A Promise of Ankles Read online

  Praise for Alexander McCall Smith’s

  44 SCOTLAND STREET SERIES

  “Powerfully addicting fiction…. Delightful…. [A] graceful and always amusing depiction of the pleasures and problems of everyday life.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “Irresistible…. Packed with the charming characters, piercing perceptions, and shrewd yet generous humor that have become McCall Smith’s cachet.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “[McCall Smith] is a tireless student of human nature, at once acutely observant and gently indulgent.”

  —The Sydney Morning Herald

  “This is Alexander McCall Smith at his most charming…. He is a delightful writer.”

  —The Washington Times

  “It is McCall Smith’s particular genius to be able to look on the brighter side of life, and he’s seldom done so more enjoyably.”

  —The Scotsman

  ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH

  A PROMISE OF ANKLES

  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

  The Promise of Ankles

  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

  To the Land of Long Lost Friends

  How to Raise an Elephant

  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 (eBook only)

  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

  The Geometry of Holding Hands

  IN THE DETECTIVE VARG SERIES

  The Department of Sensitive Crimes

  The Talented Mr. Varg

  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

  Pianos and Flowers

  AN ANCHOR BOOKS ORIGINAL, DECEMBER 2020

  Copyright © 2020 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 2020.

  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 Trade Paperback ISBN 9780593313282

  Ebook ISBN 9780593313299

  Cover illustration by Iain McIntosh

  Author illustration © Iain McIntosh

  www.anchorbooks.com

  a_prh_5.6.0_c0_r0

  This book is for James Holloway

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Books by Alexander McCall Smith

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1. At the Window, with Binoculars

  2. Épater la Bourgeoisie

  3. Student Neighbours

  4. That Dreadful Woman

  5. The Speaking of Italian, etc.

  6. You Tattie-bogle

  7. More Than Anything Else in the World

  8. A Bit of Forever

  9. Mr Fifty-One Per Cent

  10. Tribal Markings

  11. Muckle Birkies

  12. Down Among the Men

  13. Looking for Mother

  14. The Merits of an Open Mind

  15. A Lover in Aberdeen

  16. At the Wally Dug

  17. Love, Like Electricity

  18. An Offer from Paris

  19. Scotsmen Don’t Cry (Well, Not Much)

  20. Rhododendrons and Missionaries

  21. Men Don’t Send Birthday Cards

  22. A Very Strange Hotel

  23. Not Your Average Hotel

  24. Kamikaze Mosquitoes

  25. Roger’s Porcini Soup

  26. The Kelpie Cult

  27. Glenbucket

  28. Our Inner Neande
rthal

  29. Absolut (sic)

  30. A Category Three Row

  31. Irene Reversed

  32. A Suitable Education

  33. The Best News Ever

  34. Major Events

  35. A Walk to Stockbridge

  36. A Speluncean Entrance

  37. Homo Neanderthalis

  38. Generic Guilt

  39. Skinny Latte, No Vanilla

  40. The Discomfort of the Past

  41. Behold Bruce Anderson

  42. Matthew and James Set Off

  43. At Single Malt House

  44. Something Very Odd

  45. Drawing and Grammar

  46. An Art Student’s Digs

  47. Unauthorised Biting

  48. Little Hans, the Wolf Man, etc.

  49. Scandinavian Affairs

  50. Cheese Scones

  51. A Cayenne Kick

  52. Akratic Action

  53. Lobster à la Édimbourg

  54. Martini Time

  55. Getting Ready for Glasgow

  56. Ossian, etc.

  57. Inclusive Pies

  58. Ranald’s Crisis

  59. Bacon Recipes

  60. A Fine Tenor Voice

  61. Brochan Lom

  62. Stockholm Syndrome

  63. Widdershins or Deasil

  64. In Deepest Morningside

  65. Man Bitten by a Snake

  66. Doon the Watter

  67. Recovery

  68. You’ve Been a Good Friend

  69. Temptation, Its Various Forms

  70. What Was Always There

  1

  At the Window, with Binoculars

  Standing at her kitchen window, Domenica Macdonald, cultural anthropologist, denizen of Scotland Street, citizen of Edinburgh, lowered the binoculars that for the last fifteen minutes she had trained on the street below. She had owned the binoculars for over twenty years, having been given them by her first, and late, husband. Domenica had been married to a man she had met while working in South India, a member of a prosperous family who owned a small electricity factory outside what was then called Cochin, in Kerala. Her husband, a mild and somewhat melancholic man, had been electrocuted, and Domenica had returned to Scotland to pursue an academic career. That had been a success – or “sort of success”, as Domenica described it – but she had gradually slipped out of full employment in the University of Edinburgh to the status of independent scholar, which enabled her to undertake various anthropological research projects in various parts of the world, while keeping her base in Edinburgh. That, of course, was at 44 Scotland Street, a comfortable address in a sharply descending street – “only in the topographical sense”, as Domenica amusingly pointed out – towards the eastern limits of Edinburgh’s Georgian New Town.

  Domenica’s anthropological field trips had included an eventful spell in Papua New Guinea, where she studied kinship patterns and friendship networks amongst a tribal group living along the upper reaches of the Sepik River. These people, known for their worship of local crocodiles, had become accustomed to academic interest, and alongside their important spirit house maintained a lodge specifically for visiting anthropologists. This lodge, known in Pidgin as Haus bilong anthropology fella, had hot and cold running water and copious supplies of mosquito repellent. Anthropologists could stay there for as long as they liked, as the locals enjoyed talking to them and recounting ancient legends, many of which were made up on the spot in return for cartons of Australian cigarettes.

  Domenica’s small monograph, Close Friends, Distant Relatives: Patterns of Contact Amongst the Crocodile People of the Sepik River, had been well received, being shortlisted, but eventually not being awarded, the Prix Claude Lévi-Strauss, one of the more sought-after awards in the world of cultural anthropology. That was enough, though, to ensure that her next project, Marriage Negotiations and the Role of the Astrologer in Madhya Pradesh, was given adequate funding by the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the British Academy, and the Carnegie Trust. That led to an article, rather than a book, but it was still widely quoted in the footnotes of other anthropological papers, the measure by which, in an age of quantification, the success of a scholarly paper tends to be measured.

  Thereafter, there had been only one overseas project of any significance. That had involved a period living with a community of contemporary pirates on the Malacca Straits. These pirates lived at the mouth of a river, in houses surrounded by thick mangrove. They spoke an obscure dialect, but Domenica had been able to communicate with them reasonably effectively in a variant of the Pidgin she had acquired in Melanesia. She concentrated on the home life of the pirates, taking a particular interest in their domestic economy. For their part, the pirates’ wives had given her a generous welcome, and had been only too happy to discuss with her their housekeeping issues. Domenica had been taught how to cook the dishes local to that part of the country, and over the months that she spent there she had developed a taste for the coconut curries dominating pirate cuisine.

  At the end of her stay, of course, she had made a discovery that somewhat overshadowed the entire project. That had come about one morning when, out of curiosity, she had slipped a small boat of a mooring and discreetly followed the pirates as they set off for work in their larger vessels. She had followed them round the headland that marked the end of the river mouth, and then, straining her small outboard engine to keep up, she had trailed them into another river system a few miles up the coast. There all was revealed: the pirates, it transpired, were employed in a pirate CD and DVD factory, and it was to this plant that they travelled each morning and from which they returned early every evening.

  That discovery had been slightly disappointing to Domenica, but it did not compromise any of the data she had assembled on domestic economy issues and formed no more than a footnote in the paper she later published on the subject. When she left the Malacca Straits to return to Scotland she was given an emotional send-off by the pirates’ wives, whom she had taught how to make shortbread and clootie puddings. She was still in touch with them years later, sending them a copy of the Scotsman calendar each December and a gift subscription to the Scots Magazine, which they assured her they so enjoyed reading.

  On her fiftieth birthday, Domenica decided that there would be no more research trips in the field, or, rather, that the field could be visited, provided that it was local. Her scholarly time was now largely spent on freelance editing for a number of anthropological journals, occasional lectures, and work on a project that she had long nurtured – a study of the networks and customs of Watsonians, the graduates of George Watson’s College who played an important part in Edinburgh life and whose influence extended into the furthest reaches of the capital city. This research was different from that which she conducted on the Crocodile People of New Guinea, but it had risks of its own. It was also a project that would require far more time to be completed – Domenica was thinking of years, rather than months – as access was an issue and the layers of association and meaning in Watsonian affairs required a great deal of semiotic analysis.

  But there she was – standing at her window overlooking Scotland Street, lowering her Carl Zeiss binoculars and turning to her husband, Angus Lordie, who was seated at the other end of the kitchen, his dog and familiar, Cyril, at his feet. Angus, a portrait painter, was wearing his studio clothes – a paint-spattered jacket that Domenica wished he would throw away, a shirt of faded tartan material, and a pair of trousers that was slightly too large for him and that was kept from falling down by an improvised belt – a tie threaded through its loops. This tie was that of Glenalmond College, a school tucked away in Perthshire, where Angus had been all those years ago a moderately unhappy boarder and member of the school pipe band. Whenever he heard Mist-Covered Mountains, that most haunting
of pipe tunes, he saw Glenalmond under soft veils of rain. He saw his friend playing the pipes beside him in the ranks of the band; and they smiled at one another, because that friendship had been such a profound one, and we must keep alive the happiness we experience before the world closes in on us.

  2

  Épater la Bourgeoisie

  Domenica said to Angus, “Nothing yet. They’re certainly taking their time.”

  Angus laughed. “Patience is required of the curtain-twitcher. It’s like fishing, I think. You have to be patient.”

  Domenica defended herself: no anthropologist could ever be a curtain-twitcher. “I am not that at all,” she said. “For a start, we have no curtains – on this particular window, at least. Curtain-twitchers operate behind lace curtains, and their motives…”

  Angus waited. “Yes? Their motives? Curiosity?”

  “Idle curiosity,” Domenica corrected him. “I am not indulging idle curiosity here. It’s important we should know who’s going to move into that flat. It could be anybody. They might be turning it into a party flat, with hen parties coming up from places like Manchester to spend the weekend here. Imagine that. You’d soon take an interest if that happened.”

  “That’s not what we heard,” said Angus. “I told you: I bumped into the agent in the Wally Dug and he said that it was likely to be students. He said that they could charge students more rent than they could charge ordinary people…”

  “Ordinary people,” interjected Domenica. “By that…”

  “By that I mean respectable people,” said Angus. “Students are, by definition, not respectable.”

  They both laughed.

  “Nobody talks about respectable people any longer,” said Angus. “Perhaps that’s because it has become unfashionable to be respectable.”

  “Respectable people disapprove of things,” mused Domenica. “And Edinburgh used to be very disapproving. Now it’s only moderately so.”

  “Do you remember that councillor?” asked Domenica. “The one who hated the Traverse Theatre because it represented a threat to public decency.”

  Angus smiled. “That was a long time ago. Nobody can be shocked these days.” He thought about the effect of that. “Of course, that’s a matter of great regret if you’re a cutting-edge artist. How can one épater la bourgeoisie if the bourgeoisie declines to be shocked? That rather takes the wind out of the sails of the artist.”