Chance Developments: Unexpected Love Stories

by Alexander McCall Smith

  This was followed by a silence.

  “I was a teacher,” Flora continued. “I only gave it up about ten days ago. I taught mathematics to girls.” She did not say where.

  “It’s such an important subject,” said Marjorie. “I was hopeless at it, although my husband is pretty good. He’s an actuary. That’s all mathematics, I think.”

  “And luck,” said Helena.

  The waiter came to take Flora’s order.

  “The sandwiches look particularly good today,” said Helena. “But they always do.”

  Flora ordered a pot of tea and a plate of sandwiches.

  “You’ve come to Edinburgh to do some shopping?” asked Helena.

  Flora looked up at the ornate ceiling. She did not enjoy small talk; she never had. And now, quite suddenly, she felt the need to talk about something that mattered. She turned to Helena. “Actually,” she said, “I’ve come over to Edinburgh in the hope that I might meet a man.”

  It was so easy to say, and yet so utterly shocking. She felt as if she had impulsively stripped herself and was now naked. It was an extraordinary feeling—to say something so utterly shameless, in these surroundings, and in the company of two women whom she had only just met. That feeling of liberation that she had experienced on a number of occasions since leaving the convent, that light-headed sensation of release, now came back to her. It was an outrageous thing to say, but it was completely honest. That was what had been in the back of her mind all along. She might call it a shopping trip, but it was far more than that, and she might as well confess it.

  For a moment neither of the other women said anything. Then Helena burst out laughing.

  “Did I hear correctly?” she said. “Did you say you’d come to Edinburgh to find a man?”

  Flora nodded. “That’s exactly what I said.”

  Now Marjorie giggled. “Well, at least you’re honest.”

  “Yes,” said Helena. “Most of us are…”

  “...dishonest about that sort of thing,” finished Marjorie.

  “Exactly,” said Helena.

  Flora saw that there was real warmth in their smiles. “I know,” she said. “You see, I was a nun for ten years.”

  Helena gasped. “An actual nun? The real thing?”

  “Yes. It was a teaching order. I was Sister Flora. But I decided that I’d had enough.”

  They were staring at her open-mouthed. “Please forgive us,” said Marjorie, “but it’s not every day one goes to Jenners tea room and meets somebody who was a nun and who’s now looking for a man.”

  “Exactly,” said Helena.

  Marjorie leaned forward. “I hope you don’t mind my asking,” she said, “but how are you planning to meet this man?”

  Flora thought for a moment. It was a morning for honesty, and she would not pretend to have a plan when she had none. “I have no idea,” she said. “I’ve never really thought about it.”

  Helena and Marjorie exchanged glances.

  “You see,” said Marjorie, “it’s not all that easy…We know a lot about it, you see.” She glanced again at Helena, who nodded encouragement. “Helena and I are both currently without husbands.”

  “Mine died,” said Helena, “and Marjorie’s just, well…”

  “Went off with another woman,” said Marjorie. “They do that, you see—they go off if you’re unlucky.”

  “Water under the bridge,” said Helena.

  “Yes,” agreed Marjorie. “No sense in dwelling on the past.” Then she added, “She was a little strumpet, you know. And interested in one thing, and one thing alone.”

  “Two things, if you count money,” added Helena.

  They were silent as the waitress brought Flora’s tea and a large plate of sandwiches.

  “I can’t eat all of those myself,” said Flora. “I hope that you’ll help me.”

  Both Helena and Marjorie took a sandwich before Flora had a chance to help herself.

  “So kind of you,” said Helena.

  “Yes,” said Marjorie. “So kind.”

  “Marjorie may have some ideas,” said Helena, through a mouthful of egg sandwich. “She’s very good at doing these things.”

  “What things?” asked Flora.

  “Finding suitable men,” answered Helena. “Arranging little lunch parties.”

  “I enjoy it,” said Marjorie. “I’ve successfully brought together three couples over the last eighteen months. That’s a better record than some professionals have.”

  “Professionals who run marriage bureaux,” explained Helena. “Sometimes those places make grossly exaggerated claims. They charge ridiculous fees and then they come up with some very unpromising material.”

  Flora wondered why Marjorie had not yet found a man for herself if she was so good at it. “But in your case?” she said, looking at Marjorie.

  “Oh, I’m extremely fussy,” said Marjorie, quite cheerfully. “I’m looking for a particular sort of man—and I’m in no hurry.”

  “Whereas I am,” said Flora, half-seriously.

  Marjorie wiped a crumb off her lips. “It so happens that I’m having a little lunch party today.”

  Helena looked at her watch. “Oh, come on, darling: it’s half past ten already.”

  “It would be no trouble to lay an extra place,” said Marjorie. She looked at Flora. “Would you like that, Miss Marshall?”

  “Flora, please,” said Flora, remembering just in time not to say Sister Flora.

  “Would you like that, Flora?”

  Flora hesitated. She was not sure that she was ready. It was easy enough to talk about meeting men, but the actual business of speaking to them was quite another matter. She was not even sure what one talked to men about. She could say a lot about Senior Four and their problems, but would men be interested in hearing about the little ways of schoolgirls? Even some of the racier bits?

  She made up her mind. “Yes, please—if it’s no trouble. I should hate to be any trouble.”

  “None at all,” said Marjorie. “But we’d better get along, I think. I have a maid, but she needs to be supervised—you know how these women are.”

  Flora nodded. “Oh yes,” she said. You don’t, she said to herself. You have been a servant yourself. Remember that.

  She paid the bill for all three of them, and left a handsome tip.

  “Very generous,” said Helena, eyeing the tip. “But one should be careful not to encourage excessive expectations.”

  Flora noticed that Marjorie’s eyes had been fixed on the new wallet, the bulging wad of Bank of Scotland notes having caught her attention. She thought for a moment, and then said, “My ship has come in. I had an uncle over near Greenock. He left me everything, you see.”

  “Ah,” said Helena.

  “You’re very lucky,” said Marjorie. “That should make it much easier to find a man—much, much easier.”

  “Marjorie, darling!” scolded Helena.

  “But it’s a truth universally acknowledged,” said Marjorie lightly. “Jane Austen would have understood perfectly.”

  “Perhaps,” said Helena. “But I’m not altogether convinced that we should always reveal everything we have in mind.”

  “Oh, nonsense!” said Marjorie, and smiled mischievously at Flora.

  I’m so glad I’ve found you, thought Flora.

  As they left the tea room, Marjorie whispered to her, “You know, Flora, men must like you—with your looks.”

  This came as a surprise. “I’m not sure…”

  “No need for false modesty,” said Marjorie. “You’re a very beautiful woman, you know. Men will not be indifferent to that.”

  She floundered. She had never thought about her looks—or, at least, not for a long time. “I don’t know about that,” she said at last.

  “Well, I do,” said Marjorie. “And I’m telling you. You are not going to find this difficult. Quite the opposite, in fact. You’ll be fighting them off, my dear.”

  Helena had overheard this. �
�Marjorie is rarely wrong,” she said.

  6

  The lunch party was held in Marjorie’s house in Great King Street. This was a Georgian town house, one room wide but with four floors and a basement. The dining room gave off a large drawing room, both with floor-to-ceiling windows into which light flooded from both north and south. On the walls of the drawing room were several Scots colourist paintings, lively to the point of exuberance, adding splashes of red and yellow.

  The maid had wasted time polishing silver, with the result that the cooking was behind schedule.

  “Look at us,” said Marjorie, glaring at the maid. “Completely unprepared.”

  Helena and Flora both helped—Flora peeling potatoes for the salad while Helena arranged plates of cold meat and cheese.

  “Five guests,” said Marjorie, reeling off a list of names to which Helena responded with a nod or a shake of the head. There were four men and one woman. “I like to keep the odds in our favour,” she continued. “I can’t be doing with those occasions in which there are equal numbers of men and women. Why on earth do people do it? Can’t they count?”

  “To give everybody a chance,” said Helena.

  “Oh, nonsense,” said Marjorie.

  Flora wondered whether her new friend said Oh, nonsense to everything with which she disagreed. How she would have loved to say that to Mother Superior or Father Sullivan. The occasional Oh, nonsense would have stopped them in their tracks, but nobody dared, of course. It was Protestants who said Oh, nonsense; they had been saying that since the sixteenth century.

  They were ready just in time.

  “You see what I mean about her,” whispered Marjorie, nodding in the direction of the kitchen stairs. “She had done nothing but polish the silver—of all things!”

  “You’ll have to get rid of her,” said Helena. “You can’t be held hostage to that sort of thing.”

  Marjorie looked at her watch. “Well, I’ll think about it. The problem is: these people won’t work.”

  Flora turned away. There was something about this whispered conversation that she did not like. She had exchanged no more than a few words with the maid, but they had smiled at one another and there had been a current of unspoken fellow-feeling. She had noticed that the maid had a rash on her wrist—some sort of skin complaint, she thought. Doing the washing up would not help that, she decided. There was a saint for skin disorders—Saint Lazarus, was it not? She could light a candle to Saint Lazarus…but then she remembered that candles were a thing of the past, and that if they were to be lit it would be by others; she would miss them, of course, as she always loved the smell they made when extinguished—a smell that was redolent of childhood and mystery and the love of her late parents whom she missed so sorely, even now.

  One floor below, a doorbell rang. Marjorie brightened. “Alan Miller,” she said. “I bet you ten shillings it’s him. On the dot of one. He’s like that German painter they used to set their watches by in Berlin. He always went for his walk at exactly the same time.”

  “Actually, darling,” said Helena, “it was a philosopher. Immanuel Kant. And it was Königsberg, not Berlin.”

  Marjorie brushed aside the correction. “Be that as it may, the point remains—it’ll be Alan, and Geoffrey Inver with him.” She turned to Flora. “Alan is mid-forties, and so, I believe, is Geoffrey. They’ve been sharing a flat for a long time—much cheaper that way. Gloucester Place. They’re both lawyers, but different sorts of lawyers, I think. Very charming.”

  “They’d both make very good husbands,” said Helena. “It’s a pity one could only marry one of them—otherwise you’d be able to get two for the price of one.”

  Marjorie seemed shocked by this. “Helena, darling!”

  “Just a joke,” said Helena.

  “Isn’t it strange,” said Marjorie, “how polygamy—where it’s permitted—allows men to have multiple wives but does not allow women to have multiple husbands?”

  “Would any woman want more than one husband?” asked Flora.

  Helena laughed. “Good point,” she said.

  They heard voices on the stair. A few minutes later, ushered in by the maid, two men appeared.

  “Darling!” said the taller of the men, stepping forward to embrace Marjorie. He kissed her on both cheeks. “And other darling,” he said to Helena. “Every bit as lovely, of course.”

  He stopped at Flora. “And who have we here?”

  Marjorie made the introductions. “Flora, this is Alan Miller. And this is Geoffrey Inver.” The other man stepped forward and took Flora’s hand. He inclined his head rather than trying to kiss her.

  Marjorie continued. “Flora is from Glasgow.”

  “Glasgow!” exclaimed Alan. “How brave!”

  “So near and yet so far,” said Geoffrey, making a vague gesture with his right hand.

  A further male guest arrived and then, shortly afterwards, another—accompanied by a woman. The man who came by himself was called Richard Snow. The other man was Thomas McGibbon, who arrived with a thin, rather nervous-looking woman in her forties who simply gave her name as Lizzie. “Lizzie is a sculptress,” explained Marjorie in an aside to Flora. “Hence the intensity.”

  “Are they?” asked Flora, looking across the room at Lizzie.

  “Are who what?”

  “Sculptresses…are they intense?”

  Marjorie looked at her as if she had asked the most obvious of questions. “But of course they are, dear. Very intense people, I’ve found.”

  Flora thought: I’ve never met a sculptress. Here I am, thirty-two, and I’ve never met a sculptress. She wondered what Sister Frances would make of a sculptress: they would be chalk and cheese, she thought, with poor Sister Frances’s complete lack of intensity.

  Marjorie gave everybody a glass of sherry and then, fifteen minutes later, announced, “Alla tavola!” Flora smiled: she could work out what that meant, although she had never heard it before. So that was what people said in sophisticated circles: alla tavola.

  They sat down. She found herself with Richard Snow on her right and Geoffrey Inver on her left. Geoffrey spoke to her first, as they started the soup.

  “So,” he said. “Glasgow.”

  As he spoke, she noticed that a small rivulet of courgette soup dribbled down his chin; soup was a challenge to some people, she thought: sent by the Lord to try us, as Sister Beatrice was fond of saying of any irritation, from traffic lights to the more recalcitrant members of Senior Four.

  She was not sure how to respond to Geoffrey Inver, but decided to say, “Yes.” It was not enough, she felt, for somebody simply to say “Glasgow” and leave it at that.

  It was as if he realised that himself. “I must spend more time in Glasgow,” he said. “There it is, only forty miles away, and one spends so little time there. Perhaps next year. Who knows?”

  “There’s a lot going on in Glasgow,” said Flora.

  Geoffrey nodded. “So they say.”

  “There’s the Citizens’ Theatre,” she ventured. She had never been there. Nuns did not go to the Citizens’ Theatre, but for a few moments she imagined Mother Superior sitting in the front row with Father Sullivan on one side of her and Sister Frances on the other. Poor Sister Frances would have difficulty understanding the play and would have to have it explained to her by Father Sullivan, who had a reputation for being able to make things understandable.

  She continued a desultory conversation with Geoffrey, but realised that he was bored. At first she was discouraged, but then she thought: What does it matter if he finds me boring? What does his own life amount to? Being a lawyer in Edinburgh, going to lunch parties like this? What’s so special about that?

  She was able to turn to Richard Snow once the soup plates had been taken away. He seemed keen to engage in conversation, beginning by asking her how she knew Marjorie. “Jenners,” she replied, without thinking much about it. She had not intended it to be taken as a witty answer, but it was.

  He smiled
. “That’s the place to meet,” he said. “I can imagine people saying to themselves: ‘Oh, I need to go and buy a pair of socks and make a few new friends—I must go to Jenners.’ ”

  She laughed. “It wasn’t quite like that.”

  “Of course not.”

  She looked sideways at him; a quick look of appraisal. He was forty-something, she thought, and he had weathered well. His complexion was tanned and healthy—as if he enjoyed hill-walking or sailing, or something else that took him out into the open air. Her gaze slipped to his left hand: there was no ring.

  He asked her what she did.

  “I used to teach,” she said.

  “What a wonderful job.”

  She was surprised, but pleased at his response. “Sometimes,” she said.

  “I wouldn’t have the patience,” he said.

  “They can try such patience as one has,” she said, thinking of Senior Four, and of Natalie MacNeil in particular. She hesitated, and then continued, “There’s a girl called Natalie MacNeil. She tried my patience more than any of the others. Dreadful girl.” It was strangely liberating to describe Natalie MacNeil in this way, even if it was distinctly uncharitable.

  He laughed. “I think I can picture her rather well. But what was the problem?”

  “Boys,” said Flora, feeling slightly daring. She had never before had a conversation like this with a man—Father Sullivan, of course, did not count. “Her mind was full of boys.”

  “Ah,” said Richard Snow, smiling.

  They continued their conversation through the main course and into the dessert. Then, when they left the table for coffee, Richard Snow said, “Let’s go and sit by the window.”

  He told her what he did. “I have a small shipping firm,” he said. “It’s very small beer as these things go. We have five vessels—that’s all.”

  She asked him where they went.

  “They’re very unadventurous,” he said. “Glasgow to Hamburg. Leith to Stavanger. That sort of thing. We don’t go far.”

  “Do you suffer from sea-sickness?” she asked.

  He laughed. “I don’t actually go on the ships themselves,” he said. “I arrange the cargoes—that sort of thing.”