PIANOS AND
FLOWERS
ALEXANDER
McCALL SMITH
PIANOS AND
FLOWERS
Brief Encounters of the Romantic Kind
Most of the places and organisations mentioned in these stories are real, but all the persons described are entirely fictitious. Any resemblance between characters in this book and any real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
First published in 2019 by Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd
West Newington House
10 Newington Road
Edinburgh
EH9 1QS
www.polygonbooks.co.uk
Copyright © Alexander McCall Smith, 2019
Photographs © The Sunday Times / News Licensing
ISBN: 978 1 78885 325 5
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.
The moral right of Alexander McCall Smith to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
Text design by Studio Monachino
Printed and bound by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.
This book is for David Purdie
CONTENTS
PREFACE
Pianos and Flowers
I’d Cry Buckets
Sphinx
Maternal Designs
The Dwarf Tale-Teller of the Romanian Rom
Duty
Iron Jelloids
Students
Zeugma
Urchins
St John’s Wort
Blackmail
Pogo Sticks and Man with Bicycle
La Plage
PREFACE
When I was asked by the The Sunday Times to write a number of short stories for the newspaper, I suggested that I should select photographs from their extensive photographic archive, and create stories based on what I imagined the pictures depicted. Six of the stories were published in the paper – a few of them are included here, but the rest are new. We do not know, of course, who the people in these photographs were, nor what they were up to. They were almost certainly not doing what I say they are, but that is the joy of looking at photographs in this way: from the tiniest visual clue we can create a whole hinterland of experience – of love, of hope, of simply being human.
A.M.S. SEPTEMBER 2019
Pianos and Flowers
LOOK AT THE MAN AND WOMAN IN THE FOREGROUND OF THIS photograph. They are walking past the unusual topiary without much more than a glance, seemingly indifferent to whatever it was that the topiarist was striving to portray. The man had muttered “Kandinsky” under his breath, a reference to the apparent similarity of the hedge to the figures to be seen in the artist’s painting; the woman had simply sighed, and said nothing. Then the two them pass out of the photograph, and into the rest of their lives.
Further back are three sisters, standing shoulder to shoulder, with their brother on their right. The other man, standing on his own, on their left (our right) is nothing to do with them and had avoided making eye contact. He was simply there, quite coincidentally, waiting for his wife, who had gone inside the house to retrieve her sunhat. When she returned a few minutes after this photograph was taken, they made their way into the rose garden, which cannot be seen here, but which lay off to the right, hidden by the high yew hedge behind the small groups of strollers.
We do not know who that couple was, although one of the sisters later remarked, “That man in the garden was Dutch, I think. I may be wrong, but I think he looked Dutch.” Another said, “How can you tell?” To which the reply came, “I don’t know. There are some things that you just feel to be the case. You can’t be sure, but you think it. It’s hard to explain, actually.” And the third said, “Intuition. That’s the word you’re looking for. Intuition.” As it happened, he was not Dutch, but Belgian – the director of a company that imported rubber from what was then known as the Belgian Congo. His grandchildren would say of this involvement, “Don’t look at us, we had nothing to do with it”, although what they had read about the Congo and Leopold’s doings there made them shudder with embarrassment and regret.
The three women remained, as did the man accompanying them. They stood there for at least twenty minutes, and then, as if discouraged, they went back inside the house and had tea there rather than in the garden, like most of the guests.
Who were they? Why did they stand in a straight line? What did they expect, or want? Are they still alive? Each of these questions can be answered, but the last one, the question that an old photograph so often raises, might be answered first. The age of the photograph, usually revealed by the clothing, may settle the survival issue. We may guess at a decade: skirt length, hats, the presence or absence of gloves – these may be clues enough. And the question of survival having been settled, we may turn our thoughts to how the people in the photograph met their end. In this case, one of the women was killed in a traffic accident in Bristol. Another died in 1956, of rapidly-progressing septicaemia. The third lived to see the fall of the Berlin Wall. The man died at sixty-two, having fallen overboard in a yachting accident on the Solent; a spinnaker, badly handled, had folded in upon itself, wrapping him in its embrace and eventually pushing him off the deck into the sea. He was a strong swimmer, but it is thought that cold-water shock took its toll.
None of these siblings did anything out of the ordinary with their lives. People may be remembered by the things they made, or the things they made happen, perhaps by their sayings, their acts of creation, however modest. None of these four left anything much behind them. Obscurity is quick, and tactful; it keeps a straight face if it overhears our hopes of being remembered, but it knows better. So, in a sense, it was as if these four had never existed. Some lives are like that – they leave little trace, as unrecorded as were those countless lives led before writing and photography gave some degree of permanence to our human experience.
He was called Thomas Sanderson, and his sisters were Annette, Flora and Stephanie. Thomas was two years older than Annette, who was the senior of the sisters, in turn two years the senior of Flora, who was born two years before Stephanie. “We are a perfectly-spaced family,” Annette was fond of saying, “even if our poor brother is somewhat outnumbered by his sisters.”
“I don’t mind that at all,” said Thomas. “In fact, I consider myself lucky to have three sisters. That is great good fortune in this life.”
“It’s very nice of you to say that,” said Flora. “And we’re very fortunate to have such a dear brother.”
They are pictured here in England, where they lived for most of their lives. Their early childhood, though, had been spent in Penang, in what was then the Straits Settlements. Their father, Robert, the head of a port warehousing firm in George Town, also owned a small rubber estate in one of the neighbouring Malayan states. He had no taste for the jungle, though, and left the management of the estate to a taciturn Glaswegian, who had five children by a Malay woman. Robert’s wife, Francie, disliked the Glaswegian, being scandalised by his casual fathering of his brood of children. None of the children had been brought up to speak English; none wore shoes; and the two small boys amongst them had long hair that their mother lovingly tied in a ponytail. They were, without exception, very happy in their freedom, and indifferent to Francie’s frosty disapproval on the rare occasions that she visited the estate with her husband.
Francie disappro
ved of many things. Like many women in colonial society, she was acutely aware of her status, which, by the nature of things at the time, was entirely dependent on her husband’s position. Robert was well off and had been in George Town for a long time, unlike some of the more recent arrivals, whom the older planters and traders looked down upon. He was on the committee of the local Chamber of Commerce, which gave him a certain amount of clout and which ensured invitations to official functions, even if he and Francie were rarely placed at the top table at a government dinner. He had also been the Vice-Chairman of the Club for a double term of office, and that, again, conferred some standing. But for most purposes he was outranked by senior government officers and, more significantly perhaps, had an air about him that aroused the suspicions of the more snobbish. These people were discreet about it, and would not openly question his credentials, but privately they made remarks about the fact that his hair was parted in the middle, and that his shoes were not quite what one might expect. “They like shoes like that in Shanghai,” one of the members of the Club said, and laughed. “Not that I’m saying they’re not well made – they are. Frightfully elegant and all that, but, you know …”
In George Town the family lived in a large house on the slope of the hill. This had verandas that ran around all four sides, both on the ground floor and on the storey above. These had screens that could be unrolled to keep out mosquitoes, and were furnished with teak planters’ chairs. There were elephant feet cut to form the base of brass-topped side tables and on the floor there were mats made from thin strips of rattan. Ceiling fans rotated slowly, disturbing the languid air only enough to give slight relief from the heat and humidity. “Our fans provide purely psychological relief,” Robert was fond of saying.
The children loved playing on these verandas, sending chipped carpet bowls shooting from one end to another, and dragging one another about on the mats, as if they were sledges. The smooth cement floor, polished red, was tended by a servant who spent half of his waking hours bringing a shine to the surface. His hands were dyed red by the polish, and the knees of his khaki trousers were permanently the same colour. He was a Tamil, who lived in the servants’ block in the back yard. He had a slight limp, that came from some childhood injury, and a ready smile. He worshipped Robert for reasons that were obscure, although there was a story about Robert having done something about a debt that the Tamil had inherited and that would otherwise have burdened him for life. “A trifling sum,” said Robert, “but you know what it’s like for these people.” Francie said, “Yes, but you have to be careful not to spoil them. You’ll get no thanks if you spoil them, you know.”
Francie had always known that her time in Penang was finite. She employed a tutor for the children, and there was a small school where people sent their children until the age of ten, but after that there was no option but to send them home. Home, of course, was England, a country that the children had visited a few times when Robert took long leave, but that was nevertheless a strange and rather romantic place to them. England was the backdrop for their history lessons, and for the books they read; it was the place where the King lived, where knights jousted at tournaments, where people lived in castles and country houses; it was a place where there were never any storms, or cooking smells, or poisonous snakes. And yet, in spite of that, it was a place where you went off to boarding school and had to sleep in dormitories and be careful not to offend the prefects placed in authority over you.
Francie knew that once she started a family, in a few years she would have to take the children home and get them settled. Some people had arrangements with relatives, who would look after children during the school holidays; she was not too sure about that. She had heard too many stories of children being miserable because the people looking after them were only doing it for the money, or out of a sense of duty, rather than any enthusiasm for the children themselves. Neither she nor Robert had anybody whom she felt they could trust, and so she would have to stay in England, while Robert lived by himself in Penang. That sort of solution was never entirely satisfactory; so many men could not cope with loneliness, and gave in to temptation, no matter how firm their resolve at the beginning. She had known of at least two women whose husbands had behaved that way when left in the East by their wives. One had taken up with a local woman; another had had a florid and public affair with the wife of a senior government official, bringing about disgrace and unhappiness in more or less equal measure.
In Penang, there were few constraints on the children’s freedom. The house had four acres of garden, presided over by an ancient Chinese gardener and his young Malay assistant. This gardener was fascinated by the children. They seemed so strange to him, so exotic, rather like rare plants. He created paths through the undergrowth for them to run along, and built them a treehouse in a flowering Malaysian blackwood. There was a large pond for which the gardener’s assistant had made a raft for the children to use. On this raft there was a small cabin on which the gardener had inscribed Chinese characters in green paint. “Good luck,” he said, his grin revealing a few well-worn teeth as he pointed to the characters. “That is good luck. Chinese. Plenty of good luck.” The children nodded; they thought of the Chinese language as being composed of pithy appeals to fortune: good luck, happy fate, happiness, much money, and so on, while Malay, of which they had picked up a smattering, seemed full of domestic commands, wash, put away, polish.
The house next door was invisible from the Sanderson property, being shielded from view by the thickness of the garden vegetation. This house was even larger than theirs, a fact that irritated Francie, as it was occupied by a Chinese family with whom she would not mix socially. This family, the Fongs, had two daughters who were roughly of an age with Annette and Flora. These girls had learned English at the convent that they attended, the Fongs being Catholic and prominent supporters of Catholic missions in Manchuria. This philanthropy was, some time later, to prove their undoing in an unexpected and harrowing way.
The Fong girls engaged in imaginative games, the narrative of which the Sanderson girls found hard to follow. Roles and names were solemnly allocated, almost always in Chinese, with the occasional concession being made to English. The games were complex, although some were recognised by the Sanderson girls as being loosely based on the story portrayed on willow-pattern plates. These involved hiding, being found, running away, being caught – all accompanied by breathless commentary from the Fong girls. Others were pure invention. “A very sad girl lived in a house with a father who had a dragon,” intoned one of the Fongs. “This sad girl said she would run away with her friend, who was not sad. They took the dragon with them. They had many adventures. The dragon ate a wicked nun.” That, of course, was a reference to the convent the Fongs attended.
When they tired of these games the Sandersons would take the Fongs into the kitchen and plead for lemonade. If they spotted Thomas, the Fong girls would giggle amongst themselves, shooting glances at him and then covering their mouths with a hand to conceal their giggling.
“What’s wrong with those stupid girls?” Thomas asked his sisters. “Are they on laughing gas?”
“They think you’re funny,” said Annette.
“They think all boys are funny,” Flora said.
Thomas rolled his eyes. “They don’t know anything.”
Occasionally the Fong girls invited Annette and Flora to their house. They taught them Mah Jong, although this tested their patience as teachers. It seemed inexplicable to them that anybody would not know of the significance of the wind or dragon tiles. Were English girls really that ignorant? Were they like that in England itself – unaware of basic things, such as the rules of Mah Jong? Surely not.
The Fong girls had Chinese names but used Western names, Cecilia and Joan, at the convent and when with non-Chinese people. They were learning the piano, and had an Italian piano teacher who came to the house three times a week. He gave them each a piece of chocolate if their playing demonstrated conscie
ntious practising; if they fell below the standard expected they were treated to a sad shaking of the head and a wagging of the teacher’s well-manicured finger. It was the same finger that he used in place of a metronome when listening to the girls’ playing.
Joan Fong loved flowers. While Cecilia, who was the better musician, played the piano and Annette and Flora listened from the Fongs’ gold-coloured sofa, Joan would arrange flowers that she had picked earlier that day from their garden. She would sometimes present Cecilia with a bouquet of flowers at the end of the piece, and Cecilia would lower herself from the piano stool, bowing deeply in the direction of her audience. She would lay the flowers on the piano keyboard, and bow once again, this time to an imaginary audience beyond the heads of the Sanderson girls.
“See?” said Joan. “One day Cecilia will be very, very famous. In England. See?”
Penang, the Chinese gardener, the world of the Fongs, the piano, the flowers – all these seemed so far away once they went home. “But this isn’t home,” complained Annette. “Home is our house …” By which she meant the house on the hill, with its polished red floors and verandas; not this neat box of a house in Budleigh Salterton, with its heavy curtains and stifling respectability. “Many people,” said Francie, “would be more than pleased to live in Budleigh Salterton.” She said that, though, partly in an effort to convince herself that she should be one of them – one of those who aspired to Budleigh Salterton – whereas she really found it stultifying. She missed the ladies’ nights at the Club; she missed the tea parties where she was able to condescend to the wives of junior officials; she even missed the things of which she disapproved. Disapproval may provide as much a raison d’être as wholehearted endorsement; who amongst us does not enjoy at least some of our animosities? Everything here seemed too lodged, too firmly fixed in its place to offer any excitement. And what lay before her but year after lonely year of this separation from her husband, of writing a weekly letter in which she tried to summon up enough novelty to last a page or two before she reached the concluding line, I miss you terribly. That was true enough; she did miss him. And he her? She hoped so, and wrote to a close friend in Penang to ask her. Do you think he’s missing me a lot? And the friend replied, Darling, I saw him two days ago at the Club, and you know what he talked about? You. All the time. Nothing else. That answers your question, don’t you think?
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