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

“Oh. The Uses of …” The uses of something.

“Of enchantment. The Uses of Enchantment.”

“Of course.”

Hugh bent down and started to remove a sock. She watched him; the simple act of getting undressed in a confined space brought home the intimacy of the relationship into which she had entered. This was not occasional, which had been the nature of her relationship with Oedipus, and the boyfriend who, some years previously, had preceded him. It was quotidian, diurnal–nocturnal. She averted her eyes lest he see her looking upon him, as biblical language would have it; one would not want to be found looking upon another.

He took off the other sock. “Bettelheim said that violence in fairy stories and the like has a very important function. It enables us to experience it as children, and to deal with it. If you look something in the face, then you are no longer frightened of it.”

He turned away from her and switched out the main light in the compartment. The bunk reading-light, though, was still on, giving out a low, reassuring glow. The train rocked, and he had to reach out to steady himself by holding onto Barbara’s shoulder; she was already seated on the edge of the bed. Once steadied, he sat down.

“I’m very glad that you’re coming to Scotland,” he said.

She said that she was glad too. But she hardly knew Scotland, she added; it seemed very far away, particularly places with names like Fort William. “It makes it sound like a distant outpost.”

“It is.”

“But a fort. Were the locals so unfriendly?”

“At one time, yes. Remember that it was in the heart of Jacobite territory. It was occupied. Our culture was suppressed. Our national dress interdicted.”

He shifted round and lay back on the bunk, his shirt riding up over the flat of his stomach.

“ ‘How many miles to Babylon?’” he recited. “ ‘Three score and ten. Can I get there by candlelight? Yes, and back again.’”

Barbara turned and lay beside him on the bunk; there was not enough room, and had the train stopped suddenly she would undoubtedly have fallen off.

“I should get to my bunk,” Hugh said. “There really isn’t enough room for two.”

She wanted him to stay, but it was impractical. “I wish you could stay,” she said. “Then we could lie here, carried sideways through the night, just as that poet didn’t like. What was his name?”

“Norman McCaig.”

“Yes, like him.”

“Unlike him. We’d like it.”

She sat up in order to allow him to get off the bunk. As she watched him move past her and cross to the narrow door into his own compartment, she felt a sudden pang of sorrow. It was a premonition of loss, she decided; she would lose him, this beautiful stranger. For that was what he was to her still, a stranger who had come into her life, a gift from somewhere else altogether. What if he died? People did, even the young; people died.

Barbara prepared herself for bed, and then slipped between the sheets. Trains were scruffy places usually, but the sleepers had clean, beautifully ironed sheets, slightly rough to the touch as good linen and cotton can be. Rupert Brooke wrote of the “rough male kiss of blankets”; and what did he say of sheets? “The cool kindliness of sheets, that soon smooth away trouble.” That was it.

She reached up and turned out her reading-light. Through the interconnecting door she saw that Hugh had done the same. She felt safe; the morbid thoughts of a few moments earlier, when she had imagined that she might lose him, had dissipated. She was safe.

He was saying something, muttering, and it suddenly occurred to Barbara that it was a prayer. It occurred to her, too, that she had never actually asked him whether he believed in God. Who asked such a question of a lover, even of a fiancé, these days?

She strained to hear the words. It was in fact not a prayer, but a poem.

Barbara lay in complete silence. She could have slipped out of bed and embraced Hugh, hugged him, showered him with kisses of gratitude. But she did not do this, because she was awed by the moment. “My wishes for her, now, the one I love.” That’s me, she thought. That’s me.

Dee had discovered from experience that opening the Pimlico Vitamin and Supplement Agency on a Sunday brought particularly good results. She had made this lucrative discovery a couple of years earlier when she had gone into the shop on a rather dreary Sunday to do a stocktaking and had inadvertently turned the Closed sign to Open. This had resulted in a stream of customers, most of whom spent considerably more than the average. The average spend of her customers on weekdays was £6.38; on that Sunday it reached £18.76. A subsequent trial Sunday opening had resulted in an even higher spend of £23.43. That clinched matters, and from then on the Vitamin and Supplement Agency opened its doors at eleven on a Sunday morning and remained open until five in the afternoon.

She had tried to work out why Sunday should be so successful. It was not the case for every business – a nearby commercial neighbour who ran a small card shop sold practically nothing on a Sunday, and spent her Sundays tackling the more difficult weekend crosswords. Another trader at the end of the street, a dress shop for thirty-somethings, did a certain amount of business round about eleven in the morning, only to have these purchases almost invariably returned by five o’clock the same afternoon. The owner was puzzled, until the realisation dawned: her customers were buying the dresses purely in order to wear them to Sunday brunches and lunches at friends’ houses before returning them for specious reasons later in the afternoon. It was a radical solution to the complaint of having nothing to wear, or at least nothing that one’s friends had not seen several times before. Fashion for free, as one offender so honestly put it; one can, after all, be honest about dishonesty.

“We have become a thoroughly unscrupulous nation,” said the shopkeeper to Dee one day.

“Have we?” asked Dee.

“Oh yes. There’s been a survey, you know. And they – the scientists or whatever – found that fewer than half the men asked about this phenomenon of pretending to buy a dress thought that it was dishonest.”

“And women?” asked Dee.

“I remember the figure exactly. Eighty-eight-point-five per cent thought it was dishonest.”

“Well, there you are,” said Dee. “It shows that we aren’t all bad.”

The other woman disagreed. “Not at all. The fact that eighty-eight-point-five per cent of women thought it was a dishonest thing to do wouldn’t necessarily stop them doing it. They all do it – or most of them – even if they think it’s dishonest. They just don’t care.”

Dee sighed. She would never do it herself, but she suspected that the shopkeeper was right, most people now would do this sort of thing without hesitation. Look at the way people treat insurance companies, she thought; look at the way they think nothing of claiming for things that they haven’t lost. Fiddler nation, she thought.

It was all very interesting, if depressing, but it did not address the issue of why Sunday should be such a good day for selling vitamins. The answer, she suspected, had to do with what some people got up to on Saturdays. If people behaved in a virtuous way on a Sunday – and Dee was firm in her conviction that the buying and taking of vitamins was an entirely virtuous activity –it was entirely possible that they were compensating for having behaved in a vicious way on the Saturday night. And to a large extent, people did. They drank too much; they ate to excess; they stayed up too late. With the result that on Sunday, if they walked past a vitamin shop, their consciences pricked them like a thorn.