Now, faced with the need to speak to somebody in the council bureaucracy about the dead cat he had found in Drummond Street Garden, Angus was at a loss as to how to proceed. Domenica was similarly uncertain as to which branch of local government might be responsible for this sort of thing, and suggested that the best tactic would be to call the main council telephone number. From that number, one might be directed to the appropriate department.

  “Tell them you’ve found a dead cat,” she said. “Tell them that and then ask to be put through to the people who deal with…well, with dead cats.”

  Angus found the number. As he had feared, a machine answered, and gave him options. As the long list was recited, he began to doubt that he would be able to penetrate the electronic boundaries behind which authority now sequestered itself. But then, at last, a final option was presented. If you are concerned with none of the above and wish to speak to a representative, please…And at this point, the tape reached the end of the loop and the recital of the menu began again.

  Angus decided that a random selection would at least get him into the system. Closing his eyes, he stabbed blindly at the keypad, to be immediately rewarded by the sound of ringing at the other end. A minute or two later, a voice came on the line.

  “Trams,” said this voice, and then added, “Good morning.”

  Angus’s eyes lit up. “Trams?”

  “Yes.”

  He drew in his breath. “So you’re the people who built the trams?”

  There was hesitation. “Well, we’re in charge of them. We didn’t actually…Well, let’s not go there.” And then the voice continued, “Is this a lost property enquiry?”

  “It’s about a dead cat,” said Angus.

  There was a further silence. Then, “Your cat’s been run over by a tram? Is that what you’re reporting?”

  Angus laughed. “No, or at least I don’t think it was a tram.”

  The voice was becoming short. Trams had been the front line of a long war between officialdom and its critics. This was a field in which guerrillas presumably operated. “Then what is it?”

  “I found a dead cat,” said Angus. “I want to speak to the department that deals with such matters. I’ve been put through to trams—obviously not the right place.”

  The voice relaxed. “Oh, I see. Well, you don’t need us, do you?”

  “No, I don’t,” said Angus. “But could you please put me through to the right place?”

  This brought silence, before, “Dog Control, I think. I can transfer you.”

  “It’s a cat,” said Angus. “A cat.”

  “I heard what you said,” the voice retorted. “It’s just that we don’t have a cat department. But we do have Dog Control. That’s the closest I can think of. Would you like me to transfer you or not?”

  “I suppose you don’t have cat control because it’s impossible to control cats.”

  The voice listened. Then came the response, “Hah! No, you’re right about that. What do they say about herding cats?”

  “That’s it. It’s impossible. You can’t herd cats.”

  It had been a moment of real human contact, but now it came to an end. “Anyway, would you like to be transferred? They might be able to help you.”

  Angus opted to be transferred, and after a civil goodbye a ringing tone could be heard once again. As he waited for his call to be answered, he imagined the person to whom he had been speaking. It was a male voice, but not an assertive one. It was the voice of a tired official, one who probably did not like his job all that much, who might be counting the days to retirement, who had been stuck in trams for years, perhaps, answering public enquiries, fending off complaints about the impact of construction works, giving people details of fares and timetables, reuniting them with their lost umbrellas or briefcases, smoothing out the troubled relationship between Homo sapiens edinburgensis and the tram. Yet behind that official identity there would be a person—a person who knew what it was like to be in love, a person who had hopes, who wanted to go somewhere, who believed in something or other, who had ideas about how the world should be. And in spite of all that human hinterland, with its richness and its pathos, the person himself was stuck in trams, like a press-ganged oarsman in a galley.

  Dog Control answered. This time it was a business-like voice—that of one accustomed to the exercise of authority. This was a voice that dogs would dread: if this voice said Sit! dogs sat.

  Angus began to explain himself. “I know that you’re in charge of dogs,” he said.

  “Yes we are,” interrupted the voice. “Are you reporting a stray?”

  “No,” said Angus. “The fact of the matter is that I’ve found a dead cat.”

  For a few moments there was no response. Then, “This is a cat that’s been killed by a dog?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Angus. “I don’t really know the cause of death. I just came across it in Drummond Place Gardens. It was lying there.” He wanted to mention the green eyes, but he did not.

  “I’m sorry to hear this,” said the voice. “But I’m not sure that this is a matter for us.”

  “I only asked to speak to you because you deal with dogs…”

  “Yes, dogs. We deal with dogs. Your matter is…”

  “Yes, I know,” said Angus. “I know it’s about a cat. But I thought you might know who deals with cats. That’s all. I’m not expecting you to deal with this. I just wanted…”

  The voice interrupted him. “I see what you mean. Fair enough. But I don’t think we have a department that deals with cats.”

  “Could you ask somebody?”

  “I can transfer you up the line, so to speak,” the voice suggested. “I can escalate your call.”

  Escalate my call! thought Angus. This was what every caller to any system most liked to hear. You’re being escalated.

  49

  Constructive Mistruths

  Stuart very much regretted his acceptance of Katie’s invitation to dinner. He had done so, of course, before she had sprung on him the news that she had a boyfriend and that she wanted the two of them to meet. Having accepted, though, it would be difficult for him to get out of the commitment, and now the evening of the dinner party was upon him.

  Nicola was happy to look after the boys. By now she was well established in the maternal role all but abandoned by Irene, and although she still maintained her flat in Northumberland Street, she frequently stayed overnight in Scotland Street. For Stuart, this was the perfect arrangement. He had the luxury of a constantly-at-hand babysitter, while his mother could still withdraw to the private space of her flat from time to time. Since her return to Scotland, she had re-established contact with her old friends from the Borders, some of whom had moved into Edinburgh from Kelso or Melrose and were now living barely a few minutes’ walk away from Northumberland Street. It was a whole new second life—one blessed with friendship, regular bridge afternoons, and a role as grandmother. And being needed suited Nicola—the loss of that, above all, was what had distressed her in the collapse of her marriage to her Portuguese former husband, Abril Tavares de Lumiares. Abril had ceased to need her in his life, and that had hurt her to the quick.

  “A dinner party?” Nicola asked.

  “Yes,” said Stuart. He was cagey. He had never liked discussing relationships with his mother. He understood why she should be interested, but this was an area of his life that he did not wish to share with her. That reticence went back a long time.

  “Anybody I know?” asked Nicola.

  “I don’t think so,” Stuart replied.

  There was silence. Then Nicola remarked, “People don’t have dinner parties all that much these days, do they?”

  Stuart was noncommittal. “Maybe not.”

  “In my day,” Nicola continued, “people in Edinburgh had dinner parties virtually every week. Friday and Saturday were dinner party nights. You invited people to dinner and then they invited you back. You met the same people week after week.”

  “Somewhat tedious, surely?” said Stuart.

  Nicola looked thoughtful. “Not really. I always found it rather reassuring. It created a sense of community.” She paused. Community, community, community: it had become a bit of a mantra, and yet it did count for something, elusive and difficult to define though that something might be. “In fact, often I found myself hoping that there wouldn’t be anybody I didn’t know there. And I was relieved when I went into the room and there they all were. The usual crowd.”

  Was that the famous rut into which people fell, she wondered? Was that the mud in which they metaphorically stuck? Did this lead inexorably to the well-known slough in which they desponded? She imagined a map of such terrain. There was the unadventurous mud; there was the slough of despond—a Dantean morass of hopelessness; and there, glorious and shining, was the moral high ground—populated by the pharisaical—behind which, glimpsed through the clouds of confusion, were the peaks of achievement.

  Stuart interrupted her reverie. “What happened?” he asked. “Why did things change?”

  “People became busier,” said Nicola. “That was one thing. Social habits changed. Life became less formal.”

  Stuart nodded. He remembered a time when colleagues from work met in the pub on a Friday evening. That seemed to have stopped. Everybody was too tired.

  Nicola had one more try. “Where is it?” she asked. “This dinner party of yours?”

  Stuart told her. “Howe Street.”

  She waited, but there was nothing more. Nicola looked away.

  “Darling,” she said, her voice lowered. “You’re a free man now, you know. And, frankly, I’ve considered you a free man for years. You did your best—you really did—and you put up with so much. Nobody—and I mean nobody—would reproach you if you tried to find happiness elsewhere.”

  For a few moments he said nothing. Then, turning to his mother, he confided, “Thanks, Ma. Thanks. And yes, I’d like to meet somebody. I thought I had, but I’ve found out that she’s got somebody else now.”

  Nicola reached out to touch him gently on the forearm. “My darling…”

  “She asked me to dinner and my hopes shot up, but then…”

  “Oh my darling, my darling.”

  “It turned out that she only wanted to introduce me to this new man of hers. That’s all.”

  Nicola’s eyes narrowed. “That’s what she said?”

  “Yes. I went to see her and we got on really well. I thought I could resume what I’d started before, but then she mentioned this man and said that she would like me to meet him. I could hardly say no.”

  Nicola reflected on this. Her interpretation was different. “Are you sure that there’s no hope? Don’t you think it possible that she would prefer you? Otherwise, why would she invite you to dinner?”

  “For old times’ sake?”

  Nicola shook her head vigorously. “Oh no, Stuart, that’s not the way a woman looks at things. If she invites somebody to dinner in such circumstances, it’s because she wants to achieve something.”

  “And what would that be?”

  “One of two things,” explained Nicola. “One possibility is that she wants to get the new man to pay her more attention. Bringing you to the table, so to speak, is intended to show him that there are always other possibilities if he fails to shape up. That’s one possibility.”

  “And the other?”

  “The other is that she wants you but would prefer it if the current boyfriend were the one to break off the relationship. She wants to provoke him into a show of jealousy, which will give her an excuse to end the relationship with him. It’s called creating the casus belli.”

  Stuart was doubtful. “I don’t think either of those is all that likely,” he said. “I think she feels sorry for me.”

  “If that’s the case,” said Nicola, “then you should politely decline.”

  “Too late,” said Stuart.

  Nicola smiled. “People get flu,” she said.

  Stuart reproved her. “When I was a boy you told me never to lie.”

  Nicola defended herself. “You were too young to understand constructive mistruths,” she said.

  “Which are?”

  “Lies that make things better.”

  “For whom? For the person uttering the lie, or the person to whom it’s addressed?”

  “Both,” said Nicola.

  “Too late,” said Stuart. “I’m going. And I don’t care any longer, Ma. I just don’t care.”

  She moved forward and embraced him. “Don’t say that, darling. Don’t get all dried up inside.” She looked at him. What had Irene done to her son? How had she managed to kill the spirit within him?

  Nicola sighed. Throughout history, men had crushed women and any spirit that women might show. Now at last that was being confronted, but the necessary corrective had been interpreted by some women as licence to belittle men. Irene was one of those women. Irene had won. She had gone, but she had won.

  50

  Portuguese Shoes

  And it was no better for Stuart as he stood at the door of Katie’s flat in Howe Street. He looked down at his shoes—his brown suede shoes that Irene had been so disparaging about. In his view, there was nothing wrong with them, and they certainly did not deserve her scornful description of Portuguese spiv footwear. The shoes were Portuguese—as it happened—but the way that Irene put it suggested that they were suitable for wearing by Portuguese spivs, as if Portuguese spivs were worse than any other spivs. That was the trouble with Irene, Stuart thought: she went on about unacceptable attitudes in others, and yet her own views were every bit as arrogant as those of the people she disparaged.

  Now, looking down on his shoes, he thought that they were perhaps a little bit too pointed at the toes. Was that why Irene had thought them spivvish? Would it have been better, he wondered, to wear his ordinary Oxford-cap black work shoes? The problem with those was that they seemed so dull, and he would not have wanted to be the only person at Katie’s dinner party wearing Oxford-caps.

  He took a deep breath and rang the bell. He could hear voices inside—laughter too—and when the door was not answered immediately he decided to ring the bell again, just in case it had not sounded. But it had, and the door was opened by a man wearing a blue sweater. He was younger than Stuart—about thirty, Stuart thought—and had a welcoming smile.

  “You’re Stuart, I assume.” He held out a hand, and Stuart shook it. “I’m George.”

  George. Stuart registered the name. This was him. This was the man who had replaced him.

  Stuart looked down at George’s shoes. He did not do this deliberately, but his eyes seemed inexorably drawn in that direction. George was wearing trainers, the expensive leather sort, and Stuart immediately thought: my suede shoes are wrong. But George was now gesturing for him to come in so that he could close the door, and Stuart obeyed.

  “I’ve heard a lot about you,” said George.

  Stuart nodded. “Oh yes.” It was an embarrassing thing to say—in any circumstances. People did not want to hear that others had been talking about them. George, obviously, was a bit gauche in these matters. Surely Katie would see that. And then Stuart asked himself what Katie could possibly have told George about him. She hardly knew anything about him because they had spent very little time together and he did not recall talking much about himself. For the most part, they had talked about poetry and literature in general. So how could George know much about him?

  Stuart now saw that George was looking at his shoes.

  “Great shoes,” said George.

  Stuart felt the back of his neck becoming warm. This was not going to go well.

  “Italian?” asked George. “Your shoes, I mean.”

  “Portuguese.”

  George raised an eyebrow. “Portuguese shoes?”

  “Yes.”

  “I had a pair of Portuguese shoes once,” said George. “They didn’t last long. The heels fell off.”

  Stuart said nothing.

  “I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised,” George continued. “I didn’t pay much for them.”

  Stuart decided to ignore this. He felt George’s eyes upon him; he was being assessed, and it made him feel uncomfortable.

  Then George said, “Katie said you were at Heriot’s.” This was a reference to the school Stuart had attended.

  “I was,” said Stuart, thinking: such an obvious, echt-Edinburgh remark—so typical. What did it matter where you went to school? What possible relevance did it have to anything? But, out of politeness, Stuart said, “And you?”

  “Fettes.”

  Stuart looked away. Fettes was considerably above Heriot’s in the social pecking order. He made an effort to smile, and said, “Poor you.”

  George laughed. “It wasn’t too bad, actually.”

  “Not if you like cold showers.”

  George stopped laughing. “That all ended ages ago.” He paused. “My father’s time.”

  Stuart pretended not to register the point of this remark, which was: my father went there too. That, again, was typically Edinburgh, establishing…what was it establishing? Prior rights? Longer roots? Snobbery, thought Stuart. And how odd that somebody of George’s age should play that particular game. This was out of the Ark. And he realized at that precise moment that he disliked George not for what he had done—taken his place in Katie’s affections—but for what he was.