PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA

  Copyright © 2020, 2021 by Alexander McCall Smith

  Illustrations copyright © 2020 by Iain McIntosh

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2022 by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto, and simultaneously in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Polygon Books, an imprint of Birlinn Limited, Edinburgh, in 2020. Distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  Knopf Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  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.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: In a time of distance : and other poems / Alexander

  McCall Smith ; illustrated by Iain McIntosh.

  Names: McCall Smith, Alexander, 1948- author. | McIntosh, Iain, illustrator.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210156198 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210156236

  | ISBN 9781039000186 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781039000193 (EPUB)

  Classification: LCC PR6063.C326 I5 2022 | DDC 821/.914—dc23

  Cover design: Abigail Salvesen

  Cover images: Iain McIntosh

  ep_prh_6.0_139716198_c0_r0

  Contents

  In a Time of Distance

  A Washing Line Outside a Croft House

  Taste and Memory

  In a Time of Distance

  Journeys

  Our Journeys

  The Train Arriving at Platform Two

  Adelstrop Revisited

  The Language of Pilots

  College of Hypnotherapy, Next Right

  Quality Provisions for Ever

  Not Rus in Urbe but Suburbia in Rure

  A Typology of Angels

  Household Gods

  Holy River

  Mustard Field, Rajasthan

  Feel Glorious

  Do Not Lean Again

  Ne Pas

  A Scottish Four Seasons

  Spring

  Summer

  Autumn

  Winter

  Interlude: Seven Sonnets

  I. Sixty Talks to Eighteen

  II. Eighteen Replies to Sixty

  III. Forty Intervenes, Remembers Horace

  IV. Adventure and Uncertainty

  V. It Takes a Village to Raise a Child

  VI. King James VI of Scotland Reflects on the Loss of His Only Friend When Young

  VII. Love Unforgotten

  Of the Animals

  Primate Cousins

  The Gentleness of Whales

  Elephants

  Kangaroos

  The Dung Beetle

  Tortoise

  Cheetah

  Polar Bear

  Crocodile

  Lion

  Small, Insignificant Antelope

  Giraffe, Zebra

  Our World, Their World

  Of Love & Longing

  Love over Scotland

  On Clouds over Mull: A Love Song

  Nocturnal Blessing

  Love Lost

  On Looking at a Child

  Of Books & Reading

  The Goodness of Books

  I. The Book Becomes

  II. Moveable Type

  III. What the Book Is

  IV. On the Bedside Table

  Remembering Muriel Spark

  Graham Greene

  A Maker of Beautiful Books

  Library of Congress

  Places

  Greece

  The Oracle at Delphi

  Goodbye to the Ionian

  Scotland

  St. Kilda

  Dear One

  Scotland’s Claim

  Edinburgh

  A Fragile Beauty

  The Seven Hills of Edinburgh

  The Castle Rock

  Craiglockhart Hill, a Century Ago

  Arthur’s Seat and Geology

  Imagined Conversation on Blackford Hill

  Corstorphine Hill

  On Calton Hill

  Braid Hills

  Unrelated Poems

  Northland

  Wolves

  The Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg

  From a Mumbai Hotel

  Fish, and the Thoughts of Fish

  Saving an Oak Tree

  Friendship

  A number of these poems were, on their creation, dedicated to particular people. Sometimes the dedicatees happened to be there at the time of writing; on other occasions the poem seemed just right for them.

  These poems are:

  “A Typology of Angels,” for Iain McIntosh

  “Holy River,” for Prince Richard Holkar

  “Feel Glorious,” for Hugh Raven

  “Do Not Lean Again,” for Neil and Judy Swan

  “Giraffe, Zebra,” for Richard Neville-Towle and Caroline Hahn

  “On Looking at a Child,” for Ivy Rose Mant

  “The Goodness of Books,” for Laura Bush

  “Graham Greene,” for Joseph Kanon

  “A Maker of Beautiful Books,” for Stephanie Wolfe Murray

  “Goodbye to the Ionian,” for Nicky Wood

  “St. Kilda,” for Fergus Hall

  “Fish, and the Thoughts of Fish,” for Douglas Mant

  “Saving an Oak Tree,” for Malcolm Wood

  In a Time of Distance

  A poem, in the mind of its creator, is often closely associated with the memory of a place, or of a time, or of something momentarily glimpsed and then seared into memory. Here is a poem that comes from a scene I saw many years ago in the Western Highlands of Scotland. I was travelling on a remote road and suddenly noticed that hung out on the washing line outside a white-painted croft house, alongside the ordinary items one sees on a washing line—shirts and so on—was a man’s suit. The nearest dry cleaner must have been hours away, and so I should not have been surprised to see a suit being washed. But I was, and the image has remained with me over the intervening decades. It was a bright day, and the sun was upon the green of the fields and the blue of the sea. A stiff wind blew against the washing pegged out to dry, animating it in a strange choreography. I realised at the time that this was something I would remember for a long time—and that is what I have done. If I close my eyes, I see it. And I smell the breeze from the sea, which is pristine in those parts, and I feel regret for what has gone, as we all must do when we think back to times when the world was fresh to us.

  a washing line outside a croft house

  Here on a line outside a croft

  A suit has been hung,

  A dark suit, old-fashioned,

  The wear of some older man

  For the regulated Sunday

  Of a Highland kirk; its arms,

  Filled with wind, beat time,

  Remind us of half-remembered rhythms;

  Remind us of the line of green between the sea

  And the land behind the sea, that strip of flowers

  And of whitened shells they call machair;

  Remind us of that beat of the heart

  That is this land, the unexpected vision,

  The simple facts of being.

  A memory rarely stands by itself. There is the memory, and then there are the associations that it triggers. In this poem, an olfactory memory reminds me of a particular part of Scotland and of a time, a matter of a couple of weeks, I spent there—again a long time ago. But any discussion of memory may itself remind us of Proust, whose theories of memory are, remarkably, being proven by contemporary neuroscience. In this poem, the image of machair appears again. It haunts me in its beauty. It is the landscape that I would expect to find in heaven, if heaven were ever to exist. Forget the fountains and clouds of other notions of heaven—make it Scottish machair, with the sound of the waves breaking on the shore and the cry of seabirds on the wind.

  taste and memory

  For Proust it was the m
adeleine cake

  Dipped into tea; an unexpected key

  To a flood of memories; for any of us

  A taste, a smell, may evoke moments

  We had not dwelt on very much

  But that were always there, half hidden

  In the lumber room of our minds,

  Reproachful of our forgetfulness

  But generous in their rewards,

  Restoring place and emotion,

  Love, friendship, the small exchanges

  That go with being who we are

  And where, and in what ways,

  We have lived our ordinary lives,

  Reassuring us that we have not

  Lost what we thought we had.

  For me it is the smell of gorse,

  The flowers of which briefly in summer

  Are redolent of coconut; small patches

  Of yellow in the dark green foliage,

  They scent the air, cling to the breeze,

  Surprise the walkers or the lovers,

  Make them stop, interrogate

  The evening air, then put away

  That unexpected memory of coconut

  Amidst memories of islands

  And quiet glens, the secret places

  Of this country on the edge of

  A continent, an afterthought of land.

  On a Hebridean island in my twentieth year

  I passed a place where gorse had colonised

  A fold of land near a stretch of machair—

  The lovely name by which some shores

  Are known—grass and broken shells

  And tiny flowers, close to the green sea;

  But it is the gorse that I remember,

  And its floral smell, touched with notes

  Of seaweed, of sea salt, of iodine,

  Those things that one can smell—and taste—

  On the breath of the Scottish islands.

  I was happy then and wished

  Those around me, and one friend in particular,

  The happiness I felt; now it is gorse

  That reminds me of that time,

  Not noisily, or with insistence,

  But quietly, discreetly, as the wind

  May whisper gently in our ear.

  One friend in particular: anybody may do for that. All that we need is somebody on whom we can focus our feelings of gratitude. The real test of love, or friendship, is whether we are grateful that the other exists. Auden captured that in his lines about how love requires an object, but almost anything will do—even, in his case, when he was a boy, a pumping engine that was “every bit as beautiful as you.”

  Here is another poem that will, I feel, always be closely associated in my mind with a very particular moment when people were required to live in conditions of isolation. This poem refers to that experience.

  in a time of distance

  The unexpected always happens in the way

  The unexpected has always occurred:

  While we are doing something else,

  While we are thinking of altogether

  Different things—matters that events

  Then show to be every bit as unimportant

  As our human concerns so often are;

  And then, with the unexpected upon us,

  We look at one another with a sort of surprise;

  How could things possibly turn out this way

  When we are so competent, so pleased

  With the elaborate systems we’ve created—

  Networks and satellites, intelligent machines,

  Pills for every eventuality—except this one?

  And so we turn again to face one another

  And discover those things

  We had almost forgotten,

  But that, mercifully, are still there:

  Love and friendship, not just for those

  To whom we are closest, but also for those

  Whom we do not know and of whom

  Perhaps we have in the past been frightened;

  The words brother and sister, powerful still,

  Are brought out, dusted down,

  Found to be still capable of expressing

  What we feel for others, that precise concern;

  Joined together in adversity

  We discover things we had put aside:

  Old board games with obscure rules,

  Books we had been meaning to read,

  Letters we had intended to write,

  Things we had thought we might say

  But for which we never found the time;

  And from these discoveries of self, of time,

  There comes a new realisation

  That we have been in too much of a hurry,

  That we have misused our fragile world,

  That we have forgotten the claims of others

  Who have been left behind;

  We find that out in our seclusion,

  In our silence; we commit ourselves afresh,

  We look for a few bars of a song

  That we used to sing together,

  A long time ago; we give what we can,

  We wait, knowing that when this is over

  A lot of us—not all perhaps—but most,

  Will be slightly different people,

  And our world, though diminished,

  Will be much bigger, its beauty revealed afresh.

  Journeys

  Script-writers like to talk about the journey that each character has. We must see that, they say. We must witness the development of character over time. People should not be the same at the beginning of a play or film as they are at the end; stability of character does not make for good entertainment.

  So, a journey may be real or metaphorical. The real journey—one that involves ordinary transport across identifiable terrain—may be as rich in association, may give food for thought, just as much as any metaphorical journey.

  Here is a journey into the land that lies to the south of Edinburgh—through the Scottish Borders.

  our journeys

  Driving one day into the Borders,

  That quiet landscape where so much

  Has long ago been the subject

  Of such lively dispute, where the inhabitants

  Are the same people at heart,

  As they always were, but who

  Equally believe they are not;

  Into a land between two worlds,

  Our road hugs ripening fields,

  Of calculated barley,

  Past neat farms cherished

  In all their corners;

  Undisturbed by the wind

  Of our passage, those we glimpse,

  The farmer on his tractor,

  The boy walking a dog

  Beside a meandering burn

  Seem indifferent, and understandably so,

  To our noisy concern

  To be somewhere else.

  Any journey, if reflected upon,