Chance Developments (4 page)
Read Chance Developments Online
Authors: Alexander McCall Smith
“He was very proud of being Scottish, you know.”
She touched the photograph gently, as one might touch something precious. The young man sitting opposite her, on the other side of the card table on which the photographs had been spread out, noticed that there was sun damage to her hands. Or was it those discolourations that people called
liver spots
? No, it was most likely the sun, because it was fierce here in southern Tuscany, and the summer monthsâof which this was oneâcould be oven-like, even here in the hills, where it was meant to be cooler because of the Apennine wind. On the way up the winding road from San Casciano dei Bagni he had passed a sign that warned of snowâinconceivable now, in this heat, but presumably a real enough issue in winter.
“Yes, very proud,” she continued. “Not in an embarrassing way, of course. He often wore a kiltâjust as he's doing in this photograph. But he didn't go on about Scotland as some people do. I think that's boastful, don't you? To go on at length about your country and its merits. Boastful and distasteful, too, because going on about one's country often involves adverse comparisons with other countries, don't you think?”
The young man nodded. “Countries and football teams⦔
She laughed. “I suspect you don't take much interest in football, do you? No, I thought not.” She paused. “But being proud of
being
something is rather odd, I've always thought. It's rather like being proud of being tall. How can you be proud of something that had absolutely nothing to do with any effort or talent on your part? Frankly, I don't see it.”
“No, probably not.”
“You can be relieved, I suppose, that you were born something or otherâAmerican, sayâbut that's not the same thing as being proud. You can be thankful that your parents reached America in time for you to be born thereâand I suppose a lot of people were grateful for thatâbut you can't claim any credit for it.”
“They could, though.”
She frowned. “Who could?”
“The people who reached America. They could be proud of being American.”
“Yes, of course. But that pride would be about what they had achieved. They got there, and they could feel proud of that. That's legitimate enough, but it only works for the first generation.”
“I see what you mean.” He touched his forehead. It was hot and he felt damp. “You're Scottish too,” he said.
She smiled, and sat back in her chair. He noticed that the hem of the skirt she was wearing had become unstitched. Age could bring neglect of one's clothesâa giving up, reallyâbut then he reminded himself she was only sixty-three and that was hardly all that old. He himself would be sixty-three in exactly thirty years' time. And that would be inâhe did the mental arithmetic quicklyâtwo thousand and three. He thought: Would they say
twenty three
in the way in which we said nineteen seventy-three? He thought it unlikely. It would have to be something like
twenty oh-three
. Stands the calendar at twenty oh-three and is there honey still for tea? Nobody would remember Rupert Brooke by then. Nor have tea, with bread and honey. There used to be a country called Englandâ¦
He was aware she was talking. He had been momentarily back in Cambridge, sitting in his room, waiting for his friends to come back from the river.
“I am,” she said, “although people often didn't realise it. Harry and I, you see, were both taken to be English because of the way we spoke. We didn't have a Scottish accent because our classâand I'm sorry to have to use such an objectionable term, but there is no other way of saying itâbecause our class was brought up to speak in the same way as a certain sort of English person. That's an old story in Scotland, the rejection of the Scots tongue, but it did happen. We started to spurn our own language, even if we kept a few words as mementos, so to speak. Words like
dreich
that we use as occasional shibboleths. That's another interesting word, isn't it? The shibboleth was your password to whatever you wanted to get intoâor out of. I suppose you had to use the shibboleth to avoid being stoned or put to the sword, or something of that nature.
“Maybe it was because of that problem of misidentification that he made much of being Scottish. And it can't have helped to be sent off to that school in Perthshire that pretended to be English.”
She had been looking out of the window as she spoke; now she looked at him.
“I'm so sorry,” she said. “How tactless of me. You probably went to one of those places yourself.”
He reassured her that he had not taken offence. “I went to school in England. A place called Marlborough,” he said.
She nodded. “You were at the Courtauld Institute, weren't you?”
“Yes.”
“You studied under the Poussin manâ¦what was he called?”
“Blunt. Anthony Blunt. I didn't know him all that well. I found him rather formal in his manner.”
She smiled. “Like a painting by Poussin?”
“Yes, you could say that. There's a reason why we like this artist rather than that one.”
He picked up the photograph again. “May I?”
“Of course. I should put them in a proper album, but there's something depressing about putting photographs away. It's rather like filing something that shouldn't be filedâlike reducing something full of meaning and association to aâ¦to a specimen. As lepidopterists do.”
He laughed. “We all have a slight tendency to lepidoptery.”
He examined the photograph more closely.
“That's you holding the pony, I take it? And that's him in his kilt.” He paused. “
What on earth is he riding?”
“It was a sort of tricycle,” she explained. “It was a museum piece even thenâit had belonged to his father as a boy. I remember it squeaking terribly.”
“And the other little girl?”
“She was their farm manager's daughter. She was always hanging about, hoping we'd play with her.”
“He looks very unhappy about something.”
She smiled. “He probably thought I was trying to push him around. I thought he was stubbornâI couldn't understand why boys seemed so unwilling to do as they were told.” She glanced at her visitor. “On the subject of happiness, how ubiquitous do you think unhappiness is today?”
He was unprepared for the question. “I'm not sure if I know how to answer that.”
“What I mean is this: Are we happier today because we know a lot more than we knew then? Are we happier because Freud came along and showed us why we were making ourselves unhappy? Are we happier because of the sexual revolution?” She paused, and looked out of the window again. “Out thereâin Italyâare people happier because they can say boo to the local priest? I think they are.”
He ventured an opinion. “The Italians seem to have been happy in spite of religion.”
“Or because of it? Remember that Catholicism is only marginally about guilt. For the rest it's cheerfully paganâplaster saints, miracles, superstition, feast days. People love ceremony, and there's bags of ceremony and dressing up in Catholicism.”
She picked up the photograph again. “Look at him,” she said fondly. “Look at me. Fifty-whatever years ago, when it was all about to begin.
“And that hat I'm wearing,” she mused. “I was so proud of it. It was a great, floppy thing. I've been carrying that hat with meâmetaphorically, of courseâfor decades, for all my adult life.” She pointed to it. Her expression was one that he found hard to interpret. Resentment? Regret? “We carry with us the clothes of childhood, don't we? We keep them on long after they have ceased to fit.”
He looked at her with sympathy. “Yes,” he said. “I haven't heard it put that way before, but yes.”
She became brisk. “May I ask you something, Mr. Summers? This article you're writing for
The Burlington Magazine
?”
“Yes?”
“What exactly is it?”
“It's a profile. As you probably know,
The Burlington
's
period is usually somewhat earlier. We do very little on twentieth-century artists. But in his case, the editor thought it appropriate, because of the neo-classical nature of the later work.”
She sounded slightly impatient. “Yes, I understand all that. What I want to know is this: Are you going to be kind to Harry?”
The question seemed to surprise him. “But of course we are. It's a tribute, really.”
“Because so many things you read now are infected with a spirit of unkindness. People feel they have to show how clever they are by debunking othersâby belittling them.”
“I would never do that. I give you my word.”
She smiled. “The fact that nobody says
I give you my word
any more tells me all I need to know about you. And I trust you.”
“I have nothing but admiration for his work. I have no other motive.”
“In that case, I can tell you the story that nobody else knows. You may or may not wish to mention it in yourâ¦your profile. But it's the key to everything.”
“Then I'm very grateful to you. I'd like you to know that.”
She barely acknowledged his thanks. “Look at the photograph,” she said. “I'll start from there.”
“Do you mind if I make notes?”
“No, that's what you people do. You have to take notes.”
He began to write as she talked. Later he wrote it out, at far greater length than was required for his article, filling in the details of how he imagined the protagonists thought, of how they felt. It became a story in its own right; his version of what must have transpired. An omniscient narrator, were he or she to read what he wrote, would say, “Yes, that is exactly right. That is exactly how it happened.” For it was.
The photograph was taken in Argyll, he wrote, on one of those mountainous peninsulas on the western edge of Scotland. In the nineteenth century it was fashionable to put the proceeds of money made elsewhereâfrom all the pain and exploitation that lay behind Victorian fortunesâinto the construction of large houses, inserted into the wildly romantic Scottish landscape. Remote glens, stripped of their human population during the Highland Clearances of the previous century, now became the backdrop to stone-built fantasies, complete with turrets and towers. Scots baronial, a whole new architectural style, evolved to cater for this enthusiasmâand its accompanying pretensions. On that particular peninsula, an adventurer who had made his fortune in the goldfields of southern Africa built a rambling and unlikely castle solely for the use of his guests, an affirmation in stone of the sheer power of money.
More modest housesâstill large, thoughâmet the needs of smaller landed proprietors. These people did not aspire to vast estates; they were drawn from professional and business circles in Edinburgh or Glasgow, or farther afield, that fancied a toehold in the Highlands. They spent the summer months there engaged in country pursuits, before leaving in the autumn when the gales swept in from the Atlantic. They regarded themselves as a race apart from the locals, to whom they condescended as parvenus have always condescended to the people of the places they choose to colonise.
Their families were neighbours, even if they lived three miles apart: houses, particularly large ones, were few and far between in the Highlands. His father, an Edinburgh banker, was called Struan; his mother, the daughter of an English general who served most of his career in India, was called Phyllis. They never saw the general, who preferred to spend his leave in Simla. It was widely understood that he drank, but then that was not unusual. Phyllis had not seen her father since the age of sixteen, when she had made the long journey to India, became sick shortly after arrival, and had then been sent home virtually by return. She stayed with an aunt in Bristol until, at the age of twenty-one, she married Struan, whom she had met at the Caledonian Ball in London.
In 1920 she gave birth to Harry. He was her only child and she lavished affection upon him. “I want so much for him,” she said to one of her Edinburgh friends, but when asked what it was that she wanted, she could think of no answer. It would seem too vague to say that she hoped he would be happy; she wanted that, of course, but there was far more to her feelings than that. She wanted greatness.
“Perhaps you want to protect him from the world,” said the friend. “You want him to be safe.”
“Let him be what he chooses to be,” said Struan. “Boysâ¦menâ¦just like to be left alone.”
This had led to the exchange of knowing glances between the women. “Do they now?” said Phyllis.
“Yes,” said Struan. “That's what they like. They don't need to be watched over by women all the time.”
She did not argue the point, but she knew she was right, and he was wrong. Boysâand menâneeded women; they were lost without them. It was masked at times, of course, but the need was always there. Underneath all the bravado, men were little boys, whistling in the dark.
They sent him to school in Edinburgh, ignoring the general's suggestion that he be sentâat his expenseâto a militaristic boarding school in Hampshire. “I don't want him to have an English education,” said Struan. “He's my son. He's Scottish.”
Phyllis was happy to side with her husband. She could not understand how people could send small childrenâseven- and eight-year-oldsâto boarding school. “They're far too young to leave their mothers,” she said. “It's a form of cruelty.”
“Yes,” said Struan. “But don't mollycoddle him.”
She looked at him reproachfully. “I have no intention of doing that,” she said. “None at all.”
Towards the end of June each year they left their house in Edinburgh to make the journey to the house in Argyll, where they would spend two months. They travelled by train to Fort William, to be collected by their farm manager. He drove them back to the house along the tortuous road that wound along the edge of the peninsula, barely more than a track, and unused, even now, to vehicles. Harry pressed his face to the car window, drinking in the landscape of sweeping mountainsides and tumbling waterfalls. The farm manager talked on the journey about sheep and salmon fishing and the movement of the deer. There was discussion, in muted tones, of the loss of a local fishing boat. “Five bairns now without a father,” said the manager. “Just like that.”
“You'll be looking forward to seeing Jenny,” said his mother, as the car made its way up the drive, through the profusion of rhododendrons.
“Nasty things,” said his fatherâof the shrubs, still in riotous blossom. “A haven for midges. They should have left them where they found themâin the Himalayas.”
“Beautiful,” said his mother.
“You can't stop them,” said the farm manager. “Once they take root, it's the devil's own job getting rid of them.”
“Still beautiful,” she said, and turning to Harry, “Jenny? Has she written to you? Are they up yet, do you know?”
The farm manager answered. “Arrived last week. He's laid up with his leg, I believe.”
Harry tried to see through the rhododendrons, to the outcrop of rock that he knew they concealed, but there was only darkness. Jenny's father had been shot by a Germanâhe knew that because he had heard the adults talking about it.
Did he shoot him back?
We don't think of it like that.
But why not?
Because we just don't. Because when there's a war, people are told to shoot the other side. It doesn't mean that they hate them as people. They're just doing their job as soldiers.
If anybody shot me, I'd shoot him back. As long as I wasn't dead, of course.
“Your father,” he had once said to Jenny, “has got a bullet in his leg, hasn't he?”
She had looked at him with tolerance. He was not to know. His own father had stayed in the bank. He knew nothing about the trenches.
The trenches
â¦The word, it seemed, had vast power in the adult world. Her father had been in the trenches when the German shot him.
“Of course he hasn't got a bullet in his leg, stupid! You can't walk if you have a bullet in your leg. In fact, you die because the bullet goes up your leg and into your heart. It goes through your veins. That happened to lots of people.”
“Even if you got shot in the toe? Even then?”
This required thought. “Sometimes. Sometimes people died if they got shot in the toe. It depends on which toe. If it's just the little toe, then you may be all right. If it's your big toe, then you may not be so lucky.”
“Then why didn't your father die?”
She sighed; he knew so little of what the world was really like. “He had an operation. In something called a field hospital. They took the bullet out and put it in a jar. I've seen it.”
He was impressed. To have a father who had been shot by a German was distinction enough, but to have the very bullet in a jar put one in a very special position.
She looked at him. “My father won,” she said.
“Won what?”
“The War. My father won the War.”
He looked down at the ground. His father could have won it too, had he gone to the trenches. But somebody had to stay, his mother explained, because if they didn't stay to run the banks then there would be no money, and if there was no money then the Germans would have romped home to victory and that would have been the end of the British Empire. Which would have been like turning out the sun, she said. Just that: turning out the sun.
And now here was Mr. Currie having trouble with his leg, reminding everybody that you may win the War but you paid a price for it.
“All those names,” his mother said, shaking her head as she showed him the simple war memorial that had been erected beside the kirk. “Every one of them. Every single one of them a hero. All ordinary boys from right here. Local families. Every one of them.”
But now she said, as they approached the house, “Jenny will come over, no doubt. They'll have seen the car. People know when you arrive. They don't in Edinburgh, do they? You could disappear into thin air and nobody would be any the wiser. But they know here.”
