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

How could he have forgotten their arrangement to have dinner together? It was not as if it had been made weeks, or even days, earlier; it had been concluded a few hours before it was due to take place. One did not forget obligations as freshly minted as that; one simply did not.

What had happened? Had he simply decided that he had something better to do? James would never behave with such discourtesy, and yet, when she tried to telephone him, she found that his mobile phone was turned off. The only time he did that, she knew, was when he did not want to hear from her. It had happened once or twice before, after a minor row or misunderstanding, and he had even admitted it.

“I can’t bear conflict, Caroline,” he explained. “I simply can’t. There are some people, you know, who like to fight with others – I’m not one of them. I’m really not.”

“But you can’t just turn off your phone,” she said. “That’s running away.”

“I’d never run away from you,” he said soothingly.

“You’d simply turn me off?”

He smiled. “Not you! But I must admit there are some people who really need an on–off switch. I can think of at least three. Maybe even more.”

The fact, then, that he had not answered his phone on Friday night pointed to only one conclusion – he had been avoiding her because he knew that he was standing her up. And even if the phone was off because the battery had run down, or he had simply forgotten, still he stood accused of thoughtlessness at the very least.

Unless something had happened. It was this thought that, more than anything else, ruined her sleep. There were many dangers in London. A traffic accident, for example – James was so unworldly and she had often had to grab his arm to prevent him from walking out into the traffic expecting it to stop. There was that, of course. She imagined herself standing in the police station while the police ran through a list of traffic incidents involving pedestrians. “An art historian, you say, Miss? Well, we did have a young man knocked down near the Courtauld …”

And there were other dangers. People simply disappeared in London. One moment they are on their way to a meeting with a friend and the next they are nowhere to be seen. What happened to these people, she wondered. They were abducted, she had read, but where to? And how did their abductors keep them once they had them? It would be difficult, surely, to imprison somebody in central London; there simply wasn’t the space.

James had no enemies – or none that Caroline knew of. He had not even written a critical review. It would be understandable if he had written something scathing about an installation artist, for instance; such a critic might suddenly find himself put into a tank of formaldehyde or something like that by the artist’s supporters. But James had never had anything published, not even a review.

Anger turned to anxiety, and then back to anger as yet another possibility suggested itself. James might have gone off with somebody else: while Caroline was waiting for him in Corduroy Mansions, he might have been in some entirely other part of London cavorting with somebody else. She tried to imagine James cavorting; she tried to imagine anybody cavorting. It was difficult. And if James had already expressed an antipathy to kissing others for fear of germs, then surely he would be highly unlikely to cavort. Cavorting, even if it was difficult to picture, was surely even more likely to pose a risk of contamination by germs. For a moment she pictured James in the arms of another woman, preparing to cavort … She put the thought out of her mind, only to have it replaced by a still more unsettling one. What if James had decided to go off for dinner with one of those rather foppish young men who hung about the auction houses? There was one who she was quite convinced was interested in James; she had seen him looking at him, in that way. James had said, “Oh, him, he’s not at all my type,” and laughed, but now the exchange came back in a most unsettling way.

She decided to get out of bed and make herself a reviving cup of coffee. She would not phone James, she thought; she would wait for him to phone her. And then she would be cool – no matter what effort it cost her. She could even pretend to have forgotten the engagement herself, which would be very satisfactory revenge – if he phoned to apologise and she asked him what he was talking about.

She went into the kitchen. Dee, who drank green tea first thing in the morning, was standing by the window, nursing a mug in her two hands.

“Go out last night?” asked Caroline.

Dee looked out of the window. “Yes.”

“Party?”

Dee shook her head. “No, nothing special. Just went out for a meal.”

Caroline thought that rather unlike Dee, who was perpetually moneyless. “Special occasion? By yourself?”

“Yes,” said Dee. “Just me. Private treat.”

Berthea Snark, psychotherapist and mother of Oedipus Snark MP, had settled herself into her seat on the train, and was now waiting patiently it to pull out of Paddington station. It was a Saturday morning, and the station was halfway between the busyness of a weekday – when driven hordes of commuters poured into London from Oxfordshire and beyond – and the relative somnolence of a Sunday. On Saturday morning there were people travelling to see friends for the weekend, grown-up children returning to parents in the country for much-missed home cooking and laundry services, and tourists in search of an England that had once existed but now survived only in the imagination – an England of quiet villages and cricket greens and tiny, silent pubs.

Berthea Snark was on the train because she was going to visit her brother, Terence Moongrove, in his poorly maintained Queen Anne house on the edge of Cheltenham. She made this trip four or five times a year, and although her main motive for these journeys was concern for Terence, for whom she felt a considerable degree of responsibility, she also went because she enjoyed getting out of London. Her visits were usually for four or five days – quite long enough to feel the benefit of being in the country but not long enough to make her forget that she lived in London.

Sometimes, of course, they were longer; recently she had spent several weeks looking after Terence following his near-death experience. This had happened when Terence, a mechanical innocent of the first water, had attempted to recharge the battery of his Morris Traveller by connecting it directly to the mains. Not only had Terence stopped breathing for a few moments after this incident, but the battery, and the Morris itself, had stopped functioning altogether. This had resulted in Terence acquiring a second-hand Porsche from Monty, the son of his neighbour, Alfie Bismarck. Berthea had her misgivings about the acquisition of the Porsche, as she had about everything that Terence did. Her brother had always been a dreamer, and a lesser sister would have lost patience well before this, perhaps, with a brother who went on about sacred dance and the writings of the Bulgarian mystic, Peter Deunov. But Berthea was a tolerant sister – up to a point – and, of course, a psychotherapist, and she understood that no amount of persuasion on her part would ever detract Terence from his mystical preoccupations and his alternative lifestyle. All that she could do, really, was to protect him from the more obvious dangers inherent in such an approach to life. And always, in the background, she could hope that one day he might meet somebody who would take him off her hands. Not that this was at all likely, given Terence’s unprepossessing appearance – which included a propensity to cardigans and yellow slippers – and, more importantly, his utter inability to understand the way in which women – or indeed anybody else – thought.