My Italian Bulldozer

by Alexander McCall Smith

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2016 by Alexander McCall Smith

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Polygon Books, an imprint of Birlinn Limited, Edinburgh, in 2016.

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Name: McCall Smith, Alexander, [date] author.

  Title: My Italian bulldozer / Alexander McCall Smith.

  Description: First American Edition. New York : Pantheon, [2017]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016037816 (print) | LCCN 2016043718 (ebook) | ISBN 9781101871393 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781101871409 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Authors—Fiction. Bulldozers—Fiction. Italy—Fiction. BISAC: FICTION / Humorous. FICTION / Literary. GSAFD: Humorous fiction.

  Classification: LCC PR6063.C326 M9 2017 (print). LCC PR6063.C326 (ebook). DDC 823/.914—dc23

  LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/​2016037816

  Ebook ISBN 9781101871409

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  Cover illustration © Iain McIntosh

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1: People Do Strange Things

  Chapter 2: There Is No Car

  Chapter 3: I’m So Sorry, Dottore

  Chapter 4: Are You Sure You’re Not from Rome?

  Chapter 5: Shaky and Impermanent Alliances

  Chapter 6: A Simple Dish of Beans and Strong, Home-Cured Sausage

  Chapter 7: You Can Never Eat Enough Garlic

  Chapter 8: Dried Leaves, Blown Seeds, the Charity of the Winds

  Chapter 9: I Have Deleted the Word Love

  Chapter 10: A Very Famous Pincher of Women

  Chapter 11: Love Is a Soufflé

  Chapter 12: You Shouldn’t Underestimate Hens

  Chapter 13: Don’t Fall in Love with This Place

  Chapter 14: He’s Loved Her All These Years

  Chapter 15: How Rich Life Was

  THIS BOOK IS FOR

  William Dalrymple, author and historian

  People Do Strange Things

  It was the first time that Paul had made duck à l’orange for friends since Becky left him for her personal trainer. Her departure—after four years of living together—had been a surprise, but not as great a shock as the discovery of her new lover’s identity. Looking back on it, Paul realised that all the signs had been there, and might so easily have been spotted. He felt a lingering, slightly reproachful regret: had he been less absorbed by his work, he might have noticed her indifference; had he given her more time, he might have been forewarned by her restlessness, by the occasional guilty, almost furtive look; but even had he picked this up, nothing could have prepared him for her choice of Tommy, the tattooed mesomorph with whom she suddenly went off to live.

  “I didn’t want this,” he said to Gloria, his editor, trying as hard as he could to be stoical. “But it’s happened. That’s all there is to it, I suppose. People split up.”

  They were having coffee together in Gloria’s kitchen when this conversation took place. Her office was in her flat, and Paul dropped in from time to time to see her, to collect proofs, to bounce ideas off her—or just to be listened to. She was good at that—she would make him a cup of the Assam tea he liked, sit on her sofa with her legs tucked under her, and let him talk. “No, go on,” she would say if he asked her if he was wasting her time. “I like wasting time with you, Paul—you know that.”

  She was, he reflected, one of his closest friends, in a rather curious, slightly old-fashioned way. Dependable Gloria, he said to himself, always there, always positive. But in spite of their closeness, what did he know about her? That she was a freelance editor who lived in Edinburgh but who came from somewhere else originally—somewhere near Bristol, where she had gone to university. Her parents had both died when she was in her early twenties—she had told him about that—and she had no siblings. She was rather alone in the world, he imagined; there was an aunt she spoke about, and there were her friends in a hill-walking club. But apart from that did she have much of a social life? He had never really thought much about any of that. She was roughly his age—in her mid-thirties—and attractive in, well, a homely sort of way. She wore her hair short and she never used make-up. Yet she did not really need to, as her skin had that clear, almost translucent tone to it that one finds on the Celtic edges. Her mother, she had told him, was Irish, and that might explain the complexion. Rain-washed. Atlantic-blown. A friend of his had once described her as “worth a second look,” but Paul, who had never seen her in that way, had simply nodded and said, “Yes, I suppose so.”

  But the most striking aspect of Gloria was her clothing. Paul had occasionally seen her dressed more formally—they sometimes attended book events together in London—but for the rest she seemed to be wedded to loose-fitting Indian print dresses, shifts that hung about her like light curtains. Somewhere behind the curtains was a figure, but he had never really seen it. There must be a mill somewhere in India, he thought, producing those designs almost exclusively for Gloria—she had so many of them, in so many colours. He had once complimented her on them, and she had beamed with pleasure, as if he were the first man ever to say anything like that to her; perhaps he was, he thought.

  And now that he needed somebody to talk to, of course Gloria was there, and prepared to listen—as she always was.

  She nodded sympathetically. “Yes, but the one left behind, so to speak, always feels a bit raw? Who wouldn’t?”

  “Perhaps.” He sought to reassure her, not wanting to be thought self-pitying. “I’ll get over it, of course.”

  “Good.”

  Gloria was about to say something else, but Paul continued, “Yet I can’t help asking: Why him?”

  Her eyes widened. She was pleased that Becky had left. She was pleased because…She stopped herself. It was, she feared, only too obvious. She was not in the least surprised that Becky would go off with somebody…somebody less intelligent than Paul. The dark anarchic force of sex…That explained so much. “People do strange things. They fall for the most unlikely people.” She felt uncomfortable delving any further, but she could understand why he wanted to talk. “They just do. And listen, Paul; it’s not your fault. Fault doesn’t come into it.” She was not sure that this was quite true; there were times when an inference of fault seemed inescapable.

  Paul sighed. “Have you actually seen them together?”

  Gloria had. She had spotted the two of them entering a supermarket hand in hand, and she could not help but notice his pugilistic features—the broken nose, the vacuous expression, the rolling walk that only sailors and bodybuilders seem to have. She had stared—discreetly, of course—but with a certain fascination.

  “He’s obviously very…” She searched for the word, and alighted upon physical. “Very physical.” She uttered the word quietly, tentatively, as people do when they feel they might immediately have to retract what they have just said.

  Paul nodded. “She met him in the gym,” he said. “She started going there pretty regularly—sometimes twice a day. I should have realised that something was going on.”

  Gloria thought about this. It seemed to her that the gym was an odd place to conduct an affair. But perhaps not;
perhaps there was something about the vaguely sweaty atmosphere of a gym that could set the heart racing. And people fell in love in all sorts of places; her friend Alice had fallen head over heels for a man she first met at the fish counter of her local supermarket. “I was examining a piece of halibut,” she had said, “and I found myself looking at Tony, who was standing next to me. I just knew—right at that moment, I just knew.”

  “And all the time she was seeing him,” continued Paul. “You would have thought there’d be a code of ethics forbidding personal trainers from having affairs with their clients. Psychotherapists have that sort of thing, don’t they?”

  Gloria nodded. “They do. They can’t get involved with their clients, even if their clients fall in love with them—which I gather they often do. I gather they even expect it.”

  “Probably,” said Paul, hesitantly. “But falling for one’s therapist is surely entirely natural—of course we’re going to fall in love with people who listen to us.”

  “Perhaps. So few do.”

  “Fall in love—or listen?”

  She suspected that many people who appeared to be listening were in reality thinking about what they would say next. “Listen.”

  “And the relationship,” Paul went on, “is not all that different—trainer and trainee, therapist and client. I could probably report him to his professional body, if I chose to.”

  For a moment she imagined a meeting of the personal trainers’ professional body—a stern committee of the egregiously fit, all muscle, all glowing with health, conducting their business while running on the spot and lifting weights, the secretary taking the minutes while perched on an exercise bicycle.

  Paul blushed. “No, I didn’t mean to say that. I’m not feeling bitter.” He hesitated. “She might come back, of course.”

  She looked grave. “Paul, once somebody runs away with somebody…somebody like that, she’s unlikely to return.” She thought of a friend, an art historian, who had fallen for a professional tennis player whose only topic of conversation was tennis. She had been blissfully happy, which was not the outcome that many had predicted—or wished for, for that matter: we do not want those of our friends who embark on adventures to get away with it. She remembered Vidal’s famous comment—so waspish and at the same time so true—every time one of my friends succeeds, I die a little.

  Paul was staring at the floor. I don’t need her, he thought. He’s welcome to her. Tommy. Tommy and Becky. Oh, God…He wanted to cry. He wanted to utter her name and sob.

  The moment passed. “La donna è mobile,” he muttered. “Where does that come from again? You know…La donna…something, something, something.”

  “Verdi,” said Gloria. “Rigoletto, if I remember correctly. La donna è mobile, qual piuma al vento, muta d’accento e di pensiero…Of course, you speak Italian, don’t you? Didn’t you live there once?”

  “For two years. In Florence. I was a student.” He thought back to that time—the period of greatest happiness in his life; to be twenty, in Florence, with no commitments and with a sense that life would always be like this, as golden, as full of possibilities.

  “So no translation is necessary.”

  “Woman is fickle,” he mused. “Like a feather in the wind, changes in voice and thought…So true.”

  Gloria disagreed—with Verdi and with Paul. “Not at all. More men leave women than the other way round. Everybody knows that.”

  “Are you sure? Or is that just what women want to believe?”

  “No, it’s absolutely true. There have been studies…” She waved a hand vaguely; she thought there probably had been, although chapter and verse were not always at hand when one needed them.

  “La donna è mobile sounds nice,” she continued, “but is utterly false, as so many operatic themes are.”

  Paul returned to the subject of the personal trainer. “I met him once or twice, you know. I went along to the gym with her and watched him taking her through her paces.” He winced at the painful memory. “He stood very close to her, and every so often he would put a hand around her biceps and smile encouragingly.”

  “Oh dear.”

  Paul sighed. “What do they talk about, I wonder?”

  Gloria tiptoed round the issue. “In those relationships, conversation is often not the principal thing. There are other…” She struggled to put it gently. At the same time she thought: There’s no point in talking about this. Things happen. People go.

  Yet wounds have to be licked.

  “You mean sex?” asked Paul.

  She nodded sadly. “It’s very odd. I could never bring myself to…to get close to somebody like that.” She shuddered. “All that brawn. That thick neck—I take it he has a thick neck—I didn’t see his neck outside the supermarket.”

  “His neck?” mused Paul.

  “Yes, I imagine the veins stand out on the side of it, like creepers round the trunk of a tree.” She shuddered before continuing. “But listen to me, Paul, you have to put all that behind you. You have to move on.”

  The advice brought a grimace. “You’re not the first person to say that to me. Even my mother’s said it—and when your mother tells you to move on…”

  “I know that’s a resounding cliché,” Gloria persisted, “and one should never tell somebody to move on, but it’s true. The only way you’re going to get over this is to…well, to move on. Socialise, have fun…Invite the whole crowd over to your place. Cook for us, like you used to. Meet new people, even.”

  “New people?” said Paul. “I like the friends I’ve got.”

  “Then get people round,” said Gloria. “I’m free next Saturday, for example.”

  He looked at her. “You and I…You weren’t suggesting…”

  He had intended this as a joke, but realised, to his embarrassment, that she was taking it seriously.

  “Heavens no,” she said, blushing. “All I’m saying is that your old friends are the ones to help you get started on a new life. That may seem paradoxical, but the truth is often paradoxical, you know. I don’t know why, but it just is.”

  —

  When Gloria first discovered Paul, he already had a growing local reputation for his knowledge of food and wine. But had she not coaxed that first book out of him—Paul Stuart’s Bordeaux Table—he would probably have remained where she found him: working in the Scottish branch office of a London wine merchant, writing the occasional newspaper column, and from time to time helping friends with their struggling deli business.

  “I saw the possibilities,” said Gloria. “That’s all.”

  She spotted the potential when she read a small column that Paul occasionally contributed to a local lifestyle magazine. The photograph above the piece helped: “He has an interesting face,” she wrote to a colleague. “He’s good-looking, but I suspect he doesn’t know it—you can always tell. (I can’t abide vain men.) The little-boy-lost look helps, and there’s something about the way he puts things. It’s as if he’s taking you into his confidence. People like that: they like the idea that somebody is telling them things that he’s not going to tell anybody else, even if they’re reading it in a magazine or newspaper.”

  Gloria worked as a freelance editor, specialising in books that her publishers blandly described as “lifestyle.” She had a talent for bringing out the good idea that lurked in sometimes chaotic manuscripts, and at the end producing something coherent. Although most of her work was sent to her by publishers, very occasionally she suggested to them what they might do, in this way crossing the boundary into the territory of the commissioning editor. When she did this, publishers had come to trust her instinct, which more often than not was correct.

  “I’m not an agent,” she said to Paul. “I’m an editor. It’s different. I’m on your side, but not one hundred per cent, if you see what I mean.”

  “It means you can tell me what to do,” said Paul.

  Gloria laughed. “I’d never do that. No, it’s more a case of telling you that
you can’t do what you want to do.”

  “I see.”

  “But telling you in such a way that you don’t think I’m telling you what not to do.”

  “Right.”

  “In other words…look, you know how it works, don’t you?”

  He did. And he was grateful to Gloria, not that he tended to express his gratitude very often. She knew, he thought; Gloria knew that he liked her and was grateful. You don’t have to spell everything out.

  When Paul Stuart’s Bordeaux Table was published, there was no real reason for it to stand out in its discouragingly crowded field. Food writers, it seemed, were two a penny, with every regional cuisine having been thoroughly covered from all conceivable angles. Julia Child and Elizabeth David had been the trailblazers; those who followed were precisely that: followers. Yet there was something about Paul’s writing that gave it particular appeal—and this was picked up by reviewers.

  Once it had been described as “insanely readable” by the gushing food editor of a major London paper, the die was cast. There were interviews and television appearances, and on television Paul simply worked. In an age of self-promotion, people responded well to his good manners. There was nothing of the diva about him, none of the braggadocio of other well-known chefs. He was, in a word, likeable.

  “Okay, Paul,” counselled Gloria. “Big success—well done. But…” She had had this conversation with so many authors, and the but had often proved prophetic. “A first book can be a last book only too easily. The second is the real test. Put everything you have into that.”

  Paul heeded her advice. The success of the Bordeaux book had emboldened him to resign from his job with the wine merchant, and so he needed the advance that the publishers for whom Gloria worked offered for Paul Stuart’s Provençal Table. Again, the formula worked, and three months in Provence resulted in a book that was even more enthusiastically received. There then followed a further three French books, one on the food and wines of Portugal, and three on Spanish regions.