Chance Developments

by Alexander McCall Smith

  He said to her, “It’s Sunday tomorrow.”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you ever been to the Botanical Gardens here in Edinburgh?”

  She shook her head. She had visited so few places.

  “I wondered whether you might care to come with me there tomorrow? There’s going to be one of their lectures. One of the keepers is going to be talking about cactuses.”

  “Cactuses!”

  He smiled encouragingly. “I know not everyone’s interested in cactuses.”

  “But I am,” she assured him. “They’re fascinating plants.” Poor Sister Frances had kept a cactus in a pot near her window. It had never flowered, although Sister Bernadette had said it would. “Sometimes they flower only every ten years,” she had explained.

  “Well, then, you might find it interesting.”

  “Yes, I’d very much like to come with you. Thank you.”

  “Not at all.” He looked up at the ceiling. “Half past eleven? Where are you staying?”

  She thought quickly. “The North British Hotel.” It was directly above the station; she had seen it when she went up the steps. She would go back to Jenners, buy what she needed for an overnight stay, and then telephone her aunt to say that she was going to spend the night in Edinburgh. She had never stayed in a hotel before—not once—and the idea was strongly appealing. Why should she not? She had more than enough money to stay in any hotel she chose. She was free and she could do exactly as she wished. She liked Richard Snow and, she had decided, he showed every sign of enjoying her company. So it was not all that hard to find a man. On the contrary: she had come to Edinburgh and had found one within hours—a good-looking man with hazel eyes and an interest in cactuses. What more could anybody want?

  “I could come and pick you up at the hotel,” he said. “We’ll drive down there.”

  “Thank you. You said eleven thirty?”

  “Yes…” He hesitated. “I might be a little bit late—no more than five or ten minutes. I shall be at Mass, you see.”

  She caught her breath, but only for the shortest moment. It was a sign, or perhaps an enquiry. Was he testing her for prejudice—or for suitability? I’m not a Protestant, she thought. I never even reached the start line. It was destiny, she thought, and one should never fight destiny. Go along with it, and with the tides that carry you through life. They know where you’re going, and you do not. And then she thought: Some embraces last for life. Curiously enough, this realisation did not depress her; it was what she had rather expected.

  “I could meet you there. What are the times?”

  She saw the relief in his reaction. Destiny, she said to herself.

  She went back to Jenners, bought what she needed, and then walked the short distance to the North British Hotel. They had plenty of rooms, and they gave her a suite overlooking Princes Street. She sat there, her feet propped up on a stool. She ordered a half-bottle of champagne, which was brought up to her room by a smartly attired young man. The young man opened the champagne bottle for her and gave her a look. It was not a look that she understood, but it had a flirtatious feel to it. Men, it seemed, were plentiful, once one started to search for them. Indeed, she thought, Marjorie was right: one had to fight them off—or at least some of them.

  She sent him away. She closed her eyes. Such happiness, she thought; such happiness came from knowing who you were and where you came from. And from knowing, too, that you did not have to go back unless you really wanted to, and sometimes you did.

  1

  “He was very proud of being Scottish, you know.”

  She touched the photograph gently, as one might touch something precious. The young man sitting opposite her, on the other side of the card table on which the photographs had been spread out, noticed that there was sun damage to her hands. Or was it those discolourations that people called liver spots? No, it was most likely the sun, because it was fierce here in southern Tuscany, and the summer months—of which this was one—could be oven-like, even here in the hills, where it was meant to be cooler because of the Apennine wind. On the way up the winding road from San Casciano dei Bagni he had passed a sign that warned of snow—inconceivable now, in this heat, but presumably a real enough issue in winter.

  “Yes, very proud,” she continued. “Not in an embarrassing way, of course. He often wore a kilt—just as he’s doing in this photograph. But he didn’t go on about Scotland as some people do. I think that’s boastful, don’t you? To go on at length about your country and its merits. Boastful and distasteful, too, because going on about one’s country often involves adverse comparisons with other countries, don’t you think?”

  The young man nodded. “Countries and football teams…”

  She laughed. “I suspect you don’t take much interest in football, do you? No, I thought not.” She paused. “But being proud of being something is rather odd, I’ve always thought. It’s rather like being proud of being tall. How can you be proud of something that had absolutely nothing to do with any effort or talent on your part? Frankly, I don’t see it.”

  “No, probably not.”

  “You can be relieved, I suppose, that you were born something or other—American, say—but that’s not the same thing as being proud. You can be thankful that your parents reached America in time for you to be born there—and I suppose a lot of people were grateful for that—but you can’t claim any credit for it.”

  “They could, though.”

  She frowned. “Who could?”

  “The people who reached America. They could be proud of being American.”

  “Yes, of course. But that pride would be about what they had achieved. They got there, and they could feel proud of that. That’s legitimate enough, but it only works for the first generation.”

  “I see what you mean.” He touched his forehead. It was hot and he felt damp. “You’re Scottish too,” he said.

  She smiled, and sat back in her chair. He noticed that the hem of the skirt she was wearing had become unstitched. Age could bring neglect of one’s clothes—a giving up, really—but then he reminded himself she was only sixty-three and that was hardly all that old. He himself would be sixty-three in exactly thirty years’ time. And that would be in—he did the mental arithmetic quickly—two thousand and three. He thought: Would they say twenty three in the way in which we said nineteen seventy-three? He thought it unlikely. It would have to be something like twenty oh-three. Stands the calendar at twenty oh-three and is there honey still for tea? Nobody would remember Rupert Brooke by then. Nor have tea, with bread and honey. There used to be a country called England…

  He was aware she was talking. He had been momentarily back in Cambridge, sitting in his room, waiting for his friends to come back from the river.

  “I am,” she said, “although people often didn’t realise it. Harry and I, you see, were both taken to be English because of the way we spoke. We didn’t have a Scottish accent because our class—and I’m sorry to have to use such an objectionable term, but there is no other way of saying it—because our class was brought up to speak in the same way as a certain sort of English person. That’s an old story in Scotland, the rejection of the Scots tongue, but it did happen. We started to spurn our own language, even if we kept a few words as mementos, so to speak. Words like dreich that we use as occasional shibboleths. That’s another interesting word, isn’t it? The shibboleth was your password to whatever you wanted to get into—or out of. I suppose you had to use the shibboleth to avoid being stoned or put to the sword, or something of that nature.

  “Maybe it was because of that problem of misidentification that he made much of being Scottish. And it can’t have helped to be sent off to that school in Perthshire that pretended to be English.”

  She had been looking out of the window as she spoke; now she looked at him.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “How tactless of me. You probably went to one of those places yourself.”

  He reassured her that
he had not taken offence. “I went to school in England. A place called Marlborough,” he said.

  She nodded. “You were at the Courtauld Institute, weren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You studied under the Poussin man…what was he called?”

  “Blunt. Anthony Blunt. I didn’t know him all that well. I found him rather formal in his manner.”

  She smiled. “Like a painting by Poussin?”

  “Yes, you could say that. There’s a reason why we like this artist rather than that one.”

  He picked up the photograph again. “May I?”

  “Of course. I should put them in a proper album, but there’s something depressing about putting photographs away. It’s rather like filing something that shouldn’t be filed—like reducing something full of meaning and association to a…to a specimen. As lepidopterists do.”

  He laughed. “We all have a slight tendency to lepidoptery.”

  He examined the photograph more closely.

  “That’s you holding the pony, I take it? And that’s him in his kilt.” He paused. “What on earth is he riding?”

  “It was a sort of tricycle,” she explained. “It was a museum piece even then—it had belonged to his father as a boy. I remember it squeaking terribly.”

  “And the other little girl?”

  “She was their farm manager’s daughter. She was always hanging about, hoping we’d play with her.”

  “He looks very unhappy about something.”

  She smiled. “He probably thought I was trying to push him around. I thought he was stubborn—I couldn’t understand why boys seemed so unwilling to do as they were told.” She glanced at her visitor. “On the subject of happiness, how ubiquitous do you think unhappiness is today?”

  He was unprepared for the question. “I’m not sure if I know how to answer that.”

  “What I mean is this: Are we happier today because we know a lot more than we knew then? Are we happier because Freud came along and showed us why we were making ourselves unhappy? Are we happier because of the sexual revolution?” She paused, and looked out of the window again. “Out there—in Italy—are people happier because they can say boo to the local priest? I think they are.”

  He ventured an opinion. “The Italians seem to have been happy in spite of religion.”

  “Or because of it? Remember that Catholicism is only marginally about guilt. For the rest it’s cheerfully pagan—plaster saints, miracles, superstition, feast days. People love ceremony, and there’s bags of ceremony and dressing up in Catholicism.”

  She picked up the photograph again. “Look at him,” she said fondly. “Look at me. Fifty-whatever years ago, when it was all about to begin.

  “And that hat I’m wearing,” she mused. “I was so proud of it. It was a great, floppy thing. I’ve been carrying that hat with me—metaphorically, of course—for decades, for all my adult life.” She pointed to it. Her expression was one that he found hard to interpret. Resentment? Regret? “We carry with us the clothes of childhood, don’t we? We keep them on long after they have ceased to fit.”

  He looked at her with sympathy. “Yes,” he said. “I haven’t heard it put that way before, but yes.”

  She became brisk. “May I ask you something, Mr. Summers? This article you’re writing for The Burlington Magazine?”

  “Yes?”

  “What exactly is it?”

  “It’s a profile. As you probably know, The Burlington’s period is usually somewhat earlier. We do very little on twentieth-century artists. But in his case, the editor thought it appropriate, because of the neo-classical nature of the later work.”

  She sounded slightly impatient. “Yes, I understand all that. What I want to know is this: Are you going to be kind to Harry?”

  The question seemed to surprise him. “But of course we are. It’s a tribute, really.”

  “Because so many things you read now are infected with a spirit of unkindness. People feel they have to show how clever they are by debunking others—by belittling them.”

  “I would never do that. I give you my word.”

  She smiled. “The fact that nobody says I give you my word any more tells me all I need to know about you. And I trust you.”

  “I have nothing but admiration for his work. I have no other motive.”

  “In that case, I can tell you the story that nobody else knows. You may or may not wish to mention it in your…your profile. But it’s the key to everything.”

  “Then I’m very grateful to you. I’d like you to know that.”

  She barely acknowledged his thanks. “Look at the photograph,” she said. “I’ll start from there.”

  “Do you mind if I make notes?”

  “No, that’s what you people do. You have to take notes.”

  He began to write as she talked. Later he wrote it out, at far greater length than was required for his article, filling in the details of how he imagined the protagonists thought, of how they felt. It became a story in its own right; his version of what must have transpired. An omniscient narrator, were he or she to read what he wrote, would say, “Yes, that is exactly right. That is exactly how it happened.” For it was.

  2

  The photograph was taken in Argyll, he wrote, on one of those mountainous peninsulas on the western edge of Scotland. In the nineteenth century it was fashionable to put the proceeds of money made elsewhere—from all the pain and exploitation that lay behind Victorian fortunes—into the construction of large houses, inserted into the wildly romantic Scottish landscape. Remote glens, stripped of their human population during the Highland Clearances of the previous century, now became the backdrop to stone-built fantasies, complete with turrets and towers. Scots baronial, a whole new architectural style, evolved to cater for this enthusiasm—and its accompanying pretensions. On that particular peninsula, an adventurer who had made his fortune in the goldfields of southern Africa built a rambling and unlikely castle solely for the use of his guests, an affirmation in stone of the sheer power of money.

  More modest houses—still large, though—met the needs of smaller landed proprietors. These people did not aspire to vast estates; they were drawn from professional and business circles in Edinburgh or Glasgow, or farther afield, that fancied a toehold in the Highlands. They spent the summer months there engaged in country pursuits, before leaving in the autumn when the gales swept in from the Atlantic. They regarded themselves as a race apart from the locals, to whom they condescended as parvenus have always condescended to the people of the places they choose to colonise.

  Their families were neighbours, even if they lived three miles apart: houses, particularly large ones, were few and far between in the Highlands. His father, an Edinburgh banker, was called Struan; his mother, the daughter of an English general who served most of his career in India, was called Phyllis. They never saw the general, who preferred to spend his leave in Simla. It was widely understood that he drank, but then that was not unusual. Phyllis had not seen her father since the age of sixteen, when she had made the long journey to India, became sick shortly after arrival, and had then been sent home virtually by return. She stayed with an aunt in Bristol until, at the age of twenty-one, she married Struan, whom she had met at the Caledonian Ball in London.

  In 1920 she gave birth to Harry. He was her only child and she lavished affection upon him. “I want so much for him,” she said to one of her Edinburgh friends, but when asked what it was that she wanted, she could think of no answer. It would seem too vague to say that she hoped he would be happy; she wanted that, of course, but there was far more to her feelings than that. She wanted greatness.

  “Perhaps you want to protect him from the world,” said the friend. “You want him to be safe.”

  “Let him be what he chooses to be,” said Struan. “Boys…men…just like to be left alone.”

  This had led to the exchange of knowing glances between the women. “Do they now?” said Phyllis.

 
“Yes,” said Struan. “That’s what they like. They don’t need to be watched over by women all the time.”

  She did not argue the point, but she knew she was right, and he was wrong. Boys—and men—needed women; they were lost without them. It was masked at times, of course, but the need was always there. Underneath all the bravado, men were little boys, whistling in the dark.

  They sent him to school in Edinburgh, ignoring the general’s suggestion that he be sent—at his expense—to a militaristic boarding school in Hampshire. “I don’t want him to have an English education,” said Struan. “He’s my son. He’s Scottish.”

  Phyllis was happy to side with her husband. She could not understand how people could send small children—seven- and eight-year-olds—to boarding school. “They’re far too young to leave their mothers,” she said. “It’s a form of cruelty.”

  “Yes,” said Struan. “But don’t mollycoddle him.”

  She looked at him reproachfully. “I have no intention of doing that,” she said. “None at all.”

  Towards the end of June each year they left their house in Edinburgh to make the journey to the house in Argyll, where they would spend two months. They travelled by train to Fort William, to be collected by their farm manager. He drove them back to the house along the tortuous road that wound along the edge of the peninsula, barely more than a track, and unused, even now, to vehicles. Harry pressed his face to the car window, drinking in the landscape of sweeping mountainsides and tumbling waterfalls. The farm manager talked on the journey about sheep and salmon fishing and the movement of the deer. There was discussion, in muted tones, of the loss of a local fishing boat. “Five bairns now without a father,” said the manager. “Just like that.”

  “You’ll be looking forward to seeing Jenny,” said his mother, as the car made its way up the drive, through the profusion of rhododendrons.