44 Scotland Street 4ss-1

by Alexander McCall Smith

  All morning. No thank you! Ramsey and I just wouldn’t do that.

  Catch 22

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  “But I suppose if you’re an Edinburgh schoolgirl and you’re young and fit, then it’s fine to stand about and wait for the Uffizi to open. So anyway I dutifully went over to the stall and bought a packet of shortbread which said: Made by Dr McClure. I was quite tickled by this because I had heard that he’s the cook, you know. Roger. He’s a fearfully good cook and he’s writing a long book on the lives of the popes at the moment. So maybe that means there’s less time for cooking. Or perhaps one can do both

  – one can write a history of the papacy during the day and then cook at night. Something like that.

  “The shortbread was delicious. I had several pieces over the next few days and then, without any warning, while I was eating the very last piece, a bit of tooth broke off. It had nothing to do with the shortbread, of course. I wouldn’t want her to think that her shortbread broke my tooth – it didn’t. It was just that this tooth was ready to break, apparently. There must have been a tiny crack in it and this was the time that it chose to break.

  One can’t plan these things in life. They just happen, don’t they?”

  She did not wait for an answer. “I felt it immediately. If I touched the bit that had broken off, I felt a very sharp pain, like an electric shock. And so I telephoned the dental surgery, but it was a Sunday, and I got a recorded message telling me to phone some number or other. But the problem was that the person who left the message on that tape spoke indistinctly – so many people do these days – and I just couldn’t make out the number! So what could I do? Well, I’ll tell you. I had heard that there was an emergency dental service down at the Western General hospital, and so I phoned them up and asked whether I could come down and have the tooth looked at. And do you know what they said? They said that if I was registered with a dentist then I wouldn’t be allowed in the door! That’s what they said. So I said to them that I couldn’t make out the emergency number and therefore couldn’t get in touch with my own dentist, and they just repeated what they’d said about my not being able to go to their emergency clinic if I was registered elsewhere. Can you believe it! I’d fallen into some sort of void, it seemed. It’s, what do they call it? A catch 23.”

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  The Dashing White Sergeant

  “Catch 22,” said Todd quietly.

  “No, I’m sure it’s 23,” said Betty. “Same as the bus that goes down Morningside Road. The 23 bus.”

  Todd looked at his watch. It was only 10.22. No, 10.23.

  59. The Dashing White Sergeant

  “Let’s have some fun,” whispered Jim Smellie to Mungo Brown.

  Taking the microphone in his hand, he held it up and called the ball to order. “Ladies and Gentlemen! Ladies and Gentlemen!

  I’m Jim Smellie and this is Jim Smellie’s Ceilidh Band! Would you kindly arise and take your partners for an eightsome reel!”

  Mungo drew out the bellows of his piano accordion and played an inviting major chord. At the table, Todd rose quickly to his feet and gestured, almost in desperation, to Sasha. She stood up too, cutting Ramsey Dunbarton off in the middle of a sentence.

  Bruce then rose, turning to Lizzie as he did so.

  “Shall we?” he said.

  She turned down her mouth. “I don’t see how we can do an eightsome. Has anybody told the band that there aren’t enough people for an eightsome?”

  Bruce looked over at the band, the three members of which The Dashing White Sergeant

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  now seemed poised to play. This was ridiculous, he thought, but if nobody was going to do it, then he would have to go across and have a word with them.

  He strode across the floor and approached Jim Smellie, who was smiling at him, his fiddle tucked under his chin.

  “Look, we can’t do an eightsome,” said Bruce. “There are only six of us.”

  “Six?” asked Smellie, affecting surprise. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, of course I am,” said Bruce, the irritation showing in his voice. “So we’ll have to start with something else. What about a Gay Gordons?”

  Smellie looked at Mungo. “Anything gay?” he asked. “This young man wants something gay.”

  Mungo raised an eyebrow. “Yes, I suppose so. Gay Gordons then?”

  Bruce cast an angry glance at Smellie. “That’ll do,” he said.

  The band struck up and the dancers went out onto the floor.

  There were only three couples, of course, and the floor seemed wide and empty. Bruce stood beside Lizzie, his arm over her shoulder, as the dance required. Had she shuddered when he had touched her? He had the distinct impression that she had, which was very rude of her, he thought. If it weren’t for the fact that she was Todd’s daughter, and Todd was, after all, his boss, then he would have given her a piece of his mind well before this.

  Who did she think she was?

  “What do you put on your hair?” she asked suddenly. “It smells very funny. Like cloves, or pepper, or something like that.”

  Bruce winked at her. “Men’s business,” he said. “But I’m glad that you like it.”

  His response went home. “I didn’t say . . .” She was unable to finish. The band had started and the small line of couples began to move round the perimeter of the floor. There was no more time for conversation, although Todd seemed to be trying to whisper something to Sasha, who looked over her shoulder and then whispered something back.

  The Gay Gordons went on for longer than usual, or so it seemed to the dancers. Then, when the music finally came to 156

  The Dashing White Sergeant

  an end, Smellie seized the microphone and announced a Dashing White Sergeant. Sasha looked anxiously at Ramsey Dunbarton

  – the Gay Gordons had been energetic, and he seemed to have coloured. Was he up to another dance, she wondered.

  She leaned over to Todd and whispered in his ear. “Do you think it wise . . .?” she began. “He looks exhausted.”

  Todd shrugged. “He should know his limits. He seems to be all right.”

  In spite of their doubts, Ramsey Dunbarton was busy organising everybody for the next dance. Todd and Bruce were to join Betty in one set, and he would be flanked by Lizzie and Sasha.

  Smellie watched, bemused, while the two sets prepared themselves, and then, with a nod to Mungo, he started the music.

  Off they went, dancing in opposite directions, all the way round the hall, to seemingly interminable bars before they encountered one another, bowed, and went through the motions of the dance. Mungo Brown smiled and looked away; he had never seen anything quite as amusing in thirty years of playing at ceilidhs.

  “This is cruel,” he mouthed to Smellie, and Smellie nodded and smirked as the two groups of dancers went off again in their wide, lonely circling of the dance floor.

  At the end of the Dashing White Sergeant the dancers returned to their table while the band embarked on The Northern Lights of Old Aberdeen. Nobody wanted to dance to this, in spite of an exhortation from Jim Smellie that a waltz should be attempted.

  Todd looked at his watch. They might do a few more dances

  – two at the most – and then they could bring the whole thing to an end. Honour would have been satisfied; they would have had their ball and nobody would be able to say that they could not muster support for one. Did the South Edinburgh Labour Party have a ball? They did not. Of course, they didn’t know how to dance, thought Todd, with satisfaction. That’s what came of having two left feet. He paused. That was really amusing, and he would have to tell Sasha about it. He might even tell it to Bruce, who liked a joke, even if his sense of humour was rather The Tombola

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  strange. Anything, of course, was better than those awful Dunbartons, with her wittering away about dentists and breaking her tooth and about Dr McClure’s shortbread. What nonsense.

  He looked at Bruce, noticing how the exertion of the dan
ce had made his hair subside; it was still en brosse, but at a reduced angle of inclination. Todd stared at Bruce’s head. Was it something to do with the melting of whatever it was that he put on his hair? Perhaps that stuff – whatever it was – stopped supporting hair when it became warmer. Brylcreem – good old-fashioned Brylcreem, of the sort that Todd had used when he was in his last year at Watson’s, and which you could use to grease your bicycle chain if needs be – was a much simpler, and more masculine product. And it had used that very effective advertising jingle, which he could still remember, come to think of it.

  Brylcreem – a little drop will do you!/ Brylcreem – you’ll look so debonair!/ Brylcreem – the girls will all pursue you/ They’ll love to run their fingers through your hair!

  That young man is a bit of a mystery, thought Todd. He was up to something when I saw him in the drying room. And whatever it was, he had no business to be there. It was all very suspicious.

  60. The Tombola

  It was now time for the tombola at the Annual Ball of the South Edinburgh Conservative Association. Jim Smellie’s Ceilidh Band had made valiant efforts to provoke more dancing, but the guests, exhausted by the Gay Gordons and the Dashing White Sergeant had decided that they would dance no more. Jim Smellie and the band played a few more tunes and then, after a maudlin rendtion of Good-night Irene, sung by Mungo Brown in a curious nasal drone, the band had packed up and gone home.

  At their combined table on the other side of the room, the 158

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  six guests sat, still feeling rather lost in the vastness of the empty function room, but enjoying nonetheless the drinks which Todd had generously purchased everyone after the last dance.

  “We’ve had a wonderful evening,” announced Sasha, looking around the table lest anybody venture to disagree.

  Lizzie gave a snort, but not so loud that it could be heard by anyone other than Bruce, who was seated immediately beside her. “Speak for yourself,” she muttered.

  Bruce turned to her. “She is, actually,” he said. “She is speaking for herself.”

  Lizzie said nothing for a moment, digesting the barely-disguised rebuke. She had tolerated Bruce thus far – and it had been an effort – but she was not sure if she could continue to do so. There was something insufferable about him, an irritating self-confidence that begged for a put-down. The problem, though, was that it was far from easy to put down somebody who was quite so pleased with himself. And what could one say? Could anything penetrate the mantle of self-satisfaction that surrounded him, like a cloak of . . . like a cloak of . . . There was no simile, she decided, and then she thought cream.

  She turned to him. “You’re like the cat who’s got the cream,”

  she said.

  Bruce met her gaze. “Thank you,” he said. And then he gave quite a passable imitation of a purr and rubbed his left leg against her, as might an affectionate cat. “Like that?” he asked.

  Any response that Lizzie might have given was prevented by Sasha’s standing up and announcing that the time had come for the tombola.

  “We have marvellous prizes,” she said. “And since it’s only a modest crowd here tonight, there’ll be plenty for everybody.”

  “Hear, hear,” said Ramsey Dunbarton, raising his glass of whisky. “Plenty for everybody – the Party philosophy.”

  “Quite,” agreed Sasha. “Now, to save the bother of a draw, I simply divided the tickets – on a totally random basis, of course

  – into six groups. I then put each group in a separate envelope and wrote a name on the outside. On payment of six pounds –

  one pound per ticket – you will each get your envelope. And The Tombola

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  then you can open it up and when you tell me the numbers, I will tell you what you’ve won.”

  “Sounds fair,” said Bruce, but he noticed that Ramsey Dunbarton looked doubtful. Did he suspect Sasha of cheating, Bruce wondered? Surely that would be inconceivable. And yet she would have had every opportunity to dictate which tickets went into which envelope, and thus effectively determine who won what.

  The Ramsey Dunbartons, slightly reluctantly, handed over twelve pounds and were given two white envelopes with Ramsey and Betty written on the outside. Then Lizzie completed the same transaction, in her case with an ostentatious show of boredom. Bruce, by contrast, handed over six pounds with good grace and smiled as he took the envelope from Sasha.

  “Right,” said Sasha. “Betty, if you would like to start by calling out the numbers on your tickets, I’ll tell you what you’ve won.”

  While she was organising the tickets, Todd had gone out of the room and now he wheeled in a large trolley. This was covered with a sheet, which he took off with a theatrical gesture. There, stacked high in munificence, were the prizes – the silver fish knives and forks from Hamilton and Inches; the decanter from Jenners; the envelopes containing the vouchers for golf and dinner and other treats. All was laid out before them, and the guests immediately realised that this tombola represented remarkable value for the six pounds that each of them had been asked to pay.

  The fish knives and forks went to Betty Dunbarton, who received them with exclamations of delight.

  “Hamilton and Inches,” said Sasha knowingly.

  “Wonderful,” said Betty. “Ramsey loves Hamilton and Inches.”

  The other prizes she won were less exciting, but still represented a good haul. And when it came to Ramsey’s turn, although he was unmoved by the prize of the round of golf at Craiglockhart, he was extremely pleased with the two free tickets to the Lyceum Theatre to be followed by dinner (up 160

  The Tombola

  to the value of twenty-five pounds) in the Lyceum Restaurant.

  His final prize was the picture which Bruce had brought as his contribution.

  “A view of somewhere over in the west,” announced Sasha as she handed the Peploe? over to him. “A very nice prize indeed, thanks to Bruce.”

  Ramsey and Betty nodded in Bruce’s direction in acknowledgment of his generosity. Then they placed the Peploe? with the fish knives and forks and waited for the next stage of the draw.

  This saw Lizzie win the dinner at Prestonfield (“too fattening,”

  she said), a jar of pickled red peppers from Valvona and Crolla (“can’t stand red peppers,” she remarked) and a copy of the latest novel by a well known crime-writer (“Ian who?” she asked). When it came to Sasha’s turn, she won, of course, the lunch with Malcolm Rifkind and Lord James at the Balmoral Hotel. This brought some envious muttering from Ramsey Dunbarton, who clearly would have liked to have won that, but this merely confirmed Sasha’s conviction that she had done the right thing.

  “I couldn’t have imposed him on them,” she said to Todd later.

  “Imagine them having to sit there and listen to stories about North Berwick and broken teeth.”

  Laden with prizes, the party began to break up. The Ramsey Dunbartons’ taxi arrived to take them the short distance back to Morningside Drive and Bruce telephoned for a cab back to Scotland Street. Then he remembered the underpants. He had intended to slip into them earlier on, but had almost forgotten his state of undress. Now, as he remembered that the pants were in his sporran, it occurred to him that the simplest way of returning them to their owner would be to put them in the pocket of Todd’s coat, which he knew had been hung in the cloakroom on the ground floor.

  Making his excuses, Bruce left the small knot of guests around the table and made his way to the cloakroom. There, as he had expected, was Todd’s black Crombie coat with its velvet collar.

  Bruce crossed the room quickly, extracting the underpants from his sporran as he did so. Then, fumbling in the folds of the coat, he slipped the pants into the right-hand pocket.

  Bertie Begins Therapy

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  “Did you enjoy yourself?”

  It was Todd, standing at the door.

  “That’s my coat,” said Todd. “Yours is over there, isn
’t it?”

  Bruce laughed nervously. “I must have had too much to drink,”

  he said. “So it is!”

  He moved over towards his coat and took it off the hook.

  Then he turned and looked at Todd, who was watching him suspiciously. As he put on his coat, he felt Todd’s eyes remain on him. It was very disconcerting. Bruce was used to being looked at – in an admiring way – but this was different.

  61. Bertie Begins Therapy

  For Irene Pollock, the mother of that most talented five-year-old, Bertie, the decision to seek advice from the Scottish Institute of Human Relations was an entirely appropriate response to a trying set of circumstances. Bertie’s sudden outburst at the Floatarium – when he had so unexpectedly declared his opposition to speaking Italian and learning the saxophone – had been only the first sign of a worryingly rebellious attitude. Although it was difficult to put a finger on any particular incident or comment (other than his extraordinary behaviour at the Floatarium, which followed hard on the heels of the graffiti incident) there was no doubt that he was less co-operative than he used to be. An indication of this attitude was his subtle abandonment of the first names which he had been encouraged to use when addressing his parents; Irene and Stuart had come so naturally to him, and seemed so right; now it was Mummy and Daddy – terms which were acceptable when used by Irene or Stuart themselves, but which seemed disturbingly hierarchical – even reactionary – when uttered by Bertie.

  And then there had been a shift in attitude towards his room.

  One afternoon she had gone into his room – which she called 162

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  his space – to discover Bertie standing in the middle of his rug, staring disconsolately at the walls. He had not said anything at first, but she had formed the distinct impression that he was thinking about the colour – a reassuring pink – and might even have been imagining the walls in another colour.