44 Scotland Street Read online

  Todd’s face registered not anger, but disappointment. This confirmed Bruce’s fears. I’m unemployed, he said to himself. As of five minutes from now, I’m an unemployed (and unemployable, he suddenly realised) surveyor.

  “So when you went into that building at No 87 Eton Terrace, you were doing so on trust. You were …”

  Bruce sat up straight. “Number 78.”

  Todd paused. “Number …” He looked at the file in front of him. “Number …”

  Bruce closed his eyes with relief. Yes, there had been a flat for sale at No 87. He remembered somebody saying something about it over coffee. Todd had confused the two.

  Todd had now extracted a diary from a drawer and was checking a note. He closed the book, almost reluctantly, and looked up at Bruce.

  “I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “This is my mistake. I’m very sorry. I was mixing up two properties. You see …”

  Bruce shook his head. “You don’t need to apologise, Todd,” he said. “We all make mistakes. All of us. You really don’t need to apologise to me.” He paused, before continuing. “The important thing is to remember that, and to own up to one’s mistakes when one makes them. That’s the really important thing. To tell the truth. To tell the truth about one’s mistakes.”

  Todd rose to his feet. “Well,” he said. “We can put that behind us. There’s work to be done.”

  “Of course,” said Bruce. “But I was wondering whether I could possibly have the afternoon off. I’m pretty much up to date and …”

  “Of course,” said Todd. “Of course.”

  Bruce smiled at his employer and rose to leave.

  “A moment,” said Todd, reaching for the file. “Was there an old or a new tank in the roof space? Some of those places still have the lead tanks.”

  Bruce again hesitated, but only for an instant. “It was fine,” he said. “New tank.”

  Todd nodded. “Good,” he said.

  Bruce left the room. He was trying to trap me, he thought. One would have imagined that he had learned his lesson, but he was still trying to trap me. As if I would lie, as if. He felt angry with Todd now. What a hypocrite! Sitting there lecturing me about lies when he comes from a whole world of lies and hypocrisy. What hypocrites! Masonic lodges! Golf clubs! – even though he’s not a member of the golf club he really wants to be a member of, thought Bruce, with a certain degree of satisfaction.

  9. SP

  Pat was hardly surprised when Matthew announced that he was going to take a coffee break. She had been sitting in her cramped office at the back of the gallery, retyping the now somewhat grubby list of paintings which Matthew had handed her. Matthew had been reading the newspaper at his desk in the front, glancing at his watch from time and time and sighing. It was obvious to Pat that he was bored. There was nothing for him to do in the gallery and his mind was not on the newspaper.

  Shortly before half-past ten, Matthew folded up his newspaper, rose to his feet and announced to Pat that he was going out.

  “I go to that place on the other side of the road,” he said. “The Morning After, it’s called. Not a very good name, if you ask me, but that’s what it’s called. Everyone calls it Big Lou’s. If you need me, you can give me a call.”

  “When will you be back?” asked Pat.

  Matthew shrugged. “Depends,” he said. “An hour or so. Maybe more. It all depends.”

  “I’ll be fine,” said Pat. “Take your time.”

  Matthew gave her a sideways glance. “It is my time,” he muttered. “It goes with being your own boss.”

  Pat smiled. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude. I just wanted you to know that I think I’ll be all right.”

  “Of course, you will,” said Matthew. “I can tell you’re going to be a great success. I can tell these things.” He touched her lightly on the shoulder. “Smart girl.”

  Pat said nothing. She was used to condescension from a certain sort of man, and although she did not like it, it was better than what she had experienced on her gap year – her first gap year.

  Alone in the gallery, Pat seated herself at Matthew’s desk and looked out onto the street. She watched Matthew cross the road and disappear into The Morning After. She would make herself a cup of coffee in a few minutes, she thought. She rationed herself to three cups a day, and eagerly looked forward to the first cup of the morning.

  Matthew had left his newspaper on the desk, and she picked it up. The front page was filled with political news, which she skipped over, in favour of an article on an inside page about a new film which everybody was talking about but which nobody, apparently, had seen. The violence in this film, it was said, was particularly graphic. There were severed heads, and limbs, and the breaking of bones. This, the writer said, was all very exciting. But why was it exciting, to see others harmed in this way? Were we addicted to fear, or dread? Pat was reflecting on this when she heard the muted note of the bell which announced that somebody had entered the gallery. She looked up and saw a man of about forty, wearing corduroy trousers and a green sweater. He was not dressed for the office, and had the air of a person with no pressing engagements.

  “May I?” he said, gesturing at the paintings.

  “Of course,” said Pat. “If there’s anything you want to know …” She left the sentence unfinished. If there was something he wanted to know it was unlikely that she would be able to give him any information. She could call Matthew, of course, but then he appeared to know nothing as well.

  The man smiled, looking about him as if deciding where to start. After a few moments he went up to a small still-life, a Glasgow jug into which a bunch of flowers had been stuffed at a drunken angle.

  “Not the way to arrange flowers,” he said, and then added: “Nor to paint them …”

  Pat said nothing. It was an unpleasant, amateurish painting; he was quite right. But she said nothing; she felt vaguely protective of Matthew’s paintings, and it was not for customers to come in and criticise them, even if the criticism was deserved.

  The man moved over to the painting which looked like a Peploe; school of Peploe perhaps. He stood in front of it for a few moments and then turned to address Pat.

  “Very nice,” he said. “In a derivative sort of way. Peaceful. Shore of Mull from Iona, or shore of Iona from Mull?”

  Pat picked up the list from her desk and walked over to join him. “According to this, it’s Mull,” she said. “Mull, near Tobermory, by, and then there’s a question mark.”

  “It’s not a Peploe,” the man said. “That’s pretty obvious. But it has its points. Look over there, that nice shading. Confident brush strokes.”

  Pat looked. How can he be so sure it’s not a Peploe, she wondered. Particularly since there were the initials SP painted in the bottom right-hand corner. Then it occurred to her: SP – School of Peploe.

  10. The Road from Arbroath

  Matthew felt that he was the discoverer of Big Lou’s coffee bar, although, like everything that is discovered (America or Lake Victoria being examples), it had always been there; or at least it had been there for the last three years or so. Before that it had been a second-hand bookshop, noted for its jumbled stock, that observed no known principle in the shelving of its collection. Topography rubbed shoulders with poetry; books on fishing and country pursuits stood side-by-side with Hegel and Habermas; and nothing was too recondite to find a place, even if no purchaser. Nobody wanted, it seemed, a guide to the walking paths of Calabria, to be found, quite fortuitously, next to an India-paper edition of South Wind by Norman Douglas, signed by the author, and forgotten.

  Only the proprietor loved these books, so fiercely and possessively, perhaps, that he discouraged purchasers. At length, as if crushed by the sheer weight of his duty and slow-moving stock, he died, and the shop was sold by his executors to Big Lou, together with its books. And then, in a gesture which was to change her life, she took all the books home to her flat in Canonmills and began to read them, one by one. She read the Norm
an Douglas, she read the guide to Calabrian walking paths, and she read the Hegel and the Habermas. And curiously enough, she remembered the contents of all these books.

  Big Lou came from Arbroath, and that was all that anybody knew about her. Questions about what she had done before she arrived in Edinburgh were ignored, as if they had not been asked, and as a result there was some speculation. She had been married to a sailor; no, she was a sailor herself, having gone to sea dressed as a man and never been unmasked; no, she had been a man, who had gone to Tangier for an operation and returned as a woman. None of this was correct. In fact, Big Lou had done very little with her life. In Arbroath she had looked after an aged uncle until she reached the age of thirty. Then she had left, but the leaving had been ill-starred. Having decided to go to Edinburgh on the death of the demanding uncle, she had shut up the house, handed the keys to a relative, and walked to the station with her suitcase. Arbroath Station is not complicated, but Big Lou had nonetheless mistaken the north-bound platform for the south-bound one, and had boarded a train to Aberdeen. She had been tired; the carriage was warm, and she almost immediately went to sleep, to wake up shortly before the train reached Stonehaven. She alighted at Aberdeen Station and felt too discouraged to return immediately. Somehow, Aberdeen was less threatening than she suspected Edinburgh might be. Directly outside the station there was a small café, and in the window of this she saw a notice advertising a vacancy for care assistants at a nursing home. That, she thought, is what I am. I am a carer. I care for others, which is exactly what she did for the next eight years in the Granite Nursing Home.

  Although it was in some respects discouraging, this job ultimately proved to be extremely lucrative. One of the residents, a retired farmer from Buchan, had named her as the principal beneficiary in his will, and she had come into a substantial sum of money. This was the signal to stop caring for people in Aberdeen – in every sense – and to take the train that she had missed those eight years before. She was now in a position to buy the coffee bar and the flat in Canonmills, and to start a new life.

  The coffee bar had been designed for her by a man she had met in a launderette. Like most of the things that had happened in Big Lou’s life, she was not properly consulted. Things happened to her; she did not initiate anything. And so she was never asked whether she wanted the booths that this man designed and constructed for her; nor whether she approved of the large and expensive mahogany newspaper rack which he installed near the front door. This was all done without anything having been agreed, and she appeared to accept this, just as she had accepted that she should have devoted the early years of her adult life to looking after her uncle, while her friends from school had gone off to Glasgow or to London and had all led lives of their own making.

  There had been men, of course, but they had treated her badly. One had been a married man who had harboured no intention of leaving his wife for Big Lou; another had been a chef on an oil rig, who had left her to take up a job in Galveston, cooking for Texan oilmen. He had written to tell her about his life in Texas and also to tell her not to come out to join him. Galveston was no place for a woman, he had said.

  Big Lou kept this letter, as it was one of the few personal letters she had ever received. She wanted to keep it, too, because she loved this man, this oily cook, and she hoped that one day he might return, although she knew this would never happen.

  11. The Origins of Love and Hate

  Matthew negotiated his way down the stairs that led to Big Lou’s coffee bar. They were hazardous stairs, down which Hugh MacDiarmid had fallen on at least two occasions in the days when the bookshop had been there. Then, it had been the unevenness of the tread; now, to this peril was added the hazard of a collapsed railing. Big Lou had intended to fix it, but this had never been done.

  The coffee bar had been divided into booths – low divisions that enabled the tops of heads to be seen above the wooden partitions. The booths were comfortable, though, and Big Lou never encouraged her customers to hurry. So one might sit there all day, if one wished, and not feel any of the unease that one might feel elsewhere.

  Matthew usually stayed for an hour or so, although if the conversation was good he might sit there for two hours, or even more. He was joined each morning by Ronnie and his friend, Pete, furniture restorers who occupied a workshop in a lane off an elegant New Town crescent. Ronnie specialised in cabinet work, while Pete was a French polisher and upholsterer. They had worked together for two years, having met in a pub after what had been a traumatic afternoon for their football team. Matthew knew nothing about football, which interested him not at all, and by unspoken agreement they kept off the topic. But Matthew sensed that there were unresolved football issues somewhere beneath the surface, as there so often are with upholsterers.

  Ronnie was married; Pete was not. Matthew had only known Ronnie since he had taken over the gallery, and during this time he had not had the opportunity to meet Ronnie’s wife, Mags. But he had heard a great deal about her, some of it from Pete, and some from Ronnie himself.

  When Ronnie was not there, Pete was voluble on the subject of Mags.

  “I wouldn’t bother to meet her,” he said. “She’ll hate you.”

  Matthew raised an eyebrow. “I don’t see why she should hate me. Why?”

  “Oh, it’s not you,” said Pete. “It’s nothing personal. Mags could even like you until she found out.”

  Matthew was puzzled. “Until she found out what?”

  “That you’re a friend of Ronnie’s,” explained Pete. “You see, Mags hates Ronnie’s friends. She’s jealous of them, I suppose, and she can’t help herself. She looks at them like this. See? And they don’t like it.”

  Matthew winced. “What about you? Does she hate you?”

  “Oh yes,” said Pete. “Although she tries to hide it. But I can tell that she hates me.”

  “What’s the point?”

  Pete shrugged. “None that I can see. But she does it nonetheless.”

  Big Lou had been listening to this conversation from behind her counter. Now she chipped in.

  “She hates you because you threaten her,” she said. “Only insecure people hate others. I’ve read about it. There’s a book called The Origins of Love and Hate. I’ve read it, and it tells you how insecurity leads to hatred.”

  The two men turned and looked at Big Lou.

  “Are you sure?” asked Pete after a while. “Is that it?”

  “Yes,” said Big Lou. “Mags hates Ronnie’s friends because she’s afraid of losing him and because they take him away from her. How much time does Ronnie spend talking with Mags? Have you ever seen him talk to her?”

  “Never,” mused Pete. “Never.”

  “Well, there you are,” said Big Lou. “Mags feels neglected.”

  Pete was about to say something in response to this when he suddenly stiffened and tapped Matthew on the forearm.

  “They’re here,” he whispered. “Ronnie, with Mags in tow.”

  Matthew turned round to look. Ronnie was making his way down the steps, followed by a woman in a flowing Paisley dress and light brown suede boots. The woman was carrying a bulging shopping bag and a folded copy of a magazine. As they entered the coffee bar, Ronnie exchanged a glance with Pete and then turned to Mags to point to the booth where his two friends were sitting. She followed his glance and then, Matthew noticed, she frowned.

  Ronnie approached the booth.

  “This is Mags,” he said, almost apologetically. “Mags, this is Matthew. You haven’t met him before. Matthew’s a friend of mine.”

  Matthew stood up and extended a hand to Mags.

  “Why do you stand up?” she said sharply. “Do you stand up for everybody, or is it just because I’m a woman?”

  Matthew looked at the floor. “I stand up because I intend to leave,” he said evenly. “Not wishing to be condescended to, or whatever, I intend to leave. You may have my seat if you wish.”

  He walked out, and started up
the perilous steps. He was shaking, like a boy who had done something forbidden.

  12. Chanterelles Trouvées

  Bruce had offered to cook dinner for Pat that evening. The offer had been made before he left the flat in the morning as he popped his head, uninvited, round her half-open door.

  “I’m cooking anyway,” he said. “It’s as easy to cook for two as it is for one.”

  “I’d love that,” said Pat. She noticed his glance move around her room as they spoke, resting for a moment on her unmade bed before moving to the suitcase which she had not yet fully unpacked.

  Bruce nodded. “You will,” he said. “I’m not a bad cook, if you don’t mind my saying so. I could teach Delia a thing or two.”

  Pat laughed, which seemed to please Bruce.

  “Only about surveying,” he went on. “Not about cooking.” He finished, and waited for Pat to laugh again, but she did not.

  “I’m sure it’ll be very good,” she said solemnly. “What will we have?”

  “I only cook pasta,” said Bruce. “Pasta with mushrooms probably. Chanterelles. You like mushrooms, don’t you?”

  “Love them,” said Pat.

  “Good. Chanterelles in a butter sauce, then, with cream. Garlic. Black pepper and a salad dressed with olive oil and a dash of balsamic vinegar. Balsamic vinegar comes from Modena, you know. Has to. How about that?”

  “Perfect,” said Pat. “Perfect.”

  When she returned to Scotland Street that evening, late – because Matthew had asked her to show a painting to a client who could only come in after six – Bruce had laid out the ingredients of his pasta dish on the kitchen table. She sat there as he cooked, explaining as he did so some troubling incident at work that day, a row over defective central heating and a leaky cupola.