A Conspiracy of Friends

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Thinking this was strangely liberating. She realised that she had been bullied by men twice in her life—by Oedipus and by Rupert. Now, with Hugh—a good and kind man—at her side she felt so much stronger, so much more capable of dealing with male pressure.

  The conversation with Hugh had taken place in Ardnamurchan when Barbara had gone up for a weekend. She decided that she would tell Rupert of her change of mind when she returned to London. But then, on the train down from Fort William, the thought occurred to her: If she withdrew her offer to Rupert, was she not simply repeating the old pattern—doing the bidding of a man? Hugh was her fiancé and she loved and trusted him, and yet here she was, doing what he told her to do. Was this not yet another case of female inauthenticity? And if she did as Hugh told her now, would the rest of her life—her life with him—be characterised by the same behaviour? At their wedding, might she not just as well use those now-abandoned words from the marriage service and promise to love, honour and obey?

  The thought was disturbing, and presented her with a real dilemma. If she rejected Hugh’s advice she would implicitly be saying that she wanted to do as she chose. But in so doing, she would end up acting as another man—Rupert—wanted, and that would mean that she had complied with a man’s wishes in any case.

  Barbara had plenty of feminist friends—or friends who claimed feminist credentials; perhaps she should ask one of them. The friend would give advice, no doubt, but then if Barbara took it, would that not be a case of her doing the bidding of a woman? And if you were a woman was there any difference—any real difference—between doing what a woman tells you to do and doing what a man tells you to do? There was a distinction, she thought, but she was not quite sure she could put her finger on it. Was it the case that there was a presumption that a man would advise you with an eye to his own interests, whereas a woman would be more likely to take your interests into account? Yes, she thought. But then she wondered: Why should we think that men are inevitably self-interested? Could men not believe in the right of women to autonomous decisions? Of course they could.

  She made up her mind: I shall tell Rupert it’s off—and I don’t care what he does. My decision. Made by me. Authentic. Autonomous. And within her a small voice added: Disastrous.

  17. The Friendship of Dogs

  WILLIAM RARELY USED his car, which he kept in a distant lockup bought before the prices of such places had become unaffordable. He knew that the rational thing would be to sell the garage for the absurdly inflated price it would doubtless command, but for the moment inertia reigned, along with a certain attachment to the contented Saab that the lockup contained.

  The main reason for the infrequent use of the car was the fact that he very rarely had anywhere to go. Apart from work, to which he travelled by tube, and wine tastings, to which he took a taxi, William went virtually nowhere—evidence, he thought, of the profound rut into which he had fallen. London, it appeared to him, was full of people rushing around on journeys that merely underlined the point that they were not only doing far more than he was but also having more fun in the process.

  But late that Friday afternoon he, too, was about to go somewhere. With his weekend bag packed in the back of the Saab, he settled Freddie de la Hay into the front passenger seat. Freddie was thoroughly in favour of outings of any description, and the prospect of a spin in the car was particularly appealing. His mouth open in the enthusiastic grin that marks out a dog anticipating a treat, Freddie stared steadily ahead through the windscreen, focusing on the stained rear wall of the garage as if it were a vista of the utmost promise for dogs and humans alike.

  “Right,” said William, as he closed the door and strapped himself into his seatbelt. “Here we go for a weekend in the country. Suffolk to be precise. You know Suffolk, Freddie?”

  Freddie gave a small growl of encouragement that William interpreted as a yes.

  “Aldeburgh, Freddie,” William continued. “Or close by. Know that part?”

  Again, Freddie gave a receptive response.

  “And I’m pleased to say that Geoffrey and Maggie have invited you too,” William continued as he turned the key in the ignition. It was always an anxious moment when the underused battery decided whether or not it had the willpower to bring the engine to life. This time it had, and William heaved a sigh of relief.

  They drove out through the sprawling outskirts of London, a landscape that at the same time expressed and refuted the premise of its creation: a dream of rus in urbe realised in a bit of half-choked greenery, a tiny patch of ground, low walls and fences around boxlike houses. William found himself depressed by these surroundings and felt grateful that, for all the crowding and expense of town, he was not part of this suburban world. And yet he knew that most residents of these suburbs would never wish to exchange their life for his; would hate to give up their gardens, their tiny driveways and their patch of sky for a life in a flat with shared staircases and neighbours on either side, below and above, hearing one’s breathing, taking a bath, boiling a kettle, living.

  “A chacun son goût, don’t you think?” he remarked to Freddie.

  Freddie looked at his master and gave a weak canine grin. He was one for whom suburbia would be infinitely preferable to a city existence. One’s own territory, no matter how small; an en suite lamppost virtually at the front gate; a doorstep on which one might sit in the sun; a postman who provocatively came up to one’s very door, whose ankles cried out to be nipped if only one had the chance; these were the things that counted for a dog.

  William looked fondly at Freddie de la Hay. He had not had the dog for more than a couple of years, but he had become so accustomed to his company that it was difficult to remember how life had been before Freddie. He had mentioned this to Marcia—whose feelings for Freddie were not without ambiguity, she believing that the dog prevented William’s feeling really lonely. That, in Marcia’s view, was both good and bad: good because Freddie de la Hay made William happy, and bad because the lonelier William was, the more he would relish her company. She was a realist, of course, and knew that at present there was little chance of their friendship becoming anything more that just that, a friendship, but if William were to become desperate with loneliness … And it could work, she felt, it really could …

  William found that the bond between him and Freddie de la Hay raised a wider question of the relationship between man and dog. Freddie had never been asked whether he wanted to devote himself to William; he just did so. That was what made canine friendship so remarkable: a dog gave its friendship—and its devotion—without any thought as to whether the person to whom these were given deserved them. In that respect the dog acted without calculation as to what it might receive in return. How different, then, from human friendship, which in many cases is dished out sparingly and only with a great deal of forethought as to what might be got from it. That was why the beautiful and the rich had so many friends, and so easily acquired, whereas the less blessed in looks and the poor had to work much harder to win the friendship of others.

  Dogs did not care what their owners looked like. The most unprepossessing of people might have the most elegant of dogs looking up at them as if they possessed the beauty of Greek gods. The most wretched, the most materially deprived, might have a dog—admittedly a thin dog—that remained loyal in the face of pinching poverty. How dogs showed us up, thought William; they took what fate allocated to them and made the most of it.

  “So, Freddie,” said William. “I’m the straw you’ve drawn in that lottery. Thanks for being so good about it.”

  Freddie de la Hay was aware that William had addressed a remark to him but in his ears it was just a noise, even if a noise in which one recognisable element—his name—had occurred. People, Freddie had observed, made these noises constantly. They were like fridges that gurgled and hummed away during the day, a background noise that dogs found reassuring. Only when these noises stopped and there was silence did a dog have to look out. That was ominous—wh
en the gurgling stopped and disapproval set in. But that was not happening now, thank heavens, and he could turn his attentions to the smells that were wafting in from the outside. The car was now on the very outskirts of London and the countryside was making its olfactory presence felt. Freddie de la Hay shivered in anticipation as he sniffed at the rush of air from his inadequately closed window; old cars like William’s were good for dogs, as they let the outside in. And this outside air was a form of aerial palimpsest for Freddie, with layer upon layer of intriguing smells, and traces of smells: rabbit, cut grass, pheasant, rabbit, horse manure, blackberry, green wellington boots, rabbit …

  18. Old Friends

  THE HOUSE TO which William and Freddie de la Hay had been invited belonged to William’s old friend Geoffrey Chiswick and his wife, Maggie. Geoffrey and William had known one another since boyhood, when they had been together in an alternative to the scouts, the Woodcraft Folk. William had been encouraged to join the movement by his father, who had belonged when he had been evacuated during the Blitz; his father had sought to impart to his son his own enthusiasm for camping but William had never taken to it. He had, in fact, met Geoffrey on a Woodcraft camp in Sussex, both aged ten, and both homesick and afraid of being attacked by the cattle occupying the neighbouring field.

  “Is it best to play dead if you’re attacked by a bull?” William had asked.

  They were in their shared tent at night, grimly aware of the scant protection that the thin canvas offered them from anything, including stampeding cattle.

  “No,” said Geoffrey. “That’s bears. If a bear comes at you then you have to lie down and play dead, you jolly well have to, even if the bear begins to bite you. They go away if you play dead.”

  “Bears …,” said William.

  “But there aren’t any,” said Geoffrey, trying to sound convinced. “Bears are extinct.”

  Geoffrey had been slightly more confident than William, promising to protect him from the hidden dangers of camping in a large English field with forty other children, and this had been the tenor of their relationship ever since: it was implicit that Geoffrey would look out for William. Their friendship had survived—as they had—the camping expedition, and at the age of seventeen they had gone together to a pop music festival in the Netherlands, where Geoffrey had been arrested for no apparent reason and William robbed of his wallet and passport. The help they gave each other on that occasion had further cemented the relationship, and in due course Geoffrey had acted as best man at William’s wedding, with William returning the compliment four months later. When, after twenty years of marriage, William lost his wife, it was Geoffrey and Maggie who insisted on spending the first raw days of widowerhood with him, taking him up to their house in Suffolk after the funeral, walking with him on the stony beach and putting their arms about him when he cried, which he did, voluminously and despairingly.

  Their careers could hardly have been more different. While William did the one thing—wine—Geoffrey rarely spent more than three or four years in a job. He had trained as an actuary, but could not bear office life in the City of London. He had become an insurance broker in Cambridgeshire, and after that had bought, with the aid of a large loan, a garden centre in Suffolk. That had prospered, and he had sold it on and bought a country hotel. The hotel had failed, and he and Maggie had been reduced to near-penury, to be rescued by a friend who took him into partnership in a building-supply firm near Newmarket. This coincided with a rash of development in East Anglia that allowed an extraordinary expansion of the business and, in a very few years, a takeover bid by a larger firm. The proceeds of the sale of Geoffrey’s share were such that no further business activities would be required on his part unless he really wanted to do something, and he and Maggie had bought an old farmhouse in the country. Geoffrey, however, did not fancy a life of idleness, and so he acquired a pig farm about five miles from their farmhouse. He installed a manager, a young man from the village whose obsession—and sole topic of conversation—was the raising of rare-breed pigs. This venture, like many ventures run by passionate enthusiasts, proved highly successful, and also gave great pleasure to Maggie, who approved of British Saddleback pigs and enjoyed smoking hams in the old barn behind their house.

  “No more change for us,” said Geoffrey. “It’s pigs and more pigs from now on.”

  The farmhouse was of uncertain age, the safest conclusion, in Geoffrey’s view at least, being that it had “been there for ever.” And, unlike many modern buildings, which seem to have been imposed upon the land in an act of conquest, this house appeared to grow out of the land, as naturally as does a plant, or a hedgerow, or a tree. It was the materials used for its construction that gave this impression, of course: wattle and daub for the second of its two storeys, the daub being clay and sand from the land about, while the pinkness of the wash applied to it was obtained, at least in the beginning, by the mixing of the blood of oxen and the juice of sloes. The first storey was made of brick—tiny bricks, red as the land itself, uneven in their dimensions, fitting neatly into the hands of the men who laid them.

  The house was concealed from the road by trees that had been planted higgledy-piggledy, or had seeded themselves and been allowed to persist. A pond, overgrown at the edges by reeds, lay a few hundred yards away, and beyond that was a meadow, another meadow, and then a somnolent village with church and pub. It was, thought William as he drove down the farm road that evening, a perfect distillation of rural England; it could be nowhere else. And the beauty of it, the quiet, the utterly unassuming serenity of the place, made him catch his breath and swallow. It did that to him every time he visited, which he did two times a year, once in summer and once in winter.

  He drew up on the small gravel circle at the front of the house. Geoffrey’s car, an ancient and shabby Renault, was parked under a tree to the side of the house. Even this French car seemed reassuringly English in this setting: well used, understated, unthreatening in its functionality, going nowhere but not the slightest bit worried about that.

  19. Moral Meaning and Iris Murdoch

  THE DOOR TO the farmhouse was open, as it always seemed to be whenever William visited.

  “Don’t you lock?” he had once asked Geoffrey.

  “No. Not since we came here. We locked the door in Newmarket. Not here.”

  William, for whom the act of locking was second nature, shook his head in wonderment. “I have two locks,” he said. “And I know people with three.”

  Geoffrey looked regretful. “It seems such a pity to lock, doesn’t it? It makes you feel as if you’re living in a fortress.”

  “Which we are, I suppose.” And it would get worse, he thought; much worse.

  Geoffrey agreed. “Yes. And what about these panic rooms that people have in their houses now? Talk about fortresses …”

  “I don’t know anybody who has a panic room,” said William. “Or not just yet …”

  Geoffrey, who had read about them in the newspaper, launched into an explanation. “You have a sort of walk-in safe in the middle of the house. When the intruders come, you gather the family together and climb into this safe and lock the door behind you. That means that the burglars can’t get at you.”

  “And you phone the police?”

  “Yes. That’s how it works.”

  William thought about this. “Perhaps one might have a panic room to use when you have unwanted guests—people whom you can’t stand. If they come to visit you, you could retreat into your panic room and close the door behind you until they go away.”

  “Those exist,” said Geoffrey. “They’re called studies.”

  They both laughed. “You would let me know, wouldn’t you, if my visits were ever unwelcome?” asked William. How often, he thought, do we question whether our old friends still like us.

  “Your visits are never unwelcome,” replied Geoffrey. And William believed him.

  And now here was William opening the door of the car and letting Freddie de la Hay ou
t after the long journey from London. The dog shot off into the undergrowth bordering the small lawn to the side of the house, giving a bark of delight as he did so. William unloaded his bag from the back seat of the car and walked towards the front door. Underfoot, the gravel made that crunching sound that always delighted him, and reminded him, indeed, when he heard it elsewhere, of here.

  Maggie came to greet him, embracing him in the hall, keeping her hands off his jacket, though, as they were covered in flour.

  “Pastry,” she explained. “For a pie. For you to take back to London on Sunday.”

  “Darling cook,” said William, planting a kiss on her cheek.

  “You need feeding up,” said Maggie.

  “Do I?”

  “Probably not. But I’m making you a Melton Mowbray pie, or an imitation of one now that we can’t call our humble pies by that name any more. Or so Brussels says.”

  “It’s the people of Melton Mowbray who say it,” said William. “Not Brussels.”

  “I suppose so. They don’t have much else, do they, poor dears? Just their pies.”

  He followed her through to the kitchen, leaving his bag on a chair in the hall. Freddie de la Hay was still outside, but clearly remembered the house and would find his own way in once he had finished his preliminary investigations in the bushes.

  Maggie dusted her hands on her apron. She was a tall woman, still auburn-haired at forty-six; attractive, thought William, but in the habit of wearing rather old-fashioned steel-rimmed glasses that gave her a vaguely scholarly air, like that of a displaced librarian. And she was indeed scholarly, he reminded himself: when Geoffrey had married Maggie she had been a postgraduate student at the University of East Anglia, writing a doctoral thesis on moral imagery in the novels of Iris Murdoch. This thesis was never completed, marriage—and life in general—being responsible for many an uncompleted doctorate, but it still lay, a pile of neatly stacked typescript, on a desk in Maggie’s room upstairs. And then, to add to the thesis-inhibiting effect of marriage, there came the distraction of two children, a boy and a girl, both now away from home studying subjects that William could never remember: something to do with product-engineering in one case and psychology in the other.