Espresso Tales (32 page)

88. Bruce Reflects

After his unfortunate experience with George and his new fiancée, Bruce returned to Scotland Street in what almost amounted to a state of shock. He had set off for his shop in a mood of confidence and optimism, but this had been conclusively shattered by the confrontation with his erstwhile business backer, now his former friend. There was to be no money from George, and with the disappearance of that support his liabilities now exceeded his assets. The payment to the wine dealer in Leith could not be put off for more than a short time, and now he simply did not have sufficient funds to pay. He would have to return all the stock, virtually every bottle of it, and that would leave him with empty shelves, including in that new section of which he was so proud–the innovative Wines for Her.

Pat was in her room when Bruce returned. For a moment he hesitated, unsure whether to knock on her door and offer to make her a cup of coffee. He did not want her to think that he needed her company in any way–she should be in no doubt that he could take or leave that as he wished–but eventually his need for comfort and reassurance got the better of him.

Pat greeted him politely. Yes, that was kind of him; she would join him for a cup of coffee in the kitchen in a few moments.

“So,” she said. “The business. How's it going?”

“Great,” Bruce started to say. “Just great…”

He broke off. He looked at the floor. “Actually,” he went on, “it's going badly. Really badly.”

Pat raised an eyebrow. “Is there a problem with that shop you're renting?”

Bruce shook his head. “No, it's more than that. In fact, Pat, it's awful.” He sat down at the kitchen table, his head sunk in his hands.

Pat looked down at him. Poor Bruce–to be so vain and so pleased with yourself and then to become so obviously wretched. It was difficult not to sympathise with him.

“Money?” she said.

Bruce nodded miserably. “I've been let down.”

“By?”

“By somebody I was at school with back in Crieff,” said Bruce. “He should have stayed there.”

Pat frowned. “Why are you rude about Crieff, Bruce? Aren't you proud of the place you came from?”

“No,” said Bruce. “I'm not.”

Pat thought about this. “May I ask why?” she said. “I don't see anything wrong with Crieff. In fact, I think it's really a very nice place.”

“You would,” said Bruce bitterly.

Pat almost let this remark pass, but decided that Bruce had gone too far. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, you do think that you're superior, don't you? You think that by being rude about Crieff you can build yourself up. Well, you're wrong, you know. You're wrong about Crieff, completely wrong. Crieff is a great place. I know people who live there who like it very much indeed. And these are people with rather better judgment than yours, Bruce. By running Crieff down you tell me more about yourself than about Crieff. That's true, you know.”

Bruce said nothing, while Pat fixed him with her stare. “The trouble with you, Bruce, is that you think nowhere and nobody is good enough for you. You think that you're too good for Crieff. You think that you're too good for your old friends. You think that this old friend of yours has let you down, but I suspect that it's exactly the opposite. I suspect that you've been trying to use him.”

Bruce looked up abruptly. “And why do you think that, may I ask?”

Pat shrugged. “Because that's the way you do things.” She paused. “But there's no point in my talking to you like this, is there? I doubt if you're going to change.”

Bruce stood up. “No,” he said. “There's no point. Because I have no intention of listening to you, Patsy girl, thank you very much.”

And with that he left, crossed the hall into his room, and slammed the door behind him. Inside his room, though, the confidence which he had tried to show crumpled. He owed money, and he owed a great deal of it. The thought occurred to him that he could go back to his parents and ask them to lend him the money to pay the most immediate bills, including the one from Leith, but he simply could not face that. He could imagine what his father would say to him. He would be lectured about caution and misjudgment. He would be told that he should never have attempted go into business without getting the necessary experience first. And if he tried to explain about George, and how he had brought all this about, his father would probably just take George's side. He had always liked him, Bruce recalled, and had said that he thought he was the best of his son's friends. That shows how much judgment he has, thought Bruce.

He sat on his bed and considered his situation. Assets and liabilities–the fundamentals of business. He knew the assets and he knew the liabilities. The assets were the flat in Scotland Street, which was heavily mortgaged, a small amount of money in a deposit account at the bank, and…He had almost forgotten. There were three cases of Petrus. It was only George's view that these were not the real thing–but there was a chance, even if only a slim chance, that the Petrus was genuine and he remembered that he had read somewhere that there was a wine auction coming up in Edinburgh. They might be able to take late entries, and if the wine were genuine, then…

But who could advise him on that? If he asked the auctioneers, then that might plant a doubt in their mind. So he should seek a private opinion, and who better than Will Lyons! If anybody could distinguish between genuine and false wine then it would be him, and he had very generously given Bruce advice in the past. He would ask Will round for a glass of Petrus, not say anything to him about the price he had paid, and then see what the verdict was. It was a brilliant idea, and he would see if Will was free that very evening! How handy it was to live in Edinburgh, he reflected, and to have expertise so ready to hand.

89. The Restoration of Fortunes

Will Lyons had better things to do than to visit Bruce, but agreed, out of sheer kindness, to call in at 44 Scotland Street that evening shortly before eight. He would not be able to stay long, he explained, as he had work to do. He had recently agreed to write a history of the Edinburgh wine trade, and the manuscript was growing slowly beneath his hands. It was a pleasant sensation seeing the pile of pages grow higher, but, like every author, he knew that he had to guard jealously the spare hours in which he could write. There were histories to be written about those whose histories had never progressed beyond chapter one, or indeed the introduction.

Will sighed as he made his way up the stairs to Bruce's flat. He did not particularly like Bruce, whom he found both opinionated and ignorant in equal measure. He had tried to warn him about the drawbacks of going into the wine trade, but his warnings had not been heeded. It was clear to him that Bruce did not have even the basic knowledge that would enable him to run a wine shop. Nor did he possess the specialised knowledge and taste that would be required to run a wine shop in somewhere like Edinburgh's New Town, where the number of opinionated and demanding people was very high, and where many of these prided themselves on their knowledge of wine. Any enterprise of Bruce's was bound to fail, the only question being how long the failure would take, and how spectacular it would be.

Bruce opened the door to his guest and ushered him into the flat. He had been preparing coffee and it was into the kitchen that they now went and took a seat at the large, scrubbed pine table.

“I see that you have the original flagstones,” said Will, pointing at the fine stone floor.

“For the time being,” said Bruce. “I haven't got round to fixing that up yet.”

“Fixing it up?” asked Will. “It looks in quite good condition to me.”

“Modernising it,” said Bruce. “I want an oak-look effect. There's a new sort of flooring that looks just like oak. I'd challenge anybody to tell the difference. It's a bit pricey, though.”

Will kept his counsel. His eye had been caught by a bottle standing on a nearby shelf. Could it be? Was it possible?

“Yes,” said Bruce jauntily, noticing the direction of his host's gaze. “Petrus. Would you like to take a look?”

“It's a very fine wine,” said Will. “Many people would say that it's the finest wine there is, you know.”

“Oh, I know that,” said Bruce. “That's why I got in a supply.”

“A supply?”

Bruce affected nonchalance. “Actually, I bought three cases for that new business of mine. I thought that Edinburgh being the sort of place that it is, there might be demand for it. There are a lot of wealthy people who live here, you know–people who will be prepared to fork out for this sort of stuff.”

“Oh, I know that,” said Will. He peered at the bottle on its shelf. “Would you mind if I took a look?”

“Of course not,” said Bruce. “In fact, how about a glass?”

Will raised an eyebrow. “That's very generous of you,” he said. “I wasn't…”

“Of course not,” said Bruce, rising to his feet. “I've been looking forward to trying it myself and who better to share it with?”

He crossed the room to take the bottle from the shelf. Then he handed it to Will, who examined it closely.

“Lovely year,” said Will. “I take it that you know that this is pretty valuable?” He hesitated. “I suppose that you must know that, if you bought three cases of it.”

Bruce was not giving anything away. “Yes,” he said, smiling. “This wine isn't cheap, by any means. But what's the use of having the stuff if you aren't prepared to have the occasional glass?”

He reached for a corkscrew and passed it to Will. “Care to do the honours?”

Will carefully exposed the cork and looked at the top of it. Then, as Bruce fetched the glasses from the cupboard, Will gently twisted the screw into the cork and drew it up the neck of the bottle. It emerged with a satisfactory pop and he immediately sniffed at it and smiled.

“So far, so good,” he said. “Now if you pass me the glasses, we'll see what we have here.”

Bruce's expression was anxious as he passed over the glasses. This, he thought bitterly, is the moment of humiliation–the crowning humiliation, in fact, coming on top of everything that had gone wrong for him in recent months–that business over that stuck-up American girl, the loss of his job at that pathetic firm of Macauley Holmes Richardson Black, and finally that terrible betrayal by George and his haggis-like fiancée. He closed his eyes briefly, hardly daring to look at the dark red liquid which Will was now sniffing at and swirling round his glass.

He watched in fascination as Will took a sip of the wine and moved it about his mouth, drawing in air through the lips. Nervously, he raised his own glass and sipped at the wine. It tasted all right to him–rather good, in fact–but then, in a rare moment of honesty, he said to himself: what do I know about this?

Will looked at Bruce. “What a stunner!” he said.

Bruce looked startled. “Stunner?”

“A beautiful wine,” went on Will. “So supple and ripe–yet it has elegance and length. One can understand why this is seen as such a great wine. One really can.”

Afterwards, when Will had left the flat, Bruce went into the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror. His face was lit with triumph, and in his ears rang Will's parting words. His visitor had explained that he thought there would be no trouble in entering the remaining wine, now reduced to thirty-five bottles, but still a very impressive quantity, in the wine auction that was due to take place in a few days' time. And then he had said: “And I suspect that you'll clear at least thirty thousand for the lot, once commissions are taken.”

Bruce looked back into the mirror and smiled at himself. “You're a stunner yourself,” he said in self-compliment. “A human Chateau Petrus!”

90. Self-assertiveness Training for Civil Servants

It was about this time that the Scottish Executive decided that all civil servants above a certain level of seniority should receive self-assertiveness training. The reason why this training was offered only to those in more senior positions was simple: there appeared to be no need to increase the self-assertiveness of the more junior civil servants, whose confidence generally exceeded that of their superiors. Indeed, greater self-assertiveness in the higher echelons of the Executive was thought to be the only way in which policies could be implemented in the face of opposition from below. And in due course, it had been announced, ministers themselves would receive self-assertiveness training to assist them to assert unpopular policies in the face of widespread public opposition and thereby to force their acceptance. (This is not to say that these policies were bad. Indeed, many of them were good; it's just that the public cannot always be trusted to recognise a good policy when they see it.)

Stuart had signed up for a personal assertiveness workshop that would require him to spend two hours alone in the company of an assertiveness counsellor. He was looking forward to this, as he had gradually been reaching the conclusion that whatever level of assertiveness he managed to achieve in his working environment, this was far from adequate at home. In particular, he had concluded that if he was to do anything about his relationship with his son, Bertie, then he would need to stand up to Irene. And that was an alarming thought. It was all very well to have scored a minor victory with Bertie's attendance at Tofu's bowling party, but it would be quite another thing to achieve the goal of getting Bertie out of psychotherapy, of relieving him of the need to attend yoga lessons in Stockbridge, and to dismantle, as far as possible, the remaining planks of what Irene called the “Bertie project”. And yet he owed it to his son. He had vowed that he would not let the little boy down: he would restore to him the tiny pleasures and idle moments of a happy boyhood. He would make his life whole again.

Stuart sat in Meeting Room 64A/3B/4/16 (west) in the offices of the Scottish Executive, awaiting the arrival of the assertiveness counsellor, who was already ten minutes late. Stuart passed the time reading a newspaper, and was immersed in an editorial when the door was opened by a slight man in his early thirties, wearing jeans and an open-neck shirt.

“You're Stuart Pollock?” asked the counsellor, glancing at a clipboard in his hand.

Stuart replied that he was, and extended his right hand to shake hands. The counsellor seized his hand and squeezed it tightly.

“Good to meet you, Stuart!” he said. “My name's Terry. You got a problem with that?”

Stuart blinked. “No,” he said hesitantly. “Of course not.”

“You see,” said Terry, “some people think that the name Terry is a bit effeminate. Know what I mean by that?” Terry fixed him with a stare. “You don't find me short, do you, Stuart?”

“Not at all,” said Stuart.

“And would it matter if you did?” asked Terry aggressively. “What exactly is wrong with being on the short side?”

“I didn't say anything was wrong with it,” said Stuart. “You raised it, not me. And, anyway, I don't think your name is effeminate, Shorty…I mean, Terry. And your height is neither here nor there as far as I am concerned.”

Terry continued to glare at him. “All right, let's sit down. I'm going to take this chair, right? This one here. That's my chair.”

“That's fine,” said Stuart.

“But what if you really wanted to sit in that chair?” asked Terry. “What if you wanted my chair?”

“I don't think that I would make a fuss about it,” said Stuart. “It's exactly the same as this chair over here. All the Scottish Executive chairs are the same, actually.”

“And that worries you?” asked Terry. “Have you got a problem with the Scottish Executive, Stuart?”

Stuart took a deep breath. Terry was extremely irritating, and they had had only five minutes of the two-hour session. He wondered whether he would be able to survive the full time; would it be entered in his file if he failed to complete the course? Would the conclusion be drawn that he lacked the requisite degree of assertiveness needed by a competent modern civil servant?

“No,” he said in reply to Terry's question. “I have no problems with the Scottish Executive. The only problem I have at present is a slight irritation with you.”

Terry clapped his hands together. “That's the spirit, Stuart! Well done! That's exactly what I wanted you to say. I wanted you to assert yourself.”

“Well, there you are,” said Stuart, relaxing visibly. “And I suppose, if I were to be completely frank…”

“Always be frank,” said Terry. “Tell it how it is, Stuart. Don't conceal. Get it out.”

“Well,” Stuart continued, “I suppose that I do have a bit of a problem with my wife. She herself is rather on the assertive side.”

“Assertive!” exclaimed Terry. “I bet she's assertive! She's emasculating you, Stuart. I've never met her but I can tell what's happening. I see it all the time. Virtually every man I meet in this job has been emasculated by some woman. It's endemic these days, absolutely endemic.”

Stuart was surprised by the force with which the counsellor issued this judgment. By his own admission he did not know anything about Irene, and so how could he possibly judge her in such extreme terms? On the other hand…

“Is it that bad?” he asked mildly.

“You bet it's that bad,” said Terry. “And it's time for men to fight back. Men are going to have to fight back, to reclaim their space before it's too late and they become the new victims, just as women used to be the victims of men. We have to fight back.”

“So what should I do?” asked Stuart.

“Tell her what you plan to do,” said Terry. “And if she objects, just ignore her. Leave the house. Women don't like that. They don't like it if you leave the house.”

“Is that what you do?” asked Stuart.

Terry thought for a moment. “It's what I would do,” he said. “If I had to, that is. You see, I'm not heavily into relationships. I live by myself. I'm a relationship-free man. It's the new thing.”

“I see,” said Stuart.

They talked for some time after that. There were exercises in self-assertiveness which Stuart was required to do–including assertive telephone techniques–and there was a lengthy discussion about assertive report-writing. And then, at the end, Terry placed an arm over Stuart's shoulder and wished him good luck.

“Do you feel better?” he asked.

Stuart thought for a moment. No, he did not feel better. He felt, if anything, more afraid. It seemed to him that the odds had suddenly been seriously raised. It was not just Bertie's future that was at stake–it was his own.