The Revolving Door of Life

by Alexander McCall Smith

  It was unfair of Elspeth to criticise him for carrying hand sanitiser. He had seen her use it herself, and he also remembered how careful she had been in the days when she had still been teaching. He remembered her exact words. “Children,” she said, “are walking reservoirs of infection. They get everything and they pass it on really efficiently. And you should smell their hands! They look very cute but smell their hands! Disgusting!” She had gone on to tell him how she had always carried a packet of wet wipes with which she would discreetly wipe the hands and faces of the smellier children and then give them a quick spray from a small bottle of personal freshener that she kept with the wet wipes. She did all that—quite sensibly—and yet she laughed at his carrying his hand sanitiser.

  “So you haven’t got any?”

  Elspeth sounded short. “Of course I haven’t. And look, we’re going into a concealed room and you’re going on about hand sanitiser!”

  “Sorry,” said Matthew. “It’s just that I suddenly remembered those archaeologists and I thought…”

  “Matthew!”

  “All right, all right.”

  They went into the room, the beam of the torch moving quickly round its confines.

  “It’s a storeroom,” said Elspeth. “That’s all it is.”

  Matthew sounded disappointed. “I’d rather hoped…” He was not sure what he had hoped. Certainly he would have preferred something different and not these stacks of ordinary household articles, exactly the sort of thing that one would expect to find in a typical attic.

  There was a child’s toy pram. There was a rolled-up rug, tied with white string. There were several dining-room chairs, stacked one upon another. There was an old leather suitcase on which the labels of shipping companies had been stuck and then inexpertly peeled off. There was a typewriter—one of those old uprights that weighed so much they were almost impossible to lift. There was a canvas stretcher bed, half-folded, its crisscross legs an example of the intricate over-engineering of the time.

  And then Matthew saw the pictures. “May I have the torch?”

  Elspeth passed it to him. “That typewriter…”

  “No, it’s not that. It’s the pictures. Look, over there.”

  They were stacked against the far wall, four of them, a cloth of some sort draped over their top, as if to conceal them. But their shape revealed what lay beneath.

  Matthew negotiated his way between the stretcher bed and the suitcase and stood before the pictures. Slowly and somewhat gingerly he took off the dusty cloth and laid it to one side. Then he bent down to look at the first of the pictures. Elspeth joined him.

  “What are they?” she asked. “The glass on that one looks broken.”

  “Just cracked,” said Matthew.

  He handed the torch back to Elspeth while he lifted up the painting. “Just shine it on the middle bit there. That’s it.”

  He drew in his breath.

  “What?” asked Elspeth.

  He did not answer, and so she said, “What?” again.

  But he did not answer. He was rapt.

  28. French Intimisme

  “I’m pretty sure this is James Cowie,” muttered Matthew.

  Elspeth leaned over his shoulder to get a better view of the painting. As she did so, the beam of the torch moved, to fall on the painting behind the one they were examining. Only a small part of it was visible, but it was enough to elicit a gasp from Matthew.

  “Fergusson,” he said.

  “Let’s take them into the drawing room,” said Elspeth. “We can’t really see them in here.”

  Matthew picked up the first of the paintings and carried it gingerly back past the now detached bookcase. He returned for the other three, coughing from the dust that had settled on the frames in spite of the covering cloth.

  “These must have been here for ages,” he said, as he laid the final painting against a sofa. “Years and years.”

  Elspeth joined him, brushing the dust off her hands. “I’ll fetch the vacuum cleaner,” she said. “I don’t want the boys to be exposed to all this dust.” Tobermory, she suspected, had a slight tendency to asthma and she did not want him to start one of his sneezing attacks.

  While Elspeth was out of the room, Matthew bent down to examine the Cowie. It was a finely worked watercolour, the subject being what appeared to be an artist’s studio. Two girls and a boy, young enough still to be in their teens, were perched on high stools while before them was an easel holding a drawing block. One of the girls was staring directly out of the picture, her face passive but somehow expectant. The other girl and the boy were gazing out of the window, their attention held by something beyond the scope of the painting.

  Elspeth returned with the vacuum cleaner.

  “Their clothes,” said Matthew. “Look at their clothes.”

  “Nineteen thirties? Forties?”

  “Yes,” said Matthew. “The children in Cowie’s paintings all wear the same things—the girls wear a sort of tunic—you see it there—the boys have these long shorts. Schoolchildren of the time were dressed like that.”

  “And the faces,” mused Elspeth.

  Matthew nodded. “Yes. Innocent, weren’t they?”

  “Unlike modern teenagers?”

  Matthew smiled. “Modern teenagers look more knowing.”

  “And jaded?”

  “Much more. They’ve seen it all, haven’t they? On the web.”

  He took out a handkerchief and rubbed it across the face of the glass. “Cowie taught up at Hospitalfield,” he said. “You know, that place up in Angus. We went there for a jazz evening with Alan Steadman.”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  “This was probably painted up in Aberdeen, though. These are schoolchildren.”

  “And the other paintings?”

  Matthew took a deep breath. He had already looked at the Fergusson, and he was sure of that. But there were two more, both glazed and shrouded in dust. “We should use the vacuum on those two,” he said. “The dust’s really thick. I’ll do it.”

  He plugged in the cleaner and placed the head up against the glass of one of the paintings. As the machine whined into life, the dust flew off the surface; there was a glint of silver from where the glass now reflected the light. Pushing the vacuum head backwards and forwards, he had soon removed the dust. He turned to the other.

  Elspeth watched him with anticipation. “And?” she said.

  Matthew switched off the vacuum cleaner and crouched down in front of the two paintings. “Both are oil on canvas,” he said. “I’m glad that whoever had these had the good sense to put them behind the glass. Otherwise all that dust would have been on the surface itself.”

  “And?” prompted Elspeth again.

  “I have no idea what this one is,” he said, pointing to the larger of the two. He put on his art-dealer’s voice. “An unremarkable nineteenth-century genre painting, probably. Highland cattle? Yes, there they are. A stag? Yes, in the background.”

  He moved to the next. She watched him. It fascinated her to see Matthew reacting to a painting; she had seen him doing this before. You could almost see the thought process, the elimination of possibilities, the reaction to some deep, inbuilt feeling for what was before him.

  She did not want to rush him, but she was excited. If the others were a Cowie and a Fergusson, then this was not just a collection of odd bits and pieces. Fergusson was one of the most highly prized of the Scottish Colourists, and Cowie, although less widely appreciated, was interesting.

  “Anything?” she asked.

  Matthew said nothing. Now he reached forward and lifted up the painting, holding it at such an angle that the light fell more directly on it.

  “This isn’t Scottish,” he said.

  She saw that the picture was of a kitchen scene. A woman stood at a cooking range with her back to the artist; above the range, a line of copper saucepans was hanging; a rabbit, trussed for the larder, had been tossed onto a pine table to the woman’s right,
its fate the pot. The painting had a richness to it; reds predominated, with orange and copper in support. There was a visible warmth to the painting that emanated from the range with its glowing heart and its steaming pan.

  “That’s a French kitchen,” said Elspeth. She was not sure why she said this; she simply knew.

  Matthew agreed. “You know what this is,” he said quietly. “Not only is it French, but it’s…” He turned to face Elspeth. “Edouard Vuillard.”

  Elspeth’s knowledge of art history was sketchy, but she had picked up the outlines.

  “Bonnard and Vuillard. That Vuillard?”

  Matthew’s face broke into a smile. “Yes, that Vuillard. One of the French intimistes.”

  She reached out to touch the painting. It was as if she wanted to satisfy herself that it was real.

  “Obviously I’ll have to ask Belinda,” said Matthew.

  “Belinda?”

  “Belinda Thomson. She’s the Vuillard expert and she lives in Edinburgh. She’s the person who authenticated that Vuillard café scene last year.”

  “And if it is?” asked Elspeth.

  “If Belinda says it’s a Vuillard,” said Matthew. “Then it’s a Vuillard. It looks like it to me.”

  Elspeth sat down on the sofa. “Matthew,” she said. “If that’s a Vuillard and the other two are a Fergusson and a Cowie, then we’ve…”

  “Discovered rather an important haul,” said Matthew.

  Elspeth opened her hands in a gesture of puzzlement. “But who owns them?”

  Matthew frowned. “I hadn’t thought about that.”

  “But you’ll have to think of it,” said Elspeth. “These paintings are valuable, aren’t they?”

  “Very.”

  “Just how much is very?”

  “The Vuillard is the most valuable, I’d say. One hundred and twenty thousand. One hundred and fifty. Something like that. The Fergusson would be a bit less. The Cowie, about twenty. Even the other one might fetch a thousand.”

  “So all in all, something like a quarter of a million?”

  Matthew nodded.

  “A quarter of a million in our concealed room,” said Elspeth. “How many concealed rooms have something quite as valuable as that in them?”

  Matthew seemed puzzled. “But you think it might not be ours?” he asked. “How come?”

  29. We See More of the Scottish Nudists

  The Association of Scottish Nudists, with its headquarters in Moray Place, perhaps Edinburgh’s most fashionable address, had not inconsiderable assets. The Association owned its main office outright, and free from any standard security or other encumbrance (“My clients, The Association of Scottish Nudists, have more than naked title,” quipped their lawyer, continuing, “although one should always be aware of the possibility that they have unadvisedly entered into a nudum pactum, a bare promise being a somewhat tricky matter in Scots Law!” These subtle allusions, of course, would not be generally appreciated, but for their audience, a small group of lawyers meeting for a Friday evening drink in Whighams Wine Bar on Hope Street, they were wildly funny, provoking peals of appreciative laughter sufficient to drown out the normal hubbub of the bar, and to occasion envious looks from the fund managers and land agents in the bar whose own wordplay, they knew, would never match that of the lawyers).

  In addition to the valuable premises in Moray Place, recently valued at nine hundred and fifty thousand pounds—they included a substantial garden running down to Lord Moray’s Pleasure Gardens on the north side of the square—the Association owned a flat in Ainslie Place nearby. This was let out at a rent that was more than enough to cover the cost of employing the full-time secretary who ran the office in Moray Place, answering the phone and dealing with the Association’s day-to-day correspondence. Other tasks, including the organisation of meetings and outings, were handled by members of the Association’s Committee, all of whom were volunteers and who therefore required no payment.

  Yet even if payment had been required, there would have been more than sufficient funds to cover it: over the years the Association had received generous legacies from a number of late members, and these formed the core of an endowment fund that would see the Association through any conceivable difficulties. It was this fund that supported the annual travel awards that sent Scottish representatives to naturist conventions all over the world—to the annual meeting of the International Naturist Association in San Diego and to the prestigious Nudist International, known unofficially as the Nuditern, that was the governing body of the international nudist movement and that had recently been given United Nations recognition as a significant body in international civic society. International No-Clothes Day had been a result of that recognition, although the inclusion of this date in the calendar had been the subject of opposition and even derision.

  The Scottish Government had recognised it, on the grounds that they recognised all official UN special days, and felt that it might be considered noninclusive to discriminate against those who wished to take off their clothes. “This does not imply that the Scottish Government considers the taking off of clothes as mandatory,” it was announced at a press conference. “The Scottish Government believes that those who wish to take off their clothes should be entitled to do so except in such circumstances where no such entitlement is deemed to exist. For this reason, we shall be calling the day International No-Clothes Day Where Appropriate. This in no way suggests that we disapprove of those who…” The statement had not been finished, being drowned out by roars of laughter from the attending journalists.

  But even if the Association was healthy in the financial sense, the same could not be said of its constitutional status; that had been the subject of bitter internal feuds, culminating in the recent removal of the Association’s long-serving committee and its replacement with an entirely new governing body. The background to this development was complex, revolving around the peculiar terms of the Association’s original constitution. This had been drafted by an Edinburgh solicitor in such a way as to ensure that Edinburgh members could control the committee indefinitely, having, as they did, three votes each while all other members had only one. The attempt by the Edinburgh-dominated committee to justify this failed, and the result was a reconstituted committee on which nudists from Glasgow, Hawick, Aberdeen and Perth now outnumbered the Edinburgh nudists by two to one.

  The new committee took office shortly after that Extraordinary General Meeting at which the constitution had been amended. The chairman was now from Glasgow, the vice-chairman from Paisley, and the secretary and treasurer from Hawick and Aberdeen respectively. At the first meeting of the new committee, the controversial decision was taken to reverse several resolutions that the Edinburgh-dominated committee had passed shortly before demitting office. These resolutions were of no real importance, but their recall underlined the profound change that had taken place in the balance of nudist power.

  “It reflects what has happened in the country,” wrote one of the new committee members in a letter to a friend. “People think that we nudists are merely a special interest group much like any other—bridge players, curlers, ornithologists and so on—but we are emphatically not! We are far more representative: we are people without clothes, with the emphasis on ‘people’ rather than on ‘clothes.’ There’s a big difference.

  “What happens in our circles merely reflects what’s happening in the wider society,” the letter went on. “So if there is a swing to the left, for instance, in the wider society, then there is a swing to the left in the nudist movement. We are a mirror.

  “For a very long time Edinburgh has been telling the rest of Scotland what to do. Power in Scotland was unaccountable for a very long time—exercised remotely by an establishment that controlled the few domestic Scottish institutions that survived the Act of Union. That arrangement suited Edinburgh down to the ground—it was a very comfortable setup indeed, with a Secretary of State for Scotland acting as a sort of colonial governor. (Not
a single Secretary of State, be it noted, was a nudist—which speaks volumes in my view.) And then it all changed. Suddenly we had a Parliament again and the levers of power were in plain view. There was a new spirit abroad, and nowhere more so than in our nudist movement. The clothes we took off now were our clothes. The nakedness we celebrated was our nakedness. We now had control over our problems—over our midges, our weather. We acted authentically again, and showed that out-of-date, unrepresentative, smug, collaborationist Edinburgh establishment that the real Scotland, the authentic Scotland, the Scotland of local, community nudists was in control of its destiny again, after a long period of being swaddled in the clothing of oppression.”

  30. Nudist Disharmony

  But it was not that simple. The changes in the constitution of the Association of Scottish Nudists were admittedly long overdue: nobody could mount a defence of a constitution of a society that discriminated against its members on the grounds of their postal address—nobody, that is, with any political sense. But that, unfortunately, is just what the Edinburgh clique controlling the Association lacked; their attempts to justify a permanent Edinburgh weighting on the committee on the grounds of stability and good governance were nothing but a provocation to those members of the Association who came from other places.

  “Are you suggesting,” asked one outraged Glasgow member, “that we in Glasgow—we Weegies, as you so condescendingly call us—are more confrontational and excitable than you people in Edinburgh, because if you are, Jimmy, I’ve got news for you. Jeez I’m gonna…”