This was greeted with silence. Eventually the public health voice asked, “Is the cat your own cat, sir?”

  “No,” said Angus.

  “So the cat came into your flat from somewhere else and became deceased whilst in your flat? Is that what happened?”

  Angus sighed. “No. I brought it in already deceased, so to speak. Dead, in fact—if you’ll forgive my being so blunt.”

  “You’re in possession of this late cat?”

  “Yes, and I need to find out how to dispose of it.”

  It became obvious that the public health department had no suggestions to make, and Angus was once again told that he was being escalated.

  “But I’ve already been escalated,” he protested. “I was escalated to you.”

  “That may be,” said the voice. “But there are further possibilities for escalation. They are at a higher level, I assure you.” There was a pause. “May I put you on hold for a few moments? It won’t be long.”

  “More ‘Für Elise’?” Angus asked.

  There was a further silence, while the hidden pianist sat down at the keyboard, and then “Für Elise” began again. After a couple of minutes, Angus found himself talking to the Chief Executive of the city. Once more he explained what had happened. “I think this needs to be escalated,” said the Chief Executive. “Hold the line a moment, will you.”

  And that was how Angus eventually reached the Lord Provost himself.

  “I’m so sorry to hear about your cat,” said the Lord Provost. “This is most unfortunate.”

  “It wasn’t actually my cat,” said Angus.

  “Even so,” said the Provost, “you can become attached to a cat who belongs to somebody else. We’re very fond of a cat that lives next door to us.”

  Angus sensed an opportunity. “But what if that cat were to expire in your house? What would you do?”

  Now, he thought, here is my opportunity for a definitive ruling, given at the highest level.

  “It would be very upsetting,” said the Lord Provost. “But, as I said, I’m sorry to hear about this cat of yours.”

  Angus sighed. This was getting nowhere. He decided to seize his opportunity. “Lord Provost, now that you’re on the line, I’d like to talk to you about the trams.”

  There was complete silence at the other end of the line, followed, after a sudden click, by the strains of “Für Elise,” so gentle, so haunting, so calming.

  56

  Cryptological Anthropology

  When Angus had put down the telephone receiver on “Für Elise,” he had taken a deep breath. Through no fault of his own, he had stumbled into a Kafkaesque situation in which he had a dead cat on his hands and no idea of how to dispose of it legally and, importantly for him, decently. Surveying the corpse on the table, he had felt as if he were a character from one of Patricia Highsmith’s chilling novels—landed with a body and needing to dispose of it before Nemesis struck. Winged Nemesis, armed with her dagger, was constantly on the lookout for people with bodies on their hands, her radar being finely tuned, perhaps, to the waves of anxiety emanating from such people, and remorseless was she in her stalking of them once alerted to their presence.

  It was Domenica who had suggested to him that he should telephone officialdom for advice. He had tried that, and now he went through to her study to report to her that he had failed. When he entered her room, a book-lined retreat in which Domenica conducted her anthropological research, he found her sitting at her desk, reading an article from the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

  She looked up as Angus came in. “This is fascinating,” she said, gesturing to the journal in front of her. “Cryptological anthropology. What do you think that entails?”

  “Decrypting things,” said Angus.

  “Well, yes. But what precisely?”

  Angus shrugged. “The things that people do.”

  Domenica shook her head. “That’s the task of anthropology as a whole. This is a specialized branch of it.” She paused. “Language. It’s the decrypting of language with the intention of finding out about the people who spoke it.”

  “I see,” said Angus.

  “Quite fascinating,” Domenica continued. “It’s a relatively new discipline.”

  Angus glanced over her shoulder at the journal cover. Ideographic signs in Linear B, he read. A new conjecture as to social relation categorisation terms.

  “Linear B? Wasn’t that very early Greek?”

  Domenica nodded. “It was. Tremendously early.”

  “So not something one hears today in the tavernas of Kos?”

  Domenica laughed. “Certainly not. You would definitely not be understood should you attempt to order your retsina in Linear B. They would look blank, I imagine.” She paused. “Just as the Greeks at first looked blank when British officers addressed them in classical Greek in the war. Patrick Leigh Fermor and the like. They were classicists.”

  “Brave men,” said Angus.

  “Oh, they were,” said Domenica. “And some of them were Scots. I met one of them. Ian Ross. A great man. He hid up in the mountains and blew up bridges with the Greek resistance. He was very courageous—if the Germans had caught him, they would have shot him out of hand.”

  Angus ran an eye down the journal’s list of contents. One of the articles stood out. Rongorongo Decoded at Last. He looked quizzically at Domenica. “Rongorongo?”

  Domenica raised an eyebrow. “That,” she said, “is debatable.”

  “Not everyone agrees?”

  “I hae ma doots,” she said. “I could be wrong, but…”

  “But what’s Rongorongo?” asked Angus.

  Domenica explained that it was the script found on artifacts removed from Easter Island. “It consists of glyphs,” she said. “Most of them are etched into wooden items.”

  “And nobody can work out what they say?”

  She nodded. “The glyphs are written according to a system of reverse boustrophedon—that is, each line goes in the opposite direction from the one above it, and alternate lines are back to front. That’s boustrophedon for you, Angus.” She paused, and then added, “Rather like a contemporary novel.”

  “And the glyphs themselves?”

  “Funny little figures—rather wriggly in appearance. Some people, some animals. Very funny to look at, but not funny when translated, according to…”

  She picked up the copy of the journal and read out the name of the author, and the degrees he held: MA (St. Andrews), PhD (Edinburgh), DLitt (Oxford).

  “He sounds, how shall I put it?” said Angus. “Erudite?”

  “Oh yes,” said Domenica. “He can walk the walk, but…Well, I’m not sure that he should have published this—even if he’s right, which he may well be.”

  Angus pressed her to explain.

  “Well, he claims to have deciphered the surviving passages.”

  “And?”

  “And he says that the inscriptions are, in fact, a recipe book. People used to suggest they were genealogical, but he says no, it’s recipes—an early recipe book.”

  “Predating Epicius?”

  “Apicius,” Domenica corrected him. “There’s Apicius and then there’s Epicurus. Don’t confuse them.”

  “Predating him?” asked Angus again.

  “No, much later. The thirteenth century, perhaps. Around about then.”

  Angus glanced at the journal. There were tables of glyphs, with suggested meanings.

  “The embarrassing thing, though,” said Domenica, lowering her voice, as if to prevent being overheard. “The embarrassing thing is this: the collection of inscriptions in question is apparently a recipe book for cannibals.”

  Angus’s eyes widened. “You mean those ancient Easter Islanders were cannibals?”

  Domenica closed her eyes briefly. “It’s not so simple, Angus. And, as you might expect, these things are sensitive. Western scholars shouldn’t go around accusing others of being cannibals. Every society has had its Campbells—including Scotland.”

  Angus frowned. He had heard of Sawney Bean, of course, but were there others? And what was this about Campbells?

  “Did you say Campbells?” he asked.

  Domenica shook her head. “I said cannibals.”

  “I thought you said Campbells.”

  Domenica drew in her breath. “I did not,” she said. “And remember: tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner.”

  Angus had enjoyed the joke. “What I love about you, Domenica,” he said, “is your sense of humor—and your liberality of mind. Your generosity to others, even Campbells.”

  Domenica acknowledged the compliment gracefully. “Thank you,” she said. “One would hope to err on the liberal side, Angus, while at the same time not being naïve when it came to the failings, or shall I say, in this context, the appetites of others.”

  “Absolutely,” agreed Angus. “The weaker brethren…”

  He sighed. He had not told her about his fruitless conversation with the local authorities. He would do so now, and see if she wanted to come to the small, cat-sized grave that he was planning to dig in Drummond Place Garden. So what if the committee got to hear of this? As a key-holder, he paid his share of the gardens’ maintenance expenses, and was entitled to use the gardens for reasonable purposes. Burying a cat, he decided, was one such purpose.

  57

  Youth Passes

  Out at Nine Mile Burn, as the shadows cast by the rhododendrons lengthened, Matthew and Elspeth sat down to a dinner cooked for them—and their guest, Pat Macgregor—by the ever-obliging James, their young male au pair.

  “I don’t know if I ever mentioned this to you, Pat,” said Matthew, as James ladled soup into their plates from a large Spode soup tureen, “but James is a first-class cook. A seriously good cook, in fact.”

  Pat looked across the table at James, who was standing behind Elspeth, holding the tureen in one hand as he wielded the ladle with the other. She noticed his hips, which were slender, and thought: what happens to men? When do they change shape and become…? The word that came to her unbidden was gross. Boys and young men were lithe, and then, suddenly, they seemed to fill out and their center of gravity shifted. Mind you, she thought, everybody’s center of gravity shifts sooner or later. It was one of the great pivotal points in life—like adolescence, or menopause—the center of gravity shift. And it was downhill all the way from there, which was such a depressing thought, she decided.

  “You’re lucky,” Pat remarked.

  “I know,” said Matthew. “Our Danish au pairs were useless when it came to cooking. They loved salted fish and little fiddly bits of seafood.”

  “And pink sauce,” said Elspeth. “Remember the pink sauce?”

  “They put pink sauce with everything,” explained Matthew. “It was like that sauce that people used to serve in prawn cocktails. Remember that stuff? Marie Rose sauce? It had mayonnaise in it—and Worcestershire sauce, I think. And tomatoes.”

  “And James is lucky too,” added Pat. “Lucky to be able to cook.”

  “He was taught by his uncle,” said Elspeth. “We bought this house from him—from James’s uncle. The Duke of Johannesburg.”

  Pat smiled. “Oh, he’s been in the gallery, hasn’t he, Matthew?”

  “He comes down there from time to time,” said Matthew. “He has a flat in Gloucester Place these days. He uses that to conduct his business.”

  James had finished serving the soup and now sat down. He was next to Pat, and he turned and smiled at her as he took his seat. She felt a sudden pang. Yes, a pang. It was a pang. And why should I feel a pang, she thought? Because it will pass. Youth passes. A brief moment. The rose that blows and dies.

  She had noticed his teeth, which he revealed in a smile that was directed at her. It was an innocent smile. Sheer pleasure, she thought. He’s made for the aesthetic pleasure of others. But then she said to herself: no. No.

  “I’m not a great cook,” she said. “We learned a bit at school, but it was all stodgy stuff, and I forgot most of the recipes they taught us. Except for shortbread. I can still make shortbread.”

  “There’s a secret to making good shortbread,” said James. “The temperature of the mixture must be right.”

  “Really?” said Pat.

  Then James said to her, “Matthew said that you studied history of art at university. Where was that?”

  “Edinburgh,” said Pat. “Right here.”

  “I’d love to do that,” said James. “But my uncle has been trying to persuade me to do a degree in Scottish history.”

  “Which would be interesting too,” said Matthew.

  From her side of the table, and between sips of soup, Elspeth said, “Life was so interesting in the past.”

  Matthew stared at her. Was this a rebuke? Was this to suggest that life at Nine Mile Burn, with three young sons, was uninteresting? “We shouldn’t romanticise the past,” he said evenly.

  Elspeth denied that she would ever do that. “Oh, I know that. In fact, the past—when you were actually living it—was quite boring. It’s only later, when we look at the past through the lens of the present, that we think it was exciting. It wasn’t.”

  James frowned. “Are you sure about that?” he said.

  “I think I agree with Elspeth,” Matthew said. “In fact, I’m reading a book at the moment about what it was like to live through the British Empire. Everybody thinks that the nineteenth century, when the empire was almost at its height, was a really exciting time. But this book—and its title makes the point: Imperial Boredom—says that it really wasn’t. People were bored stiff. Nothing very much happened. People were sent out to remote places and found that once they were there there was nothing to do. They sat and played cards and suffered from the heat, and drank in clubs at night with other bored people and said the same things night after night. That was the British Empire for you.” He paused, and then continued, “It was the same for the people on whom the whole thing was imposed. They found it boring because there was nothing they could do to change their situation. They ceased to be in control of their fate, which at least is one way of not being bored.”

  “This is really good soup, James,” said Elspeth.

  James smiled. “Thank you.” He turned to Pat. “Do you like Vuillard? I mean, did you study him at uni?”

  “A bit,” said Pat. “There were lectures on French art by Professor Thomson. The best lectures I ever went to. He occasionally mentioned Vuillard and Bonnard…the Nabis. I rather liked them.”

  “They were comfortable,” said Matthew. “They painted on an intimate scale. People doing things in houses—that sort of thing.” He sighed. “I wish more artists today would paint pictures of people doing ordinary things in their houses. And it wasn’t just the French intimistes who did that—the Dutch also did it in the seventeenth century. They painted people sitting about in Amsterdam and Delft, doing things in their houses or courtyards.”

  “Chilling,” said James. “Just chilling.”

  “I’m not sure if they chilled in those days,” Matthew said.

  Pat smiled. “Perhaps they did, but didn’t know they were chilling.”

  The conversation continued along these lines as James brought in the main course—a pheasant casserole. “I got these pheasants from my uncle,” he said. “He has this Gaelic-speaking driver, you see. He gets them from somebody out at West Linton, and then passes them on to my uncle after he’s plucked them.”

  “You have to be careful when you talk about pheasant pluckers,” observed Matthew.

  Elspeth shot him a glance.

  “Or seashells,” said Pat.

  “I’m so worried about him,” said James. “I’m worried about my uncle’s project.”

  Pat asked him what it was, and James explained about the microlight seaplane that the Duke and Padruig were making in a byre near Single Malt House. “I could show you, if you like,” he said to Pat. “We could walk over there after dinner. It’s not far. Only if you like, of course…”

  “But I’d love to,” said Pat. Rather too quickly, thought Elspeth.

  58

  Agas etc.

  After Pat and James had gone off on their walk together, Matthew busied himself with the washing up. Elspeth sat in the kitchen, drinking a cup of decaffeinated coffee. She wanted to apologise to Matthew, but was finding it difficult to choose the right words. Now, addressing his back as he piled plates into the dishwasher, she said, “Matthew, darling, I’m really sorry about how I was earlier on. I shouldn’t have said what I did…I just felt…” She cast her eyes down. It sounded lame, she felt, as real apologies often sound. False apologies, in all their insistence, may be too loud, while their true equivalents, the heartfelt, the sincere, are often meek and hesitant.

  He turned and walked back toward her, drying his hands on the apron he had donned for the clearing up. The apron had a picture of the Pentland Hills on it and, being his favorite, it was well used. He knew that she was sorry, as was he.

  He held out his arms. “You don’t need to say one word more. Not one. We’ve already made up. You’ve forgiven me and I’ve forgiven you. Mutual forgiveness. Over.”

  “But I need to ask myself something,” Elspeth insisted. “Why was I so crabby?”

  Matthew sat down next to her and took her hands in his. “It’s because you get fed up being stuck in the house. Who wouldn’t?”

  “Could we get somebody in to help James? To make it easier for him? A girl? So that I could go back to work?”

  Matthew considered this. “You can have whatever you want,” he said. “We can afford it.”

  “I feel guilty,” she said.