Espresso Tales 4ss-2

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “That was rather too close for comfort,” the man said. “You should stick to the crossings, you know. That’s what the green man’s for.”

  His tone was not unkind, and Bertie looked up at him for a moment. His face looked familiar, but Bertie was not quite sure.

  The man smiled. “Where do you stay?” he asked.

  Bertie pointed in the direction of Scotland Street.

  “Well, I think you should get back home,” said the man. “Will you be all right, do you think?”

  Bertie nodded. He had always been taught to thank people, and now he remembered. “Thank you very much,” he said.

  “Thank you for saving me.”

  “That’s all right,” said the man, smiling. “I’m sure that you would have done the same for me if that had been me stuck out there!”

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  “I don’t know,” said Bertie.

  “I’m sure you would.”

  Bertie returned the smile. Then he began to walk back along Cumberland Street, turning once to wave to the man, who was watching him set off safely on his way. It had been a dreadful, humiliating experience – and a terrifying one, too. And had he not been saved by that kind man, whoever he was, he would be crushed by now; perhaps in a wailing ambulance, being carried off to hospital. Or would they take him to Dr Fairbairn’s office first, where he would be asked at great length why he wanted to cross Dundas Street in the first place? That was possible, thought Bertie. Nothing was ever simple.

  In Dundas Street, things had quickly returned to normal, as they do in cities when something untoward occurs. Few people had seen what had happened; Peter Backhouse had, but he had missed one detail. That detail had been spotted by an elderly woman who happened to be looking out of her window more or less immediately above the point where the incident had taken place. She had seen it all, and she now telephoned her friend in Trinity.

  “Effie,” she said breathlessly, “Effie, you simply won’t believe what I’ve just seen, right outside my window. A wee boy panicked in the middle of Dundas Street and froze. Then he was rescued, snatched from the jaws of death by . . . Now, you won’t believe who it was, Betty, you really won’t. Jack McConnell, First Minister of Scotland. Yes! Yes! What a to-do! But he slipped away, and so I don’t think he’ll want this to get into the papers.

  So not a word, Effie. We don’t want it to get into the Scotsman, do we?”

  36. Ramsey Dunbarton

  High above the city, on the bracing slopes of the Braids, Ramsey Dunbarton stood before the window of his study, looking out over the rooftops and to the hills of Fife beyond. It was a view Ramsey Dunbarton

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  that he had lived with for almost forty years and he knew it in every mood. In winter, when the light was thin, the distant hills became shapes of pale grey, hardly distinguishable from the scud-ding clouds above them. In summer and in autumn, the hills would stand out, sharply delineated mounds of green and purple, folds of earth that seemed, so misleadingly, to be just a short distance away. And always there was that wide, unpredictable northern sky, with its constantly changing clouds that shifted and parted with the wind.

  Ramsey was a northerner by temperament. He felt ill at ease whenever he travelled south, to England or to France, feeling inside him that things were just too bright, and dusty – almost as if the sun had taken something out of the countryside and blanched it. And the air was stale in such latitudes, he thought; stale and stagnant. Ramsey liked Scottish light, pure and clean, and sharp. He liked long, cool evenings in summer and the comfortable darkness of winter days. He liked Scotland exactly as it was: unfussy, cold, and sometimes only half-visible. “I am not a Mediterranean type,” he had once remarked to his wife, Betty. And she had looked at him, and sighed. He was not. And nor, she reflected, was she.

  Standing before his window, Ramsey thought of the day that lay ahead. It was ten-thirty in the morning and he had already dealt with the newspaper and the morning mail. Since there had been little news of any consequence, he had not taken long to finish the newspaper, and the mail had not been much better.

  There had been a rose catalogue from Aberdeen – it was his policy always to order roses from Aberdeen, as northern roses would always be the hardiest and would do well in Edinburgh.

  Buy north, plant south, Ramsey had often said, and the success of his roses spoke to the wisdom of this policy. It could equally apply to people, he had sometimes thought: Aberdonians did well wherever they went in the south.

  Then there had been a newsletter from the secretary of the local Conservative Association in which plans for several social events had been revealed to members. The ball a few months earlier, of course, had been most enjoyable, although the 118 Ramsey Dunbarton

  attendance, it was pointed out – six people – had been a little disappointing. The secretary, who had been unable to attend herself, exhorted the members to make next year’s ball an even greater success, and noted that an attempt would be made to secure the services of a different band. “We had some very critical comments about the performance of the band,” she wrote,

  “and these have been forwarded to the ball committee (convened by Sasha and Raeburn Todd). One member has raised with me the question of whether it is proper for bands to allow their socialist convictions to interfere with the performance of their duties at paid functions. This is a very pertinent point and I believe that we should take action. If anybody knows of a Conservative ceilidh band, please contact us as soon as possible so that we can book them for next year. So far, no suggestions of possible bands have been received.”

  Ramsey Dunbarton read this with interest. He was the member who had raised the question of the band’s performance and he was pleased to see that his complaint had been taken up.

  There had been a lot wrong with the organisation of the ball, in his view. To begin with, somebody had tried to put him and Betty at a separate table from the other four guests. This was a ridiculous idea, and he had soon dealt with it by the simple expedient of moving the tables together. Then there was the question of the raffle, about which he still felt moderately vexed.

  There had been some very generous prizes donated by the members, and it was imperative that any raffle for these should have been carried out fairly. He was not convinced that this had happened; in fact, he was sure that Sasha Todd, who had arranged the whole thing, had actually fixed the lottery so that she and her family should get the most desirable prizes. In particular, Ramsey had noted that she had made sure that she would win the lunch with Malcolm Rifkind and Lord James, which was the prize that he would most have liked to win. It can hardly have been much fun for the two politicians to have to sit through a lunch and listen to her going on about the sort of things that she tended to talk about. She was a very superficial woman, in his view, and she would have had no conversation of any interest.

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  He, by contrast, could have talked to them about things they understood and appreciated.

  Ramsey’s thoughts on the newsletter were interrupted by the arrival of Betty in his study.

  “Coffee, dear,” she said, handing him his cup with its small piece of shortbread perched on the edge of the saucer.

  “Bless you, Betty,” Ramsey said, taking the cup from his wife.

  “Deep in thought?” Betty asked. “As always.”

  Ramsey smiled. “Politics,” he said. “I was reading the newsletter. That made me think about politics.”

  Betty nodded. “You would have made a wonderful politician, Ramsey,” she said. “I often wonder what would have happened had you entered Parliament. I’m sure that you would have reached the top, or close enough to the top.”

  “I don’t know, Betty,” said Ramsey. “Politics are dirty. I’m not sure whether I would have had the stomach for it. They are very rude to one another, you know. And the moment they get the chance, they stab you in the back.”

  Betty nodded. “Of cou
rse, if you had gone into politics, you’d now be sitting down writing your memoirs. That’s what they all seem to do these days.”

  120 The Ramsey Dunbarton Story: Part 1 – Early Days Ramsey spun round and looked at his wife. “Memoirs?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said Betty. “Your political memoirs.”

  Ramsey put down his cup. “Betty,” he said. “There’s something that I’ve been meaning to talk to you about. The question of memoirs.”

  Betty looked at him inquiringly. “Yes?”

  Ramsey lowered his gaze, as if in modesty. “It’s funny you should have mentioned memoirs,” he said quietly. “I’ve actually been writing them. I’ve got quite a bit down on paper already.”

  For a moment, Betty said nothing. Then she clapped her hands together. “That’s wonderful, my dear. Wonderful!”

  Ramsey smiled. “And I thought that you might like to hear a few excerpts. I was plucking up courage to offer to read them to you.”

  “I can’t wait,” said Betty. “Let’s hear something right now.

  I’ll fetch more coffee and then we can sit down.”

  “It’s not going to set the heather on fire,” said Ramsey modestly. “But I think that my story is every bit as interesting as the next man’s.”

  “Even more so,” said Betty. “Even more so.”

  37. The Ramsey Dunbarton Story: Part 1 – Early Days Ramsey Dunbarton, having shuffled through a sheaf of papers, looked at his wife over the top of his reading glasses. “I shan’t bore you with the early stuff,” he said. “School and all that. I had a pretty uneventful time at school, and nothing much happened; it’s hardly worth recording. So I’ll start off when I was a young man. Twenty-five. Can you imagine me at twenty-five, Betty?”

  Betty smiled coyly. “How could I forget? The year we met.”

  Ramsey frowned. “No, sorry, my dear. Not the year we met.

  We met when I was twenty-six, not twenty-five. I remember it very well. I had just finished my apprenticeship with Shepherd The Ramsey Dunbarton Story: Part 1 – Early Days 121

  and Wedderburn and had been engaged by another office. I remember it very well.”

  Betty took a sip of her coffee. “And I remember it very well too, my darling. You were twenty-five because I remember –

  very clearly indeed in my case – going to your twenty-sixth birthday party, and I couldn’t have done that if I hadn’t already met you. You don’t normally go to the birthday parties of people you have yet to meet, do you?”

  Ramsey laid down the sheaf of papers. “That party – and I was going to say something about it in the memoirs – was not my twenty-sixth. It was my twenty-fifth. I did not celebrate my twenty-sixth because – if you cast your mind back

  – I had tonsillitis and was having my tonsils removed in the Royal Infirmary! I remember getting a card from the office wishing me a speedy recovery, and a happy birthday too. It was signed by the senior partner, and I kept it. I was very pleased to have received it.”

  Betty pursed her lips. For a moment it seemed as if she was about to speak, but then she did not.

  “I suggest that we stop arguing,” said Ramsey. “If you’re going to find fault with my memoirs on matters of detail, then I’m not sure if it will be at all productive to read them to you.”

  Betty sprang to her own defence. “I was not finding fault, as you put it. I was merely wanting to keep the historical record straight. These things are important. Imagine what the world would be like if memoirs were misleading. You have to be accurate.”

  “And I am being accurate,” retorted Ramsey. “I’m checking every single fact that I commit to paper. I’ve been consulting my diaries, and they are very full, I’ll have you know. I’ve gone down to George IV Bridge to make sure that everything I say about contemporary events is true. I am being very historical in all this.” He paused, and then added peevishly: “I don’t want to mislead posterity, Betty.”

  Betty thought for a moment. She was certain that she was right about the birthday being the twenty-sixth rather than the twenty-fifth, but she felt that she should let it be, even if it was 122 The Ramsey Dunbarton Story: Part 1 – Early Days a serious mistake on her husband’s part. “Of course you don’t want to mislead, Ramsey,” she said placatingly. “Let’s not discuss it any further. Twenty-five, twenty-six – it’s very much the same thing. You carry on, dear. I’m listening.”

  Ramsey Dunbarton picked up the sheaf of papers again and cleared his throat. “I was now twenty . . . somewhere in my mid-twenties. I had recently finished my years as an apprentice lawyer and had been admitted to the Society of Writers to Her Majesty’s Signet. This was a great honour for me, as this entitled me to put the letters WS after my name. I lost no time, I must admit, in having new notepaper printed and cards too. I was proud of the new letters, and I must admit that I became very impatient with people who affected not to know what WS

  stood for. (One of these people even had the gall to ask whether I was a water surveyor!) ‘If you live in Edinburgh,’ I would point out, ‘you should know these things. Wouldn’t you expect a Roman to know what the Swiss Guard is?’

  “This question often silenced people, and I hope that they were sufficiently chastened to go home and look the abbrevia-tion up. I did not want to embarrass anybody, of course, and one should be slow to point out to others their ignorance. But there are limits, and I think that ignorance of the meaning of WS is one of them.

  “One very important feature of the WS Society is that it’s always mainly been for lawyers working in Edinburgh firms, and not every Edinburgh firm at that. There may be some members who have their practices elsewhere – even in places like Pitlochry

  – but in such cases it is perfectly obvious that they are really Edinburgh types. This is as it should be, as the Society has its premises here in Edinburgh and was founded by Edinburgh lawyers for themselves and nobody else. Lawyers from Glasgow have their own societies and are welcome to join those, if they wish – and I’m sure that some of these societies are perfectly respectable and worthwhile organisations, although I do not know for certain. So I have usually had very little time for those who question our important institutions, such as the WS Society or the Royal Company of Archers, for that matter. These people The Ramsey Dunbarton Story: Part 1 – Early Days 123

  are usually jealous and would soon change their tune if they were to be admitted to membership of one of these bodies.

  “I was now working as an assistant in the firm of Ptarmigan Monboddo, which was a very highly-regarded Edinburgh legal firm. There were eight partners and three assistants, of whom I was one. I was told by my principal, the late Mr Fergus Monboddo, that if I played my cards right I could expect to be assumed into the partnership within five years. It was possible, he said, to become a partner rather earlier than that, but if I wanted to achieve that I would have to marry one of the senior partner’s daughters, and that, he said, was asking too much. I think that this was meant to be a joke, but I thought that it was in very bad taste, and I was surprised that a partner in an Edinburgh firm would speak in this way. I later discovered that Mr Monboddo only said things like that when he had had a small glass of sherry, and so I learned to distinguish between those things that were said in all seriousness and those that were not. I have always taken the view that one should never hold against a man anything that he says after twelve o’clock at night or after a glass or two of something.

  “I had no desire to marry the senior partner’s daughter, as it happened, because I had just met the woman whose hand I was determined to obtain. This was my dear wife, Betty, to whom I have been married for many happy years. Although it is a long time ago now, I remember very vividly the day we met, which was in the Brown Derby tea room on Princes Street.

  That was the most important day of my life, I think, and I hardly dare contemplate what might have happened had I not gone there on a whim and met the person who was to transform my life.”

  Betty smiled at thi
s. It was so kind of him, so gallant. And yet he was wrong again, she feared. It had not been the Brown Derby, it had been Crawford’s. But she did not have the heart to correct him again, and so she nodded brightly and urged him to continue. Their courtship had been a passionate one, and she wondered whether he was going to say anything about that!

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  38. The Ramsey Dunbarton Story:

  Part 2 – Courting Days

  “Those were very special days,” read Ramsey Dunbarton. “I knew almost immediately that this was the girl I wished to marry, but in those days one had to go through a good deal of courting before one felt it right to pop the question. Of course I knew some people who got engaged very quickly, but they were usually rather fast types, and although I considered myself adventurous, I would not have described myself as fast.

  “We used to go to the cinema, to the Dominion in Church Hill, and sometimes to the Playhouse, where there was a splendid cinema organ. This rose out from under the floor with the organist sitting at the keyboard, playing for all he was worth.

  It was a splendid sight, and I think that it contributed in no little way to the romance of those occasions. They had newsreels then, of course, and we would come away from the cinema not only entertained but also informed about current affairs. It would be no bad thing if they reintroduced newsreels in the cinemas, but I suspect that people would just laugh or pay no attention. Nobody is serious about these things any more.

  “Another favourite outing of ours was to Cramond, where we went for walks when the weather was fine. It was very romantic down at Cramond in those days and there were many courting couples who went there in search of a place to be alone and to talk about the future. Betty and I used to like walking along the shore, watching the oyster catchers and other sea-birds. We would also watch ships in the Forth, heading out from Rosyth or from Leith. In those days there was a passenger ship that came down from Kirkwall and Aberdeen, the St Rognvald. It was owned by the North of Scotland Orkney and Shetland Shipping Company and I once had the privilege of making a trip on that vessel. It had a beautiful panelled dining room. We also counted ourselves lucky if we saw the Pharos, which was the ship that the Northern Lighthouse Commissioners used to inspect their lighthouses. That was a beautiful ship. I myself would have loved to have been a Commissioner of the Northern The Ramsey Dunbarton Story: Part 2 – Courting Days 125