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

Rupert did not answer, and so Errol Greatorex continued. “There’s a whole body of evidence,” he said. “There have been numerous, perfectly well-documented sightings. They’re all there in the literature.”

“And photographs?”

“Some.”

Rupert spread his hands on the table. “Very well. Let’s just say that this particular jury is still out. And now, is there anything I can do for you until Barbara returns?”

Errol Greatorex shook his head. “No, I just wanted to bring in the latest chapters. She’s been giving them to the commissioning editor at the publishers – passing them on personally.”

“You have them here?”

Errol Greatorex nodded, opening the briefcase he had brought with him. From this he extracted a folder and placed it on the desk in front of him. “You can read them if you like,” he said.

Rupert took the folder. “Thank you, I shall.” He began to rise to his feet to indicate that the meeting was over. Errol Greatorex took his cue, and rose to his feet as well. “Do you want to meet him right now?” he asked.

“Who?”

“The yeti,” said Errol Greatorex. “He’s in the waiting room.”

Rupert struggled to remain calm. How should one behave in the presence of full-scale, florid delusions? Should one humour the person concerned, and then try to call, what, an ambulance? The police? Should one play along with the delusions, or did that draw one into a form of engagement with the sufferer which would merely exacerbate the problem? This was all Barbara’s fault, he thought crossly. The rest of us are perfectly capable of identifying the lunatics when they send us their manuscripts. She has to go and get this man a contract of all things! Now he was a client, and one could therefore hardly slam the door in his face, or get him sectioned under the Mental Health Act. It would not be a good advertisement for the Ragg Porter Literary Agency were they to have their clients sectioned under the mental health legislation.

“Very well,” said Rupert. “I’ll see him.” He looked at his watch ostentatiously. “I’m afraid I don’t have a great deal of time, though.”

“Just a minute will do,” said Errol Greatorex. “Just to shake hands with him.”

They left the office and walked down the short corridor to the reception area and waiting room.

“What’s his name, by the way?” asked Rupert.

“His yeti name is fairly unpronounceable,” said Errol Greatorex. “Most of the locals who get an education at the mission schools choose a saint’s name. It makes things easier. There are a lot of Jameses and Johns, that sort of thing. A smattering of John-Pauls in recent years, for obvious reasons. But he’s called Charles.”

Rupert did not know what to say, so he muttered, “Mmmn. Charles.”

They reached the reception area. Andrea smiled at them. “I gave your friend a cup of tea,” she said to Errol Greatorex. “He drank it and then said he had to go out. He asked me to tell you that he’d meet you outside Fortnum & Mason at twelve.”

Errol Greatorex appeared to take this in his stride. “He’s got some shopping to do,” he explained to Rupert. “Fortnum & Mason do a wonderful ghee. Another time.”

“Yes,” said Rupert. “Another time.”

He showed Errol Greatorex out and then returned to face Andrea. “You saw him?”

She looked blank. “Who?”

“Greatorex’s friend. The … er, man who was with him.”

She did not seem in the least perturbed. “Yes. I made him tea – as I said.”

“Describe him,” said Rupert.

She shrugged. “Tall. Very tall in fact. Wearing a sort of beige coat – Marks & Spencer’s, I’d say.”

“And?”

“And a bit hairy, I suppose. Could have done with a shave.”

“Hairy?”

“Yes. Hairy. Some men are, Rupert, believe it or not. I don’t go in for that sort of thing, not personally, but some people—”

“Yes, yes, I know all that. I wasn’t born yesterday. But what did he sound like? What sort of accent?”

Andrea thought for a moment. “Belgian, I’d say.”

William’s sense that all was not well in his life, an incipient, nagging doubt, had now become a full-blown conviction. There were many reasons for this, but one of them –possibly the most important one – was simple loneliness. Just as Freddie de la Hay was missing him, so too was he experiencing that sense of incompleteness one feels when a familiar presence is suddenly no longer there. Such feelings can be profound and long-lived, as when we lose a close friend or a member of the family – at that level, we are in the presence of true grief – or they may be less substantial, more transient, as when a shop or coffee bar we have grown to like closes down, or a favourite office colleague is transferred. These may seem little things, but they constitute the anchor-points of our lives and are often more important than we imagine. If we lose enough of these small things, we risk finding ourselves adrift, as William now felt himself to be.

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura … In the middle of the path through life I found myself in a dark wood. This was one of the scraps of William’s education that had remained with him, and now, as it came to mind, he remembered the classroom in which the line had been explained to him by his English teacher, a chain-smoker with a nicotine-stained moustache and a wheezy voice. The middle of the path in Dante’s days, the teacher had pointed out, was thirty-five – an impossibly distant age when you are sixteen, as William then was. Sixteen was not even quite the middle of the path to thirty-five, and now here he was, at forty-nine, or thereabouts, and thirty-five seemed distant from a quite different perspective. Life seeped away ever more quickly the further along Dante’s path one went, he decided, just as water drained more quickly the emptier the bathtub became. When the plug was first pulled it all seemed so slow and then, towards the end, it rushed away in a tiny, feverish whirlpool.

These thoughts came to William as he closed up his wine shop for the night. It had not been a particularly busy day, and he had been able to use much of the morning to catch up on paperwork, which had kept his mind off his situation. But as the day progressed, he had increasingly dwelled on what he thought of as his plight . No dog, no wife nor girlfriend, no social life worthy of the name, and, to top it all, no letters after his name.

The letters he particularly wanted were MW. This stood for Master of Wine, a qualification awarded only after a gruelling examination that took four days, during which the candidate was subjected to searching theoretical and practical tests. William had sat the examination a few years ago and failed, a galling experience, heightened in its intensity by the sight of a whole cohort of younger people succeeding, some of whom were only nel mezzo del cammin , or not even that far. What did they know that he did not? How was it that they could write about wine with such authority when he, who had spent a lifetime in the business, had so manifestly failed to impress the examiners?

Of course he had nobody to blame but himself, and he recognised that. When he received his grade D he had felt humiliated, but he knew that that a grade D was exactly what he deserved, particularly in the written part of the examination, where he had lost his self-control and made wild guesses at the provenance of the wines they were required to identify and write about. He had sat there, with ten glasses set out in front of him, and panicked when he tasted the first. He thought that the wine was Portuguese, and was on the point of setting out the arguments to support this view when it had occurred to him that it might be Argentinian. From then on, his progress through the examination had gone downhill. Instead of using the small spittoon that each candidate had on his desk, William had drained the first glass dry. The second sample, a Côtes du Rhone, he found no difficulty in identifying. Encouraged by this success, he again swallowed the entire glass, and by the time he reached the sixth sample he was drunk. It was shameful and extremely unprofessional. The examiners had been tactful, quietly suggesting that he have a break. “I’m very sorry, Mr French,” the chief invigilator had said, “but you’re disturbing the other candidates. It doesn’t really help, you know, if one of the examinees is humming away.”