Espresso Tales Read online

  And of course Todd had behaved in exactly the way one would have expected of him. He had fired him on the spot, right there in the Café St Honoré, using as his pretext the fact that he had put in a false report on a roof-space inspection some time back. That was typical of the man, in Bruce’s view–to keep a little thing like that up his sleeve, waiting for his chance to use it. No harm had been done by that slight cutting of the corner. The client had been perfectly happy with the purchase, he had heard, and the seller was happy too. Everybody was happy, apart from Todd, who parroted on about professional standards and integrity. Blah, blah, blah, thought Bruce. If everybody behaved in such a retentive way, he reflected, then would anything in this world ever get done? It would not. The world needed people of spirit–people of decisiveness; people who were prepared to see beyond the narrow rules, as long as they kept to the general spirit of things. That’s me, Bruce said to himself.

  Bruce remembered very clearly each detail of that fatal afternoon. Todd had stormed out, closely followed by Sasha, who had run after him up the narrow cobbled lane outside the restaurant. From his table near the window, Bruce had seen the two of them standing on the corner of Thistle Street, yelling at one another, although he could hear nothing of what was said. Presumably she was explaining to her husband that things were not as he imagined, and indeed after a few minutes Todd appeared to calm down. They began to talk more calmly, and Sasha then leant forward and planted a kiss on her husband’s cheek.

  The sight of this brought relief to Bruce, who concluded that the matter had been sorted out and that Sasha would return to the rest of her lunch and he would in due course return to his job. However, this did not happen, as Sasha merely walked off in the opposite direction, leaving Bruce to pay for his ruined lunch. This outraged him. She had invited him, after all, having recently inherited four hundred thousand pounds, and she very specifically said that the lunch was on her. Now Bruce had to pay for both of them, as well as the wine, which he had offered to pay for anyway, but which was largely untouched. Still, at least he would get his job back, until the time arrived for him to resign on his own terms.

  But that was not to be. He returned to the office half an hour or so later to find a note from Todd awaiting him on his desk. He could speak to the cashier about his final cheque, the note said (he would be paid up to the end of that month), and would he please ensure that all personal effects were removed from his desk by four o’clock that afternoon? He should also return the mobile telephone which the firm had bought him and duly account for any personal calls that he had made on it during the period since the last bill.

  Bruce stood there, quite still, the note in his hand. Several minutes passed before he let the piece of paper fall from his hand and he walked out of his office and made his way to the end of the corridor and pushed open Todd’s door.

  “You should always knock,” said Todd. “What if I had a client in here with me? What then?”

  “I’m going to take you to a tribunal,” said Bruce.

  “Go ahead,” said Todd. “I’d already spoken to the lawyers about getting rid of you and they assured me that the making of a fraudulent survey report constitutes perfectly good grounds for dismissal. So by all means take me to a tribunal.”

  Bruce opened his mouth to speak, and then closed it again. It was difficult to know what to say. Then the words came to him. “You have a ridiculous name, you know, Mr Todd. Raeburn! That’s the name of a gas cooker, you know. That’s what you are, Mr Todd–you’re just a gas cooker.”

  Raeburn Todd appeared undisturbed by the insult. “A gas cooker, am I?” he said quietly. “Well, I’ve just cooked your goose for you, young man, would you not say?”

  9. Sally’s Thoughts

  After he had lost his job–or resigned, as he put it–Bruce went home to Crieff for several days to lick his wounds. His parents had been concerned over his resignation, and they had quizzed him as to what lay behind it.

  “It’s not much of a firm,” Bruce had explained airily. “I found myself–how shall I put it?–a bit thwarted. The job didn’t stretch me enough.”

  His mother had nodded. “You thrive on new challenges, Brucie,” she said. “As a little boy you were like that. You were a very creative child.”

  Bruce’s father had looked at him over the top of his spectacles. He was an accountant who specialised in the winding-up of companies, and he had a strong nose for lies and obfuscation. The trouble with my son, he thought, is that he’s vain. He’s lost this job of his and he can’t bring himself to tell us. Poor boy. I suppose I can’t blame him for that, but I wish he wouldn’t lie to us.

  “What are you going to do?” asked his father. “How are things in surveying at the moment? Are they tight?”

  Bruce shrugged, and looked out of the window of “Lochnagar”, the family’s two-storey granite house in Crieff. One thing one has to say about the parental house, he thought, is that it has a good view, down into the strath, over all that good farming land. I should marry the daughter of one of those farmers down there–those comfortable farmers (minor lairds, really, some of them)–and then things would be all right. I could raise Blackface sheep, in a small way, and some cattle, some arable. It would be an easy life.

  But then there was the problem of the farmer’s daughter–whoever she turned out to be. Some of them were all right, it had to be said, but then the ones he might find worth looking at tended to move to Edinburgh, or even to London, where they had jobs in public relations or possibly at Christie’s. At Christie’s, they were the ones who were sometimes allowed to hold up the vases and paintings at the auctions (provided, of course, that they had studied history of art at university, although sometimes a declared intention to study history of art was sufficient qualification). That was the problem; they had no desire to remain in Perthshire. That was until they became broody; things changed then, and the idea of living in the country with dogs (Labradors, usually, the dog of choice for such persons) and children suddenly became an attractive one. Bruce sighed. Life seemed very predictable, whatever choice one made.

  He looked back at his father, and held his gaze for a few moments. Then he looked away again. He knows, he thought. He knows exactly what has happened. “I think I’ll try something different,” he replied quietly. “The wine business is interesting. I might try that.”

  “You always had a good nose for wine, Brucie,” said his mother. “And for sniffing things out in general.” She cast a glance at her son’s hair. “Is that cloves, I smell, by the way? I love the scent of cloves. I think it’s marvellous that boys have all those different things to choose from at the chemist’s these days. Hair things and shaving things, that is.”

  Over the next few days, he was looked after by his mother, and felt reassured. It still riled him to think of Todd and the injustice that had been done him, but after three days in Crieff the pain seemed to ease–unconditional maternal affirmation had its effect–and he found himself in a position to make decisions. He would return to Edinburgh, plan a holiday–a month or two perhaps, since he had the opportunity–and then he could start seriously to look for a job in the wine trade. He had some leads there. Will Lyons had more or less guaranteed that he would find something, and so, with any luck, he would be fixed up by, say, late September. That would be a good time to start in the wine trade, with Christmas and New Year sales coming up.

  Bruce felt positively buoyed by the thought of a couple of months off, and spent the first few days after returning to Scotland Street in deciding where he would go. He had never been in the Far East, and he spoke to one or two people in the Cumberland Bar who had been to Thailand.

  “Terrific country,” one of them said. “Just terrific. South–terrific. North–terrific. Unconditionally terrific.”

  That helped Bruce a bit, but gave him very little concrete information. What about Vietnam?

  “Not quite as terrific as Thailand,” said the same person. “But terrific in its own way.”
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br />   Bruce was still seeing Sally, the American girl he had met in the Cumberland Bar. The relationship had not progressed as far as he had imagined it might, and he had decided that he most definitely would not ask her to marry him, but it was a convenient arrangement for both of them and they met one another once or twice a week, usually in the Cumberland Bar, and thereafter they went to 44 Scotland Street, where they were able to continue their conversation.

  “I find him a bit of a drag,” Sally had written in an e-mail sent to her friend, Jane, who lived in Nantucket. “You don’t know Scotsmen, do you? Well, I’ll tell you a bit about them. They’re usually quite pale, as if they’ve spent too much time indoors, which they often have (although I must say that Bruce is really good-looking, and a few months in Arizona or somewhere like that could really improve him). They like drinking, and they go on and on–and I really mean on and on–about soccer, even the relatively civilised ones (the ones you meet in the Cumberland Bar–and you should just see the rest!). Bruce doesn’t talk about soccer, but he makes up for it with rugby. You won’t have even heard about rugby, Jane. It’s this really weird game, a bit like football–the proper football, the one we play–but without the shoulders. It’s very tribal. They run up and down a soggy pitch and bring one another down in hugs. I don’t think that’s the word they use for it–I think there’s some other term–but that’s what they are–hugs. And so it goes on.

  “Bruce is all right, I suppose, for a couple of months. (So, OK, I’ve been bored. You can’t blame a girl who’s feeling bored.) But I would love–just love–to meet some nice, normal boy over here–you know what I mean?–somebody like that guy you met at Dartmouth (what was his name again? Remember him?!) But they just don’t exist. So I’ll make do with Bruce a little longer before I give him his pink slip and then it’s back home and we can meet up and you can introduce me to somebody. Agree?”

  And Jane had written back: “Don’t worry. I’ve met the cutest guy at a party at the Martinsons’ and I’m saving him just for you! I’ve told him all about you and he’s really interested. So come home soon. You won’t believe your luck when you meet him. His name’s Billy, by the way. Isn’t that cute? Yale.”

  10. Bruce’s Plan

  When Sally revealed to Bruce that she was intending to return to the United States at the beginning of September, and that she would only come back to Scotland in November, for her graduation, and for no more than a week at that, she was surprised that he took the news so calmly. There was a reason for his unruffled demeanour in the face of this impending separation: Bruce was, in fact, more than a little relieved that she would be going, as he was beginning to find her company slightly irksome. She’s neurotic, he thought; always probing into his reasons for doing and saying things, as American girls tended to do. Scottish girls were almost always more straightforward and less demanding; they did not ask you to explain yourself at every step, but accepted you for what you were, a man–and let you get on with it.

  The roots of the difference lay in the very nature of the two societies: whatever Scotland was, it was not a matriarchy; whereas the United States was a profoundly matriarchal society–and much more feminine than would be suggested by all that male bravado. That was a front, and a misleading one at that; underneath the male swagger lay a passive acceptance of female dominance–a fact not always appreciated by outsiders. And as a result, such people often fundamentally misread American society and assume that decisions articulated by men are male decisions–a serious mistake.

  Although he had not reflected on the general issue of why American women behaved the way they did, Bruce found it very difficult to adjust to the independence which Sally showed in her relationship with him. In his view, it was only natural that the male should take the lead in most matters (“That’s the whole point of being a male,” he had once remarked to a friend who had consulted him about a fraying relationship). Women who did not accept this were, in Bruce’s view, self-evidently unhappy in their gender. They made very unstable girlfriends and were best avoided, even if they were sometimes every bit as enthusiastic as other women were in flinging themselves at him. Bruce knew that he was attractive even to women who were not interested in men at all, although they often fought so hard against it and felt so bad about their feelings towards him. Go with the flow, he might have said. That is how Bruce thought.

  The impending departure of Sally, rather curiously, added a zest to the relationship. Although neither would have thought of it in these terms, this was probably owing to the fact that neither now felt trapped, and a sense of freedom in a friendship–or in a love affair–often adds a certain lightness to what might otherwise weigh heavily. It is not hard to be considerate, or even enthusiastic, towards those who are going away; in fact, they often appear much more attractive and desirable as friends than they did before they announced their intention to go. Now, after the decision to go is taken, the obligation of those who are staying behind is finite; we do not have to be nice to them for much longer–the smile need not be maintained into some distant and unknowable future.

  For her part, knowledge of the fact that Bruce was about to be dropped made Sally feel slightly guilty, which caused her to be particularly affectionate towards him. She gave him several small and unexpected presents–a set of cuff links from Jenners, and a silk tie which she bought from Stewart Christie in Queen Street. And Bruce reciprocated with a box of Callard and Bowser nougat and a book of Edinburgh views taken by a well-known soft-focus photographer. “So that you can remember how happy you’ve been in Edinburgh,” he wrote on the title page of the book. “And to remind you of me.”

  Sally was touched by this, but when she began to analyse the wording of his inscription, her irritation with Bruce resurfaced. Was he implying that her happiness in Edinburgh was directly attributable to her having met him? If so, that was nonsense. She had been perfectly happy before she had met him; indeed she had even been slightly happier then. So the inscription might more accurately have read: “To remind you of how happy you’ve been in Edinburgh, in spite of memories of me.” But people never wrote that sort of brutally honest thing in books, largely because people very rarely have a clear idea of the effect that they have on other people, or can bring themselves to admit it. And Bruce, as Sally had discovered, lacked both insight into himself and an understanding of how somebody like her might feel about somebody like him. I really am wasting my time with him, she said to herself; I may as well bring the whole thing to an end right now. And yet there was something compelling about him, something fascinating that drew her to him. Something to do with the way he looked, she thought; the lowest common denominator of such dalliances. The conclusion depressed her, but there it was: some relationships are a matter of the physical, try as we might to ennoble them. Ultimately, the reason why one person may stay with another may be as small a thing as the shape of the other’s nose.

  Unaware of Sally’s doubts, Bruce assumed that she would find the separation difficult, and that she might wish to prolong their affair at a distance. So when the idea occurred to him of how he might spend a month or two before he started his new job in the autumn, he imagined that Sally would welcome the suggestion.

  “I’ve got some good news for you,” he said casually, as they sat in the garden at the Cumberland Bar, enjoying some late Saturday afternoon sunshine.

  She looked at him and smiled. The sun was in his hair, melting the gel. Poor Bruce!

  “I can come to Nantucket with you,” said Bruce. “You’ve made me curious about it. We could spend a few weeks there maybe, at your place, and then do some travelling. I’ve always wanted to see New Orleans. We could go down there maybe.”

  Sally stared at him. The moment had come, unexpected just then, but it had definitely arrived.

  11. A Bus for Bertie

  “We have to reach a decision,” said Irene Pollock, mother of Bertie, and neighbour, one floor down, of Pat, Bruce and Domenica. She looked at her husband and waited for
him to speak.

  He was sitting in the chair which he liked to occupy near one of the windows of the sitting room, immediately under the small reproduction Warhol which Irene had bought for him at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He had not been listening closely to what Irene was saying, as he had been thinking about a row which had blown up at the office–Stuart was a statistician in the Scottish Executive–and there had been an intense discussion in an internal meeting of how figures might be presented. The optimists had been pitted against the pessimists, and Stuart was not sure exactly into which camp he fitted. He believed that there were sometimes grounds for optimism and sometimes grounds for pessimism, and that one might on occasion choose between them at the level of subtle, and permissible, nuances but in general should stick to the truth, which was often uncomfortable.

  All of this was some distance away from the matter which Irene was talking about, which was the issue of how their son, Bertie, the remarkably talented five-and-three-quarter-year-old, should get from Scotland Street, where they lived, to the school in Merchiston, in which he had now been enrolled.