Alexander McCall Smith - The Dog Who Came In From The Cold

Her friend looked at her pityingly. “Yes,” she said. “It makes you inauthentic, Marcia.”

Marcia winced. “Does it really?”

The friend nodded. “Yes, it does. You have to live for yourself, you know. You have to do things that fulfil you, not others. Women are not there to look after men.”

Marcia thought about this. “But who’ll look after them if we don’t?” she asked.

Her friend rolled her eyes. “Marcia, dear …”

Marcia tried another approach. “But what if you’re fulfilled by doing things for other people? Why can’t I feel fulfilled by making food for other people …” She corrected herself. It was not feeding other people that gave her pleasure, it was the feeding of men. “Making food for men, that is.”

The friend’s frustration showed itself. “That’s really sad,” she said. “It’s sad because you don’t know that you’re being used by a system – the old, deep-rooted system of male domination. Of course men want us to feed them. Who wouldn’t?” She looked at Marcia, as if to challenge her to contradict this. But Marcia just listened, and so the friend continued, “Most men, you see, don’t grow up; they’re fed by their mothers when they’re little boys and they realise how satisfactory that is. And being fed by somebody else is really very comfortable. So they manipulate women into carrying on doing it for the rest of their lives.”

“But if women want …”

“No, Marcia, that’s not going to work. Women think they want to make food for men, but that’s false consciousness. You know what that is? No? Well, I’ll explain it to you some other time. The point is that women are made to think that they like doing things, but they don’t really. They want to do their own things, things for themselves.”

The conversation had ended at that point, and Marcia had gone about her business, which was feeding people. Her friend might have been right but she felt that there was not much that she could do about the state of inauthenticity that her friend had diagnosed. And now that she came to think of it, perhaps it was quite pleasant to be inauthentic, and if one was happy in one’s inauthenticity, why should one try to change it? It was an interesting question, but there were canapés to be prepared and that was a more immediate task than the rectification of false consciousness.

Now, as she removed the cover from a dish of rolled herring, she felt a warm glow of satisfaction at William’s obvious pleasure.

“My absolute favourite!” he exclaimed, picking up one of the strips of herring on its cocktail-stick skewer.

Marcia smiled. “Well, I’m glad. The Icelandic poet turned up her nose at these. And yet her poems are all about cod and herring, apparently.”

“Perhaps she couldn’t bring herself to eat the subject of her poems,” suggested William, reaching for another. “Poor woman. It would be like Wordsworth eating daffodils. One just can’t.”

William went on to tell Marcia about Angelica’s visit and the assignation that he had the next day. Marcia put down the plate of herring and listened intently.

“This is ridiculous,” she said, when he had described the incredible conversation for the second time. “I take it you won’t be going.”

William shook his head. “No. I mean, yes, I am going.”

Marcia stared at him incredulously. “But this is a lot of nonsense, William. You can’t get involved in these ridiculous schoolboy games. Get a grip, for heaven’s sake!’

William looked away. He did not like Marcia telling him what to do, and he felt that this really was none of her business. But she was a difficult person to argue with and he had to admit that it was a rather absurd situation.

“But I told them I’d come,” he said. “They’re expecting me.”

“Then stand them up,” she retorted.

He looked at her reproachfully. Marcia might have been a friend but there were times when he realised that there lay between them a gulf of difference in attitudes to things both large and small. One of these was their attitude to obligation: if William said that he was going to do something, he did it. Marcia, although not unreliable, was more flexible. That was the difference between them.

Marcia stared back at William. She knew what he was thinking, which would be something to do with doing what one said one was going to do; she could read him so very easily.

“Don’t go, William,” she said quietly. “You’re going to regret it if you do.”

Marcia had put it bluntly. “Listen William,” she said, “You haven’t crossed the … the Nile yet.”

“Rubicon, Marcia,” corrected William. “One crosses the Rubicon.” He paused. “And then, if one is really into mixing metaphors, one burns one’s boats.”

“Rubicon, Nile – whatever,” said Marcia breezily. “The point is you’ve crossed nothing yet. So you can still get out of this. Don’t go. Just don’t go.”

But he had ignored her advice, and found himself taking a delicious, almost perverse pleasure in doing so. The problem with Marcia, he thought, is that she thinks she’s my mother. For some men, of course, that would be a positive recommendation, the many men whose deepest ambition is to find their mother in another woman; but for William exactly the opposite was true. His mother had sought to run his life for him, and he had engaged wholeheartedly in both a conscious and subconscious cutting of apron strings. So any suggestions from Marcia were viewed through the very strong anti-maternal filter developed over time. This filter had led William to become a wine merchant precisely because his mother had been a teetotaller; it had prompted him to apply – unsuccessfully – to the University of Cambridge because his mother had set her heart on his going to Oxford; and it had resulted in his living in Pimlico because his mother had once expressed an antipathy for that part of London.

The trip from which Marcia sought to dissuade him was hardly a dangerous one. William was no Mungo Park, setting off into uncharted regions of the upper Senegal Basin; Mungo Parks’s mother, he imagined, was probably dead-set against her son wandering off to Africa like that, as, no doubt, was Mrs Livingstone. But if they had advised their sons not to go, then they had been ignored. And likewise William would take no notice of Marcia’s advice, even though he was only proposing to take a taxi to Birdcage Walk, stroll across the road into St James’s Park, and then along a footpath in the direction of the Mall. At the point where the path skirted the ornamental lake, he was told, he would come across a bench facing a copper beech tree, and that was where he was to sit until he was approached.

He left the flat with Freddie de la Hay half an hour before he was due to be in the park. As always, Freddie was delighted at the prospect of a walk and sniffed the air appreciatively as they set off from Corduroy Mansions.

“They were very insistent that you should come along, Freddie,” William explained. “That’s why you’re here.”

Freddie de la Hay glanced up at his owner. He was aware of the fact that a remark had been addressed to him, but of course he had no idea what it was. He was a well-mannered dog, though, and he wagged his tail in that friendly way dogs have of encouraging their owners. Freddie de la Hay valued William highly, not simply because he was his master, but because he was what the Americans refer to as a pre-owned dog, and as such he had a distant memory of somebody else who had not been as kind as William; who had made him eat carrots and use a seatbelt when he travelled in the car; who had forbidden him to chase cats and squirrels, lecturing him sharply if he set off in the pursuit of either. It had been a world of unfreedom, a world from which all joy and canine exuberance had been excluded, and he did not want to return to that dark and cold place. William was to be valued for that – for rescuing him from bondage, from durance vile.