44 Scotland Street 4ss-1

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Her father waited for her to finish the sentence, but she did not. So he changed the subject and asked her when she was going to move in. He would transport everything, as he always did; the Stuff Happens

  5

  bundles of clothing, the bedside lamp, the suitcases, the kettle.

  And he would not complain.

  “And work?” he asked. “When do you start at the gallery?”

  “Tuesday,” said Pat. “They’re closed on Mondays. Tuesday’s my first day.”

  “You must be pleased about that,” said her father. “Working in a gallery. Isn’t that what most of you people want to do?”

  “Not in particular,” said Pat, somewhat irritated. Her father used the expression you people indiscriminately to encompass Pat, her age group, and her circle of friends. Some people wanted to work in a gallery, and perhaps there were a lot of those, but it was hardly a universal desire. There were presumably some people who wanted to work in bars, to work with beer, so to speak; and there were people, plenty of people, who would find themselves quite uncomfortable in a gallery. Bruce, for instance, with his rugby shirt and his en brosse haircut. He was not gallery material.

  That had been another interview altogether. She had seen the discreet, hand-written notice in the window of the gallery a few streets away. A bit of help wanted. Reception. Answering the phone

  – that sort of thing. The wording had been diffident, as if it was almost indecent to suggest that anybody who read it might actually be looking for something to do. But when she had gone in and found the tall, slightly lost-looking young man sitting at his desk – the wording had seemed perfect.

  “It’s not much of a job,” he had said. “You won’t have to sell any paintings, I expect. You’ll just be providing cover for me.

  And you’ll have to do the occasional other thing. This and that.

  You know.”

  She did not know, but did not ask. It looked as if he might have found it tedious to give the details of the job. And he certainly asked her nothing about herself, not even her name, before he sat back in his chair, folded his arms, and said: “The job’s yours if you want it. Want it?”

  2. A Room with a Smell

  Bruce had shown Pat the vacant room in the flat and this had brought home to him what a complete slut Anna had been. He had asked her to clean the room before she left – he had asked her at least twice – and she had assured him, twice, that it would be done. But he should have known that she did not mean it, and now, looking at the room with a visitor’s eyes, he saw what she had done. The middle of the carpet had been vacuumed, and looked clean enough, but everywhere else looked dirty and neglected. The bed, pulled halfway away from the wall, had large balls of dust under it, as well as a collapsed stack of magazines.

  A glass of water, with lipstick stains on the rim, had been left on the bedside table. She had moved out a week ago and he should have checked, but he had always hated going into the room while she was there and her presence somehow lingered. So he had left the door closed and tried to forget that she had ever lived there.

  Pat stood still for a moment. There was a musty odour to the room; a smell of unwashed sheets and clothes.

  “It’s got a great view,” said Bruce, striding across to draw the curtains, which had been left half-closed. “Look,” he said. “That’s the back of that street over there and that’s the green. Look at the pigeons.”

  “It’s big enough,” said Pat, uncertainly.

  “It’s not just big, it’s huge,” said Bruce. “Huge.”

  Pat moved over towards the wardrobe, a rickety old oak wardrobe with half-hearted art nouveau designs carved up each side. She reached out to open it. Bruce drew his breath. That slut Anna, that slut, had probably left the cupboard full of her dirty washing. That was just the sort of thing she would do; like a child, really, leaving clothes on the floor for the adults to pick up.

  “That’s a wardrobe,” he said, hoping that she would not try to open it. “I’ll clean it out for you. It might have some of her stuff still in it.”

  Pat hesitated. Was the smell any stronger near the wardrobe?

  She was unsure.

  “She didn’t keep the place very clean, did she?” she said.

  A Room with a Smell

  7

  Bruce laughed. “You’re right. She was a real slut, that girl. We were all pleased when she decided to go over to Glasgow. I encouraged her. I said that the job she had been offered sounded just fine. A real opportunity.”

  “And was it?”

  Bruce shrugged. “She fancied herself getting into television journalism. She had been offered a job making tea for some producer over there. Great job. Great tea possibilities.”

  Pat moved towards the desk. One of the drawers was half-open and she could see papers inside.

  “It almost looks as if she’s planning to come back,” she said.

  “Maybe she hasn’t moved out altogether.”

  Bruce glanced at the drawer. He would throw all this out as soon as Pat went. And he would stop forwarding her mail too.

  “If there’s any danger of her coming back,” he said, smiling,

  “we’ll change the locks.”

  Later, when Pat had left, he went back to the room and opened the window. Then he crossed the room to the wardrobe and looked inside. The right-hand side was empty, but on the left, in the hanging section, there was a large plastic bag, stuffed full of clothes. This was the source of the musty odour, and, handling it gingerly, he took it out. Underneath the bag was a pair of abandoned shoes, the soles curling off. He picked these up, looked at them with disgust, and dropped them into the open mouth of the plastic bag.

  He moved over to the desk. The top drawer looked as if it had been cleared out, apart from a few paper clips and a chipped plastic ruler. The drawer beneath that, half-open, had papers in it. He picked up the paper on the top and looked at it. It was a letter from a political party asking for a donation to a fighting fund. A smiling politician beamed out from a photograph. I know you care, said the politician, in bold type, I know you care enough to help me care for our common future. Bruce grimaced, crumpled up the letter, and tossed it into the black plastic bag. He picked up the next piece of paper and began to read it. It was hand-written, the second or subsequent page of a letter as it began halfway through a sentence: which was not very clever of me! Still, 8

  A Room with a Smell

  I wasn’t going to see them again and so I suppose it made no difference. And what about you? I don’t know how you put up with those people you live with. Come through to Glasgow. I know somebody who’s got a spare room in her flat and who’s looking for somebody. That guy Bruce sounds a creep. I couldn’t believe it when you said that you thought he read your letters. You reading this one, Bruce?

  It was settled. Pat had agreed to move in, and would pay rent from the following Monday. The room was not cheap, in spite of the musty smell (which Bruce pointed out was temporary) and the general dinginess of the décor (which Bruce had ignored).

  After all, as he pointed out to Pat, she was staying in the New Town, and the New Town was expensive whether you lived in a basement in East Claremont Street (barely New Town, Bruce said) or in a drawing-room flat in Heriot Row. And he should know, he said. He was a surveyor.

  “You have found a job, haven’t you?” he asked tentatively. “The rent . . .”

  She assured him that she would pay in advance, and he relaxed.

  Anna had left rent unpaid and he and the rest of them had been obliged to make up the shortfall. But it was worth it to get rid of her, he thought.

  A Room with a Smell

  9

  He showed Pat to the door and gave her a key. “For you. Now you can bring your things over any time.” He paused. “I think you’re going to like this place.”

  Pat smiled, and she continued to smile as she made her way down the stair. After the disaster of last year, staying put was exactly what she wante
d. And Bruce seemed fine. In fact, he reminded her of a cousin who had also been keen on rugby and who used to take her to pubs on international nights with all his friends, who sang raucously and kissed her beerily on the cheek.

  Men like that were very unthreatening; they tended not to be moody, or brood, or make emotional demands – they just were.

  Not that she ever envisaged herself becoming emotionally involved with one of them. Her man – when she found him –

  would be . . .

  “Very distressing! Very, very distressing!”

  Pat looked up. She had reached the bottom of the stair and had opened the front door to find a middle-aged woman standing before her, rummaging through a voluminous handbag.

  “It’s very distressing,” continued the woman, looking at Pat over half-moon spectacles. “This is the second time this month that I have come out without my outside key. There are two keys, you see. One to the flat and one to the outside door. And if I come out without my outside key, then I have to disturb one of the other residents to let me in, and I don’t like doing that.

  That’s why I’m so pleased to see you.”

  “Well-timed,” said Pat, moving to let the woman in.

  “Oh yes. But Bruce will usually let me in, or one of his friends . . .” She paused. “Are you one of Bruce’s friends?”

  “I’ve just met him.”

  The woman nodded. “One never knows. He has so many girlfriends that I lose track of them. Just when I’ve got used to one, a quite different girl turns up. Some men are like that, you know.”

  Pat said nothing. Perhaps wholesome, the word which she had previously alighted upon to describe Bruce, was not the right choice.

  The woman adjusted her spectacles and stared directly at Pat.

  10

  A Room with a Smell

  “Some men, you see, have inordinate appetites,” she remarked.

  “They seem to be genetically programmed to have a rather large number of partners. And if they’re genetically predisposed to do that sort of thing, then I wonder whether we can actually blame them for it. What do you think?”

  Pat hesitated. “They could try a bit harder not to cheat.”

  The woman shook her head. “Not easy,” she said. “I believe that we have much less free will than we think. Quite frankly, we delude ourselves if we think that we are completely free. We aren’t. And that means if dear Bruce must have rather a lot of girlfriends, then there’s not very much he can do about it.”

  Pat said nothing. Bruce had said nothing about the neighbours, and perhaps this was the reason.

  “But this is very rude of me,” the woman said. “I’ve been talking away without introducing myself. And you’ll be wondering: Who is this deterministic person? Well, I’m Domenica Macdonald, and I live in the flat opposite Bruce and his friends. That’s who I am.”

  Pat gave the woman her name and they shook hands. Her explanation that she had just agreed to take the spare room in Bruce’s flat brought a broad smile to Domenica’s face.

  “I’m very pleased to hear that,” she said. “That last girl – the girl whose room you’ll be taking . . .” She shook her head.

  “Genetically programmed to have lots of boyfriends, I think.”

  “A slut? That’s what Bruce called her to me.”

  This surprised the woman. “Male double standards,” said Domenica sharply, adding: “Of course, Edinburgh’s full of double standards, isn’t it? Hypocrisy is built into the stonework here.”

  “I’m not sure,” ventured Pat. Edinburgh seemed much like anywhere else to her. Why should there be more hypocrisy in Edinburgh than anywhere else?

  “Oh, you’ll find out,” said Domenica. “You’ll find out.”

  3. We See a Bit More of Bruce

  “Terrific!” said Bruce, unbuttoning his Triple Crown rugby shirt.

  “That looks just terrific!”

  He was standing in front of the mirror in the bathroom, waiting for the bath to fill. It was a favourite mirror of his, full-length – unlike most bathroom mirrors – which made it possible to inspect at close quarters the benefits of his thrice-weekly sessions in the gym. And the benefits were very evident, in whatever light they were viewed.

  He pulled the shirt up over his head and flung it down on the top of the wicker laundry basket. Flexing his biceps, he stared back at the mirror and liked what he saw. Next, by crouching slightly, as if poised to leap forward, the muscles that ran down the side of his trunk – he had no idea what they were called, but could look them up in the chart his personal trainer had given him – these muscles tensed like a series of small skiing moguls.

  Moguls, in fact, might be a good word for them, he thought.

  Biceps, pecs, moguls.

  He removed the rest of his clothes and looked again in the mirror. Very satisfactory, he thought – very satisfactory. Reaching up, he ran his fingers lightly across the top of his en brosse haircut. Perhaps a little off round the sides next week, or, again, perhaps not. He might ask his new flatmate what she thought.

  Would I look better with longer hair? What do you think, Pat?

  He was not sure about this new girl. She was not going to be any trouble – she could pay the rent and he knew that she would keep the place clean. He had seen her look of concern over the state of the room, and that had been a good sign. But she was a bit young, and that might be problematic. The four years that separated them were crucial ones, in Bruce’s mind. It was not that he had no time for twenty-year-olds, it was just that they talked about different things and listened to different music. He had often had to hammer on Anna’s door late at night when he was being kept awake by the constant thump thump of her music.

  She played the same music all the time, day-in day-out, and when he had suggested that she might get something different, 12

  We See a Bit More of Bruce

  she had looked at him with what was meant to be a patient expression, as one might look at somebody who simply did not understand.

  And of course Bruce could never think of anything to say to her. He would have loved to have been able to come up with a suitable put-down, but it never seemed to be there at the right time, or at any other time, when he came to think of it.

  He tested the temperature of the bath and then lowered himself into the water. The cleaning of Anna’s room had made him feel dirty, but a good soak in the bath would deal with that. It was a wonderful bath in which to soak; one of the best features of the flat. It must have been there for fifty years, or even more; a great, generous tub, standing on four claw-feet, and filled from large-mouthed silver taps. He very rarely saw a bath like that when he did a valuation, but when he did, he always drew it to the attention of the client. Fine bathroom fittings, he would write, knowing that he could be writing the epitaph of the bath, which would be removed and replaced by something half its weight and dura-bility.

  He lay back in the water and thought of Pat. He had decided that she was not his type, and in general he preferred to keep relationships with flatmates on a platonic basis, but one should not make absolute rules on these matters, he thought. She was attractive enough, he reflected, although she would not necessarily turn his head in the street. Comfortable, perhaps, was the word. Undisturbing. Average.

  Perhaps she would be worth a little attention. He was, after all, between girlfriends, now that Laura had gone down to London. They had agreed that she would come up to Edinburgh once a month and he would go down to London with the same frequency, but it had not worked out. She had made the journey three months in a row, but he had been unable to find the time to do the same. And she had been most unreasonable about it, he thought.

  “If you cared anything about me, you would have made the effort,” she had said to him. “But you don’t and you didn’t.”

  He had been appalled by this attack. There had been very Fathers and Sons

  13

  good reasons why he could not go to London, apart from the expense,
of course. And he had had every justification for cancelling that weekend: he had entered the wrong date for the Irish international at Murrayfield in his diary and had only discovered his error four days before the event. If she thought that he was going to miss that just to go down for a weekend which could be rearranged for any time, then she was going to have to think again, which she did.

  He stood up and stepped out of the bath. As he did so, he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror, and smiled.

  4. Fathers and Sons

  Somebody had pushed a bundle of advertisements into the mail box of the Something Special Gallery, which irritated Matthew Duncan. It was Tuesday morning, and the beginning of another working week for Matthew, who took Sundays and Mondays off.

  He was early that morning – normally he opened at ten o’clock, as it was unheard of to sell a painting before ten, or even eleven.

  He believed that the best time to make a sale was just before lunch, on a Saturday, to a client who had accepted a glass of sherry. Of course, private views were even better than that, because crowd behaviour then entered into the equation and red spots could proliferate like measles. That, at least, was what he had been told when he had taken over the gallery a few weeks previously. But he could not be sure, as he had so far sold nothing. Not one painting; not one print; nothing at all had been bought by any of the people who had drifted in, looked about them, and then, almost regretfully in some cases, almost apologetically in others, had walked back out of the front door.

  Matthew flung the advertisements into the wastepaper bin and walked into the back of the gallery to deal with the alarm, which had picked up his presence and was giving its first warning pips.