The Peppermint Tea Chronicles Read online

  Praise for Alexander McCall Smith’s

  44 SCOTLAND STREET SERIES

  “[McCall Smith’s] sense of gentle but pointed humor is once again afoot.”

  —The Seattle Times

  “McCall Smith’s plots offer wit, charm, and intrigue in equal doses.”

  —Richmond Times-Dispatch

  “McCall Smith’s assessments of fellow humans are piercing and profound….[His] depictions of Edinburgh are vivid and seamless.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle

  “Full of charm, gentleness and penetrating insight.”

  —The Daily Express (Scotland)

  “Entertaining and witty….A sly send-up of society in Edinburgh.”

  —Orlando Sentinel

  Alexander McCall Smith

  THE PEPPERMINT TEA CHRONICLES

  Alexander McCall Smith is the author of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency novels and a number of other series and stand-alone books. His works have been translated into more than forty languages and have been bestsellers throughout the world. He lives in Scotland.

  www.alexandermccallsmith.com

  BOOKS BY ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH

  IN THE 44 SCOTLAND STREET SERIES

  44 Scotland Street

  Espresso Tales

  Love Over Scotland

  The World According to Bertie

  The Unbearable Lightness of Scones

  The Importance of Being Seven

  Bertie Plays the Blues

  Sunshine on Scotland Street

  Bertie’s Guide to Life and Mothers

  The Revolving Door of Life

  The Bertie Project

  A Time of Love and Tartan

  The Peppermint Tea Chronicles

  IN THE NO. 1 LADIES’ DETECTIVE AGENCY SERIES

  The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency

  Tears of the Giraffe

  Morality for Beautiful Girls

  The Kalahari Typing School for Men

  The Full Cupboard of Life

  In the Company of Cheerful Ladies

  Blue Shoes and Happiness

  The Good Husband of Zebra Drive

  The Miracle at Speedy Motors

  Tea Time for the Traditionally Built

  The Double-Comfort Safari Club

  The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party

  The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection

  The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon

  The Handsome Man’s De Luxe Café

  The Woman Who Walked in Sunshine

  Precious and Grace

  The House of Unexpected Sisters

  The Colors of All the Cattle

  FOR YOUNG READERS

  The Great Cake Mystery

  The Mystery of Meerkat Hill

  The Mystery of the Missing Lion

  IN THE ISABEL DALHOUSIE SERIES

  The Sunday Philosophy Club

  Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

  The Right Attitude to Rain

  The Careful Use of Compliments

  The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday

  The Lost Art of Gratitude

  The Charming Quirks of Others

  The Forgotten Affairs of Youth

  The Perils of Morning Coffee

  The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds

  At the Reunion Buffet (eBook only)

  The Novel Habits of Happiness

  A Distant View of Everything

  The Quiet Side of Passion

  IN THE DETECTIVE VARG SERIES

  The Department of Sensitive Crimes

  IN THE PAUL STUART SERIES

  My Italian Bulldozer

  The Second-Worst Restaurant in France

  IN THE CORDUROY MANSIONS SERIES

  Corduroy Mansions

  The Dog Who Came in from the Cold

  A Conspiracy of Friends

  IN THE PORTUGUESE IRREGULAR VERBS SERIES

  Portuguese Irregular Verbs

  The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs

  At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances

  Unusual Uses for Olive Oil

  OTHER WORKS

  La’s Orchestra Saves the World

  The Girl Who Married a Lion and Other Tales from Africa

  Trains and Lovers

  The Forever Girl

  Fatty O’Leary’s Dinner Party

  Emma: A Modern Retelling

  Chance Developments

  The Good Pilot Peter Woodhouse

  AN ANCHOR BOOKS ORIGINAL, DECEMBER 2019

  Copyright © 2019 by Alexander McCall Smith

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd., Edinburgh, in 2019.

  Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  This book is excerpted from a series that originally appeared in The Scotsman newspaper.

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available at the Library of Congress.

  Anchor Books Paperback ISBN 9781984897817

  Ebook ISBN 9781984897824

  Cover illustration by Iain McIntosh

  Author illustration © Iain McIntosh

  www.anchorbooks.com

  v5.4

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Books by Alexander McCall Smith

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1: The Plight of Cats in South Australia

  2: Angus Thinks about Freedom

  3: Aberdeen

  4: Ranald Braveheart Macpherson’s Book Club

  5: Scotch Pies

  6: Boyle’s Law and Business Growth

  7: Schadenfreude

  8: He Loved Him More Than Ice Cream

  9: Bacon without Nitrites

  10: An Inadvisable Home Construction Project

  11: Merry Hart with Small Possessioun…

  12: Olive’s Party

  13: Olive Spells It Out

  14: A Stendhal Syndrome Survivor

  15: Garden Governance Issues

  16: Wee Moupie

  17: A Worrying Prospect

  18: She Would Do Anything for Him

  19: Bruce Reflects

  20: At the Wally Dug

  21: Where the Thickos Go

  22: The Desperation of Dan

  23: A Very Special Olive Oil

  24: Bonnie Charlie’s Noo Awa…

  25: The Reel of the 51st

  26: Price on Application

  27: Scottish Art and Goose Pimples

  28: Do Angels Cook?

  29: Time, Poetry, Triplets, Life

  30: Weegie Dugs

  31: A Gift from Glasgow

  32: A Free Man Thinks

  33: In Howe Street

  34: Peppermint Tea

  35: Spinach for St
rength

  36: Not Quite Scottish Enough

  37: Men and Clothes

  38: The Aphorist

  39: The Contents of a Private Bag

  40: Brogue Boots for Women, and Others

  41: The Reading of Shoes

  42: Questions About Bags

  43: Unearned Happiness

  44: Being Simpatico

  45: A Gift of Kiwis

  46: An Upsetting Discovery

  47: Poor Fellow

  48: On Being Escalated

  49: Constructive Mistruths

  50: Portuguese Shoes

  51: Nepalese Momos

  52: An Albanian Story

  53: Innocents at Play

  54: A Matter of Mis-speaking

  55: Für Elise

  56: Cryptological Anthropology

  57: Youth Passes

  58: Agas etc.

  59: Temptation

  60: Something Happens…At Last

  61: Angels and Metaphor

  62: A Borrowed Morgan

  63: Engine Capacity

  64: Here Comes the Sun

  65: Never Gush

  66: The Lost Art of Gentlemanliness

  67: Bruce in Conversation

  68: On the 23 Bus

  69: Angus Says Something

  70: Big Lou Gets an Offer

  71: The Duke of Johannesburg Aloft

  72: A Subtle Love Affair

  This is for Lorraine Veitch Rutherford

  1

  The Plight of Cats in South Australia

  Domenica Macdonald, anthropologist, resident of Scotland Street, and wife of Angus Lordie, portrait painter and long-standing member of the Scottish Arts Club, sat in the kitchen of her flat in Scotland Street. She was immersed in a magazine she had bought on impulse at the local newsstand, and so did not hear Angus when he asked her about her plans for the day.

  “I said,” repeated Angus, “are you going to be doing anything very much today?”

  “I’m sorry,” said Domenica, looking up from her magazine. “I didn’t hear you. I’m reading something here that I can hardly believe.”

  “Ah!” said Angus. “Oscar Wilde.”

  “What about him?”

  Angus tried to remember exactly what Oscar Wilde had said—he had pronounced on so many things—but found that he could not recall the precise words. “He said something about his diary being sensational reading. Or somebody else’s diary. I don’t really remember…”

  “It doesn’t matter too much if you can’t remember exactly what he said,” Domenica reassured him. “Wilde will undoubtedly have more to say. Uniquely, perhaps, among those who are no longer with us, he continues to make witty remarks from beyond the grave—people impute them to him, you see. The volume of his quotations grows daily. This article, though, is about cats in South Australia.”

  Angus was puzzled. “What about them?”

  Domenica shook her head. “They’re to be confined.”

  “In what sense?”

  She looked down at the article. “Apparently cats in South Australia have been eating too many birds and small mammals. They’re very destructive, cats.”

  Angus glanced down at his dog Cyril, who was lying under the kitchen table, one eye firmly closed, but with the other slightly open, allowing him to watch his master. Angus was sure that Cyril knew when the conversation concerned him, or in more general terms had something to do with canine issues; the flicker of an eyelid, almost imperceptible, was enough to reveal that Cyril was listening, waiting to see whether the situation developed in such a way as to be of interest to him. Cyril’s vocabulary, like that of all dogs, was limited to a few familiar words—walk, bone, sit, and so on—and one or two adjectives, good and bad being the most important ones. Beyond that, Cyril’s intellectual life was no more than Pavlovian. So when anybody mentioned the Turner Prize, an institution that for Angus stood for everything that was wrong in the contemporary art world, Cyril would dutifully raise a leg. This was not a gesture of contempt, of course, but was a trained response, instilled in Cyril through the use of rewards. Angus found it amusing enough—as did most of his friends—but Domenica had expressed the view that it was childish. Many of the things that men do are childish in the eyes of women, but this was egregiously so.

  “Really, Angus,” she had said when she first saw Cyril performing his new trick. “That’s a bit adolescent, surely.”

  Angus was unrepentant. “I have little time for the Turner Prize,” he said. “I have no taste for its pretentiousness. I dislike the way it is awarded to people who cannot paint, draw, nor sculpt.” His eyes widened; he became slightly red, his breathing shallow—all fairly typical reactions provoked by the Turner Prize in those of sound artistic judgment. “You are not an artist if you merely make a video about paint drying or pile a few objets trouvés in a heap. You just aren’t.”

  Domenica shrugged. “Calm down,” she said. “Installations make us look at the world in a different way. They must have some artistic merit. They challenge us. Isn’t that what the Turner Prize is all ab—?”

  She had stopped herself, but it was almost too late. “Don’t say Turner Prize,” blurted out Angus. “Not when Cyril…”

  But he, too, had spoken without thought of the consequences. “Cyril,” he shouted, just as the dog, impervious to the fact that they were indoors at the time, prepared to pass judgment on installation art. “No, Cyril! Sit!”

  It had been the right—and timeous—counter-command. Cyril, confused, forgot about the Turner Prize and lowered his hindquarters, waiting for further instructions.

  Now, with Cyril somnolent below the table, the discussion of feline destructiveness continued. “Yes,” Angus mused. “Murderous creatures. Birds, in particular. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds gets hot under the collar about cats.”

  Domenica pointed to the article. “This,” she said, “tells us what Australian cats get up to—and it makes sobering reading. Nearly four hundred million birds are killed by cats in Australia every year. A lot of those cats are feral, of course, but pet cats, it says, get through over forty million a year. Some of those are threatened species too.” She looked up at Angus. “Four hundred million, Angus. Four hundred million.”

  Angus sighed. “It’s what cats do, I suppose. Nature’s red in tooth and claw, isn’t it?”

  Domenica referred to the article again. “They take their wildlife seriously in Australia, of course. And so…” She looked down at the page. “People have to keep their cats under control in cities. You can’t let them wander around.”

  Angus frowned. “But you can’t keep a cat under control. They’re not like dogs. They don’t accept our authority.”

  “According to this,” Domenica went on, “in South Australia you have to keep the cat in the house or in a cage in the garden. You don’t have any option.”

  Angus looked out of the window. Freedom: everywhere, it seemed to him, the boundaries of freedom were being encroached upon. Passports, regulations, prohibitions, requirements pinched at the lives of us all, and now this. No cats stalking about in the garden; no cats lying on walls in the sun, watching us; no cats leading their parallel lives in the gardens of other cats, or other people; cat doors, the symbol of cats’ liberty, a thing of the past, a reminder of what used to be.

  “That poem,” he muttered.

  “What poem?”

  “That Christopher Smart poem. He wrote it when he was in the asylum. I learned chunks of it as a boy. There was a teacher who believed in poetry. We loved him. He was gentle; he didn’t disapprove. And then he died.”

  Domenica lis
tened. Yes, she thought. Great teachers are like that: they believe in something—poetry, physics, it can be anything, really—and they are loved, but often do not know it. Then they die, and are loved all the more.

  “He—Christopher Smart, that is—listed all the merits of cats. He said: For his motions on the face of the earth are more than any other quadruped. For he can swim for life. For he can creep.”

  “No longer,” said Domenica.

  Below the table, Cyril cocked an ear. He was unaware of the subject of discussion, of course, but he hated cats. He resented their freedom and their arrogance. Their humiliation would be heaven for him—justly deserved, and none too soon in its coming.

  2

  Angus Thinks about Freedom

  “I can see the point, of course,” said Angus. “We have to protect species, and cats are certainly a threat to birds. But…”

  Domenica nodded. “You can’t have unfettered freedom. We certainly can’t, and nor should cats have it. There has to be a compromise.”