44 Scotland Street (5 page)

He replaced the ladder, locked the flat, and then made his way downstairs. On the other side of the street there was a set of gardens which sloped steeply down the hill to the Water of Leith below. Bruce crossed over and stood on the pavement, his binoculars trained on the roof of the building. It was by no means ideal, he thought; the angle from which he had to observe the roof made it impossible for him to see more than the first third of it, but that seemed perfectly all right. He ran the binoculars over the stonework along the front of the roof. That seemed fine as well.
Roof inspected and found to be in good condition,
he dictated to himself. He looked at his watch. He had ten minutes to get back to the office, twenty minutes to dictate the report, and that would mean that the client would get it just in time. There was the valuation to think about, of course, but that was not going to be a particular problem. The location was good: the flat was a ten-minute walk from Charlotte Square; the street was quiet, and there was nothing to suggest that the neighbours were difficult. A flat three doors down had gone recently for three hundred and eighty thousand pounds (Todd had told him about that transaction) but that was on the first floor, which added to the price, and so:
Three hundred and twenty thousand pounds
, thought Bruce, and then, feeling benevolent to the purchasers and their mortgage needs, he added a further eight thousand pounds for good measure.
A fine, late-Georgian flat with many original features.
Superb cornice in the south-facing drawing room; wainscoting in all public rooms; a fine bath which a purchaser might wish to preserve, and a decorated fireplace in the rear bedroom depicting the Ettrick Shepherd, Walter Scott and Robert Burns in conversation with one another in a country inn.
These reports wrote themselves, thought Bruce, if one was prepared to loosen up one’s prose a bit.

He drove back to Queen Street, parked the car in the mews garage (for which the firm had paid the equivalent price of a small flat in Dundee) and made his way into the office. There the report was dictated, presented to the secretary, and delivered to Todd in a crisp blue folder.

Todd gestured for Bruce to sit down while he read the survey. Then, looking up at his employee, he asked him quietly: “You inspected the roof, did you?”

“Yes,” said Bruce. “Nothing wrong there.”

“Are you sure?” asked Todd, fingering the edge of the folder. “Did you get up into the roof space?”

Bruce hesitated, but only for a moment. There was nothing wrong with that roof and it would have made no difference had he been able to squeeze through the partly-blocked trapdoor. “I went up,” he said. “Everything was fine.”

Todd raised an eyebrow. “Well,” he said. “It wasn’t when I went up last week. I looked at it for another client, you see. He

lost interest in offering before I wrote a report, and so I thought a fresh survey appropriate. Had you really gone up, you might have seen the fulminating rot and also noticed the very dicey state of one of the chimney stacks. But …”

Bruce said nothing. He was looking at his shoes.

8. Hypocrisy, Lies, Golf Clubs

The silence lasted for several minutes. Todd stared at Bruce across his desk. I trained this young man, he thought; I am partly responsible for this. I had my reservations, of course, but they were about other things, about more general failings, and all the time I was missing the obvious: he’s untruthful.

Bruce found it difficult to meet his employer’s gaze. I tell far fewer lies than most people, he thought. I really do. Everybody –
everybody
– has cut the occasional corner. It’s not as if I had made a report in bad faith. That roof looked fine to me, and I
did
open that trapdoor and look inside. Fulminating rot? Surely I would have smelled it.

Todd drew in his breath. He was still staring at Bruce accusingly, a gaze which was unreturned.

“If surveyors lie,” said Todd, “then whom can we believe?”

Bruce said nothing, but shook his head slightly. Self-reproach?

“You see,” said Todd, “when a client approaches a professional person, he puts his trust in him or her. He doesn’t expect to be misled. Hmm?”

Bruce looked up briefly. “No,” he said. “You’re right, Todd.”

“We rely on our reputation,” went on Todd. “If we lose that – and you can lose that very quickly, let me tell you – then we have nothing. Years and years of hard work by my brother and, if I may say so, by me, go out of the window just because somebody is found to be misleading a client. I’ve seen it happen.

“And there are much broader considerations,” he went on. “All of our life is based on acts of trust. We trust other people to do what they say they’re going to do. When we get on an aeroplane we trust the airline to have maintained its aircraft. We trust the pilot, who has our lives in his hands. We trust other people, you see, Bruce. We trust them. And that’s why what you’ve done is so dreadful. It really is. It’s unforgivable. Yes, sorry, but that’s the word. Unforgivable.”

It was at this point that Bruce realised that he was about to lose his job. Up to now, it had been one of the little lectures that Todd occasionally gave his staff; now it was something different. He looked at his employer, meeting his gaze, hoping to read his intentions.

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 Norman 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.