The Revolving Door of Life

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “Maleness exists, don’t you think?”

  Domenica nodded. “Yes. Yes, it does.”

  “But what exactly is it?”

  Domenica thought it was an approach to the world. “It’s an attitude. It’s an attitude of engagement.”

  “Engagement?”

  Domenica was pleased with the term, and warmed to the subject. “Yes. Look at the way in which a little boy plays. He prods. He investigates things all around him. He moves them. He tries to push them over. Then look at girls. They touch things gently. They watch them. They don’t try to push them about. They…” She searched for the right word. “They cherish them.”

  The friend agreed. “Yes,” she said. “It’s exactly that.”

  “So,” continued Domenica. “If we’re agreed that maleness is something to do with engagement, then why do we find it attractive? Assuming, of course, that we do find it attractive.”

  The friend smiled. “Yes, we do. As women, we do. We like it. We like men, or at least, those of us who like men like it.”

  Domenica raised an objection. “And we don’t like men who don’t have that maleness about them?”

  This was problematic. “No, we do like them. Women like sensitive men—men who aren’t interested in pushing or shoving things about.”

  Domenica thought of the sensitive men she knew. She had several friends in that category. “But we don’t like them for their maleness, do we?”

  “No, we like them because they’re easy company. Because we can talk to them. It has nothing to do with maleness.”

  They looked at one another, and smiled. Their discussion had come back to that central mystery of the way in which men and women saw one another and why, because of that, the ancient dance of fascination took place.

  “So, why do we do it?” asked Domenica.

  “Get involved with men? Fall for maleness?”

  “Yes.”

  The friend hesitated. “Because we want to possess it,” she said. “Because we want to possess men, to tame them, to own them.” She paused. “Remember D.H. Lawrence’s essay, ‘Flowery Tuscany’?”

  “Of course,” said Domenica, perhaps a little bit too quickly.

  “Because he points out,” the friend continued, “that when women see flowers they feel the need to pick them—to possess them—whereas men don’t.”

  Domenica said nothing. She could not abide Lawrence. And anyway, if men didn’t pick flowers it was probably because they didn’t see them in the first place.

  11. A Selfish Climber

  There was an overlap of just over two weeks between the getting of the keys to the house at Nine Mile Burn and the handing over of the flat in India Street to its purchasers. During that period, Matthew and Elspeth found themselves owners of two properties—a situation that for most people is made distinctly uncomfortable by the need to have a bridging loan between mortgages. For a brief spell interest is paid not only on the old mortgage but on the new loan too—a potentially crippling burden. People on bridging loans can be seen in restaurants eating only one course or, indeed, nothing at all, so pressing is the enforced parsimony a bridging loan entails.

  In Matthew’s case, such exigencies were unnecessary, as he had found the purchase price of the new house from capital—an unusual position for one in his late twenties to be in. But even so, being insulated from harsh economic reality does not mean that one is unaware of the stringencies under which most people live.

  “How does anybody do it?” he remarked to Elspeth as they sat in their kitchen in India Street, amidst the half-packed crates of pots and pans, cutlery and crockery.

  “It helps to have packers,” said Elspeth. “Those guys move in—bang, bang—and everything’s wrapped up in crumpled newspaper and stacked away.”

  “Not that,” said Matthew. “I meant financially, but since you mentioned it, what if you can’t afford movers? What do you do?”

  Elspeth looked at him. There was the odd occasion—such as now—when the difference in their backgrounds showed. Had Matthew never done a flat move as a student? Had he been able to afford removal men even then?

  “You pack everything yourself,” she said. “But it depends on how much stuff you have. Lots of people don’t have all that much stuff, you know.”

  “Oh, I know that,” said Matthew. He was sensitive to any suggestion of privilege.

  “Then you hire a van,” Elspeth went on. “And you get your friends to help.”

  “Of course.”

  Elspeth continued. “There’s a certain stage in your life, though, when you realise that you’re not going to help anybody else to move. You say to yourself: that’s it—no more helping friends with their move.”

  Matthew smiled. He had done that; only a few months ago he had declined an invitation to have a drink with a friend when the friend had casually added to the invitation that there was a wardrobe that needed shifting afterwards.

  “It comes at about twenty-eight,” Elspeth continued. “You turn twenty-eight and you decide that you’ve helped enough friends to move flats. And that’s the point at which you say…”

  “My back,” interjected Matthew.

  “Exactly. You say: ‘Sorry, I’ve got this back, you see.’ It always works.”

  Matthew looked thoughtful. “There’s a limit to what one can do for friends—whether or not you have a tendency to put your back out.”

  Elspeth agreed. “Of course, some people are so selfish they’ll do nothing for others—even for their friends.”

  Matthew thought about this. He had several very generous friends—their names came to him quite readily, even if they were all from his pre-Elspeth days—but it was difficult to call to mind entirely selfish ones. But then he remembered. “Yes,” he said. “I knew somebody like that. I remember driving with her up to Fort William once—we both belonged to a climbing club at university. We were going somewhere up there—I forget exactly which mountain we were going to climb—it wasn’t Ben Nevis.”

  “I’m not sure I would want to climb with a selfish person,” mused Elspeth. “She’d let go of the rope rather than try to save you—if you fell, that is.”

  “It’s unusual to find a selfish climber,” said Matthew. “Generally speaking climbers help one another. But this woman, well…”

  He related to Elspeth how they stopped at Tyndrum, before the road began its ascent to Rannoch Moor and to Glencoe beyond. He told her how in the car park of the Green Welly they had sat down to an improvised picnic lunch. Matthew had gone into the shop to buy some food, and had returned with ready-made sandwiches and two apples. He had offered his companion a sandwich and he had seen her glance discreetly at the sell-by date on the packaging. One sandwich was fresher than the other—and it was this one she chose. Then she had turned to the apples and again he had seen a quick appraisal of desirability before she left him with the smaller and less inviting of the two.

  “In those two quick glances she gave herself away,” he said. “She said everything about her personality that needed to be said, and I realised that I was in the company of a consummately selfish person.”

  Elspeth agreed. “Imagine giving somebody else the older sandwich,” she said. “A good person would not have done that, would she?”

  “No,” said Matthew. “She would not.”

  “Where does generosity come from?” Elspeth asked.

  It was a strange question, and Matthew wondered whether the same question might be asked of any of the virtues. “I suspect that generosity is determined at a very early age,” he said. “Probably in one’s very earliest years, and then it becomes cemented through the habits of the heart.”

  “Like everything else,” said Elspeth. “Like kindness; like sympathy; like the ability to think yourself into the shoes of another.”

  “Yes,” said Matthew. “Like all of that.”

  “Mind you,” said Elspeth. “Our characters are partly a matter of genes, aren’t they?”

  “Could
be.”

  “I think they are. You know, when I was doing my teaching qualification we were advised to read a book on twins. It was fascinating. It was all about those studies in which twins who are separated at birth and who have had totally different upbringings are later assessed by psychologists. And you know what? They are often remarkably similar in their behaviour and their preferences.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. In one case two men turned up who had not seen one another since birth. They were twins who had been adopted by different families. And when the researchers saw them in their thirties or whatever age they were, they wore similar clothes, voted for the same party, watched the same movies, had the same hobbies, and drove the same make of car.”

  “No!”

  “Yes. And there was something else—they had each married a woman with the same first name.”

  “Well!” exclaimed Matthew.

  “Yes,” said Elspeth. “So much for the idea that nurture beats nature.”

  “Oh,” said Matthew, vaguely depressed at the thought that our fate was so much a question of deoxyribonucleic acid.

  12. Alpha Males and Sociopathy

  Matthew and Elspeth may have had packers to help them in their move, but there was still a daunting amount of sorting out that Elspeth, in particular, felt they would have to do themselves.

  “We acquire so much,” she sighed, looking about the disarray in the kitchen. “Just by existing, we seem to acquire so much.”

  Matthew glanced at the shelf behind his chair. Elspeth was right: a tin soldier in the uniform of a Highland regiment stood beside a broken wally dug; beside the china dog was a small stack of recipe books, an assortment of unlikely shelf-fellows—the ubiquitous Delia, The Scots Kitchen, The River Café Cookbook—and alongside that was a fankle of string, mixed with old bills and receipts.

  He thought of his study: the movers had been told to pack the books, of which there were at least five hundred, but he had asked them to leave the papers to him. These were stacked in piles at the bottom of the bookshelves, or crammed into the drawers of the two low filing cabinets on either side of his desk. If I am like this at this stage in my life, he thought, then what will I be like at fifty? Or sixty?

  Elspeth hardly helped his anxiety. She had been reading an article in a Sunday newspaper and had passed it over with the suggestion that he read it.

  “I’m not saying that this is you,” she said, pointing to the page in question. “All I’m saying is that you have to be careful. OCD.” She uttered the acronym OCD as if it were QED.

  “OCD? Me?”

  “Hoarding,” she said. “Read it. It’s caused by OCD.”

  Matthew took the newspaper but did not begin to read. “Do you think I’ve got OCD?” he asked. “Do you really think…”

  Elspeth shook her head. “No…or maybe just a touch. Apparently lots of people have mild OCD, or at least a tendency to it. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

  She saw the look of dismay on Matthew’s face and sought to reassure him. “No, seriously, if you read that, you’ll see you’re nowhere near as bad as the real McCoy. It talks about these two brothers in New York, you see—they were called the Collyers.”

  Matthew glanced at a photograph above the article. He read the names below it. “Homer and Langley Collyer?”

  “Yes, that’s them. They lived in a mansion in New York, apparently, and they filled it up with so much stuff that they had to get from room to room by tunnel through all the junk. Their tunnels collapsed and they died.”

  “Oh.” Matthew thought: I’m nowhere near needing a tunnel…

  Elspeth continued with the story. “It took the police ages to work their way through all the things stacked in the rooms before they could find their bodies. They had been dead for weeks—entombed in all the rubbish.”

  “Poor guys…”

  “Yes,” said Elspeth. “And it tells you there some of the things they found in the house. It wasn’t just old newspapers and so on: they had fourteen pianos, an X-ray machine, a number of violins, a car chassis, countless telephone directories, the pickled body of a baby in a jar…and so on. There were 140 tons of rubbish in the house.”

  Matthew looked about the kitchen. There were the old receipts, of course, and the cookery books, but no car chassis nor X-ray machine.

  “I’m going to tidy up,” he said. He was filled with resolve, but he still looked at her reproachfully. “Do you really think I’m obsessive-compulsive? I only wash my hands once or twice a day, you know, and I never come back upstairs to check I’ve turned off the iron. Or hardly ever…”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t. I just think that you…or rather we—that is, all of us—need to watch ourselves for signs of some of these common conditions. We might just be very slightly…just a teensie-weensie bit on the spectrum…”

  Matthew looked up in alarm. “On the spectrum? Of what? Asperger’s? Do you think I’ve got Asperger’s?”

  She did not. “Of course I don’t think that. Lots of other people are just a little bit on the spectrum, but you aren’t. And you’re not a psychopath either. Or a sociopath, as they call them now.”

  “Can one be just a touch sociopathic?” asked Matthew.

  “Oh, I think so. I know plenty of people who are a touch sociopathic. I think psychiatrists say that it’s perfectly possible to have a mild degree of a personality disorder, don’t they? Lots of alpha males are like that—politicians and so on.”

  “Really?”

  Elspeth nodded. “Yes. Sociopaths are attracted to politics because they see it as a sphere in which you can be ruthless and step all over people. That fact that some politicians can tell such awful lies is another example of sociopathy. Sociopaths lie—they see nothing wrong with it.”

  Matthew remembered a line of poetry he had learned a long time ago. “Matilda,” he began…

  “Told such dreadful lies,” supplied Elspeth. “It made one gasp and stretch one’s eyes.” She laughed. “Belloc. I read it to the children when I was teaching. I used to look at Bertie’s little friend, Tofu, as I read it to them, because he was a terrific liar. But he just looked back at me as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth.”

  “So Matilda was a psychopath—I mean, a sociopath?”

  Elspeth nodded. “Probably. Of course she was burned to a cinder. Nobody heeded her calls for help when her house actually did go up in flames. For every time she shouted ‘Fire!’ They simply answered ‘Little Liar!’ ”

  “Poor girl.”

  “But that’s what happens in morality tales. People come to a sticky end, or, in her case, a fiery one.” Elspeth paused. “Talking of OCD, do you know who really had it? Full-blown?”

  Matthew waited.

  “Lady Macbeth,” said Elspeth. “Remember? All the perfumes of Araby…”

  “Ah,” said Matthew. “Of course. I thought that was guilt.”

  “It can be the same thing,” said Elspeth. “Or so I’ve read.”

  Matthew sighed. “I’m going to have to start throwing things out.”

  Then he remembered something. “The people who bought the flat,” he said, looking at his watch. “They were going to come round to see us. I’d forgotten.”

  Elspeth had forgotten too. But what she remembered was what their lawyer, who had already met them, had said. “Apparently they’re well-known,” he had remarked. “He’s…well, I forget what he does, but I gather he’s some sort of celebrity. B-list, or possibly even C, but beggars can’t be choosers, so to speak. Scotland has only a handful of A-list celebrities, and most of those live abroad. All the rest are distinctly B-list…and below.”

  “Really?” said Elspeth.

  “Yes,” said the lawyer. “Everybody knows that—except for the B-listers, of course. They don’t know they’re B-list.”

  “The whole notion of celebrity is absurd, anyway,” said Elspeth.

  The lawyer was inclined to agree. “Everybody knows that,” he said. �
�Except the celebs themselves, perhaps.”

  13. Enter Nairn MacTaggart

  It was Matthew who opened the door to the new purchasers of the India Street flat. Standing before him on the landing were a man and a woman, the man in his early forties, the woman a good ten years or so his junior, or so it seemed to Matthew. The man was well-built, but with a slightly drawn face; the woman, who was considerably shorter than him, had an interesting and intelligent face but also had that look, indefinable but quite recognisable, of somebody who lived in the shadow of another.

  The man extended a hand to Matthew. “I’m Nairn,” he said. “Nairn MacTaggart.”

  The accent was more West of Scotland than East, with the upward swirl, like the movement of a wave, that marked the speech patterns of Glasgow or its satellites. It was in a friendly register, though, unlike the sometimes disapproving tones of Edinburgh that could inhibit a conversation even as it started.

  The woman also proffered her hand. “And I’m Chrissie.”

  Matthew invited them in. “Welcome to your new home,” he said, ushering them into the hall.

  “Not quite,” said Nairn, smiling.

  For a brief moment, Matthew wondered whether the sale had fallen through. He laughed nervously. “Well, it will be in…what? Ten days, I think.”

  “Yes,” said Nairn. “Ten days.”

  “And we’re looking forward to that,” said Chrissie. “We’re staying with friends at the moment—we’ve been there for three weeks, ever since we sold our old place at…”

  Nairn interrupted her. “Staying with friends can be a very rewarding experience,” he said, “but not necessarily for the friends.”

  “Hah!” said Matthew.

  Chrissie looked at Nairn appreciatively. “That’s very clever, Nairn,” she said.

  Reasonably clever, thought Matthew. I wouldn’t say very clever.

  “You begin to notice their faults,” said Nairn. “Living with somebody brings you up against the reality of other people, doesn’t it?”