44 Scotland Street Read online

  Sasha, who was seated beside Bruce, and who had been talking to Betty Dunbarton, had now disengaged and switched her attention to the conversation between Bruce and Ramsey. But in the course of this change, she had heard only the mention of the Duke of Plaza-Toro.

  “The Duke of Plaza-Toro – do you know him?” she asked.

  Ramsey Dunbarton laughed politely. “Heavens no! He’s in The Gondoliers. Not a real duke.”

  Sasha blushed. “I thought …” she began.

  “There aren’t all that many dukes in Scotland,” Ramsey Dunbarton observed, laying down his soup spoon. “There’s the Duke of Roxburghe, our southernmost duke, so to speak. No, hold on, hold on, is the Duke of Buccleuch more to the south? I think he may be, you know, come to think of it. Is Bowhill to the south of Kelso? I think it may be. If it is, then it would be, starting from the south, Buccleuch, Roxburghe… let me think … Hamilton, then Montrose (because he sits on the edge of Loch Lomond, doesn’t he, nowhere near Montrose itself), Atholl, Argyll, and then Sutherland. Hold your horses! Doesn’t the Duke of Sutherland live in the Borders? I think he does. So, he would have to go in that list between …”

  Bruce looked around the table. All eyes had been fixed on Ramsey Dunbarton, but now they had shifted. Todd, who was still smarting over the moving together of the tables – against his explicit instructions – was glowering at Sasha, who was looking at Bruce, but in a way that he had not noticed; for he was looking at Betty Dunbarton, whose eyes, he saw, went in slightly different directions, and so could have been looking at anything; while Lizzie looked at the waiter who was watching the bowls of soup, ready to whisk them away and allow the service of the next course, and the course after that, so that the dancing could begin.

  58. Catch 22

  “Tories,” muttered Jim Smellie, leader of Jim Smellie’s Ceilidh Band. “And gey few of them too! Look, one two … six altogether. See that, Mungo? Six!”

  Mungo Brown, accordionist and occasional percussionist, drew on a cigarette as he looked across the dance floor to the table where the guests were sitting, waiting for the arrival of their coffee. “Don’t complain,” he said, smiling. “This bunch won’t stay up late. We’ll be out of here by eleven-thirty.”

  “Aye,” said Jim, gazing across the empty dance floor. They were still deep in conversation, it seemed, and he wondered what they were talking about. In his experience there were two topics of conversation that dominated bourgeois Edinburgh: schools and house prices.

  At the table, Betty Dunbarton turned to Todd, who was looking about anxiously, waiting for the coffee to be served. The service had been very good – one could not fault the Braid Hills Hotel, which was an excellent hotel, and it was certainly nothing to do with them that the two tables had been placed together – but it was now time for coffee, distinctly so, and then they could get out on the dance floor and he could get away from this woman at last.

  “I do hope that we get a piece of shortbread with our coffee,” Betty remarked. “Although, you know, I had a very bad experience with a bit of shortbread only last week. Ramsey was down at Muirfield …”

  Todd turned round sharply. “Muirfield?”

  “Yes,” said Betty brightly. “He plays down there at least once a week these days. He’s a little bit slow now, with his leg playing up, but he always gets in nine holes. He has the same foursome, you know. David Forth, you know, Lord Playfair …”

  “Yes, yes,” said Todd irritably. The mention of Muirfield had annoyed him. How long had Ramsey Dunbarton been on the waiting list, he wondered. Probably no time at all. And what was the use of his being a member? He would surely get as much enjoyment from playing somewhere closer to town.

  “You know him?” asked Betty. “You know David?”

  “No, I don’t,” said Todd. “I know who he is. I don’t know him.”

  “I thought that you might have met him out at Muirfield,” she said. “Do you get out there a great deal?”

  Todd looked over his shoulder in an attempt to catch the waiter’s eye. “No,” he said. “I don’t. My brother plays there, but I don’t. I play elsewhere.”

  “Wouldn’t it be nice to be in the same club as your brother?” asked Betty.

  Todd shrugged. “I’m perfectly happy,” he said. “And I really don’t get the chance to play much golf these days. You know how it is. Not everyone wants to be a member of Muirfield, you know.”

  Betty laughed – a high-pitched sound which irritated Todd even more. It would be impossible to be married to a woman like this, he thought, and for a moment he felt sympathy for Ramsey, but no, that was going too far.

  “I was going to tell you about this shortbread,” said Betty. “I was sitting down for a cup of tea while Ramsey was out at Muirfield, with David and the others, and I decided to have a piece of shortbread. Now the shortbread itself was interesting because it had been baked by no less a person than Judith McClure, who’s headmistress of St George’s. You know her?”

  Todd stared at her glassily. “No,” he said. “But I know who she is.”

  “Well,” continued Betty, “I had gone to a coffee morning at St George’s, in the art centre, with a friend, who’s got a daughter there – a very talented girl – and I’m friendly with her mother, who lives over in Gordon Terrace, and she very kindly invited me to come to the coffee morning. Anyway, we went off and there was a stand with all sorts of things which had been baked by the girls and by the staff too. They were selling scones and the like to raise money for a school art trip to Florence. So I decided to buy something to add my little contribution to the cause. I love Florence, although Ramsey and I haven’t been there for at least twenty years.

  “Mind you,” she went on, “there are lots of people who say that Florence is ruined. They say that there are now so many visitors that you have to queue more or less all morning to get into the Uffizi in the afternoon. Can you believe that? Standing there with all those Germans and what-not with their backpacks? All morning. No thank you! Ramsey and I just wouldn’t do that.

  “But I suppose if you’re an Edinburgh schoolgirl and you’re young and fit, then it’s fine to stand about and wait for the Uffizi to open. So anyway I dutifully went over to the stall and bought a packet of shortbread which said: Made by Dr McClure. I was quite tickled by this because I had heard that he’s the cook, you know. Roger. He’s a fearfully good cook and he’s writing a long book on the lives of the popes at the moment. So maybe that means there’s less time for cooking. Or perhaps one can do both – one can write a history of the papacy during the day and then cook at night. Something like that.

  “The shortbread was delicious. I had several pieces over the next few days and then, without any warning, while I was eating the very last piece, a bit of tooth broke off. It had nothing to do with the shortbread, of course. I wouldn’t want her to think that her shortbread broke my tooth – it didn’t. It was just that this tooth was ready to break, apparently. There must have been a tiny crack in it and this was the time that it chose to break. One can’t plan these things in life. They just happen, don’t they?”

  She did not wait for an answer. “I felt it immediately. If I touched the bit that had broken off, I felt a very sharp pain, like an electric shock. And so I telephoned the dental surgery, but it was a Sunday, and I got a recorded message telling me to phone some number or other. But the problem was that the person who left the message on that tape spoke indistinctly – so many people do these days – and I just couldn’t make out the number! So what could I do? Well, I’ll tell you. I had heard that there was an emergency dental service down at the Western General hospital, and so I phoned them up and asked whether I could come down and have the tooth looked at. And do you know what they said? They said that if I was registered with a dentist then I wouldn’t be allowed in the door! That’s what they said. So I said to them that I couldn’t make out the emergency number and therefore couldn’t get in touch with my own dentist, and they just repeated what th
ey’d said about my not being able to go to their emergency clinic if I was registered elsewhere. Can you believe it! I’d fallen into some sort of void, it seemed. It’s, what do they call it? A catch 23.”

  “Catch 22,” said Todd quietly.

  “No, I’m sure it’s 23,” said Betty. “Same as the bus that goes down Morningside Road. The 23 bus.”

  Todd looked at his watch. It was only 10.22. No, 10.23.

  59. The Dashing White Sergeant

  “Let’s have some fun,” whispered Jim Smellie to Mungo Brown. Taking the microphone in his hand, he held it up and called the ball to order. “Ladies and Gentlemen! Ladies and Gentlemen! I’m Jim Smellie and this is Jim Smellie’s Ceilidh Band! Would you kindly arise and take your partners for an eightsome reel!”

  Mungo drew out the bellows of his piano accordion and played an inviting major chord. At the table, Todd rose quickly to his feet and gestured, almost in desperation, to Sasha. She stood up too, cutting Ramsey Dunbarton off in the middle of a sentence. Bruce then rose, turning to Lizzie as he did so.

  “Shall we?” he said.

  She turned down her mouth. “I don’t see how we can do an eightsome. Has anybody told the band that there aren’t enough people for an eightsome?”

  Bruce looked over at the band, the three members of which now seemed poised to play. This was ridiculous, he thought, but if nobody was going to do it, then he would have to go across and have a word with them.

  He strode across the floor and approached Jim Smellie, who was smiling at him, his fiddle tucked under his chin.

  “Look, we can’t do an eightsome,” said Bruce. “There are only six of us.”

  “Six?” asked Smellie, affecting surprise. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, of course I am,” said Bruce, the irritation showing in his voice. “So we’ll have to start with something else. What about a Gay Gordons?”

  Smellie looked at Mungo. “Anything gay?” he asked. “This young man wants something gay.”

  Mungo raised an eyebrow. “Yes, I suppose so. Gay Gordons then?”

  Bruce cast an angry glance at Smellie. “That’ll do,” he said.

  The band struck up and the dancers went out onto the floor. There were only three couples, of course, and the floor seemed wide and empty. Bruce stood beside Lizzie, his arm over her shoulder, as the dance required. Had she shuddered when he had touched her? He had the distinct impression that she had, which was very rude of her, he thought. If it weren’t for the fact that she was Todd’s daughter, and Todd was, after all, his boss, then he would have given her a piece of his mind well before this. Who did she think she was?

  “What do you put on your hair?” she asked suddenly. “It smells very funny. Like cloves, or pepper, or something like that.”

  Bruce winked at her. “Men’s business,” he said. “But I’m glad that you like it.”

  His response went home. “I didn’t say …” She was unable to finish. The band had started and the small line of couples began to move round the perimeter of the floor. There was no more time for conversation, although Todd seemed to be trying to whisper something to Sasha, who looked over her shoulder and then whispered something back.

  The Gay Gordons went on for longer than usual, or so it seemed to the dancers. Then, when the music finally came to an end, Smellie seized the microphone and announced a Dashing White Sergeant. Sasha looked anxiously at Ramsey Dunbarton – the Gay Gordons had been energetic, and he seemed to have coloured. Was he up to another dance, she wondered.

  She leaned over to Todd and whispered in his ear. “Do you think it wise …?” she began. “He looks exhausted.”

  Todd shrugged. “He should know his limits. He seems to be all right.”

  In spite of their doubts, Ramsey Dunbarton was busy organising everybody for the next dance. Todd and Bruce were to join Betty in one set, and he would be flanked by Lizzie and Sasha.

  Smellie watched, bemused, while the two sets prepared themselves, and then, with a nod to Mungo, he started the music. Off they went, dancing in opposite directions, all the way round the hall, to seemingly interminable bars before they encountered one another, bowed, and went through the motions of the dance. Mungo Brown smiled and looked away; he had never seen anything quite as amusing in thirty years of playing at ceilidhs.

  “This is cruel,” he mouthed to Smellie, and Smellie nodded and smirked as the two groups of dancers went off again in their wide, lonely circling of the dance floor.

  At the end of the Dashing White Sergeant the dancers returned to their table while the band embarked on The Northern Lights of Old Aberdeen. Nobody wanted to dance to this, in spite of an exhortation from Jim Smellie that a waltz should be attempted.

  Todd looked at his watch. They might do a few more dances – two at the most – and then they could bring the whole thing to an end. Honour would have been satisfied; they would have had their ball and nobody would be able to say that they could not muster support for one. Did the South Edinburgh Labour Party have a ball? They did not. Of course, they didn’t know how to dance, thought Todd, with satisfaction. That’s what came of having two left feet. He paused. That was really amusing, and he would have to tell Sasha about it. He might even tell it to Bruce, who liked a joke, even if his sense of humour was rather strange. Anything, of course, was better than those awful Dunbartons, with her wittering away about dentists and breaking her tooth and about Dr McClure’s shortbread. What nonsense.

  He looked at Bruce, noticing how the exertion of the dance had made his hair subside; it was still en brosse, but at a reduced angle of inclination. Todd stared at Bruce’s head. Was it something to do with the melting of whatever it was that he put on his hair? Perhaps that stuff – whatever it was – stopped supporting hair when it became warmer. Brylcreem – good old-fashioned Brylcreem, of the sort that Todd had used when he was in his last year at Watson’s, and which you could use to grease your bicycle chain if needs be – was a much simpler, and more masculine product. And it had used that very effective advertising jingle, which he could still remember, come to think of it. Brylcreem – a little drop will do you!/ Brylcreem – you’ll look so debonair!/ Brylcreem – the girls will all pursue you/ They’ll love to run their fingers through your hair!

  That young man is a bit of a mystery, thought Todd. He was up to something when I saw him in the drying room. And whatever it was, he had no business to be there. It was all very suspicious.

  60. The Tombola

  It was now time for the tombola at the Annual Ball of the South Edinburgh Conservative Association. Jim Smellie’s Ceilidh Band had made valiant efforts to provoke more dancing, but the guests, exhausted by the Gay Gordons and the Dashing White Sergeant had decided that they would dance no more. Jim Smellie and the band played a few more tunes and then, after a maudlin rendtion of Good-night Irene, sung by Mungo Brown in a curious nasal drone, the band had packed up and gone home.

  At their combined table on the other side of the room, the six guests sat, still feeling rather lost in the vastness of the empty function room, but enjoying nonetheless the drinks which Todd had generously purchased everyone after the last dance.

  “We’ve had a wonderful evening,” announced Sasha, looking around the table lest anybody venture to disagree.

  Lizzie gave a snort, but not so loud that it could be heard by anyone other than Bruce, who was seated immediately beside her. “Speak for yourself,” she muttered.

  Bruce turned to her. “She is, actually,” he said. “She is speaking for herself.”

  Lizzie said nothing for a moment, digesting the barely-disguised rebuke. She had tolerated Bruce thus far – and it had been an effort – but she was not sure if she could continue to do so. There was something insufferable about him, an irritating self-confidence that begged for a put-down. The problem, though, was that it was far from easy to put down somebody who was quite so pleased with himself. And what could one say? Could anything penetrate the mantle of self-satisfaction
that surrounded him, like a cloak of … like a cloak of … There was no simile, she decided, and then she thought cream.

  She turned to him. “You’re like the cat who’s got the cream,” she said.

  Bruce met her gaze. “Thank you,” he said. And then he gave quite a passable imitation of a purr and rubbed his left leg against her, as might an affectionate cat. “Like that?” he asked.

  Any response that Lizzie might have given was prevented by Sasha’s standing up and announcing that the time had come for the tombola.

  “We have marvellous prizes,” she said. “And since it’s only a modest crowd here tonight, there’ll be plenty for everybody.”

  “Hear, hear,” said Ramsey Dunbarton, raising his glass of whisky. “Plenty for everybody – the Party philosophy.”

  “Quite,” agreed Sasha. “Now, to save the bother of a draw, I simply divided the tickets – on a totally random basis, of course – into six groups. I then put each group in a separate envelope and wrote a name on the outside. On payment of six pounds – one pound per ticket – you will each get your envelope. And then you can open it up and when you tell me the numbers, I will tell you what you’ve won.”

  “Sounds fair,” said Bruce, but he noticed that Ramsey Dunbarton looked doubtful. Did he suspect Sasha of cheating, Bruce wondered? Surely that would be inconceivable. And yet she would have had every opportunity to dictate which tickets went into which envelope, and thus effectively determine who won what.

  The Ramsey Dunbartons, slightly reluctantly, handed over twelve pounds and were given two white envelopes with Ramsey and Betty written on the outside. Then Lizzie completed the same transaction, in her case with an ostentatious show of boredom. Bruce, by contrast, handed over six pounds with good grace and smiled as he took the envelope from Sasha.