Chance Developments

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “Nasty things,” said his father—of the shrubs, still in riotous blossom. “A haven for midges. They should have left them where they found them—in the Himalayas.”

  “Beautiful,” said his mother.

  “You can’t stop them,” said the farm manager. “Once they take root, it’s the devil’s own job getting rid of them.”

  “Still beautiful,” she said, and turning to Harry, “Jenny? Has she written to you? Are they up yet, do you know?”

  The farm manager answered. “Arrived last week. He’s laid up with his leg, I believe.”

  Harry tried to see through the rhododendrons, to the outcrop of rock that he knew they concealed, but there was only darkness. Jenny’s father had been shot by a German—he knew that because he had heard the adults talking about it. Did he shoot him back? We don’t think of it like that. But why not? Because we just don’t. Because when there’s a war, people are told to shoot the other side. It doesn’t mean that they hate them as people. They’re just doing their job as soldiers. If anybody shot me, I’d shoot him back. As long as I wasn’t dead, of course.

  “Your father,” he had once said to Jenny, “has got a bullet in his leg, hasn’t he?”

  She had looked at him with tolerance. He was not to know. His own father had stayed in the bank. He knew nothing about the trenches. The trenches…The word, it seemed, had vast power in the adult world. Her father had been in the trenches when the German shot him.

  “Of course he hasn’t got a bullet in his leg, stupid! You can’t walk if you have a bullet in your leg. In fact, you die because the bullet goes up your leg and into your heart. It goes through your veins. That happened to lots of people.”

  “Even if you got shot in the toe? Even then?”

  This required thought. “Sometimes. Sometimes people died if they got shot in the toe. It depends on which toe. If it’s just the little toe, then you may be all right. If it’s your big toe, then you may not be so lucky.”

  “Then why didn’t your father die?”

  She sighed; he knew so little of what the world was really like. “He had an operation. In something called a field hospital. They took the bullet out and put it in a jar. I’ve seen it.”

  He was impressed. To have a father who had been shot by a German was distinction enough, but to have the very bullet in a jar put one in a very special position.

  She looked at him. “My father won,” she said.

  “Won what?”

  “The War. My father won the War.”

  He looked down at the ground. His father could have won it too, had he gone to the trenches. But somebody had to stay, his mother explained, because if they didn’t stay to run the banks then there would be no money, and if there was no money then the Germans would have romped home to victory and that would have been the end of the British Empire. Which would have been like turning out the sun, she said. Just that: turning out the sun.

  And now here was Mr. Currie having trouble with his leg, reminding everybody that you may win the War but you paid a price for it.

  “All those names,” his mother said, shaking her head as she showed him the simple war memorial that had been erected beside the kirk. “Every one of them. Every single one of them a hero. All ordinary boys from right here. Local families. Every one of them.”

  But now she said, as they approached the house, “Jenny will come over, no doubt. They’ll have seen the car. People know when you arrive. They don’t in Edinburgh, do they? You could disappear into thin air and nobody would be any the wiser. But they know here.”

  3

  She came to the house virtually every day. Sometimes he imagined he was by himself, engaged in some activity of his own devising, and then he would realise that she was there, almost as if she had been there all along, watching him, waiting for an opportunity to tell him that he was doing things the wrong way, or should be doing something else altogether.

  For the most part, he was happy to follow her suggestions. “We could pretend we were Vikings,” she said. “There were lots of them settled near here, you know. I could be a Viking lady and you could be a Viking warrior.”

  He liked the idea, but was uncertain what Vikings did.

  “They mostly burn things,” she said. “They travel in long boats—really long—and then they come ashore and burn everything. They carry everybody off.”

  “Where to?”

  Her answer was vague. She pointed out towards the islands. “Over there. Maybe Skye. They liked Skye.”

  “And what did they do to them? Did they kill them?”

  She shook her head. “Not always. The Vikings sometimes killed people—if they felt in the mood—but most of the time they just carried them off and overcame them. That was enough.”

  He was not sure how people were overcome, and asked for clarification, but she simply shook her head. “I’ll tell you later,” she said. “Not now.”

  He gathered an armful of brushwood from the woods above the house. They set fire to this down by the shore, the smoke billowing up voluminously. It was a convincing Viking display and he was momentarily awed by what they had done.

  “That’ll show all the Scottish people,” she said. “They’ll know that we’re here. They’ll run off from the Vikings, but we’ll get them sooner or later.”

  “And overcome them?”

  “Maybe.” She thought for a moment, moving away from the smoke. He followed her; the smoke was making his eyes smart. “Have you heard of Somerled?”

  He shook his head. She knew so much more than he did.

  “He lived here a long time ago. He was Scottish, although his mother was a Viking. He rose up against the Vikings.”

  “Did they kill him?”

  “No, he beat them. He showed the Scots how to overcome the Vikings.” She paused. “I learned all that in history. You’ve got a lot to learn, Harry.”

  “I know.”

  “Still, you can pick up quite a lot from me. I can tell you quite a lot of what you have to know—just so that you won’t seem so ignorant when you go to a bigger school. You don’t want them to laugh at you.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “So you should just listen to me.”

  He said nothing. He had always listened to her, it seemed to him, and he would have to continue to do so.

  “Let’s go and catch some sheep,” she said. “And eat them.”

  He stared at her open-eyed.

  “We’re Vikings,” she reminded him. “Remember.”

  They ran towards a bedraggled ewe that had made its way down to the line of seaweed on the shore. The ewe had her lamb at her side—a cold year had made for spindly lambs—and she backed away in panic, the lamb bleating in confusion. For a moment he thought that Jenny had been serious, and that she would fall upon the ewe—would overcome it—but she stopped short of the frightened creature, waved her arms a final time, and watched as it scampered off to a safe distance.

  “You see,” she said. “Now we can go back to our Viking house.”

  This was a clearing they had made under a particularly thick rhododendron bush. They had brought in two hessian sacks, using one for a floor and one as a curtain. There was just enough room for them both to sit down.

  She had brought sandwiches.

  “Did Vikings eat sandwiches?” he asked.

  “Yes, of course they did. They made sandwiches from the things they stole from the Scots. Then they ate them before the Scots could steal them back.”

  He bit into the sandwich. It was thick with the smoked salmon that Jenny’s parents’ housekeeper, Mrs. Macneill, made in the smoker at the back of her house. She soaked the salmon in rum and honey before lighting the fire, and this gave it a rich, rather sweet taste.

  She looked at him. “When are you going away to school?” she asked. “Not in Edinburgh, but that other one—the one in Perthshire.”

  “Next year,” he said. “Just before my twelfth birthday.”

  She considered t
his. “You could run away,” she said. “If you don’t like it, you could run away.”

  “Where?”

  “Here. Or you could go to Glasgow, if you like. I know somewhere you could hide in Glasgow. I could bring you food, if you liked. Nobody would know.”

  He thought for a moment. “I might like that school.”

  She shook her head. “No, you won’t. They beat you at boys’ schools, you know. On your bottom. They have canes and things.”

  “That’s only if you do something bad.”

  She denied this. “They beat you if they don’t like your face,” she said. “My cousin went to a school like that. They beat him because his face was too round.”

  “But he couldn’t help that…”

  “Of course he couldn’t. But that didn’t stop them from beating him. He hated it and he would have run away, only he was worried that if he ran away they would just beat him even more.”

  He was silent. The world, it seemed to him, was a place of dire and constant threat. There were Germans who would shoot you and there were others who would beat you. This made life an anxious, restless business. He wished that somehow it were different; that the world was a kinder, less threatening place. The problem, it seemed to him, was with boys and men. They were the ones who were cruel; they were the ones who made it hard to be a boy. Girls and women were different, and kinder. But there was not much you could do if nature decided that you were going to be a boy. You had to accept it. You had to work out how to survive, so that your chances of being beaten or shot were diminished. He was not sure how to do that yet, but he thought that he might learn.

  —

  It was Jenny’s mother who realised that he could draw. She was an amateur watercolourist who painted the things that amateur watercolourists like to paint: hazy seascapes, hills covered in purple heather, the moods of the sky. She had a box of oil pastels that she allowed him to use, and the results intrigued her. He had sketched a domestic scene—a table covered with a gingham tablecloth, a teapot and cups, a chair with an intensely red cushion. She could see that he had an eye for colour, but there was more that that: he had composed his picture well.

  “But that’s remarkable, Harry,” she said. “Who’s taught you to draw so well?”

  “Nobody,” he said. “Nobody’s taught me.”

  “I find that hard to believe. Are you sure?”

  He nodded. “I like drawing.”

  Jenny joined in. “He’s going to be a famous artist one day. I can tell that. I’ve known for ages.”

  He was embarrassed. “I’m not. I’m not all that good.”

  Jenny’s mother brought out a book to show him. “I’m going to lend you this. There are lots of lovely pictures in it. They’re all Dutch.”

  He opened the book, and ran his hand across one of the pages. There was a picture of peasants at a village feast.

  “That’s Breughel, I think,” she said. “There were several Breughels—I get them a bit mixed up. Let me look. Yes, that’s Peter Breughel, who started them off. What do you think of it?”

  He studied the figures. “They’re cooking a pig.”

  “Yes, they are. It must have been a very important celebration for them to cook a pig. I think they’re looking forward to it.”

  He turned the page.

  “That’s what they call an interior,” she said. “The Dutch loved painting scenes like that. And do you see something? You see that open doorway? The Dutch artists loved open doorways—it meant that you could look out of the painting into something. Here we’re looking into a courtyard. And you see the sunlight. You see how clear it is outside? They liked that.”

  He touched the picture, which was reproduced in black and white. “I wish I could see the colours.”

  “When you get back to Edinburgh, you can go to the National Gallery. They have paintings like that. You can see the colours then.”

  He took the book away. He spent hours studying the pictures and trying to pronounce the names of the artists. “De Hooch,” he whispered, “De Hooch. Hondecoeter.”

  He thought the name Hondecoeter was the most exciting name he had ever heard. He would call himself Hondecoeter if he ever had to change his name. He had heard that in Scotland you could call yourself whatever you wanted. He would choose Hondecoeter.

  4

  Those summers in Argyll, so long when you looked at them on the calendar, seemed to her to pass far too quickly. They did not see one another between the end of September and the middle of June. She wrote to him and sent him a Christmas card each year, but he did not reply.

  “It’s very rude,” she said reproachfully. “If somebody writes you a letter, then you should write back. That’s the rule, you know.”

  They were sixteen now, and July had drawn a mantle of warm air over Scotland. The hills of Skye were shimmering and blue, the sea glassy smooth and reflective.

  “Even if you’ve got nothing to say?”

  She laughed. “Yes, even if you’ve got nothing to say. You write back to the person and say Thank you for your letter. I regret to say that nothing has happened to me, but I really enjoyed reading your letter. Please write again soon. And then you finish off with Yours sincerely, followed by your name.” She paused. “If you’re writing to a friend, you can say Love from and then sign your name after that.”

  She looked at him. She knew that her words would have no effect. He ignored her; he always did. He looked straight ahead when she spoke to him, as if seeing something else altogether. It was most annoying, but she knew that if she revealed how irritating it was he would simply look straight ahead while she told him off. She had read a story recently where a woman kept closing her eyes and saying to herself Men! She felt like doing that now. Men!

  “Besides,” she continued, “you can’t really say that nothing has happened to you. I know that you have plenty of things happening to you. Things happen at school don’t they? They must do.”

  He shrugged. “Not a lot.”

  “I don’t believe that. You put a whole lot of boys in a school, and things will happen. There’ll be fights, won’t there? Boys fight a lot. You could tell me about that. You play sports, don’t you? Isn’t there rugby there? What about fencing? Are you allowed to do fencing? And the food? Don’t tell me they don’t feed you—you could write to me and tell me what they give you to eat. I’m interested in all these things, you know.”

  “The food’s horrible,” he said. “They say that the cooks spit in the stew. All of them. They have spitting competitions in the kitchen.”

  “Well, there you are,” she said, a note of triumph in her voice. “You could have written to me and told me about the cooks spitting in the stew.”

  He shook his head. “I’ve never seen it myself. I can’t be sure it happens.”

  “Well, you could have said that you weren’t sure. I’d still be interested to read about things that might have happened.”

  He lapsed into silence. She watched him. She liked doing that, simply watching him, even if he was ignoring her. Sometimes he would sit there with that sketchbook of his, completely absorbed, and draw while she watched him.

  “You could do me,” she said. “If you wanted to draw me, I’d say yes, you know.”

  He continued with his sketch of a dove that he had found lying underneath a tree, undamaged but dead. He had stretched out the wing and was drawing the feathers. He thought of how it was such a waste for nature to make something like this, a creature so intricate, and then for it to die beneath the tree that was its home, just like that.

  “If you drew me,” she said, “then you could give the picture to my mother. Or I could even buy it. I’ll give you two shillings for it—maybe a bit more if you get a good likeness.”

  “I’ll think about it,” he said. “I’m drawing a dove at the moment.”

  She wished that he would pay more attention to her. Since he had gone to that school, something seemed to have happened. Of course he still spent time with
her—most days they were together, although she remarked that she always had to come over to see him as he never made the journey to her house.

  “You could ride over on your bike,” she said. “It’s not all that far, especially on a bicycle. Or you could even walk. I walk over every day, you know. It only takes me forty-five minutes. Or you could ask your father to drive you over in his car. You could do that, you know.”

  “Maybe.”

  She sighed. “We could go on a picnic tomorrow. I could make sandwiches for both of us. And some chicken. I could get some roast chicken legs. We could have them cold. And cake too. We’ve got lots of cake because my mother likes baking and we can’t eat it all.”

  “Maybe.”

  Her frustration showed. “Don’t just say maybe. What if the Prime Minister said maybe to everything? What if they brought some new law for him to sign and he just said maybe?”

  “That’s not how it works. He has somebody to sign for him. He can’t sit there all the time signing papers. He’s got plenty of other things to do.”

  She shook her head. “You’re very wrong, Harry. You’re wrong about that—and a whole lot of other things. You still get things wrong.”

  He was silent for a while. Then he said, “Do you think there really are angels? Do you think they have wings like this?”

  He held out the dove’s wing, spreading the feathers.

  “I’m not sure about angels,” she said. “I don’t think they really exist. People talk about them, but if they existed, then surely we would have seen them.”

  “Or they would have found feathers,” he said. “We find eagle feathers, you know. Mr. Thompson found one the other day.”

  She had been confirmed in the Episcopal Church of Scotland, at her mother’s instance; her father had no time for bishops. There had been talk of saints, but nothing had been said about angels, as she far as she could recall. “Yes, you would have thought that there would be feathers. But there aren’t. So, no, I think angels are imaginary—like elves and fairies and so on. Only the weak-minded believe in such nonsense.”

  “And God?”

  She caught her breath. “You shouldn’t ask questions like that.”