Espresso Tales

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Matthew thought. What evidence did he have? Now that he thought of it, none at all. So what was it? And at that point he realised that the reason why he took this view was simple. It was simple, but true. Janis did not love his father. You can tell when somebody loves another. It shows in the eyes; the attitude. There was none of that feeling in this case, thought Matthew. Any overt signs of affection on her part just did not seem to ring true. She was a gold-digger; it was obvious, and yet his poor father, infatuated because an attractive younger woman had shown an interest in him, simply could not see what her real motive was.

  Matthew wondered whether he should tell his father this. It was a hard thing for anybody to hear–that love was unreciprocated. Many people would simply not believe that if they heard it. And yet, his father was an adult (offspring often have to remind themselves of that hard fact) and could not be protected from uncomfortable knowledge. So he looked at his father, met his gaze, and said: “Dad, she doesn’t love you. I can tell.”

  At first, Gordon did nothing. He stared at his son, as if uncomprehending, and then reached for his coffee cup and took a sip of his espresso. He’s struggling, thought Matthew. He’s struggling with his dented pride (poor man) and with his amour-propre. This is very painful. This is very hard.

  “So,” said Gordon quietly. “So she doesn’t love me, you say.”

  Matthew nodded. “She doesn’t love you.”

  “And so when I asked her to marry me,” went on Gordon, “and she accepted–that meant nothing, did it?”

  Matthew sighed. “You’ve gone and proposed?” he asked. “Oh, Dad, Dad, Dad! You’re making a big mistake. Mega-disaster all round. Oh, no, no, no!”

  “Give me your evidence,” said Gordon grimly. “Give me one single shred of evidence you have that she doesn’t love me. Show me. Just show me.”

  “But can’t you see?” said Matthew, raising his voice. “Can’t you see that there’ll be no evidence as such? You sense these things. You know them. You can’t necessarily find any evidence.”

  Gordon held up a hand to stop his son. “Right,” he said. “You’ve said enough as far as I’m concerned. You’ve insulted the woman I love. I’m not going to stand for it, Matthew. I’m just not.”

  “I’m only trying to help you,” protested Matthew. He reached out to touch his father, but Gordon sat back, out of reach. “Look,” went on Matthew. “Try to think. Have you told her about your money? Did she ask you?”

  “I’ve spoken to her,” said Gordon. “She raised it with me.”

  Matthew’s eyes widened. “She raised it?” he asked. “She did?”

  “That’s correct,” said Gordon. “She asked me some fairly searching questions. And I gave her perfectly frank answers.”

  “Well, there you are!” cried Matthew. “It’s just exactly as I said. She’s interested in getting her hands on your cash. It’s glaringly obvious.”

  Gordon shook his head. “You stupid boy,” he said. “Sorry, but that’s what you are, Matthew. She raised the issue because she wanted to talk to me about divesting myself of a large part of it.”

  “To her, I suppose,” observed Matthew wryly. “Great tactic.”

  “No,” said Gordon patiently. “You’re one hundred per cent wrong there, Matthew. You see, Janis has persuaded me to set up a charitable fund. I thought I might set one up for golfers in distress. Then she has urged me to transfer a considerable amount of money to you, as it happens. She’s suggested that I should, in fact, give away about seven million. Three to the fund and four to you.”

  Matthew was silent. He stared at his father. And then he bit his lip.

  “Yes,” said Gordon. “Do you know, when you were a wee boy you used to bite your lip like that whenever you were in the wrong over something. You just bit your lip.

  “And I see you doing it right now. It’s funny, isn’t it?–how we keep these little mannerisms over the years.”

  “Dad,” Matthew began. “I didn’t…”

  “No,” said Gordon, “you didn’t know. Well, as they say, ye ken noo.”

  “Yes,” said Matthew. “I ken noo.”

  “And can you think of any reason,” Gordon asked, “why I should not reverse my decision to transfer that money to you? After all, you have such a low opinion of my fiancée. I wouldn’t want to force a decision of hers upon you, would I?”

  “I’m sorry,” said Matthew. “I really am. I’m sorry.”

  Gordon stared at his son. My son has never been a liar, he said to himself. He has been lazy, maybe, and a bit weak, but he has never been a liar. And so if he says that he is sorry for what he said, then he is. And the least I can do is to accept that apology.

  Gordon stood up. “Stand up, Matthew,” he said. Matthew, shamefacedly, stood up, and Gordon walked round the side of the table and faced his son.

  “That’s fine by me,” he said. He leaned forward, so that nobody else might hear what he had to say. “And do you know something, Matthew? Well, here’s something you should know: I’m proud of you. I never told you that, and I should have. I’m proud of what you are. I’m proud of the fact that, unlike me, you’ve never trodden on anybody else, or even considered doing that. And that makes you more of a man than I am, in my book.”

  Matthew could not say anything. So he stood there with his father, and Gordon put his arm about his son’s shoulder and left it there, to reassure him, to show what he felt but could not find the words to say.

  100. Big Lou

  Big Lou watched as Matthew and his father went their separate ways, Matthew to his gallery over the road and Gordon up the hill in the direction of Queen Street. It had been obvious to her what was going on: a reconciliation of some sort between father and son. That pleased her; Big Lou did not like conflict and estrangement–what was the point, she thought, in being at odds with those whom we should love when our time on this earth was so very short?

  She stared out of the window onto the steps that climbed up to Dundas Street. The coffee bar was now empty, but a customer would no doubt soon appear. Angus Lordie, perhaps, with that dog of his, or one of the antique dealers from down the road, from the Three Estaits, who would entertain Lou with news from the auction rooms.

  But it was the postman who arrived, a thin-faced man who came from Dundee and always asked Big Lou about Arbroath, although she had nothing to tell him. This morning he extracted a couple of letters from his sack and placed them carefully on the counter.

  “Arbroath,” he said, looking at Big Lou’s face with searching eyes. “Did you know some people called McNair? He was a joiner there, a long time ago. Then they moved to Dundee.”

  Big Lou shook her head. “Sorry, Willy. It’s been a long time.” She glanced at the letters. Was it? Yes, it was.

  “They had a daughter who went to Glasgow,” continued the postman. “I think she trained as a nurse at Yorkhill.” Scotland was like that; long stories, endless links, things that half-happened.

  Big Lou was staring at the letters. “Oh yes,” she said. “I didn’t know anybody called McNair. They might have been there while I was, but you know how it is when you’re younger. You just think of yourself.”

  “That’s it,” he said. “You’re right there, Lou.”

  Big Lou looked down at the letters and then glanced at her watch.

  “Won’t keep you,” said the postman. “Cheerio, Lou.”

  As he turned to leave, she reached for one of the letters and slit the envelope open with a bread-knife. The postmark had told her who it was, and now she unfolded the letter within and saw his characteristic handwriting, the same writing that had been on the letter which she had cherished for all those years, the years of his absence.

  “Dear Lou,” she read, “you know, don’t you, what a bad letter-writer I am. This is not because I find it difficult to write things down–I don’t. It’s just because I find it hard to write to you, because I have treated you so badly. Well, maybe I haven’t treated you badly, exactly, but I have
not been very good about telling you things. And then there were all those years in which I never wrote to you at all although I knew that you must have been wondering what I was doing and when I was going to come back to Scotland.

  “Well, I let you down on that, didn’t I? When I wrote to you and told you that I was going to be in Edinburgh you must have wondered whether I was going to remember my promise to invite you over to Texas. And I had not even had the decency to write to you and tell you that I was married and that I had moved to Mobile. I’m sorry about that, Lou. I should have told you. Men sometimes don’t think about these things and then they are surprised when women are upset about it. I want you to know that I’m sorry about that.

  “I told you, didn’t I, about how I had moved to Mobile and opened a restaurant which I was running with my wife? Well, we ran that restaurant for six months and then I discovered something really hard for me. My wife was carrying on with one of the waiters. I had no idea that this was happening until I discovered them together at a fun-fair. She had said that she was going to see her aunt and I believed her. But then I telephoned the aunt and she said that she wasn’t there. So I knew that she was lying.

  “I went out for a drive. It was a way of calming my anger that she should have lied to me, and by chance I found a fun-fair on a bit of wasteland near this big causeway that we have in Mobile. I don’t know why I stopped, but I’m glad that I did, as I found the two of them going round and round on the great wheel. I got into one of the cars behind them and up and round we went. They had not seen me, but I could see them and I could see him put his arm around her and kiss her. That was hard, Lou–it was very hard.

  “I did nothing for a while, and then I shouted out: I can see you!

  “She turned round and spotted me up above them and I thought she was going to fall out of the car. But she did not, and when they went down again they signalled to the operator to let them out and they ran off to the car park and climbed into his van. That’s the last I saw of her. I shouldn’t have married her, Lou. She was too young for me. Sixteen’s too young for a girl to marry.

  “So I divorced her and now I’m coming back to Scotland and I want to know two things. The first is whether you will be prepared to see me again. And the second is whether you will agree to marry me. That is what I want to know. I hope you do, Lou, because you are the lady I have always loved, even when I told myself that I loved somebody else. I didn’t. I loved you. That’s all, Lou. That’s all there is to it.”

  Lou put the letter down, and then, fumbling with the strings, she tore off her apron, picked up a sign that said CLOSED, and half walked, half ran, out of the coffee bar and up the steps to the road above. She had to tell somebody, and Matthew would do. He would not be particularly interested, she knew, but she would tell him anyway. She had to share her joy, as Lou knew that joy unshared was a halved emotion, just as sadness and loss, when borne alone, were often doubled.

  101. In the Bookshop

  Seated on a comfortable blue sofa in the coffee shop of Ottakar’s Bookshop, Domenica Macdonald was in conversation with her old friend, Dilly Emslie. Beside her, in a plastic shopping bag, lay Domenica’s haul from her trip to the bookshop: a racy biography of an eighteenth-century German princeling (or Domenica hoped it was racy–the cover certainly suggested that, but covers were notoriously meretricious), a history of aspirin, and a novel about a young woman who went to London, discovered it was a mistake, and returned to her small town in Northumbria, where nothing happened for the remainder of the book.

  “I almost bought a book about pirates,” Domenica remarked. “Pirates are such an interesting subject, don’t you think? And yet there are very few anthropological studies of pirate life.”

  “It must be rather difficult to do,” Dilly said thoughtfully. “Presumably pirates wouldn’t exactly encourage anthropologists.”

  Domenica took a sip of her espresso. “I’m not sure about that,” she said. “Most people are flattered by attention. And remember that anthropologists have studied all sorts of apparently dangerous people. Head-hunters in New Guinea, for example. Those people became very used to having an anthropologist about the place. Some of them became quite dependent on their anthropologists–rather like some people become rather dependent on their social workers.”

  “But of course it’s a bit late now, don’t you think?” said Dilly. “Today’s pirates must be rather elusive.”

  “There are more than you imagine,” said Domenica. “I gather that the South China Seas are riddled with them. And they’re becoming bolder and bolder. They even try to board tankers and ships like that. They’re very piratical.”

  The two friends were silent for a moment. There was a certain incongruity in discussing pirates in George Street. But Domenica had a further thought. “Do you know that pirates used to be quite active, even in British waters? They used to plague the south coast of England, coming ashore and carrying off the local women into captivity. Can you imagine going about your day-to-day business in your kitchen and suddenly having a large pirate bursting in and carrying one off? What a shock it must have been.”

  Dilly agreed. It must have been very disruptive, she thought.

  Domenica warmed to her theme. “Of course, it might have suited some women to be carried off by pirates. You know, the plainer sort of girl may have found it livened up her life a bit, don’t you think? In fact, one might just imagine groups of plainer girls having endless picnics on likely-looking cliffs, just on the off-chance that a pirate ship might go past. Waving, perhaps, to attract attention…”

  They both laughed.

  “That’s enough about pirates,” said Dilly. “What about you, Domenica? What have you been up to?”

  Domenica thought for a moment. What had she been up to? The answer, it seemed, was very little. She had gone nowhere, she had stopped writing the paper she was working on, and she had hardly even spoken to her neighbours for months. It was a depressing thought.

  “Very little,” she answered. “In fact, Dilly, I feel quite stuck. I’m in a rut.”

  “Impossible,” said Dilly. “I’ve never known you to be anything but involved. You do so much.”

  “Not any more,” said Domenica. “I’m stalled.”

  Dilly smiled. “You need a new project. A new anthropological study. Something novel. Something that will make waves.”

  Domenica looked at the ceiling. A new project was a good idea, but what was there for her to do? She had no stomach for further theoretical speculation on method and objectivity, and she had no idea of what opportunities there were in the field. New Guinea was stale these days, and the head-hunters were more concerned with human rights than they used to be…Besides, it was politically incorrect even to use the term head-hunter. They were…what were they? Head re-locators? Or, by some lovely inversion, personnel recruiters?

  “I have an idea for you,” said Dilly. “What about pirates? What about a pioneering anthropological study of the life and customs of modern pirates in the South China Seas? You could live with them in their mangrove swamps and then sit in the back of their boats as they dash out to commit acts of piracy. Of course, you’d have to be completely detached. You could hardly join in. But you anthropologists know all about detachment and disinterested observation.”

  Domenica, who had been cradling her coffee cup in her hands as Dilly talked, now put it down on the table with a thud.

  “Do you know?” she said. “That’s a very intriguing idea. There are plenty of studies of modern criminals–even the Mafia has been looked into by anthropologists and criminologists. But, as far as I know, nobody has actually gone and lived with pirates.”

  “And would you?” asked Dilly.

  “I feel like a change,” said Domenica. “I’m fed up. I need a new challenge.”

  “This will be challenging,” said Dilly, expressing a note of caution. “In fact, I wonder if it would be altogether wise. These people sound as if they are rather desperate characters
. They might not appreciate…”

  But it was too late for caution. Domenica had gone to New Guinea on impulse; she had carried out her ground-breaking study of bride-price procedures amongst the Basotho on the passing suggestion of a colleague; and she had spent an entire year among the Inuit of the North-West Territories simply because she had seen a striking picture of the Aurora Borealis, pictured from Yellowknife. Pirates now beckoned in exactly the same way, and the call would be answered.

  “It’s a marvellous idea,” Domenica said. “I shall get in touch with the Royal Anthropological Institute. I imagine that they’ll be positive about it.”

  “We shall miss you,” said Dilly, “when you’re with the pirates.”

  “Oh, I expect they’re on e-mail these days,” said Domenica. “I shall keep in touch.” They said goodbye to one another at the front door of the bookshop and Domenica began the walk back to Scotland Street. On the surface, it was an outrageous idea; but then so many important anthropological endeavours must have seemed outrageous when first conceived. This would certainly be difficult, but once one had established contact, and trust, it would be much the same as any fieldwork. One would observe the households. One would study family relationships. One would look at the domestic economy and the ideological justification structure (if any). It would, in many senses, be mundane work. But pirates! One had to admit there was a certain ring to it.

  102. Matthew Thinks

  After Big Lou had burst into the gallery, full of her good news, and had burst out again, Matthew and Pat sat quietly around a desk, sorting out the photographs for a catalogue that they were planning.

  “I’m very pleased for Big Lou,” Matthew said. “She had written him off, you know. She thought she’d seen the last of him.”

  “She deserves some good luck,” said Pat. “I hope that he’s good for her.”

  “Big Lou can look after herself,” said Matthew. “She’s strong.”