The Revolving Door of Life

by Alexander McCall Smith

  He glanced at his watch. He had slept in and it was almost ten. He would go out for breakfast, he decided—that place round the corner, Big Lou’s or whatever she was calling it now, had started serving croissants—about time, he thought—and he could have one there with a cup of coffee and a flick through the latest issue of GQ. He had bought it yesterday and had not yet had the time to read it; it was a great mag, that, Bruce said to himself: all those gadgets, and fashion, and cars. Perfect.

  He let himself out of the flat and crossed the street. A woman was walking her dog, heading for the Queen Street Gardens, and Bruce noticed her admiring glance. He nodded a greeting, and she blushed. Poor woman, he thought. If only I had time I could do so much for her confidence and sense of well-being…but there was never enough time. One could not look after the whole world.

  As he passed the top of Dundas Street he paused at the Open Eye Gallery, where a John Bellany exhibition had opened that week. Bruce liked Bellany—he liked the yellows and the reds. He liked the seagulls and the boats and the occasional puffin. He liked the elongated faces with their wide eyes. There was a lot to look at in a John Bellany painting, thought Bruce.

  He was gazing at one of the paintings through the window when he became aware that somebody was standing behind him. It was the reflection in the gallery window that made him aware of this—the reflection of a woman. He turned round.

  Anichka was smiling at him.

  He opened his mouth, but the words he needed—if any—did not emerge.

  Her smile became coy, almost reproachful. “You did say to look you up.”

  He drew in his breath. What exactly had he said?

  His voice sounded weak. “Did I?”

  “Yes. You said that we should meet up some time.”

  It was possible; it was just possible. But of course one said that sort of thing to people all the time and did not mean it. The problem was that she was foreign and did not understand that often people did not mean what they said. The last thing that “We must have lunch sometime” meant was that we should have lunch.

  “Could we have a cup of coffee?” she asked. “I saw a place just round the corner.”

  Bruce hesitated.

  “Come on,” she said. “I’ll buy you a cup.”

  There was something commanding in her manner—something that made him feel that resistance if not futile, would at least be difficult.

  “I was just on my way to your place,” said Anichka. “It’s back there, isn’t it?” She pointed in the direction of Bruce’s flat.

  “How did you know?”

  “I asked Pat,” she said.

  Bruce bit his lip. “Oh.”

  “Will you show it to me afterwards? After we’ve had coffee?”

  “I was going to go…”

  She cut him short.

  “Thanks,” she said. “I’m very interested in people’s flats.”

  They began the descent of Dundas Street towards Big Lou’s.

  “You know, I was with somebody at dinner last night,” said Anichka.

  “Yes,” said Bruce, not without relief. “That’s great.”

  “Not so great now,” said Anichka. “He’s finished with me.”

  66. You Have a Good, Hollow Back

  Bruce felt trapped. This meeting with Anichka was not what he had had in mind the previous evening. He had spoken to her at the dinner table, but he had certainly not gone out of his way to charm her, as had been the original plan. As he was more or less propelled towards Big Lou’s coffee bar he wondered whether he had said anything that might be misconstrued as encouragement. He did not think he had; in fact he thought that he had at times been quite cool towards her. How could she possibly have assumed that he had any greater interest in her than one dinner guest normally has for another next to whom he finds himself seated. Politeness was as much as he had shown; and that was something quite different from romantic interest.

  “I do not know this part of town,” Anichka said. “It is very pleasant, I think.”

  “It’s great,” said Bruce. “I like it here.”

  “I wouldn’t mind living here too,” said Anichka. “It is more convenient than my current flat.”

  “It’s more expensive,” Bruce said quickly.

  “Unless you share,” said Anichka. “I love sharing. Don’t you?”

  “No,” said Bruce.

  Anichka laughed. “You should try it, Mr. Bruce.”

  Bruce winced. “Please don’t call me that,” he said. “Mr. Bruce.”

  She looked at him askance. “What’s wrong with your own name?”

  “It’s my first name,” said Bruce. “We don’t add mister to first names. We just don’t.”

  “Is it rude?” asked Anichka.

  “No, not rude. Just…Well, we don’t do it.”

  Anichka flounced. “You Scotchmen are very…how do you say it? Inhibited. You do not like to bare your souls. You should, you know. Having all that passion wound up inside is not good for you. It is like a pressure cooker. Then suddenly, bang—and you start shouting. Scotchmen need to undo their buttons.”

  “And don’t call us Scotchmen,” said Bruce. “The word is Scotsmen.”

  “I like that word very much,” said Anichka. “My funny Scotsman. Like that song about funny valentines. You are my funny Scotsman! That sounds good, doesn’t it?”

  Bruce said nothing. They had reached the steps to Big Lou’s coffee bar. He led the way, with Anichka behind him. As he descended, he felt a hand on the small of his back.

  “You have a good, hollow back,” said Anichka. “It is very firm. Strong. I think that Scotsmen have very firm backs. It is nice for a Czech lady to feel a Scotsman’s back. It makes her think of how lucky she is.”

  Bruce narrowly avoided tripping. He felt himself blushing.

  “I can see that you are blushing,” whispered Anichka. “That is a good sign, you know. If a man blushes, then that shows he has a good blood supply. It is very important to have a good blood supply.”

  They entered the coffee bar. Bruce noticed that Big Lou was not there. He had seen her new assistant once or twice, and had exchanged a few words with her. What was she called? Hettie, he remembered. And he remembered that she came from somewhere up where Lou came from. Montrose or somewhere like that. Arbroath. Somewhere up there.

  He nodded to Hettie and then turned to Anichka. “If you sit down over there I’ll get you something. What sort of coffee?”

  “Strong coffee,” said Anichka. “Big strong coffee to drink with a big strong Scotsman.”

  Bruce placed the order and returned to the table. He was trying to order his thoughts: he would have to make it very clear.

  He sat down. “I think you ought to know something, Anichka,” he began.

  She stared at him. “You think I should know something?”

  “Yes, there’s something I need to tell you.”

  She looked at him through eyes that had suddenly become frightened. “You want to tell me that you…that you don’t like women. That’s it, isn’t it?”

  Bruce’s mouth opened. “I…Well, no, I do like women.”

  She looked flustered. “You mean you like women as well as men? Is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

  “No,” said Bruce. “I like women. I like women a lot.”

  “As friends?” said Anichka. “Is that how you like them?”

  Bruce felt himself becoming increasingly impatient. Conversation with this woman, he thought, is like wading in treacle.

  “No,” he said. “I like women as friends, but also as lovers. I do not like men in that way.”

  Anichka’s expression lightened. “You mean you’re not…”

  “No, I’m not,” said Bruce. “I have nothing against people who are, but I’m not.”

  “What a relief,” said Anichka. “I suddenly thought that there was no chance for me if you were more inclined to like men. But now I know you like me, it’s easier. Now I know what you m
eant when you told me last night. You did not mean that you just wanted me as a friend.”

  “Told you what?” snapped Bruce.

  “Told me that you’d like to see me again. Now I know that you wanted an affair, not just a friendship. That is much better from my point of view. That is what I want, you see. I am a very physical woman. I am very interested in physical conversation. And now that I’m free…”

  “Well, I’m not free,” said Bruce. “I have somebody else.”

  “But you were by yourself at the dinner. Pat said to me that you were single. She said that.”

  Bruce felt desperate. “I’m not,” he said. “I’m just not.”

  “I think you really are,” said Anichka. “I think you are a free spirit. I think that even if you have some small entanglement at present, it is not an entanglement of the soul.”

  Bruce looked about him in despair. He saw Hettie standing behind the counter. She was looking at him. On impulse he stood up and made his way over to her.

  “You’re Hettie, aren’t you?” he said, his voice lowered.

  Hettie flushed. A good blood supply, thought Bruce. “Yes,” she said.

  “I’ve admired you for some time,” said Bruce. “Would you give me a kiss?”

  “Ah, jings!” said Hettie. “What an invitation! But of course I will. Here.”

  She planted a kiss on his mouth.

  “One more,” said Bruce.

  He glanced over his shoulder at Anichka. She was watching him, wide-eyed. I had to do it, he thought.

  Hettie was whispering to him. “I get off at five,” she said. “Lou comes back then.”

  “Five?” asked Bruce vaguely.

  “Yes,” said Hettie. “See you then.”

  67. A Father Forgives

  Pat walked up the path to her father’s front door, past the lavender bushes that always made the scent of lavender so evocative for her of home and the warm feeling of security that home entailed. Now, though, the lavender only seemed to accentuate her feelings of guilt. She had hardly slept that night of her dinner party, rehearsing over and over the folly of her ridiculous plan. She had tried to call it off—in fact she had done everything she could to call it off—but it seemed to have worked anyway. And the result had been her father’s departure from the party and without Anichka.

  She had not telephoned in advance as she was not sure what she would say. She would see him instead, and try to explain, if she had the courage to do so—which she rather doubted.

  She had her own key and let herself in.

  “Daddy?”

  The house was in silence, and for a few moments she panicked. She imagined finding him on the floor, unmoving. She imagined finding a note.

  “Daddy?” her voice had an edge of dread in it.

  He answered from the kitchen. “In here.”

  Relief flooded over her as she opened the kitchen door and saw him standing at the work table. He had a bag of flour in his hand and had been measuring a quantity of it into the pan of a set of scales.

  “What are you doing, Daddy?”

  “Making bread,” he said.

  His voice sounded quite normal, and she breathed again.

  “I didn’t know you made bread. You didn’t tell me.”

  He turned to her. Were his eyes red? She took a step closer to him.

  “I bought a book,” he said. “A book of bread recipes. I made a Neapolitan loaf the other day. I’ve still got some of it.” He paused, and put down the bag of flour. “No, we don’t have to talk about bread…”

  His voice faltered, and she rushed to him, flinging her arms around him. For a while they said nothing; he patted her back, and she joined her hands and hugged him hard.

  “Don’t knock all the wind out of me,” he mumbled. “Breathing is important to me, you know.”

  She wanted to laugh, but it was tears that came instead.

  “There, there, my darling.” He patted her back again. “My darling, you mustn’t cry. There’s no need to cry—none at all.”

  “I’m so sorry, Daddy. I’m so, so sorry.”

  “Sorry for what? You’ve got no reason to be sorry. It was nothing to do with you.”

  “But…”

  He drew back, and looked into her eyes. He brushed at her cheek, gently, at a tear.

  “I’ve been foolish,” he said. “No. Listen to me. Listen. I’ve been foolish in the way that all of us—or most of us—are foolish at one time or other. I closed my eyes to something that must have been so obvious to everybody else. I don’t know how I could do it.”

  “Oh, Daddy, you were just being kind…You’ve always been kind.”

  He shook his head. “You’re the one who’s being kind. No, I was stupid. My head was turned because a woman who was much younger gave me some attention. I was flattered, I suppose. And I behaved like a teenage boy. I had no judgement at all. All the time I’m telling other people, my patients, how to lead their lives, yet I end up doing something really stupid, making the mistake a sixteen-year-old boy would make.”

  “Oh, Daddy…”

  He looked at her lovingly. “And of course you could see it all along. Of course you saw it, didn’t you?”

  Pat lowered her head. She was ashamed to meet his eyes. “I suppose I thought that she didn’t really love you…not for yourself, if you see what I mean.”

  “I see perfectly,” he said. “I’m like a man who has a new set of spectacles. Everything is very clear since I put them on.”

  “I thought that she might be…”

  “Of course you did—and you were right.”

  She plucked up her courage. She had to confess; she simply had to tell him.

  “I rather hoped that Bruce might…”

  He smiled. “I knew that.”

  “Knew what?”

  “I knew what you were up to.”

  She stared at him. She was mute.

  “When you brought that young man into things,” he continued, I worked out what you were up to. It was pretty obvious, you know.”

  “You must have been furious.” Her voice was weak.

  “Not at all. The opposite, in fact. I had suspected it, I’m afraid, but somehow I couldn’t bring myself to the final admission that Anichka was using me. It’s not an easy realisation, you know, and we tend to put it off until there really is no other conclusion we can reasonably reach.”

  “So you’re not cross with me?”

  “No, my darling, how could I be cross with you? All that you did was try to save me, and I suspect that is just what you’ve done.”

  “I see.”

  “Yes.” He took her hand. There was flour on his fingers and she looked down and saw it now on her skin—a thin dusting of flour.

  “Infatuation is an extraordinary thing, isn’t it? You have no real control of yourself. You see, but you don’t see; you embrace denial. Amor furor brevis est. Love is a short madness—from which we recover, if we are lucky.”

  “Not all love is like that.”

  “No, of course not, but some is.”

  He smiled at her again. “Do you want to help me make bread?”

  She threw her arms around him again, kissing him on his cheek. He had not shaved.

  “You must go and shave. Then we can make bread.”

  “Why do daughters push their fathers around so much?”

  She gave him the answer without hesitation. “Because they love them. In spite of any of the silly things they do, they love them.”

  “And fathers love them back?”

  “Yes.”

  He pointed to the recipe book. “A big Puglian loaf? Or a French country recipe?”

  She hesitated a moment, and then replied, “Puglian.”

  “Then that shall be it.” He rubbed his hands. “And afterwards? A walk in the Botanics?”

  She looked out of the window. “Perfect,” she said. “But go and shave now. Go on.”

  “Mrs. Thatcher,” he said.

  She loo
ked at him blankly, and he realised that she was too young to remember—and not old enough to know.

  68. The Caledonian Antisyzygy

  “I’d like to make one thing clear,” said Irene. “I do not want any sympathy.”

  She was addressing Stuart and Nicola in the kitchen. The three of them were seated at the scrubbed pine table, finishing the meal that Nicola had prepared—the remnants of a large pot of risotto she had made the previous day. When she had made the risotto, little had Nicola imagined that she would be serving it the following day to Irene, newly returned from almost six weeks in the Persian Gulf—a five-day holiday that had gone spectacularly wrong: losing one’s luggage on holiday is one thing—being mistaken for the new wife of a Bedouin sheikh and being immured in a desert harem is quite another.

  Nicola frowned and wondered why Irene should not want sympathy; if she had herself been detained in the desert, whether or not in a harem, she would be looking for every available scrap of sympathy, she thought, and for as long as possible. Some people could draw on sympathy for years after the event, as Aunt Ada Doom did in Cold Comfort Farm—she had seen something nasty in the woodshed years ago and still needed sympathy…

  Irene continued. “The Foreign Office counsellor went on and on about Stockholm Syndrome and PTSD and so on. I told them that I had had a very enjoyable spell in the harem and had succeeded in introducing the women to a number of new ideas. I was treated with the utmost courtesy.”

  Nicola’s eyes widened. “And the sheikh…”

  “I very rarely saw him,” she said. “In fact, I think he was unaware of my presence. He had nothing to do with my being there—that was an administrative slip by his harem manager. He was the one who made the original mistake, but he was one of those typical men who can’t admit to being wrong. All the women were shouting at him in Arabic to the effect that I was not meant to be there, but he would have none of it. He said that he had signed for me and that was that.”