Chance Developments: Unexpected Love Stories

by Alexander McCall Smith

  That ended the business side of the conversation, and as they chatted over a cup of tea, she thought, Would it be better to get a flat before a husband, or get a husband first and then a flat? She would have like to have asked them, but she could not, because neither knew the nature of her plans just yet, and she was eager not to play her hand too soon.

  3

  She might have continued as a teacher; she might have continued as a nun, if it had been possible to live with a less doctrinaire faith with conviction. But she could not see how that would work. As a nun she felt she had to adhere to the Church more strictly than a layperson, and she felt that doing this would be hypocritical on her part. So she would take a sabbatical from the Church. She might still go to Mass, but she would give even that a break for a while. She would explore other avenues. She would look at things critically. She would find God in places she had been afraid to look. And she would do all this without Father Sullivan or the bishop telling her what she could think and do. They are fine men, but I am my own person, she thought, I am entitled to look for God in this world in the way I choose to do…She paused. Goodness! I’m becoming a Protestant—or almost; she, from a family steeped in Catholicism, whose social life, whose very sense of identity was rooted in a tight, exclusive Catholic world—she was becoming, of all things, a Protestant.

  And why should she not take just a look at Protestantism and what it had to offer? She would not do anything immediately, but she would do it. It would shock her aunt and the few cousins she had on her mother’s side, for whom loyalty to Catholicism was a tribal matter and for whom the bonds that secured them to their religion were as hoops of steel. But it was her life she was thinking about, and she should be able to do with it what she wanted to do.

  “The dear sisters,” said the aunt, “have no clothes sense, do they, bless them.”

  She was surveying the beige bombazine with a bemused expression.

  “It’s actually a rather fine fabric,” said Flora, fingering the sleeve of the dress. “But it looks so old-fashioned, doesn’t it?”

  “I’m afraid it does,” agreed the aunt. “You can go shopping tomorrow. Mr. O’Malley has left some cash for you, to keep you going before the bank account is sorted out. I have my bridge club, if you don’t mind my not coming.”

  “I’ll be fine,” said Flora. “I have to start sometime.”

  “Start what?”

  “Start standing on my own two feet. You see, I can’t remember when I last bought something. It must have been years ago.”

  The aunt smiled. “You’ll find things are a bit more expensive, I’m afraid.”

  She wore the beige bombazine dress to go shopping. She took the train into Glasgow, relishing the novelty of travelling by herself and not in a group of nuns and schoolgirls, as she had done for the last ten years. It was a strange feeling—one of almost physical lightness. And in the shop she found herself overwhelmed by the choices available. In the convent one got by with very few things, and with virtually no choice. Now she was confronted with a bewildering range of outfits, the elegance of which only underlined the shabbiness of what she was wearing.

  Mr. O’Malley had left what struck her as a grossly excessive amount of money, but by lunchtime she had spent most of what was in her purse. Many of the items would be delivered later, but the bombazine dress was now safely folded away in a cardboard box and she was wearing a new bright red dress, a patterned coat, a hat with a side peak, and a pair of high-heeled shoes, her first pair of high heels since university days. She felt slightly insecure in them, and almost lost her balance when crossing a road, but she would persist, and she was already feeling more confident about them.

  Her aunt examined the new outfits and expressed pleasure.

  “Very elegant,” she said.

  “Good,” said Flora.

  “And what plans have you for tomorrow?” asked the aunt.

  “Edinburgh,” said Flora. “I thought I might take a train to Edinburgh.”

  “And visit the museum?” asked the aunt.

  “Possibly,” said Flora. “But perhaps not this time.” That was not what she would do; she had other plans altogether.

  4

  The convent had few mirrors and Flora was not accustomed to admiring herself. That morning, though, as she prepared to leave her aunt’s house, she paused in front of the full-length dressing mirror on the front of her wardrobe. The person looking back at her was a stranger, or so it seemed to her, so accustomed had she become to the unchanging black and white garb of the last ten years. Now there was colour: the red of her new dress from Copeland’s in Sauchiehall Street; the russet and purple of the coat she had agonised over for so long before buying; the violet of the close-fitting, rather jaunty hat. Was that really her—Flora Marshall, the same Flora Marshall who only a week ago had been standing in front of a class of Senior Four girls explaining calculus to them, hoping that they would grasp what she was trying to convey? Telling Jean Abercrombie not to fiddle with her ruler; looking askance at Jennifer Morris, who was clearly thinking about boys because that particular expression—the one she had on her face at the moment—was exactly what these Senior Four girls looked like when they thought about boys, which she believed was remarkably often; warning Natalie MacNeil that if she continued to talk to Margaret Cousins she would be sent to stand outside for ten minutes? That was not much of a sanction on the face of it, but what if Mother Superior walked past—and she was inclined to prowl—and saw them? That was the real threat.

  She smiled at the thought. Sister Frances would have assumed responsibility for all that; Sister Frances, who had gasped with the shock of her announcement that she was leaving and had put her hand to her mouth as she had muttered, “May the Lord preserve us…” But then she had composed herself and said, as bravely as she could, “If the Lord wants me to take over Senior Four mathematics, then he must have his reasons.” Poor Sister Frances—a good soul, she had always felt—would never have a red dress like this or a violet hat; or any hat, for that matter. Poor Sister Frances would never board a train to Edinburgh, by herself, in high heels, with the capital waiting for her with all its possibilities and delights; poor Sister Frances would never savour the wicked but delicious sensation of contemplating Protestantism. And Father Sullivan could look at her reproachfully for as long as he liked, she was beyond his reach now. She imagined for a moment what she might say to Father Sullivan were she to meet him in Sauchiehall Street; she in her new finery and he in his accustomed black. Their conversation, she imagined, would be superficial and restrained; Father Sullivan was unfailingly polite. But then she might steer it in a more engaging direction and say something like, “Tell me, Father, I’ve never really asked you this, but what’s your view on the Reformation? Do you think it was timely, or even overdue?”

  She turned away from the mirror, and blushed. These thoughts were unworthy of her. Father Sullivan had been kind to her; it was quite wrong to heap on his shoulders any abuses that the Church might have been guilty of in the past; it was quite wrong to imply that the need for the Reformation was in some way his responsibility, as if he had asked for a reformation because of the way he had tolerated sixteenth-century clerical wrongdoing. Nor should she dwell on the thought of Sister Frances doing what she herself had been doing for all those years. There was nothing dishonourable in being called to educate Senior Four: quite the contrary, in fact—it was an entirely worthy thing to devote one’s life to the dispelling of ignorance. Girls were not born with a knowledge of trigonometry; they did not naturally understand what sines, cosines, and tangents were. It was a shameful thing, she decided, to revel in the distinction between her current position of freedom and the position she had been in only a few days ago.

  She looked back into the mirror and thought: A Protestant is looking back at me. And as she boarded the train at Queen Street Station, carefully, as her new high-heeled shoes were taking a bit of getting used to, she thought: Here’s a Protestant board
ing the train.

  She rolled the word around in her mouth, silently, without actually saying it out loud: Protestant. Protestant. It was one of those words that one uttered without thinking about what it really meant or where it came from. Protestants were the other; they were the people one did not marry; the people who supported Rangers rather than Celtic on the football field; they were the people who led godless, sometimes even sinful lives, doing what they wanted to do without any fear of the consequences for their immortal souls; Protestants were people who had fun…The last conclusion came unbidden. No, it could not be right—it had slipped out.

  Protestants protested. They did not accept things as they were. They said no to corruption and vainglory; they said no to status and hierarchy; they stood up and made their protest. Protestant.

  The train journey from Glasgow took not much more than an hour. They stopped at small stations on the way—Falkirk, Linlithgow—and various Protestants (they must be, she thought) got off the train, or boarded it. They sat down and read their papers or snatched a few minutes’ sleep before arriving in Edinburgh. They are not thinking the sort of thoughts I’m thinking, she told herself. They don’t know that I’m really Sister Flora underneath this red dress and violet hat—or have been Sister Flora for years—and that I’m heading to Edinburgh because I’ve decided that I want to start living, and it’s easier to start living in another place, where people don’t know you and have no preconceptions as to what you are like. In Glasgow she would always be Sister Flora, one of the nuns, one of the teachers at St. Catherine’s; in Edinburgh she would be Flora Marshall, a woman in a violet hat, who had views and interests all of her own, a woman quite willing to enjoy the company of men, provided, of course, they were the right sort of men—men interested in conversation and the arts; and Edinburgh was full of such men, she believed.

  At Waverley Station she made her way from the train towards the steps that led up to Princes Street. As she crossed the station concourse, under the sign that invoked the blessing of White Horse whisky, a shaft of light slanting down from the glass roof illuminated her progress, as a light falling from the sky might bathe a figure in a painting or stained-glass window, might fall on one who has been chosen for special attention, shown to us as a person who is about to do something significant, or be vouchsafed some special sign of favour. She was aware of the light about her; she felt its distant, attenuated warmth, and for a short while she hesitated, if only to savour the moment, conscious of the significance of what she was doing, feeling that she had somehow arrived at the point where an old life was consigned to the past and an entirely different life was being embarked upon. In this second life there would be new friends, and these would be people of her choosing, not just those with whom she happened to have grown up; there would be new people whose experience was quite different from her own, who had been to places she had never visited, who had insights into things she had never encountered, whose company would broaden her perspective beyond anything she had known before.

  She imagined that there were people who, if they started a new life, would be keen to hide or ignore the life they had led before. Those with social ambitions might do that sort of thing, she thought; might conceal their origins, or embroider a modest past, could even deny their parents and family. She had heard people talk about instances of that and had shared their distaste for such behaviour. She would not seek to disguise the fact that she had been a nun; indeed, in the circles in which she was planning to move, such a past might even seem exotic, might be an advantage. This is Flora—she was a nun, would you believe it? Yes, a nun! It would be like having served in the Foreign Legion or having lived somewhere remote and romantic. Who was that man, the father of one of her past Senior Four girls, who had been pointed out to her by Sister Frances at some school function? Who was said by Sister Frances to have lived in Biarritz? Biarritz—people must live in Biarritz, but what an aura it gave them. They must live ordinary lives at one level; they must get colds and go to the shops and do the laundry and so on, but then all of this happened in Biarritz, and that somehow transformed it.

  She reached the steps and started her climb up to Princes Street. A man brushed past her; he is in a hurry to get to the office, she thought, and he must be forgiven if he fails to apologise, as I am making my way up these steps far too slowly—in these heels—and he has somebody waiting for him at the other end, waiting and looking at his watch; but then the man stopped and raised his hat to her. He said, “I’m sorry—I wasn’t looking where I was going.” He spoke quietly, in what her mother would have described as an educated voice, and he smiled at her, revealing that one of his front teeth had been capped in gold—educated teeth, she thought, and returned his smile. But then he was gone, and she didn’t have the opportunity to follow up their brief encounter with some further remark, such as: “Yes, of course, we are all in a hurry these days, aren’t we?” As if we had not been in such a hurry in 1959 or 1960…To say we were all in a hurry was a simple comment, but it conveyed so much, including regret at having spent ten years teaching Senior Four mathematics and trying to stop them thinking about boys all the time. Mind you, she thought, Senior Four could do to contemplate the folly of spending a whole year—admittedly not ten, but still a whole year—thinking about boys.

  5

  Opposite the monument to Sir Walter Scott stood Jenners, the finest department store that Edinburgh could muster, as confident in itself as any such store could be, as all-encompassing, as tempting. She took a deep breath as she entered its front door, reminding herself that she was as entitled as anybody to shop in this place—more so, perhaps, as she had in her purse slightly over two hundred pounds in crisp Bank of Scotland notes: the balance of the float that Mr. O’Malley had left with the aunt. It was a vast sum, she felt—thirty pounds would have more than done, but she had decided that after ten years of spending nothing she could perhaps indulge herself. It occurred to her now that nobody else in Jenners would have two hundred pounds in her purse, and that she could hold her head high amongst any grand Edinburgh ladies. She immediately thought: Pride! and made a conscious effort to exclude such thoughts. She would, as penance, send a cheque for twenty pounds to the St. Vincent de Paul Society once her cheque book arrived; that was the least she could do. Penance: Would that notion remain with her for life—even if she became a Protestant? The thought brought a moment of gloom: You can take the girl out of the Church but you can’t take the Church out of the girl. They used to say that when they discussed girls who had strayed, and now she found herself applying the adage to herself. She swallowed hard. I am not Sister Flora, she muttered. I am no longer that person.

  She stopped at the perfume counter, where a woman in a black wool dress with a white lace collar showed her the latest offering from Paris. She bought a small square bottle, trying, but failing, to conceal her surprise at the cost. The woman noticed, and smiled apologetically. “I know,” she said. “But it’s the ambergris, I believe.”

  She hesitated, feeling the heavy cut-glass bottle. Ambergris was something to do with whales, and she was not sure what bearing whales had on perfume. “I don’t mind,” she said. “If you like something enough, then the price is always worth it.”

  She thought: What grounds do I have for saying that—I, who have bought nothing for years, and never bought perfume?

  There were other purchases, a pair of shoes, a blouse, a mohair cardigan, an Italian leather purse to replace the functional one lent her by her aunt. The Bank of Scotland notes, barely depleted, were tucked safely into this new purse and the battered older one tucked into the bag containing the shoes.

  Now the tea room beckoned. She knew of Jenners tea room—it was legendary, even in Glasgow, and stood for everything that was refined and grand in Edinburgh. Tea at Jenners was not to be taken lightly, but seriously and with good intentions.

  She was met by a young man in a morning suit, his hair smoothed down with pomade, the creases of his trousers knife-sha
rp. “I’m terribly sorry,” he said, “but we don’t have any tables free at the moment.”

  She surveyed the tea room and its sea of heads. She noticed the hats, and was relieved that she was wearing her own violet one.

  “Oh dear.”

  The young man craned his neck to look for a table that he might have missed. “We’re much busier than usual,” he said, “except at the sales, of course; it’s even busier then.”

  Two women nearby saw what was happening, and one of them called the young man over. When he returned he was smiling. “Those two ladies wondered whether you would care to join them,” he said. “They have a spare place.”

  She looked in their direction. Her eye was caught by one of the women, who smiled and pointed at the empty chair.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I shall be delighted.”

  She handed her parcels to the young man for safekeeping and made her way over to the table.

  “You’re very kind,” she said. “I don’t want to intrude.”

  “Not at all,” said one of the women. “There’s no point in having an empty chair, I always say.”

  “I’ve never seen it this crowded,” said the other.

  “Except at the sales,” said Flora.

  “Of course. Except at the sales.”

  They introduced one another. Her two new companions were called Helena and Marjorie. They were cousins, they explained. Helena lived in the country while Marjorie lived in the New Town. They met at the tea room every other Monday, they said.

  They looked at her expectantly, waiting for her to tell them something about her. She noticed their surreptitious glance at her left hand, and guessed—correctly—the reason.

  “I’m from Glasgow,” she said.

  “How nice,” said Marjorie.

  “Yes,” said Helena. “How very nice.”