Praise for Alexander McCall Smith’s
44 SCOTLAND STREET SERIES
“Powerfully addicting fiction…. Delightful…. [A] graceful and always amusing depiction of the pleasures and problems of everyday life.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Irresistible…. Packed with the charming characters, piercing perceptions, and shrewd yet generous humor that have become McCall Smith’s cachet.”
—Chicago Sun-Times
“[McCall Smith] is a tireless student of human nature, at once acutely observant and gently indulgent.”
—The Sydney Morning Herald
“This is Alexander McCall Smith at his most charming…. He is a delightful writer.”
—The Washington Times
“It is McCall Smith’s particular genius to be able to look on the brighter side of life, and he’s seldom done so more enjoyably.”
—The Scotsman
ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH
A PROMISE OF ANKLES
Alexander McCall Smith is the author of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency novels and a number of other series and stand-alone books. His works have been translated into more than forty languages and have been bestsellers throughout the world. He lives in Scotland.
www.alexandermccallsmith.com
BOOKS BY ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH
IN THE 44 SCOTLAND STREET SERIES
44 Scotland Street
Espresso Tales
Love Over Scotland
The World According to Bertie
The Unbearable Lightness of Scones
The Importance of Being Seven
Bertie Plays the Blues
Sunshine on Scotland Street
Bertie’s Guide to Life and Mothers
The Revolving Door of Life
The Bertie Project
A Time of Love and Tartan
The Peppermint Tea Chronicles
The Promise of Ankles
IN THE NO. 1 LADIES’ DETECTIVE AGENCY SERIES
The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency
Tears of the Giraffe
Morality for Beautiful Girls
The Kalahari Typing School for Men
The Full Cupboard of Life
In the Company of Cheerful Ladies
Blue Shoes and Happiness
The Good Husband of Zebra Drive
The Miracle at Speedy Motors
Tea Time for the Traditionally Built
The Double Comfort Safari Club
The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party
The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection
The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon
The Handsome Man’s De Luxe Café
The Woman Who Walked in Sunshine
Precious and Grace
The House of Unexpected Sisters
The Colors of All the Cattle
To the Land of Long Lost Friends
How to Raise an Elephant
The Great Cake Mystery
The Mystery of Meerkat Hill
The Mystery of the Missing Lion
IN THE ISABEL DALHOUSIE SERIES
The Sunday Philosophy Club
Friends, Lovers, Chocolate
The Right Attitude to Rain
The Careful Use of Compliments
The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday
The Lost Art of Gratitude
The Charming Quirks of Others
The Forgotten Affairs of Youth
The Perils of Morning Coffee (eBook only)
The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds
At the Reunion Buffet (eBook only)
The Novel Habits of Happiness
A Distant View of Everything
The Quiet Side of Passion
The Geometry of Holding Hands
IN THE DETECTIVE VARG SERIES
The Department of Sensitive Crimes
The Talented Mr. Varg
IN THE PAUL STUART SERIES
My Italian Bulldozer
The Second-Worst Restaurant in France
IN THE CORDUROY MANSIONS SERIES
Corduroy Mansions
The Dog Who Came in from the Cold
A Conspiracy of Friends
IN THE PORTUGUESE IRREGULAR VERBS SERIES
Portuguese Irregular Verbs
The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs
At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances
Unusual Uses for Olive Oil
OTHER WORKS
La’s Orchestra Saves the World
The Girl Who Married a Lion and Other Tales from Africa
Trains and Lovers
The Forever Girl
Fatty O’Leary’s Dinner Party
Emma: A Modern Retelling
Chance Developments
The Good Pilot Peter Woodhouse
Pianos and Flowers
AN ANCHOR BOOKS ORIGINAL, DECEMBER 2020
Copyright © 2020 by Alexander McCall Smith
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd., Edinburgh, in 2020.
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
This book is excerpted from a series that originally appeared in The Scotsman newspaper.
Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available at the Library of Congress.
Anchor Books Trade Paperback ISBN 9780593313282
Ebook ISBN 9780593313299
Cover illustration by Iain McIntosh
Author illustration © Iain McIntosh
www.anchorbooks.com
a_prh_5.6.0_c0_r0
This book is for James Holloway
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Books by Alexander McCall Smith
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
1. At the Window, with Binoculars
2. Épater la Bourgeoisie
3. Student Neighbours
4. That Dreadful Woman
5. The Speaking of Italian, etc.
6. You Tattie-bogle
7. More Than Anything Else in the World
8. A Bit of Forever
9. Mr Fifty-One Per Cent
10. Tribal Markings
11. Muckle Birkies
12. Down Among the Men
13. Looking for Mother
14. The Merits of an Open Mind
15. A Lover in Aberdeen
16. At the Wally Dug
17. Love, Like Electricity
18. An Offer from Paris
19. Scotsmen Don’t Cry (Well, Not Much)
20. Rhododendrons and Missionaries
21. Men Don’t Send Birthday Cards
22. A Very Strange Hotel
23. Not Your Average Hotel
24. Kamikaze Mosquitoes
25. Roger’s Porcini Soup
26. The Kelpie Cult
27. Glenbucket
28. Our Inner Neande
rthal
29. Absolut (sic)
30. A Category Three Row
31. Irene Reversed
32. A Suitable Education
33. The Best News Ever
34. Major Events
35. A Walk to Stockbridge
36. A Speluncean Entrance
37. Homo Neanderthalis
38. Generic Guilt
39. Skinny Latte, No Vanilla
40. The Discomfort of the Past
41. Behold Bruce Anderson
42. Matthew and James Set Off
43. At Single Malt House
44. Something Very Odd
45. Drawing and Grammar
46. An Art Student’s Digs
47. Unauthorised Biting
48. Little Hans, the Wolf Man, etc.
49. Scandinavian Affairs
50. Cheese Scones
51. A Cayenne Kick
52. Akratic Action
53. Lobster à la Édimbourg
54. Martini Time
55. Getting Ready for Glasgow
56. Ossian, etc.
57. Inclusive Pies
58. Ranald’s Crisis
59. Bacon Recipes
60. A Fine Tenor Voice
61. Brochan Lom
62. Stockholm Syndrome
63. Widdershins or Deasil
64. In Deepest Morningside
65. Man Bitten by a Snake
66. Doon the Watter
67. Recovery
68. You’ve Been a Good Friend
69. Temptation, Its Various Forms
70. What Was Always There
1
At the Window, with Binoculars
Standing at her kitchen window, Domenica Macdonald, cultural anthropologist, denizen of Scotland Street, citizen of Edinburgh, lowered the binoculars that for the last fifteen minutes she had trained on the street below. She had owned the binoculars for over twenty years, having been given them by her first, and late, husband. Domenica had been married to a man she had met while working in South India, a member of a prosperous family who owned a small electricity factory outside what was then called Cochin, in Kerala. Her husband, a mild and somewhat melancholic man, had been electrocuted, and Domenica had returned to Scotland to pursue an academic career. That had been a success – or “sort of success”, as Domenica described it – but she had gradually slipped out of full employment in the University of Edinburgh to the status of independent scholar, which enabled her to undertake various anthropological research projects in various parts of the world, while keeping her base in Edinburgh. That, of course, was at 44 Scotland Street, a comfortable address in a sharply descending street – “only in the topographical sense”, as Domenica amusingly pointed out – towards the eastern limits of Edinburgh’s Georgian New Town.
Domenica’s anthropological field trips had included an eventful spell in Papua New Guinea, where she studied kinship patterns and friendship networks amongst a tribal group living along the upper reaches of the Sepik River. These people, known for their worship of local crocodiles, had become accustomed to academic interest, and alongside their important spirit house maintained a lodge specifically for visiting anthropologists. This lodge, known in Pidgin as Haus bilong anthropology fella, had hot and cold running water and copious supplies of mosquito repellent. Anthropologists could stay there for as long as they liked, as the locals enjoyed talking to them and recounting ancient legends, many of which were made up on the spot in return for cartons of Australian cigarettes.
Domenica’s small monograph, Close Friends, Distant Relatives: Patterns of Contact Amongst the Crocodile People of the Sepik River, had been well received, being shortlisted, but eventually not being awarded, the Prix Claude Lévi-Strauss, one of the more sought-after awards in the world of cultural anthropology. That was enough, though, to ensure that her next project, Marriage Negotiations and the Role of the Astrologer in Madhya Pradesh, was given adequate funding by the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the British Academy, and the Carnegie Trust. That led to an article, rather than a book, but it was still widely quoted in the footnotes of other anthropological papers, the measure by which, in an age of quantification, the success of a scholarly paper tends to be measured.
Thereafter, there had been only one overseas project of any significance. That had involved a period living with a community of contemporary pirates on the Malacca Straits. These pirates lived at the mouth of a river, in houses surrounded by thick mangrove. They spoke an obscure dialect, but Domenica had been able to communicate with them reasonably effectively in a variant of the Pidgin she had acquired in Melanesia. She concentrated on the home life of the pirates, taking a particular interest in their domestic economy. For their part, the pirates’ wives had given her a generous welcome, and had been only too happy to discuss with her their housekeeping issues. Domenica had been taught how to cook the dishes local to that part of the country, and over the months that she spent there she had developed a taste for the coconut curries dominating pirate cuisine.
At the end of her stay, of course, she had made a discovery that somewhat overshadowed the entire project. That had come about one morning when, out of curiosity, she had slipped a small boat of a mooring and discreetly followed the pirates as they set off for work in their larger vessels. She had followed them round the headland that marked the end of the river mouth, and then, straining her small outboard engine to keep up, she had trailed them into another river system a few miles up the coast. There all was revealed: the pirates, it transpired, were employed in a pirate CD and DVD factory, and it was to this plant that they travelled each morning and from which they returned early every evening.
That discovery had been slightly disappointing to Domenica, but it did not compromise any of the data she had assembled on domestic economy issues and formed no more than a footnote in the paper she later published on the subject. When she left the Malacca Straits to return to Scotland she was given an emotional send-off by the pirates’ wives, whom she had taught how to make shortbread and clootie puddings. She was still in touch with them years later, sending them a copy of the Scotsman calendar each December and a gift subscription to the Scots Magazine, which they assured her they so enjoyed reading.
On her fiftieth birthday, Domenica decided that there would be no more research trips in the field, or, rather, that the field could be visited, provided that it was local. Her scholarly time was now largely spent on freelance editing for a number of anthropological journals, occasional lectures, and work on a project that she had long nurtured – a study of the networks and customs of Watsonians, the graduates of George Watson’s College who played an important part in Edinburgh life and whose influence extended into the furthest reaches of the capital city. This research was different from that which she conducted on the Crocodile People of New Guinea, but it had risks of its own. It was also a project that would require far more time to be completed – Domenica was thinking of years, rather than months – as access was an issue and the layers of association and meaning in Watsonian affairs required a great deal of semiotic analysis.
But there she was – standing at her window overlooking Scotland Street, lowering her Carl Zeiss binoculars and turning to her husband, Angus Lordie, who was seated at the other end of the kitchen, his dog and familiar, Cyril, at his feet. Angus, a portrait painter, was wearing his studio clothes – a paint-spattered jacket that Domenica wished he would throw away, a shirt of faded tartan material, and a pair of trousers that was slightly too large for him and that was kept from falling down by an improvised belt – a tie threaded through its loops. This tie was that of Glenalmond College, a school tucked away in Perthshire, where Angus had been all those years ago a moderately unhappy boarder and member of the school pipe band. Whenever he heard Mist-Covered Mountains, that most haunting
of pipe tunes, he saw Glenalmond under soft veils of rain. He saw his friend playing the pipes beside him in the ranks of the band; and they smiled at one another, because that friendship had been such a profound one, and we must keep alive the happiness we experience before the world closes in on us.
2
Épater la Bourgeoisie
Domenica said to Angus, “Nothing yet. They’re certainly taking their time.”
Angus laughed. “Patience is required of the curtain-twitcher. It’s like fishing, I think. You have to be patient.”
Domenica defended herself: no anthropologist could ever be a curtain-twitcher. “I am not that at all,” she said. “For a start, we have no curtains – on this particular window, at least. Curtain-twitchers operate behind lace curtains, and their motives…”
Angus waited. “Yes? Their motives? Curiosity?”
“Idle curiosity,” Domenica corrected him. “I am not indulging idle curiosity here. It’s important we should know who’s going to move into that flat. It could be anybody. They might be turning it into a party flat, with hen parties coming up from places like Manchester to spend the weekend here. Imagine that. You’d soon take an interest if that happened.”
“That’s not what we heard,” said Angus. “I told you: I bumped into the agent in the Wally Dug and he said that it was likely to be students. He said that they could charge students more rent than they could charge ordinary people…”
“Ordinary people,” interjected Domenica. “By that…”
“By that I mean respectable people,” said Angus. “Students are, by definition, not respectable.”
They both laughed.
“Nobody talks about respectable people any longer,” said Angus. “Perhaps that’s because it has become unfashionable to be respectable.”
“Respectable people disapprove of things,” mused Domenica. “And Edinburgh used to be very disapproving. Now it’s only moderately so.”
“Do you remember that councillor?” asked Domenica. “The one who hated the Traverse Theatre because it represented a threat to public decency.”
Angus smiled. “That was a long time ago. Nobody can be shocked these days.” He thought about the effect of that. “Of course, that’s a matter of great regret if you’re a cutting-edge artist. How can one épater la bourgeoisie if the bourgeoisie declines to be shocked? That rather takes the wind out of the sails of the artist.”