Praise for Alexander McCall Smith’s

  44 SCOTLAND STREET SERIES

  “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 once again proves himself a wry but gentle chronicler of humanity and its foibles.”

  —Miami Herald

  “McCall Smith…is a pro, and he delivers sharp observation, gentle satire…as well as the expected romantic complications.…[Readers will] relish McCall Smith’s depiction of this place…and enjoy his tolerant, good-humored company.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Contain[s] a healthy helping of McCall Smith’s patented charm…just about perfect.”

  —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “The most genial of writers and most gentle of satirists.…[The] characters are great fun.…McCall Smith treats them with affection.”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  “Powerfully addicting fiction.…Delightful.…[A] graceful and always amusing depiction of the pleasures and problems of everyday life.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  Alexander McCall Smith

  THE ENIGMA OF GARLIC

  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.

  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

  A Promise of Ankles

  Love in the Time of Bertie

  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 Joy and Light Bus Company

  A Song of Comfortable Chairs

  FOR YOUNG READERS

  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

  The Novel Habits of Happiness

  At the Reunion Buffet (eBook only)

  Sweet, Thoughtful Valentine (eBook only)

  A Distant View of Everything

  The Quiet Side of Passion

  The Geometry of Holding Hands

  The Sweet Remnants of Summer

  IN THE DETECTIVE VARG SERIES

  The Department of Sensitive Crimes

  The Talented Mr. Varg

  The Man with the Silver Saab

  The Strange Case of the Moderate Extremists (eBook only)

  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

  Your Inner Hedgehog

  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 (eBook only)

  Emma: A Modern Retelling

  Chance Developments

  The Good Pilot Peter Woodhouse

  Pianos and Flowers

  Tiny Tales

  The Pavilion in the Clouds (eBook only)

  In a Time of Distance

  AN ANCHOR BOOKS ORIGINAL 2023

  Copyright © 2022 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 Books, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd., Edinburgh, in 2022.

  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.

  Trade Paperback ISBN 9780593685198

  Ebook ISBN 9780593685204

  Cover illustration by Iain McIntosh

  Author illustration © Iain McIntosh

  anchorbooks.com

  a_prh_6.0_143301906_c0_r1

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Books by Alexander McCall Smith

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1: Cooking for Men

  2: Dutchitude

  3: Domenica Thinks About Time

  4: Stuart Is Unactivated

  5: Stereotypes, Bullfighting, Danger

  6: A Strawberry-blonde Experience

  7: Borthy Arrives

  8: Changed, Changed Utterly

  9: Wedding Plans

  10: At the Mansfield Traquair Centre

  11: A Modernist Poet

  12: Angry Penguins

  13: Minor Disagreements, Germs, Promises

  14: The Reel of the Fifty-First

  15: The Perfect Bacon Roll

  16: ‘The lightning is all about me’

  17: The Pronunciation of Gullane (Again)

  18: Energy Fields; Low Amperages

  19: Kitchen Confidential

  20: Lunch with a Dental Hygienist

  21: Airbag Issues

  22: Babar, Apollo, Contrition

  23: Matthew Answers Elspeth’s Phone

  24: Canine ESP

  25: The Whiff of Battle

  26: A Damascene Moment

  27: St Senga of Dunfermline

  28: Dr Livingstone Expounds

  29: Capgras et al.

  30: A Swiss Army Knife

  31: Vitamin D Deficiency

  32: Transparency

  33: Fungus Issues

  34: Signed in Green Ink

  35: No Point in Girning

  36: At Valvona & Crolla

  37: Ossian, and So On

  38: Seriously Cold

  39: The Consequences of Frostbite

  40: Early Rising

  41: An Astonishing Act by Bruce

  42: The Entity

  43: Down in Leith

  44: Very Uxorious

  45: The Road to Carlops

  46: Olive Takes Command

  47: Vigils

  48: Rust on Garlic

  49: Lion-tamers, Change, Truth

  50: Waterfalls, Scotland, Everything

  51: Vitamin D: A National Issue

&nb
sp; 52: Angus Makes a List

  53: In the Pentlands

  54: Swallows and House Martins

  55: The Talented Mr Borthwick

  56: At The Chaumer

  57: Sumptuary Laws

  58: Glasgow Is Our Only Hope

  _143301906_

  This book is for Anna Marshall

  1

  Cooking for Men

  Domenica Macdonald, anthropologist, resident of Edinburgh, observer of humanity and believer in the old-fashioned and increasingly rare virtue of tolerance, looked out of her window onto the cobbled street below and wondered what to cook for dinner. It was not a question on which she would spend much time – nor was it one with which she engaged emotionally. Domenica was a competent enough cook, but she had never been able to develop much enthusiasm for time-consuming recipes or for the cults surrounding some of the better-known chefs. She was aware of the prominent culinary names of the age, of those described as celebrity chefs, but took no real interest in them or in their doings, other than to be disappointed, in some cases at least, by their rude behaviour. The people who worked in kitchens had not signed up for the Foreign Legion – an organisation in which recruits could hardly complain if they were shouted at; kitchen staff should not have to put up with being sworn at and threatened in their workplace. The fact that you can make a tasty sauce is no ground for thinking you have the right to belittle those who help you make it. There was no excuse for impoliteness, Domenica would like to remind them: politeness cost nothing, did not smell, and there was always enough of it to go round.

  Domenica did almost all the cooking in her household. Although her husband, Angus Lordie, a portrait painter of some distinction, did not belong to that generation of men who were completely incapable in the kitchen, his repertoire was nonetheless somewhat limited. In his bachelor days, Angus had relied on a small number of dishes that he prepared for himself and that he was able to make without reference to any recipe book. These included a pasta dish (spaghetti aglio e olio); Macsween’s haggis, served with mashed potatoes, neeps and peas; and kedgeree made with Arbroath smokies. The ingredients of these concoctions were few in number. Spaghetti aglio e olio, as the name suggested, required only spaghetti, garlic and olive oil. You cooked the spaghetti in another readily available ingredient – water – and then you placed it in heated olive oil to which you had added copious quantities of chopped garlic. That was all, and yet the name – aglio e olio – was so poetic, so full of Italian promise.

  Haggis was perhaps even simpler. You obtained your haggis and you put it in the oven, wrapped in foil. Then you took it out and punctured the skin, having boiled the vegetables in advance. That, again, was all that you had to do, and all this could easily be accomplished, Angus thought, by mere men, possessed of no further culinary skills than those elucidated in a small and well-thumbed book that somebody had once given him entitled Cooking for Men.

  It was not an unhealthy or unpalatable diet but it was with some relief that, after their marriage, Angus fell into the habit of allowing Domenica to prepare their evening meal. He was aware, though, that there were potential objections to this arrangement, and that the days when men could sit back and rely on being uncomplainingly cooked for by women were over. It was the duty of men to pull their weight domestically, and Angus fully accepted that. It was just that between the recognition of a duty and its fulfilment there was often something of a gap. We all want to be good, he told himself; we all want to do the right thing; but it’s not always easy. St Augustine had had something to say about that, he thought.

  “I must get myself organised,” he said to Domenica. “I must do more in the kitchen. I really must. I enjoy cooking, you know.”

  Domenica smiled. One had to encourage men in their inchoate schemes of self-improvement. “Yes,” she said. “That’s a very good idea, Angus. The kitchen, you may have noticed, is over there.”

  But somehow Angus had never managed to put this vague intention into practice, and the task of cooking was shouldered by Domenica, just as it is by so many wives whose husbands express an intention to sharpen their culinary skills but somehow never get round to it.

  Now, as she looked down on Scotland Street, Domenica decided that they would that evening have tomato soup out of a can, followed by scrambled eggs served on toast. This was plain fare – nursery food, as Angus sometimes called it – but it had the merit of a preparation time of five minutes, at the most. Angus would like it and for her part she had more pressing concerns than those of the kitchen. Domenica was currently working on a scholarly paper, An ethno-linguistic analysis of a Scottish sub-dialect: conjectures and possibilities. The paper itself was already written and accepted, in principle, for publication in a reputable scholarly journal. The journal editors, though, had passed on to Domenica various proposals for change made by the peer reviewers to whom the paper had been submitted, and these would need to be attended to.

  Reviewers could be irritating; while some of them were helpful and approved publication without change, others seemed to feel it necessary to suggest amendments, even where none were strictly necessary. Domenica was convinced that this sometimes happened simply because reviewers felt that they had to do something to justify their involvement in the whole process. It was a familiar story in so many fields of activity. If you appointed a bureaucrat, for example, then you must expect the bureaucrat to create rules and think of reasons for not doing things. That is what bureaucrats do. If you bought a dog, then you must expect him to bark. That is what dogs do.

  It was a matter of regret, Domenica thought, that people felt the need to do things. There were many situations, she felt, where inaction would be a perfectly good policy, where things could be left where they were without any attempt at improvement. The adage that what was not broken should not be fixed was derided as folk wisdom, and yet it was, Domenica thought, profoundly true. There was nothing wrong with inaction, in spite of the widespread belief that everything had constantly to be adjusted and rearranged. Things might be left exactly where they were, unaltered by interference. After all, there was no essential merit in change, in spite of the belief that disaster would follow unless all our arrangements were constantly revisited and reorganised.

  Domenica had recently come across a biography of Calvin Coolidge, the American president who served so unobtrusively between 1923 and 1929. It was Coolidge of whom Dorothy Parker, when told of his death, asked, “How can they tell?” Dorothy Parker was extremely witty, but in this case her amusing observation obscured the fact that Coolidge, who was undoubtedly dull, was also a fairly successful president – for the very reason that he did nothing, and said even less. That would not be possible today, of course. People had to do things, and would not rest until they had done them.

  Domenica turned round from her window and caught her husband’s eye. “I’ll cook dinner this evening, Angus,” she said. “Nothing fancy.”

  “Thank you,” he said, looking slightly guilty.

  2

  Dutchitude

  The paper on which Domenica had been working, and to which she would return after she and Angus had consumed their dinner of tomato soup and scrambled eggs on toast, represented the first fruits of a significant piece of research. Unlike the fieldwork she had previously done in her anthropological career, which involved travelling to distant and exotic places, Domenica’s latest project was one that took her no further than the slopes of the Pentland Hills on Edinburgh’s southern boundary. That is not to say that it was without risk: there had been several difficult moments in Fairmilehead and even in Morningside itself, the epicentre of Edinburgh respectability, but by and large there were none of the dangers that she had faced on her earlier forays into Papua New Guinea and the Malacca Straits.

  Domenica’s career had closely followed the cursus honorum of the academic anthropologist. An undergraduate degree had been followed by research for a PhD and that, in due course, led to a postdoctoral fellowship. The PhD was completed under the supervision of the distinguished social anthropologist, Professor Lance Studebaker, an authority on the use of linguistic evidence in support of anthropological conclusions. Studebaker came from a cosmopolitan background. His father had been an American air force colonel who spent some years as air attaché in the American Embassy in Sri Lanka. It was while he was in Colombo that he met Anna-Marie van Vonk, the daughter of a prominent member of the Burgher community. The Burghers were people mostly of Dutch or Portuguese origin who had lived in Ceylon, as it once was, and Sri Lanka, as it became, for generations. Most of them had intermarried with the Sinhalese and become very much part of the patchwork of peoples who made up Sri Lankan society. The van Vonks were tea merchants and had their own small tea garden not far from Galle. Anna-Marie, the eldest of three daughters, was a bird painter whose works had attracted an international following; her delicate watercolours of the island’s birds were displayed in museums all over the world and had been published, too, in a handsome, privately printed book. Lance was born in Colombo, but was taken back to the United States at the age of four. He was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy and then at Princeton, where his interest in anthropology was first aroused. Because of his family connection with the country, it is perhaps not surprising that he should have chosen to do postgraduate research into an aspect of his mother’s country, concentrating on the sense of Dutch identity experienced by the Burgher community. To this concept he gave a name – Dutchitude – a nod in the direction of Léopold Sédar Senghor’s influential work on identity.