The Revolving Door of Life

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Big Lou had heeded his advice and ordered a catalogue from a firm in England. She had been intrigued by some of the lamps on offer: one acted as an alarm clock, gradually filling the bedroom with the equivalent of morning sunlight; another, a Scottish offering, had the bulbs behind a panel of tartan glass—this bathed the user in tartan light, said to be of particular benefit to those in whose heart a dark winter might diminish positive feelings of Scottishness, or might indeed encourage a feeling of the wrong sort of Scottishness. It was impossible, the catalogue claimed, to feel at all dour if you sat in this light each day, even in places, of which there were admittedly one or two in Scotland, where one might be inclined to feel slightly on the dour side.

  19. Big Lou Makes a Change

  As Big Lou’s light box gradually had its effect, she found herself looking forward to spring rather than dwelling on the reality of prolonged winter. And when spring eventually arrived—in May that year—she was ready for the transition. It was a brief spring, modulating within weeks to full-blown summer, but in that short period she made a number of important decisions.

  The first of these was that she would change the name of her coffee bar. She had never been entirely happy with The Morning After Coffee Bar as a name. It was suggestive, first and foremost, of a hangover—something that, for most people, had entirely negative associations. Then there was a slight whiff of guilt to it: the morning after, even if one had not been drinking, could be a time of regret for what had been done the night before—for an unfortunate encounter or a tactless word. What was needed, she felt, was something that played to the particular appeal of her coffee bar. The result was Big Lou’s Coffee and Conversation Bar, a name that was welcoming on several counts. The inclusion of a reference to the owner in a business name made everything more personal. If we go to Harry’s Bar, for instance, we know that a friendly host awaits us; if we enter a restaurant called Marco’s, we know that Marco will be there to ensure that all goes well. Less reassuring are those establishments where the noun is not a proper one. It is unwise to eat in a restaurant called Mama’s, or, even more so, Doc’s. In each case the claim is probably suspect: there will be no mama in Mama’s and anyone called Doc is surely apocryphal.

  The new name told you what you might expect if you descended those somewhat hazardous steps that led down from Dundas Street: Big Lou, coffee, and conversation. Those steps, of course, had a history, particularly when the coffee bar was still a bookshop: it was on the fourth step from the top that Christopher Murray Grieve, the poet Hugh MacDiarmid, tripped. He did not fall far, and was unharmed; other literary figures had been less fortunate, although none as unfortunate as the late Lard O’Connor, who succumbed to a heart attack halfway down and could not be resuscitated even when an ambulance arrived within minutes. The heart attack had nothing to do with the steps, of course, since Lard was descending rather than ascending when it struck him; it had everything to do with the Glasgow diet, with year after year of overindulgence in fried foods, sugar, and a complete lack of exposure to anything green. In fact, Lard had been heard to say that green things were generally poisonous, and that those who ate vegetables were asking for trouble, although he exempted onions from this category as they could be made palatable if covered in batter, fried, and served as onion rings.

  If you reached the bottom of the steps unharmed, you would then find Big Lou and the promised conversation. Big Lou would not have been described as unduly chatty—where she came from there was a general reluctance to use words unnecessarily—nae time fur Marcel Proust, as the common Angus saying has it—but she was always prepared to engage with any customer who wanted to pass the time of day or even to move on to meaty issues. When Big Lou had bought the premises, she had acquired the stock of secondhand books still on the shelves, and had transferred them to her flat in Canonmills. There she had started to work through them, title by title, with all the determination of the autodidact. So it was that she could discuss the philosophical theories of David Hume, Adam Smith, and, with great enthusiasm, Thomas Reid; so it was that she had read the first four volumes of the Scott Moncrieff translation of Proust; and so it was that she was familiar with George Davie’s The Democratic Intellect and Professor Youngson’s The Making of Classical Edinburgh. Occasionally—very occasionally—a customer might share her interest in these matters and an exchange of ideas might result, but more often people simply looked blank if Big Lou mentioned any of these saliences in Scottish intellectual history.

  She wondered about this. “Do folk know anything any more?” she once asked Angus Lordie.

  And Angus replied, “Depends on how old they are, Lou.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  Angus shrugged. “It all depends on what schools teach. I’m not sure how much that is, these days.” He paused. “Are we producing people who are more literate and better-informed than they used to be? I don’t know, Lou, but somehow I hae ma doots.”

  For Lou, it was a question of facts. “Geography, Angus? Capitals of the world? Major rivers? Contour lines?”

  Angus shook his head. “I’m not sure any of that is taught any more, Lou.”

  “Robert Burns?” she said.

  Angus shook his head again. “They don’t learn poetry. Not off by heart.”

  “Why?”

  “Could it be…” Angus hesitated. “Could it be that the teachers…”

  “Dinnae ken any themselves?” prompted Big Lou.

  Angus scratched his head. “I don’t know, I’m afraid.”

  Big Lou sighed. “Are we facing a new Dark Age, Angus?”

  “Possibly, Lou. A dark age in which our concentration spell is this long.” He held up his little finger. “And there’s another thing, Lou—I heard the other day that in some schools in America they were no longer teaching children handwriting. Kids can’t write any more.”

  “What do they do?”

  “They print. Or they type on their iPads. But no actual cursive script.”

  Big Lou thought for a moment. “And their signatures? How will they sign things?”

  “They’ll make a mark,” said Angus. “Just like the old days. Or I suppose they could print their names.”

  “And is it true that teachers don’t bother about correcting spelling mistakes any more?”

  “People say that. But then, a lot of people sound off about these things without knowing what they’re talking about.”

  Angus finished his coffee and wiped the milk from his lips with his handkerchief. “Oh well, Lou, O tempora, O mores…” He paused. “Not that one would say that to the teachers.”

  20. The Sodium Chloride of the Earth

  The change in name of the coffee bar was one of Big Lou’s major decisions that late spring; the other was the employment of an assistant. For Lou that was a very significant milestone: she had always been the one to be employed as a handmaid to the efforts of others—to have an assistant herself seemed all wrong to her; seemed to be a reversal of the natural order.

  It was Matthew who had persuaded her to consider the possibility. “Look Lou,” he had said one morning. “All sorts of people have assistants these days. I have one in the gallery. Remember that girl, Pat MacGregor? She’s working for me again.”

  “Well you’re you and I’m me,” said Big Lou.

  Matthew laughed. “That’s no answer, Lou. If somebody gives you advice, you can’t just rebuff him by saying You’re you and I’m me. What sort of answer is that?”

  “Mine,” said Big Lou. “It’s my answer.”

  Matthew sighed. “What did Burns say, Lou?”

  “An awfie lot,” said Lou, wiping the counter of her coffee bar with a cloth. She kept the bar scrupulously clean, but sometimes the top had to be wiped for emphasis.

  “He said A wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us to see oursels as ithers see us.”

  “Well?” said Big Lou. “I’m well aware of myself, Matthew.”

  Matthew was undeterred. “You see, Lou
, I see you as somebody who just works and works. You’ve been working all your life, haven’t you? On the farm, up at Montrose…”

  “Arbroath,” corrected Lou.

  “Well, up there. I know how hard people work in that part of the world. Aberdeen’s the same.”

  “Well, if there’s work to be done, Matthew…”

  It was hard going, thought Matthew. Big Lou was the sodium chloride of the earth, but sometimes convincing the salt of the earth about something—about anything—could be difficult. But he continued. “Then you went off to that place, didn’t you? To the Granite Nursing Home, or whatever it was called. That place in Aberdeen.”

  “Aye, that was it.”

  “And what did you do there, Lou? You worked all the time to look after other people. I can just imagine it. Cleaning, scrubbing. All that stuff they get up to in Aberdeen. Then you came here and you worked really hard to get this place going. I saw you, Lou. You never stopped. Six days a week, from…what time do you get in here in the mornings, Lou? Seven? Eight?”

  Big Lou paused in her polishing of the counter. “It’s eight these days, because of wee Findlay.”

  “Of course. And that’s another thing, Lou. You’ve taken on that wee boy and all the work that goes with bringing up a child. But that’s more work, isn’t it? All for other people.”

  She said nothing, but she asked herself: what does he expect? If there was work to be done, then it had to be done. That was the way the world was. It was the way it was in Arbroath, Aberdeen, and Edinburgh. Work had to be done, and if you were around, then you had to do it. You couldn’t sit about and expect others to do it.

  She met Matthew’s gaze. “I’m all right, Matthew.”

  “No, you aren’t, Lou. I’ve seen how busy you get when there are a lot of people in here. You need somebody to help you.” He paused. “And how about offering food as well? People come in here and it would be nice if they could get a scone, maybe, with their coffee. Or one of those rolls you have up in Aberdeen. Those butteries. How about that, Lou?”

  “Butteries,” she said, and closed her eyes for a moment.

  He pressed his point. “Well, why not? Grow the business a bit—that’s what they say you should do, isn’t it? They’re always going on about how a business that doesn’t grow is going to get smaller. Well, you could grow yours by offering a bit more.”

  Matthew had thought it was one of those inconclusive conversations that he sometimes had with Big Lou—conversations that raised issues that were never resolved—and had not thought much more of it. But he had planted a seed in Big Lou’s mind, and only a week or so later Big Lou received a visit that was to bring the idea to the fore.

  The visit was from a younger cousin, Hettie. Wee Hettie, as Big Lou called her, was not as small as the sobriquet suggested. In Arbroath the honorifics big, or sometimes its Scots variant muckle, and wee were used in a relative sense, and indeed sometimes ironically. Thus Big Jimmy could be so called because he was actually small, and Wee Eck, possibly named after the small character in a popular newspaper cartoon strip, could, in fact, be considerably bigger than Big Jimmy, or indeed more generously built than Fat Bob, another very popular name for a thin boy who happened to be called Robert. That was the ironical usage; the relative usage involved calling somebody big to differentiate him or her from some other person in the same circle. That other person may not be big in the objective sense, and indeed could be quite small, but was, at least, clearly not the same person as the one who was called wee.

  Big Lou’s cousin, Wee Hettie, was not quite as large as Lou, who was tall and well-built, but she was by no means small. She and Lou had seen a lot of one another as children, as Hettie came from the next farm but one, an arable farm called Snell Mains. She had three brothers, two of whom were, for some inexplicable reason, called Graeme. This led to confusion, of course—a confusion that was resolved by one being called Big Graeme and the other being known as Wee Graeme. Unfortunately Big Graeme, who was physically larger than Wee Graeme, was also younger, which led to considerable difficulty amongst those who thought that he, being called Big Graeme, would naturally be older than Wee Graeme.

  It was Wee Hettie who telephoned Big Lou and said, “Big Lou, is that you?”

  “Aye.”

  “It’s Wee Hettie.”

  That was how it started.

  21. Wee Hettie

  Big Lou had not seen Wee Hettie for almost five years. Their last meeting had been at the family wedding at which their cousin Maggie had married an irascible farmer from Kelso, a man whom nobody liked. Lou and Hettie had sat together in the church, neither expressing the foreboding that each felt—at least not expressing it in words, body language being another matter. As Maggie and her new husband made their way back down the aisle, the expression on the faces of the congregation ranged from mute resignation to outright despair. At the reception that followed, though, the atmosphere of gloom lifted, and Lou and Hettie were able to catch up on their own news and that of other relatives.

  Wee Hettie had just completed a degree in chemistry at the University of Aberdeen. She had hoped to get a job, but had been called back to Snell Mains, the family farm, to help her father, who was crippled with arthritis. Her brothers, both called Graeme, were younger than she was, and neither would be in a position to take over the running of the farm for several years. One of them, Big Graeme, had shown great promise as a rugby player and had already been selected to play for Scotland in an international Under-21 match against Wales. It would be wrong, thought Hettie’s father, to nip a distinguished rugby career in the bud, and it was tacitly agreed that he would be brought under no pressure to return to the farm.

  That left Wee Graeme, who had also enrolled at Aberdeen University, though several years behind his sister. His course in agricultural science would take four years to complete, which meant that the spotlight of responsibility fell solely on Hettie. She did not protest, although her heart sank at the thought of being trapped at Snell Mains for an indeterminate and probably lengthy period.

  Hettie’s real ambition—confessed to Big Lou during their conversation at that family wedding—was to become a dietician. She had decided this during her chemistry course and had enquired about doing a course in Edinburgh, but her hopes had been dashed by the plaintive message from the farm that if she were unable to come home, then Snell Mains would have to be sold. And that meant that not only would her father have to leave the house in which he had spent his entire life, but that Wee Graeme would have no farm to take over. She could not let either of these things happen, and so Hettie went home to do her duty, as uncomplainingly as she, and her mother before her, had tackled all the tasks that went with being the daughter or the wife of an Angus farmer.

  That was five years ago, and now here was Hettie contacting Lou in Edinburgh and arranging to come to see her at eleven the following morning. It was a good time for their meeting: Lou would have finished with the going-to-work rush and would not yet be dealing with the first of the lunch customers. She found herself anticipating the visit with some excitement: five years was a long gap and there would be much ground to cover.

  Each commented positively on the appearance of the other. “You’re no worse,” said Hettie—a common compliment in their part of rural Angus.

  “Aye, and your heid’s still there,” replied Big Lou—high praise in the same circles, negative versions of the same remark being, “Your heid’s awa, I see,” or “Your heid’s mince.”

  That established, Big Lou made Wee Hettie a cup of coffee and they began their conversation. At length Big Lou asked the question that had been in her mind since Hettie had telephoned the day before. Why was she in Edinburgh?

  “It’s a long story,” said Hettie, “but the short version is this: I’m here because I no longer have to be there.”

  Big Lou knew exactly what she meant. Wee Hettie was talking about freedom: freedom from getting up at four to do the milking; freedom from mucking out the
byre; freedom from struggling with fencing and tractor tyres and ewes in the distress of difficult lambings; freedom from listening to long sermons in the kirk on Sunday and from hearing the same lengthy stories from visiting aunts time after time; freedom from baking scones every day, and freedom from eating them with the aunts as they told their long-winded tales of local events.

  And what was Hettie planning to do? Big Lou listened as her cousin explained the part-time course in dietetics she would be starting a couple of months later. Her degree in chemistry had stood her application in good stead, and she had been given credits that would allow her to complete the course in two years rather than three.

  Hettie, seated on one of the coffee bar’s high stools, looked at her cousin across the polished surface of Lou’s counter. “It’s what I have to do, Lou,” she said. “I’ve found my…my…”

  “Vocation?” offered Big Lou.

  Hettie nodded enthusiastically. “I want to make a difference, Lou. I want to do whatever I can to change what Scotland eats. This is not about me, Lou—it’s about our diet—the diet of all of us—everyone.”

  “Even Glasgow?” asked Lou.

  Hettie’s expression showed no sign of reservation. “Even Glasgow, Lou. Yes, even Glasgow.”

  Lou took a sip of her coffee. “That’s a pretty big job, Hettie. You know what they’re like over there. You know what they like to eat.”

  “Of course I do, Lou,” said Hettie.

  Lou looked down at the ground. It was never pleasant to throw cold water on enthusiasm, but she wondered whether Wee Hettie, this woman of…what age was Hettie now?…twenty-seven…could seriously entertain thoughts of changing the Scottish diet through what? Advice? Moral suasion? Political engagement?

  She looked back at Hettie, at the familiar face, a face that represented so naturally and unself-consciously the world of those quiet farms, that uneventful landscape, that unchanging hinterland. It was the face of one who had very little experience of the cynical world of cities, the face of one who simply had no idea how large things were, how immutable—and how bad.