man, blanket around his legs, sitting on the pavement right next to the machine. As people came to draw their money, he looked up at them and asked for change. The sight made her angry. He was able-bodied, was he not? He was young enough to work, or draw benefit if he could not: what right did he have to impor-tune people in this way? People had the right to draw money, she felt, without being subjected to any pressure. And where were the police? Did they stand by and tolerate this? It appeared that they did.

  She stopped herself. Should I be thinking like this? she wondered. Like what? She supplied her own answer: like a Conservative. The problem was that whenever the Conservatives made a policy statement these days she found herself agreeing with it. That was awkward, in her book, and she put the thought out of her mind. But then the thought occurred to her: perhaps I’m a Conservative leftist. That sounded much more respectable than being a leftist Conservative. But what exactly was the difference?

  19. Matthew’s Situation

  Matthew, proprietor of the Something Special Gallery, and Pat’s employer of four months’ standing, opened the gallery that morning rather earlier than usual. Pat often arrived well before he did. She came in shortly after nine, at a time when all the other galleries in the area were still firmly closed. And what would have been the point of their opening that early? People did not buy paintings at that hour, and indeed the sort of people who bought paintings were still enjoying a leisurely breakfast then or were hard at work in their offices.

  Matthew’s Situation

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  Matthew had tried to work out exactly who his customers were. He had read few business books, but had eventually picked one more or less at random from the business section of a bookshop, that section so distinguished by such titles as Cut out the Competition! and The New Executive You. His choice was called Retail Success: Ten Secrets Revealed. Matthew thought the title absurd but had found the book more interesting than he had imagined it would be. Retail, it appeared, was a complicated process, in which people who were unwilling, for entirely understandable reasons, to hand over their money to others, were persuaded by those very others to do just that. That was secret number one: nobody really wanted to buy anything. It was then revealed that the second secret, closely allied to the first, was that even if people were persuaded to hand over their money, they wished to minimise the extent to which they did so. This led the authors of the book to counsel the reader to encourage unanticipated overspend.

  Matthew’s business career had not been conspicuously successful. Indeed, it had been a dismal failure: each time his father had set him up in a new enterprise it had not lasted long.

  If, then, there were secrets to business success, he was not party to them. His last business before the gallery had been a travel agency, which had failed as well, largely due to the incompetence of the two members of staff whom Matthew had employed and whom he had not had the courage, nor the business acumen, to dismiss. One of these employees had made a series of bad mistakes, usually of a geographical nature, but also, occasionally, of a linguistic one. One client had been sold a package holiday to Turkey, in the belief that it was Greece, and another who was travelling to Strasbourg and who wished to be booked into the Hotel de Paris there, had unfortunately been booked into the Hotel de Strasbourg in Paris. This sort of thing happened all the time.

  Matthew had, in fact, tackled the young man about his geographical ignorance.

  “Did they teach you geography at school?” he had asked, after one particularly awkward geographical mix-up (involving 62

  Matthew’s Situation

  a confusion between British Columbia in Canada and the Republic of Colombia).

  “What?” asked the young man.

  “Geography,” said Matthew. “You know – the world. Maps.

  Where things are.”

  The young man shook his head. “Dunno,” he said. “Don’t think so.”

  “Clearly not,” said Matthew. “Tell me: which do you think is further south – India or Australia?”

  The young man shook his head. “Difficult,” he said. “Not sure.”

  Matthew had sighed, and left it at that. And the travel agency had limped on, and then collapsed, and he had gone back to his father apologetically and reported the failure.

  Matthew’s father had not been surprised. “You’ve got to be tougher, son,” he had said. “You have to have a clear business plan and then stick to it. Set targets. Beat them. Look for ways of cutting costs. Businesses can’t be left just to tick over. They go under if you do that.”

  Matthew had nodded. The problem was that he was not very good with people. He was too soft. He paid them too much and he could never bring himself to criticise their performance. He was not cut out for business. And that was well understood by his father, who had come to the realisation that even if the best thing for his son was to find him a business, that was no more than a facade – a sinecure, in other words. So when he heard that one of the tenants in a building he owned in Edinburgh, a gallery, was going to close, it seemed the perfect opportunity. Matthew could run that. He need not make any money, as long as he did not make too much of a loss. Perhaps a loss of fifteen to twenty thousand pounds a year would be about right, although he could carry much more than that, if need be. To Matthew’s astonishment, at the end of the first quarter’s trading, the gallery appeared to have made a modest profit. He had arranged an appointment with his accountant, a man who acted for one of his father’s companies, and they had gone over the accounts together.

  “I must say that is amazing,” said the accountant, pointing to Matthew’s Situation

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  the balance sheet which he had prepared for Matthew. “I’m quite astonished. You’re showing a profit.” He said this, and then immediately felt embarrassed. It was tantamount to saying that he expected Matthew to fail – which of course he did.

  Matthew had not noticed the slight; he looked at the figures.

  “According to this, I’ve made eleven thousand pounds in three months. Are you sure there’s no mistake?”

  The accountant smiled. “We’re very careful about that. And I’ve checked the spread-sheets. You’ve made just over eleven thousand, as it says there. Profit. But remember, trading goes in cycles. A good quarter doesn’t make a good year.”

  “But even if I made no more this year, that’s still a respectable profit . . .” he tailed off, and then added, “for me.”

  The accountant nodded. “I’ve told your old man. I hope you don’t mind. He’s been quite chirpy over the last few weeks, I think. This news cheered him up even more.”

  Matthew barely took in this news about his father, so ecstatic was he over the gallery’s success. And the news from Pat, that she was going to stay in Edinburgh and could continue to work part-time while at university, had boosted Matthew’s spirits. In fact, he realised that Pat had had a great deal to do with this profit. She was good at sales. She knew the ten secrets of retail, even if she did not know that she knew them. He must talk to her about that.

  Having opened the gallery that morning, and having switched on the lights that illuminated the paintings, Matthew sat back in his chair and browsed through an auction catalogue that had arrived the previous day. There was to be a sale of Scottish art at Hopetoun House, and it occurred to him that now was the time for him to start buying. With that eleven thousand pounds’

  profit behind him he could go to the bank and get a line of credit for the expansion of his stock. Not little, frippery things, but big paintings. A Hornel perhaps.

  He was thinking of this when he heard the bell which sounded as the front door opened
. It would be Pat. He looked up. It was not. It was his father.

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  Chapter title

  20. Second Flowering

  Matthew greeted his father warmly. Although they had not always been on the easiest of terms, particularly in the days of Matthew’s earlier business failures, they had come to understand one another, and with that understanding had come a comfortable and undemanding relationship. Matthew’s father, Gordon, came to appreciate the fact that even if his son was a bad businessman, he was honest and well-meaning, and would not disgrace him in any way. And for his part, Matthew had reached that stage in life when one accepts parents for what they are. His father’s world – the world of Rotary clubs and business lunches – would never be his own world, but did that matter?

  Matthew did not know it, but Gordon felt strongly guilty about him. He felt this guilt because he believed that he had been a failure as a father. While other fathers had made time to spend with their sons, he had not. He had gone to none of the school plays which Matthew had appeared in, and had even missed the school production of Carousel, in which Matthew had played Billy Bigelow and his friend, Mark, had played Mr Snow.

  He had been too busy with business affairs and with the social life that went with that. Then Matthew had grown up and left home and he had tried to make it up to him by setting him up in businesses and putting money in his bank account. And now it was too late.

  Matthew rose to greet his father. “A nice surprise,” he said.

  “Want to buy a painting?”

  Gordon smiled. “I have simple tastes in art,” he said.

  “Highland scenes. Seascapes.”

  “We have both of those,” said Matthew. “And a very rare Vettriano abstract.”

  “I came to say hello,” said Gordon. “I was on my way to the lawyers in Charlotte Square. They look after me very well, those people. I’m seeing them at eleven, and I thought I’d drop in and see how things were going. I gather you’re turning in a profit.”

  Second Flowering

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  Matthew sat back in his chair and smiled. “Yes,” he said.

  “Surprised?”

  Gordon looked down. My son knows what I think of him, he thought. He expects me to be surprised if he does anything well. And that’s my fault; nobody else’s – mine.

  “I wanted to congratulate you,” he said. “Yes, I was a little bit surprised. But perhaps . . . perhaps you’ve found your niche.

  And good for you.”

  Matthew looked at his father. There was something about him which was slightly different. He had had a haircut, yes, and he was losing a bit of weight. But there was something else.

  Were his clothes slightly younger in style ?

  “You look in good shape,” he said. “Have you started going to the gym?”

  Gordon blushed. “As a matter of fact, I have. Nothing too strenuous, of course. A bit of weight training and those running machines – you know, the ones which make you sweat. I do about two hours a week.”

  Matthew raised an eyebrow. “Do you go by yourself ?”

  Gordon hesitated before he answered. “Actually,” he began,

  “I have somebody who goes with me. She does aerobics and I do my running and pushing weights.”

  Matthew said nothing for a moment. She. That would explain the change. He had found a girlfriend. “Good,” he said, after a while. “It’s nice to have company. Who is she, by the way?”

  Gordon moved across the room. He continued the conversation as he leaned forward to examine a painting.

  “Nice landscape this,” he said. “She’s called Janis. I met her a few months ago at the Barbours’. Remember them? They send their regards. Anyway, Janis was at a dinner party there and . . .

  and, well, we hit it off. I’d like you to meet her.”

  Matthew looked across the room. Why was it so hard to imagine one’s parents having an emotional life? There was no reason why this should be so, but it just was. And his father, of all people! What could any woman possibly see in him . . . apart from money, of course?

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  Second Flowering

  “What does . . . what does Janis do?” he asked.

  “She owns a flower shop,” said Gordon. “It’s a nice little business. People still buy flowers, you know. She says that flowers are all about guilt. Men buy flowers because they feel guilty about something. About neglecting their wives, about all that sort of thing . . .” He tailed off. And what about neglect of sons?

  he thought. What about that?

  Matthew listened to this information. A woman who owned a flower shop? There was nothing wrong with that, of course, but he could picture her – alone in her flower shop, amidst all those carnations and bunches of red roses, waiting for her chance. And along comes his father, with his GBP 11.2 million (or that was the figure that Matthew had last heard) and, well, it would be infinitely better, would it not, than selling flowers to guilty husbands. Gold-digger, he thought.

  Gordon turned round from the painting he had been examining. “I’d like you to meet her,” he said. “How about dinner in the club this Friday? Would that suit?”

  There was something almost pathetically eager in his tone that made Matthew regret what he had been thinking; more guilt, but this time the son’s rather than the father’s. There was so much guilt in Edinburgh, everywhere one turned. Everyone felt guilty about something. Guilt. Guilt.

  “Yes,” said Matthew, guiltily. “I could be free. What time?”

  “Seven-guilty,” said Gordon, and then rapidly correcting himself, “I mean seven-thirty.”

  “Fine,” said Matthew. “I look forward to meeting . . .”

  “Janis,” supplied his father. “With an is, not an ice. ”

  Matthew wondered whether this made a difference. He had a very clear idea of what she would be like, however she spelled her name. Blonde hair. And sharp features. And a nose for money.

  They moved on to other subjects. Gordon had recently sold off one of his businesses and told Matthew about what had happened to it in its new hands. Then he related developments at the golf club, where a new secretary had been appointed and had upset some of the members by unilaterally changing the Demographic Discussions

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  date of the annual dinner dance, a small thing perhaps, but a big thing for some.

  And there was more of that sort of news, although Matthew paid even less attention to it than usual. He was wondering: what if I didn’t have my father behind me? What if somebody came along and took all that support away from me? How would I react to being done out of my inheritance? Badly, he thought.

  21. Demographic Discussions

  Pat came into the gallery to find Matthew at his desk, sunk in thought. She looked at her watch. “You’re in early,” she said brightly. Matthew looked up at her and mumbled a good-morning.

  Since his father had left ten minutes earlier, he had been sitting at his desk thinking of the implications of Janis. It was possible – just possible – that she had no ulterior intent, that her interest in his father was emotional rather than pecuniary.

  But was that likely? Matthew could not imagine that anybody could find his father attractive; indeed, he was a most un-romantic figure, with his thoughts of balance-sheets and the Watsonian Club and Rotary lunches. Could any woman find any of that interesting? Surely not. And yet, and yet . . . It was one of the constant surprises of this life, Matthew had found, that women found men attractive, against all the odds, and irrespective of the sort of man involved. The most appalling men had their partners, did they not, and these women often appeared to like them. There were so many examples of that, including people in the public eye. It was well-known, for instance, that psychopaths took rather well to the world of business and that modern business culture encouraged precisely that sort of personality. Some of these business moguls were often much sought after by women. Why? Because such men were cave-men, without their physical clubs, perhaps, bu
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  Demographic Discussions

  the modern equivalent, and there were some women who simply found such men interesting.

  And of course one had to remember – and Matthew did –

  that there were many women whose condition was one of quiet desperation. There were many women who wanted a man and who simply could not find one, for demographic or other reasons. Such women will accept anybody who comes along and shows the remotest interest, even my father, thought Matthew.

  He looked up at Pat. “Why are there so few men, do you think, Pat?”

  He asked the question without thinking, and was immediately embarrassed. But Pat smiled at him, apparently unsurprised to be greeted this early in the morning with such a query.

  “Well,” she said. “Are there so few men? Aren’t there roughly the same number – to begin with – and only a little bit later, when the men die off, does the number of women go up? Isn’t that the way it works?”

  Matthew frowned. “That may be true,” he said. “That may be true in terms of strict numbers, but why is it that even before the point at which men start to die off, there do not seem to be enough men to . . . to go round? Isn’t that what women find?”

  Pat thought about this for a moment. Matthew was probably right; there never seemed to be enough men to satisfy women. Now that sounded odd; she would not put it quite that way. There never seemed enough men to provide each woman who was looking for a man with a man. That was it.

  Yes, Matthew was right. “Yes,” she said. “It’s not easy to find a boyfriend these days. I know plenty of people who would love to find a man, but can’t find one. We don’t know where they’ve gone. Disappeared.”

  Matthew thought: you could look under your nose, you know.

  What about me? But said nothing. Somehow, he suspected, he did not count in this particular reckoning.

  “Why is it?” he said. “What’s happened?”

  Pat thought that he must know; but Matthew had always struck her as being unworldly. Perhaps he was unaware.