The World According to Bertie 4ss-4

by Alexander McCall Smith

  96. Bruce Samples the Porsche Experience On the day that Matthew proposed – successfully – to Elspeth Harmony, Bruce went to see a motor dealer. The dealer knew Bruce’s future father-in-law and had received a call from him several days earlier on the subject of Bruce’s car; instructions were given, and the dealer in due course telephoned Bruce to arrange the appointment.

  For Bruce, this was the first result of the agreement he had reached with Graeme Donald following their meeting over dinner in Julia’s flat. Bruce had been surprised by the directness with which the older man had spoken. There had been no beating about the bush, no tactful references to vague possibilities: it had all been spelled out in the most unambiguous terms. Graeme Donald would see to it that his daughter’s husband would be well looked after.

  There would be an engagement, followed by a wedding, and once that was over, then the real benefits would begin to flow.

  Nothing could be simpler.

  The car, which went with the soon-to-be-assumed director-ship of the holding company (that would be put into effect after the wedding), would be an earnest of things to come, and, besides, with Bruce shortly assuming operational responsibility for the wine bar in George Street, transport would be necessary. So the call to the dealer was made.

  The dealer, who operated from a small showroom in Bruce Samples the Porsche Experience 327

  Morningside, was of course a freemason, and was a member of the same lodge as Graeme.

  “Julia’s young man is not in the craft yet,” said Graeme. “But that will be arranged soon enough. I think he’s sound enough.”

  As it happened, the dealer was not listening when Graeme said this, with the result that when Bruce arrived at his garage, he gave him a warm and prolonged handshake, in the course of which, using his thumb, he firmly pressed Bruce’s middle knuckle.

  At the same time, the dealer kept his heels together and the toes of his shoes out, thus forming an angle of exactly ninety degrees with his feet. This is what is known as being on the square and is a sure sign of masonic status.

  When Bruce felt his knuckles being pressed in this peculiar fashion, he misunderstood the signal. Of course these chaps go for me, he thought. Quite understandable, but he would have to give a signal that he played for the other team.

  “My girlfriend couldn’t come with me,” said Bruce, repeating, for emphasis, “Girlfriend.”

  The dealer smiled. “We’re better off without them,” he said, meaning, of course, that in his view the choosing of cars was really a male matter, best done by men.

  They moved on to the cars. “I have four Porsches in stock,”

  said the dealer. “All of them low mileage. Would you like to take a look?”

  Bruce nodded, and was shown over to the first of the Porsches, a silver model, a low-slung, sneaky-looking car.

  “Great cars,” said Bruce.

  “They go from nought to sixty like that,” said the dealer, snapping his fingers. “This one here is a 911 Turbo.” He patted the top of the car. “You’ll be wondering about the difference between it and the GT3? A few facts and figures?”

  “Great,” said Bruce, bending down to look in the window.

  “Maximum Torque (Nm) at rpm in the Turbo is 620 Nm (with overboot to 680 Nm),” the dealer began. He paused, while Bruce absorbed this information. “Whereas, with the GT3 –

  and that red car over there, that’s a GT3 – the max torque is 328 Bruce Samples the Porsche Experience 405 Nm. Also,” and here he raised a finger, “also, there’s a different compression ratio. 9.0:1 in the Turbo, and 12.0:1 in the GT3. Mind you, there’s a bottom line.”

  “There always is,” said Bruce.

  “Yes,” said the dealer. “The bottom line is this: the maximum speed in each case is 193 mph. Tops. That’s the max.”

  Bruce looked thoughtful. “Not bad,” he said.

  The dealer nodded. “Dr Porsche is working on pushing that up a bit, but for the time being, 193 mph it is.”

  Bruce opened the door of the silver car and slid into the driver’s seat. He held the leather-covered steering wheel and gazed at the array of instruments. This was very good. At 193

  miles per hour, it would take him how long to reach Glasgow from Edinburgh? That was about three miles a minute, which meant that one would divide forty by three, to get just over thir-teen. So he could reach Glasgow in fourteen minutes!

  Bruce looked up at the dealer, who was standing by the door, looking down on him, smiling. “Could we take this for a test drive?” he asked.

  The dealer nodded. “Of course. If you hold on a moment, I’ll get the key.”

  Bruce moved his hands gently up and down the steering wheel and then felt the gear lever. The head of the lever was covered with leather and silver, with a little Porsche symbol on the top.

  The dealer came back, lowered himself into the passenger seat and passed the keys over to Bruce. “It’s all yours,” he said.

  Bruce switched on the engine and listened appreciatively to the throaty roar which resulted. “You can get that sound as a ring-tone for your mobile phone,” said the dealer. “That’s what I have on my own phone.”

  “Great,” said Bruce.

  “All right,” said the dealer. “Let’s take her out.”

  The silver car slipped out onto the road outside the showroom.

  Bruce felt the power of the engine as he pressed down on the accelerator, a strong, throbbing feeling, as if there were something live within the machine, some great, stirring creature. He pressed the accelerator down farther, and the roar, and the power, grew.

  Bruce Samples the Porsche Experience 329

  They soon found themselves up in the Braids, where the comparatively empty roads allowed Bruce to increase his speed.

  This was heady, intoxicating.

  “Feel the G-forces!” said Bruce, giving the engine its head for a few seconds.

  “Serious,” said the dealer. “Really serious G-forces.”

  They turned round, the car engine making a satisfactory growl even at idling speed. Then they drove back to the showroom.

  “Fantastic,” said Bruce. “That’s the one.”

  The salesman looked awkward, and Bruce frowned. Had he already sold that model – in which case, what was the point of letting him take the vehicle out for a test drive?

  “Well, actually,” the dealer began, “your father-in-law, if I may call him that, has already chosen something for you.”

  Bruce looked puzzled. “Chosen?”

  “Yes,” said the dealer. “You’re to get a GT3, I’m afraid. The red one over there.”

  Bruce bit his lip. “Then why let me drive the Turbo?”

  The dealer smiled. “I wanted you to have the best Porsche experience you could,” he said. “And that’s with the Turbo. But the GT3 is still a great car.”

  Bruce turned away. It had suddenly occurred to him that he was walking into something for which he might not have bargained.

  Trapped, he thought; I’m trapped. But was it better, he wondered, to be trapped with a Porsche or not trapped without a Porsche?

  The former, he decided.

  97. Do We Have to Love Our Neighbour?

  Domenica Macdonald looked at her watch. Five o’clock in the afternoon. As Lorca observed, she thought, at that terrible five in the afternoon. A las cinco de la tarde. It was five in the afternoon by all the clocks, said Lorca. And five sounded so sinister, so final (in spite of the existence of six o’clock). Three-thirty had no such associations. Somehow, it did not seem quite so sombre, so tragic, to say: it was at three-thirty in the afternoon.

  Ah, that terrible three-thirty in the afternoon! Three o’clock seemed somehow more innocent, less brooding, than five, as Rupert Brooke sensed when he referred to the church clock standing at ten-to-three. Nothing ominous happened at ten-to-three, as opposed to five minutes to midnight (a dreadful, worrying time) or, of course, five in the afternoon.

  She looked out of her window on
to Scotland Street, where the evening shadows were beginning to lengthen. It was a fine evening, something for which she was grateful, as she had chosen it for the dinner party she had long been planning to mark her safe return from the Malacca Straits, back to Edinburgh, into the bosom of the New Town and those who made up her circle of friends. She remembered how, before she had left for Malaysia, she had been joined in this very room by those self-same friends. She remembered how Angus had made a speech, as he always did on such occasions, and how his speech – which was quite touching – had modulated into a poem about small places, as she recalled. The poem had said something about being grateful for the small scale, for the local, for the minor things that gave meaning to life. And Angus was right: these things were being forgotten in the headlong rush into globalisation, which drained identity out of life, rendered it distant, impersonal. Thank heavens, thought Domenica, for the Royal Bank of Scotland, which still had people round the corner to whom one could speak on the telephone, unlike others, who put one through to India, or Sri Lanka, or even Wales. That was a good object lesson for the Do We Have to Love Our Neighbour? 331

  rest: the Royal Bank of Scotland was a global bank, but they still knew how important it was to remain rooted. That made Domenica proud. People made a big fuss about sporting heroes – some of whom were pretty ghastly, she thought – but nobody seemed to make a fuss of bankers. And yet they did great things and made piles of money. The big challenge, though, was to get them to share it . . . and also to make sure that they were nice to people with overdrafts.

  Domenica herself had no overdraft, but she suspected that virtually everybody else had one. An overdraft was a rite of passage, in a sense; one went from pocket-money as a child straight into the world of overdraft as a student. And many people remained there, never graduating to the really adult phase when their bank account was in credit. Anthropology had paid little attention to this, she reflected. There were plenty of studies on debt bondage patterns elsewhere, but few, if any, on such bondage in urban Western societies. In some countries, one might be reduced to virtual slavery, saddled with debts incurred by one’s grandfather, and labouring endlessly just to pay the interest. But here, for many, the sentence was not all that dissimilar, even if the debt was not inherited.

  She thought about her friends and wondered how many of them lived on an overdraft. Angus Lordie, she thought, was one.

  His finances were a closed book to her; she knew that he received commissions for portraits, but these were sporadic, and she doubted if he made a great deal from them. Angus occasionally painted opulent people, and charged accordingly, but his strong democratic instincts, so deeply rooted in the Scottish psyche, also inclined him to paint those whose pockets were not so deep, indeed were shallow, or had large holes in them; these people he painted for nothing, or next to nothing. Which was wonderful, thought Domenica, and meant that the future record of what Scottish people looked like would be a far more balanced one than the record we had from the past, when artists painted only the wealthy. So we know what rich faces looked like in those days, but we had little idea of what the features of the indigent 332 Do We Have to Love Our Neighbour?

  were like. No, that, she decided, was nonsense, but it had been an interesting thought.

  Yet how did Angus survive? Of course he had relatively few outgoings, as he appeared to eat very little, probably rather less than that dog of his. And his studio was really rather cold most of the time, which suggested that he did not have large gas bills.

  So perhaps he was all right after all, and she need not worry.

  Of course it was tempting to speculate on the personal finances of others – what greater pleasure is there than to see somebody else’s bank statement, a guilty pleasure of course, and a furtive one, but tremendously interesting? But it was not a healthy thing to do, and Domenica decided that if she saw Angus Lordie’s bank statement lying around, she would fold it up and return it to him, without looking. Or perhaps without looking a great deal.

  But for this evening, as she stared out at Scotland Street, at the sun on the tops of the roofs, so beautiful, so beguiling, she reflected that she had spared no expense, or trouble, in preparing the meal for her friends. With their pre-dinner drink they would have Spanish olives from Hasta Mañana in Bruntsfield, generous olives the size of small ping-pong balls.

  Then they would sit down to table, to a salmon timbale made with smoked salmon from the smokehouse in Dunbar, followed by a venison cassoulet, and finally a sort of apple tart which she had constructed and covered with strips of pastry in Celtic designs (a touch of which she felt inordinately proud).

  She looked at her watch again. Twenty minutes had passed in reverie, and it was time to get things ready. She hesitated.

  She had not invited Antonia, and now she felt the first twinges of guilt; perhaps she should go and ask her right now, at the last moment. But do we really have to love our neighbour? she wondered. Really?

  Domenica looked out of the window again. The sky was clear, with just the slightest trace of cloud, high, attenuated, so delicate. And the answer came to her quite clearly: yes, we do.

  Thus do epiphanies come in Scotland Street, as elsewhere in The Domenica Connection Becomes Clear 333

  Edinburgh, across the tops of roofs, from an empty sky, when the city’s fragile beauty can touch the heart so profoundly, so unexpectedly.

  98. The Domenica Connection Becomes Clear

  “Olives!” said Angus Lordie, reaching out to the bowl which Domenica had placed on the table. “Yes,” said Domenica. “For you – and others. So please don’t eat them all. Exercise restraint if you can, Angus.”

  Angus gave her a reproachful look – as if he, of all people, with his ascetic attitudes – would exercise anything but restraint.

  But if he looked reproachful he did not feel it; quite the opposite in fact: Angus liked to be told off by Domenica, and the more she scolded him, the more he liked it. What a masterful woman, he thought, so calm, so assured; so much like . . . Mother.

  The realisation came to him quite suddenly. Domenica was his mother. That was why he liked her; that was why he did not mind being told what to do and what not to do, especially at the table. Now it was olives; all those years ago it had been soor plooms that the late Patricia Lordie, wife of Fitzroy Lordie, innovative agriculturist and pioneering figure in the Perthshire soft-fruit industry, told her son Angus not to eat in excess; but the tone, and the authority, was much the same. Women are here to tell us what to do, thought Angus; that is why they are here, and we are here to do their bidding.

  Angus looked at Domenica with moist, admiring eyes. How comfortable it would be to be married to her, to have her running his life for him, looking after him. They would breakfast together in this very room, looking out over the tops of the roofs, with the glorious day before them. They could discuss what was in the news – or such bits as bore discussion – and then they would take a walk and Angus would go to Valvona & Crolla, with a list drawn up by Domenica, to purchase whatever it was that

  334 The Domenica Connection Becomes Clear she needed in order to prepare the evening meal. Oh bliss! Oh sheer matrimonial bliss!

  But then it occurred to him that none of this would be possible, fond though its imagining might be, for the simple reason that Domenica did not like Cyril. She had made this perfectly clear to him – and to Cyril – on a number of occasions, and she would never agree to having the dog live with them. But this practical obstacle did not stand too much in the way of fantasy, and in his mind’s eye he saw the pair of them standing before the altar at St John’s in Princes Street, he in his kilt, Domenica in an elegant cream-coloured outfit, while beside him, neatly groomed, Cyril watched proceedings with interest. They could modify the vows, perhaps: do you, Domenica, take this man, and his dog

  . . . No, it was impossible. And Angus could hardly fire Cyril after all those years of devotion that the dog had shown him.

  No, it could never be. />
  Domenica looked at her watch. Angus always arrived half an hour early at her parties, something which she encouraged, as it gave them time to discuss the guests before they came. She often consulted Angus on the proposed guest list and was prepared to strike people off if he raised a sufficiently weighty objection.

  “Oh, we can’t have her,” Angus once said, pointing to a name on Domenica’s list for an earlier dinner party. “She talks about nothing but herself. All the time. Have you noticed it? Yak, yak, yak. Moi, moi, moi.”

  The Domenica Connection Becomes Clear 335

  “True,” said Domenica, drawing a line through the name.

  “Mind you, that is the most perennially fascinating subject, don’t you find? Ourselves.”

  Angus thought about this. He did not talk about himself, and so he could not agree, but when he thought of others he could see the truth of Domenica’s observation. Most people were delighted to talk about themselves and their doings, asked or unasked.

  “And we can’t have him,” he said, pointing at another name.

  “Because if we have him, then we can’t have her. And if one had to choose, I would have thought that she was the one we really wanted.”

  Domenica scrutinised the list. “Yes,” she said. “I’d forgotten about that. Was it true, do you think? Do you think that he really did that?”

  “Apparently he did,” said Angus, shaking his head over the foibles of humanity. Edinburgh was a city that took note of these things. Indeed, he had heard that there was a book somewhere in Heriot Row in which these things were all written down, so that they could be remembered. The book, he had been told, was in the hands of a carefully chosen committee (although anybody was entitled to nominate an incident for inclusion), and went back as far as 1956. It had once been proposed that the record should be expunged ten years after an event, but this suggestion had been turned down on the grounds that many of the older scandals still gave a great deal of enjoyment to people and it would be wrong to deprive them of that.