Espresso Tales (4 page)

7. Anger and Apology

When Pat eventually got back to her flat in Scotland Street, she still felt angry over what Domenica had done. Their cups of coffee in Glass and Thompson's delicatessen and café had been drunk largely in silence.

“I've done something to upset you, haven't I?” said Domenica, after the silence became too obvious to remain unremarked upon. “Is it to do with what I said to that young man–what was his name again?”

“Peter.”

“Yes, Peter. A nice name, isn't it?”

Pat said nothing. Domenica looked at her, and frowned. “I'm sorry. I really am. I had no idea that you would be so…well, so embarrassed by all that. I did it for
you,
you know.”

Pat looked up sharply. “You asked him to dinner, out of the blue, just like that–for
me?
”

Domenica seemed surprised by this. “But of course I did! You don't think that I go around picking up young men for my own sake, do you? Good heavens! I do have a sense of the appropriate, you know.”

“And it's appropriate to go and ask perfect strangers to dinner to meet me? Do you consider that appropriate? How did you know that I wanted to meet him anyway? Just because he looks like some ridiculous poet you've read…”

Domenica put down her coffee cup–firmly. “Now wait a moment! I'm sorry if you think I've overstepped the mark, but I will not stand by while you refer to Rupert Brooke as a ridiculous poet. Have you read him? You have not! He wrote wonderful pastoral, allusive verse, and the story of his brief life–yes, his brief life–is really rather a moving one. So don't call him a ridiculous poet. Please don't. There are lots of ridiculous poets, but he wasn't one of them. No.”

There was a further silence. Then Pat rose to her feet. “I think we should go. I'm sorry if I got upset–and I'm sorry if I offended you. It's just that…”

They walked out of the delicatessen, passing Peter, working at the counter, as they did so. Pat looked away, but Domenica smiled at him, and he smiled back at her, although weakly, as one smiles at a new acquaintance of whom one is unsure.

“Look, it's not such a terrible thing I've done,” said Domenica, as they went out into the street. “And if it embarrasses you, I suggest that we just forget the whole thing.”

She looked at Pat, who turned to her, frowning. “No,” she said. “Don't do that.”

Domenica raised an eyebrow. “Oh? So you'd like me to invite him after all? Do I detect…do I detect a slight mellowing?”

Pat looked down at the ground. Her feelings were confused. She was irritated by the assumptions that Domenica had made, but there was something about Peter that interested her, and she had seen that he had looked at her too, that he had noticed her. There was something that her friends called “the look”, that glance, that second take, which gives everything away. One could not mistake the look when one received it; it was unambiguous.

Peter had given her the look. Had she been by herself, she would have not known what to do about it. They might have exchanged further glances, but it was difficult to take matters further when you were working, as he was. You could hardly say: “Here's your coffee, and what are you doing afterwards?” Perhaps people did say that, but it was not the most sophisticated of approaches and he would not have done that. And for much the same reason, she could hardly have said: “Thanks for the coffee, and what are you doing afterwards?” One did not say that to waiters, whatever the temptation.

So the fact of the matter was that Domenica must have intuitively worked out that there was potential in that casual encounter and had acted with swiftness and ingenuity. She had set up a meeting which would enable nature to take its course–if that was the course that nature intended to take. They would meet for dinner at Domenica's flat and if the look were given again, then they could take it further. No doubt Domenica would ease the way, perhaps by suggesting that they go out after dinner to the Cumberland Bar and then she would herself decline on the grounds of tiredness, leaving the field open for the two of them.

I should be grateful to her, Pat thought, and now, back in her flat, she realised that she had been churlish. She wondered whether to cross the landing and apologise there and then, but she decided against that. An apology would lead to a conversation and she did not feel in the mood for further discussions. She felt slightly light-headed, in fact, as if she had drunk a glass of champagne on an empty stomach. She went through to her bedroom, lay down on her bed, and closed her eyes, imagining herself back in the café with Peter standing beside the table, staring at her. She remembered the way he stooped–like the other tall employees–and he put the coffee down in front of her and then looked up. What had he been wearing? She had hardly noticed, but it was a white shirt, was it not? And jeans, like everybody else. If one could not remember somebody's trousers, then jeans were the safe default. Indeed, “defaults” was a good name for jeans. I put on my
defaults.
It sounded quite right.

She got up off her bed and picked up her key from the table. Bruce was in the flat–she had noticed that his door was closed, which inevitably meant that he was in–but she had no desire to talk to him. Bruce was history in every sense of the word. He was history at the firm of Macauley Holmes Richardson Black, where he had lost his job as a surveyor after being found having an intimate lunch in the Café St Honoré with the wife of his boss–an intimate
and
innocent lunch, but not so to the outside observer, unfortunately in this case his boss himself.

And he was history in Pat's eyes, too, as she had quite recovered from her brief infatuation with him. How could I? she had asked herself, in agonising self-reproach. To which a Latinist, if there were one about, might have answered
amor furor brevis est
–love (like anger) is a brief madness. The most prosaic of observations, but, like many such observations, acutely true. And one might add: if love is a brief madness, then it is often also sadness, and sometimes, alas, badness.

She left the flat and walked down to Henderson Row, where she bought a small bunch of flowers. This she subsequently placed outside Domenica's door, where she might pick it up when next she opened it.

8. An Exchange of Cruel Insults

It was not that there was an atmosphere between Bruce and Pat; relations, in fact, were quite cordial. Bruce was indifferent to the fact that she had rejected his advances (“her loss,” he told himself, “silly girl”). He knew, of course, that she had been besotted by him–any man would have realised that–and for Bruce it was nothing in the least unusual for a woman to feel like that about him. Indeed, it was the normal way of things, and Bruce would have been surprised if Pat had not found herself in this position, sharing the flat, as they did, when she had every opportunity to be in close proximity to him. Poor girl! It must have been hard for her, he thought; rather like living with a full fridge or store-cupboard when one is on a strict diet. One may look, but not touch. What a pity!

There had been a brief period during which Pat had seemed to avoid him–and he had noticed that. However, he had been tolerant. If it helped her to stay out of his way for a few days, then that was her way of dealing with the situation and he would not force his company upon her. And after a while that awkwardness passed, and there seemed to be no tension in the air when they coincided in the kitchen, or when they passed on telephone messages to one another.

Bruce was pleased that things had not become more fraught. His life over the past couple of months had not been particularly easy, and he would not have enjoyed having to deal with domestic difficulties on top of what he had been experiencing elsewhere. To begin with, there had been the problem with the job. He had been planning to leave the firm and to move on to something more satisfying even before the show-down with his employer, Raeburn Todd, joint senior partner with his brother, Jock Todd, of Macauley Holmes Richardson Black, Chartered Surveyors and Factors. But it was unfortunate, from Bruce's point of view, that this departure should have been on Todd's terms rather than on his own. That had been extremely irritating.

What annoyed Bruce in particular about that episode was that when he was asked by Todd's wife, Sasha, to lunch with her in the Café St Honoré, he had agreed to do this only out of charity. He had no particular interest in her, and he had certainly not been planning any involvement with her, although it had been perfectly obvious to him at the South Edinburgh Conservative Ball that she found him attractive. That was understandable, of course, but he had not expected her to do anything about this, and indeed that fatal lunch was hardly a romantic encounter at all. It was true that when Todd walked into the Café St Honoré unexpectedly, he had found his wife holding Bruce's hand in hers, over the table, but that had been purely in the context of their discussion about tennis prowess and the importance of having a strong wrist. If he were going to hold hands with a married woman in an Edinburgh restaurant, then he would do so under the table, not above.

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.”

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.”