44 Scotland Street 4ss-1

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “Her school was in the hills above Cochin, in Kerala. It’s a lovely state, Kerala – all that greenery and those waterways and those cool towns up in the Western Ghats. I fell in love with the place immediately, and begged her to let me stay with her, which I did. I had no idea what I was going to do at home, and Scotland was pretty dull, remember, in the early Sixties. I suppose we were still in the Fifties while everybody else had moved on.

  “So I stayed with my mother in the principal’s lodge at the school. It seemed very grand to be living in a lodge, but it was quite a modest house, really. There was a verandah which ran round two sides of the house and a garden with fire coral trees. There were pepper vines growing up these trees and we used to harvest our own pepper and let it dry on banana leaves on the ground.

  “I loved living there, as you can imagine, although I didn’t have all that much to do. I was taken on as a teacher, but I was not paid for this, and the duties were pretty light. But it was easy work, because the girls at the school were all very well-behaved and wouldn’t dream of being rude to the staff. Nobody was rude then. Rudeness was invented much later.

  “And that’s where I stayed for three years. Then, at a lunch party held by the manager of a tea company, I met the man who became my husband. He came from Cochin, where his father The Electricity Factory

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  had owned a business – more of that in a moment. He was called Thomas, as many people are in that part of the world because, as you know, it’s a largely Christian state – Thomist Christians.

  Very ancient communities. In fact, you get all sorts of churches, including the Syrian Orthodox Church, which goes in for fire-works in a big way on important saints’ days. Quite wonderful.

  “Thomas asked me to marry him, and I said that I would. I had fallen for India, you see, and the idea of marrying into the country was a very exciting one. And Thomas was a good man

  – very quiet and thoughtful, and very kind. Of course, I hadn’t realised that I would have to put up with his mother too, who would live with us in our house in Cochin. But that’s what happens when you marry into an Indian family. You get the whole lot.

  “Thomas told me that he had a job in the business that his father had set up, but he didn’t explain what the business was. He would show me the factory, he said, and I would see. But before that, when I met his mother for the first time and I was drinking tea under her enquiring eye, I asked what the family factory made.

  “She looked at me in surprise, and then said: ‘Why, we make electricity. It’s an electricity factory. We make very fine electricity.

  Everybody knows that.’

  “I was surprised. I thought that power stations would belong to the government, or to very large companies, but, no, it seemed that there was a role for a few private generating companies, and we were one of them. Varghese Electricity was the name of the company and the factory, as they called it, was a large building to the east of Cochin. It had a railway line running into it, and the trains brought loads of coal into our private siding.

  “Thomas went to the factory every morning, but did not stay long, as there was nothing for him to do. He had an office there, but there never seemed to be any papers on the table and the whole place was run by very efficient managers. So he used to go off to his club and read the newspapers until it was time to come back for lunch. Then he would supervise the gardener in an orchid-house which we had at the back of the property, and after that he would go and sleep for an hour or so until the worst of the afternoon heat was over.

  “That was our life, and I suddenly realised that this was what 72

  Thomas Is Electrocuted

  I was going to be doing for the rest of my days. Suddenly, India did not seem quite as beguiling and I began to wonder whether I had made the most awful mistake.”

  Domenica looked at Pat. “What would you have done in my circumstances? Married to a nice man who owned an electricity factory, but with a great emptiness of years stretching out ahead of you? What would you have done?

  28. Thomas Is Electrocuted

  “No, that’s unfair,” said Domenica Macdonald, withdrawing her own question. “Nobody really knows how they would react to hypothetical situations.”

  “I don’t know,” said Pat. “We can imagine what we would do.

  I think that if I found myself in your position, I would possibly have . . .”

  Domenica raised a hand. “You don’t know, though. You don’t really know what you would do. But I can tell you what I did. I left Thomas. I remained with him for five years, and then, shortly after my thirtieth birthday, I asked him what he would feel if I left him.

  “Of course he said that he would be very upset. My light would go out, is what I think he said. The whole family talked like that. They used the metaphors of electricity. I am a bit below my normal wattage. I feel like shorting out. That sort of thing.

  “That made me hesitate, but I persisted. I explained to him that I was not cut out for the sort of life that we were leading. I wanted to travel. I wanted to get to know people. I couldn’t face the prospect of sitting there on the verandah for the next goodness knows how many years, drinking afternoon tea with his mother while she went on and on about some complicated injustice that had been done to her family twenty years before. I just couldn’t face it.

  “He tried to persuade me to stay. He offered to build a new house next to the existing one, which I could then live in and not have to share with his mother. He said that he would pay Thomas Is Electrocuted

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  for people – educated people, he said – to come and talk to me during the day. He made all sorts of offers.

  “I became more and more depressed at the thought of what I was doing. Thomas was such a good man, and I was behaving as if I was some petulant Madame Bovary. But I couldn’t stop how I felt. I couldn’t work up any enthusiasm for a life which I found so completely unfulfilling and so I eventually gave him a date on which I proposed to leave.

  “Two days before I was due to go – I had already packed everything and had the flight from Bombay all organised – two days before, there was the most awful kerfuffle. One of the managers from the factory arrived and he was sobbing and waving his arms about. It took some time before I managed to work out what it was all about. There had been an accident at the factory. Thomas had taken it upon himself to inspect a piece of equipment and had inadvertently touched a live wire. They had tried to revive him, the manager said between his sobs, but it had been to no avail. ‘You are widow now,’ he said. ‘I am very sorry, but now you are widow. Your husband has died of electricity.’

  “You can imagine how guilty I felt. And I still do, to an extent.

  That man had offered me nothing but affection and support, and I had repaid him with what I suppose he must have viewed as contempt. That is not what I felt, of course, but that is what he must have seen it as.

  “His mother now became mute. She looked at me, but then looked away, as if it was painful even to see me. I did my best to speak to her, but she simply didn’t seem to hear me. And in the meantime, I had to deal with the lawyers, who informed me that I now effectively controlled the electricity factory, as Thomas had left his entire shareholding to me. This was worth quite a bit of money. The family was well-off anyway, but the factory, it turned out, had some very valuable land attached to it. I could easily live very well on the income which the shares produced, even if we sold none of the extra land. And I could live on that not only in India, where things are cheap, but back in Scotland.

  “To begin with, of course, the thought of controlling the factory appalled me, as it tied me down even more. But I did make an 74

  Friendship

  effort, and I stayed for a further few years, getting the hang of how the business worked. Eventually, I decided that I had done enough and that I could leave without feeling too guilty. The old woman

  – Thomas’s mother – had become demented by now, and spent her time w
andering around the garden with a long-suffering attendant, chopping the heads off flowers. I returned to Scotland for a while, and then went off on further adventures for quite some time, which I regret that I can’t tell you about just now because this risotto I’m making is requiring my complete attention and I cannot talk about anthropology and make a proper risotto all at the same time. So the rest of my life will have to wait for some other occasion.”

  29. Friendship

  Pat left Domenica shortly after ten, crossed the landing to her flat, and went straight to her room. Bruce’s door was shut, but the narrow band of light from beneath it told her that he was in. And there was music too; in the hall she could just make out the faint sound of the Cuban bands that he liked to play. He was considerate in that respect, at least, as he was always careful to keep the volume low.

  She closed her door behind her and prepared for bed. The evening had started badly with that exchange over the hair gel –

  she would replace that tomorrow, she had decided – but Domenica’s company had soon made her forget her irritation. Domenica and Bruce were polar opposites: she represented wit, and subtlety; Bruce represented . . . well, what did he represent? She closed her eyes and thought of Bruce, to see what free association might bring, but she opened them again sharply. A jar of hair gel.

  She had been unsure what to expect of Domenica. On the face of it, dinner with a sixty-one-year-old neighbour might have been a dull prospect, but it had turned out to be anything but that. There were, presumably, dull sixty-one-year-olds, but there were also plenty of dull twenty-year-olds. It might even be, Friendship

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  thought Pat, that there were more of the latter than the former.

  Or did it not matter what age one was? If one was dull at twenty, then one would still be dull at sixty-one.

  Age was not of great importance to Pat. The secret, she thought

  – and she had read about this somewhere – was to talk to people as if they were contemporaries, and that was something that Domenica obviously understood. Her older neighbour had not talked down to her, which she might easily have done. She had treated her as somebody with whom she could easily share references and common experiences. And that had made it all seem so easy.

  She had found out a certain amount about Domenica – about India and anthropology and, tantalisingly, a few snippets about feral children – but she was sure that there was much more to come. During dinner, their conversation had not let up, but Domenica had said little more about herself. Rather, she had told Pat something of the neighbours: of Tim and Jamie, who lived in the flat below, of Bertie’s parents, Irene and Stuart, and of the man in the ground-floor flat, the man whom nobody saw, but who was there nonetheless.

  “There may be a perfectly simple explanation,” said Domenica.

  “Agoraphobia. If he suffers from that, poor man, he won’t want to go out at all.”

  Pat noticed that Domenica spoke charitably, but when it came to Irene and Stuart, her tone changed.

  “That poor little boy is nothing but an experiment to them,”

  she said. “How much music and mathematics and so on can be poured into him before the age of seven? Will he compose his first symphony before he starts at primary school? And so on.

  Poor little boy! Have you seen him?”

  “I’ve heard him,” said Pat.

  And Tim and Jamie downstairs? “There are many different recipes for unhappiness in this life,” said Domenica, “and poor Tim is following a very common one. To love that which one cannot attain. It’s terribly sad, really. But people persist in doing it.”

  Pat said nothing. She had seen a young man walking up the stairs in front of her, but by the time she reached the landing he had disappeared. That, she assumed, was Tim or Jamie.

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  Friendship

  “Tim is very attached to Jamie,” Domenica went on. “And Jamie is very keen on a girl who’s gone to Canada for a year. So that’s that, really.”

  “It can’t be easy,” said Pat.

  Domenica shrugged. “No, it can’t. But sometimes people decide to be happy with what they’ve got. I’ve known so many cases like that. People hold a candle for somebody who’s never going to be for them what they want them to be. It’s hopeless.

  But they carry on and on and make do with the scraps of time and attention that come their way.”

  “Sad.”

  “Very,” Domenica replied, and then thought for a moment.

  “When I had him up here one evening for sherry, all he wanted to talk about was Jamie, and what Jamie was doing. Jamie was going to Montreal to see this girlfriend of his. And all that Tim was thinking of was this. His sadness was written large for me to see. He was losing his friend.”

  “And what made it worse for him was that there were so few people he could talk to about this, because he feared their lack of understanding, or their scorn. People are cruel, aren’t they?”

  After that they had sat in silence for a while and Pat had thought, and thought again, now that she was back in her room: we love the unattainable. Yes, we do. Foolishly. Hopelessly. All the time.

  30. Things Happen at the Gallery

  Pat arrived at the gallery slightly early the next morning, to find that the postman, a cheerful man with a weather-beaten face, had already been and there was a letter on the floor. She opened it and saw that it was an invitation to an opening to be held in a gallery further down the road. They were always getting this sort of thing, and it struck her that there was a lot of this in the art world: dealer sells to dealer, round and round in a circle.

  Eventually a genuine customer would have to buy a picture, but where were they? So far they had sold nothing, and the only person who had shown the slightest interest in buying something had turned out to be intent on obtaining a bargain. Perhaps things would change. Perhaps somebody would come and buy one of the D.Y. Cameron prints; somebody who would not make a dismissive remark about Mr Vettriano; somebody who liked pictures of hills and glens.

  She put the gallery invitation on Matthew’s desk and was about to go through to the back, when she stopped. Usually, when she came in in the morning, she would hear the alarm signal and have to key in the security number to stop it. This had not happened this morning, or had it? It was perfectly possible to go through the motions of a familiar action and not remember that one had done it. But Pat was sure that she had not attended to the alarm this morning. She had come in, opened the letter, and then walked over to Matthew’s desk, where she now stood. The control box was on the other side of the gallery, near the light switch, and she had definitely not been over there.

  Had the alarm been set? Pat tried to remember who had been last to leave the gallery last night. It was not Matthew. He had gone off to meet his father shortly after four and she had stayed at work until five. She remembered leaving the gallery and when she had done so, because she had been concerned about being in time for Domenica’s invitation.

  She glanced towards the control box, across the semi-darkened gallery. Two small red lights blinked regular pulses back at her. That was different. Normally, when she came in a single 78

  Things Happen at the Gallery

  red light flashed until the code was keyed in. Now there were two.

  Pat looked about her. The gallery had a large expanse of glass at the front, and this gave out onto the street. There were people on the pavement, traffic on the road. The door was only a few feet away. But even so, she felt suddenly uneasy, and now she saw that the door that led to the room at the back was ajar. She closed that door – always – before she left. She would not have left it open like that, as the alarm system depended on its being closed.

  Now she felt frightened, and she ran across the room to switch on the lights. Then, with the gallery bathed in light, each of the larger pictures illuminated by their spotlights, she found the courage to walk over to the inner office door and tentatively push it open.

  The i
ntruder had managed to raise the lower panel of the back window about eighteen inches. The glass was not broken, but the catch had been forced and there were splinters of wood on the floor – she saw those immediately.

  She stood in the doorway, quite still, her feelings confused.

  There was a feeling of intrusion, almost of violation. They had been burgled at home once, and she remembered how dirtied she had felt at the thought that somebody had come into their house and just been there, just been physically present and uninvited. She had spoken to her father about it, and he had simply nodded and said: Yes, that’s how it feels.

  She stepped back from the doorway and walked calmly to Matthew’s desk, where she picked up the telephone and dialled the emergency code. A comforting voice told her that the police would arrive within minutes and that she should not touch anything until that happened. So she stood there, her heart pounding within her, wondering what had happened. Why had the alarm not gone off? Why was the office door ajar? It suggested that the intruder had managed to get in through that small opening and had then been disturbed, perhaps by the sounding of the signal on the control box. That would have made a perfectly audible sound, even if the main part of the alarm, the siren, had failed to go off.

  The Lothian and Borders Police Art Squad 79

  Or perhaps Matthew had come in last night for some reason, set the alarm improperly, and then left the door ajar; he was the only other person with a key, as far as Pat knew.

  But then if he had done this, why would he have forced the window?

  It suddenly occurred to Pat that a break-in could be quite convenient for Matthew. He was having difficulty in selling any of his paintings; perhaps it would be easier to arrange an insurance claim.

  31. The Lothian and Borders Police Art Squad A few minutes later, as promised by the calm voice on the telephone, a police car drew up outside the gallery and two uniformed officers, generously equipped with radios, handcuffs, and commodious pockets, emerged. Pat went to the front door and opened it to them.