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

“And then I went in and surprised my mother in the kitchen. She gave a shriek – a really loud shriek, a scream even. She was making scones – she makes these really good cheese scones for my old man – and her hands were sticky with the mixture. She screamed and ran to put her arms around me, flour and all that stuff, and it was all over my shoulders.

“And then my dad came in to find out what the fuss was. He was wearing shorts and a singlet. That’s what he wears when it’s hot – it was the hot season then. He looked at me and smiled and said, ‘Strewth!’ That’s all he said. He just smiled. I tell you, Caroline, it was all I could do to stop myself bawling my eyes out.

“Because, you see, that’s what home’s all about, isn’t it? Scones and singlets and everything the same as it always was. And if you get a dose of that – of all that familiar stuff that you thought you never wanted to see again – then it sorts everything out, it really does.”

Jo had more to say. “I went over the road. We have these neighbours who are really good friends, you see, and they were all in the house. They have a daughter who’s my age and she was at uni in Perth. She was there with a friend of hers I knew a bit, and we sat and talked about people we all knew and hadn’t seen for a while. And I asked them what was going on in Perth and they said nothing. So I laughed. Because that’s what I wanted. I didn’t want anything to have changed.”

She paused now, and looked enquiringly at Caroline. “Can you go home for the weekend?”

Caroline said that she could. Cheltenham was a couple of hours in the train. Then, on impulse, she said, “Come with me, Jo. Why don’t you come home with me?”

Jo did not reply immediately. But then she accepted. She had nothing planned, she said – or nothing she could not cancel.

“There’s nothing to do there,” warned Caroline.

“That’s why you’re going,” said Jo. “Remember?”

“And I’m not sure what you’ll make of my folks.”

“Or what they’ll make of me?”

Caroline looked out of the window. “They’re not too bad,” she said. “In their way.” Her father would not wear a singlet. And her mother bought her scones.

Jo looked at Caroline with concern. “Feeling better?” she asked.

Caroline nodded. “Yes. And thanks for … for helping. Thanks a lot.”

“It’s what flatmates are for,” said Jo. “That, and making dinner for their flatmate when she’s feeling a bit low. Like now.”

“Really?”

“Yes, why not? I’m going to open a bottle of wine and pour us a glass. Then I’ll make dinner.”

Caroline smiled appreciatively. “Thanks. What’ll you make?”

“Risotto, I think,” said Jo.

Rupert Porter walked back down the corridor in the Ragg Porter Literary Agency in a state of mild astonishment. He was normally not one to allow another to have the last word, but he had found himself completely at a loss when Andrea, the agency’s receptionist, had casually referred to her conversation with the person – if it was really a person – who had been sitting in the waiting room. It was a thoroughly ridiculous situation, and as he returned to his office, he went over in his mind each absurd development.

At the heart of it all was Errol Greatorex, Barbara Ragg’s American author, who claimed – and it was an utterly risible claim – to be writing the biography of the yeti, the Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas. But Greatorex was no random crank; he had a significant body of publications behind him, including two travel books that had won awards in Canada and the United States, and had been published in London too, by a reputable publisher. He had also written for popular geographical magazines and the Melbourne Age, all of which amounted to a perfectly respectable set of credentials.

Greatorex’s career suggested that he must have developed a healthy degree of intellectual caution. How, then, Rupert wondered, could somebody like him swallow the claim of some fakir that he was a yeti, of all things? Surely the whole point about yetis was that they were an intermediate primate – not quite homo sapiens, even if given to walking erect and leaving intriguing footprints in the snow. That was the legend, but, like all legends, it could hardly stand up to the investigative standards of our times. There were no mysteries left, none at all; not in an age of satellite photography, when the remotest corners of the globe were laid bare by unsleeping, all-seeing cameras. The Loch Ness monster, the yeti, Lord Lucan – all of these would have been seen if they really existed.

Yet many people were gullible, and when you combined this inherent gullibility with a wish to believe in things beyond the ordinary you ended up with a whole raft of myth. Errol Greatorex was either a charlatan, cynically prepared to exploit his credulous readers, or he was himself the victim of an even greater charlatan – this Himalayan type pretending to be the yeti. And it might not be all that difficult; one had only to be tall – yetis had always been thought to be on the tall side – and markedly hirsute. There were plenty of hairy people around, and one might expect that some of them were tall. So if a tall, hairy person, although homo sapiens, were to come up with a story of being taken from a remote valley and put in some mission school, there to be educated by … by Jesuits, perhaps, who had always claimed, “Give us the boy until the age of seven and we will give you the man”, might one not say the same thing of a yeti? “Give us the yeti until the age of seven …” Rupert frowned. He was not sure whether the Jesuits ever actually said that. Perhaps it was one of those chance remarks, dropped as an aside, that were seized upon and magnified out of all proportion. Had Margaret Thatcher ever really said, “There’s no such thing as society”? That statement had gone on to haunt her, although what she had in fact said – and Rupert had this on good authority, although very few people knew it – was, “There’s no such thing as hockey”. It was a curious remark to make, and she certainly should not have made it, but it was not the same as saying that there was no such thing as society. Had people heard her correctly and understood that she was talking about hockey, they might have been forewarned that she would go on to say a number of other very peculiar things.

He reached his office, and stopped. Thinking on these matters had made him momentarily forget about what Andrea had said to Errol Greatorex in the reception. She had said that the tall hairy person had gone off to do some shopping and would meet him in front of Fortnum & Mason at twelve. He looked at his watch. It was now ten o’clock, which meant that in two hours anybody who just happened to be walking along that particular section of Piccadilly would actually see this person who claimed to be the yeti. Even if there were other people waiting outside the shop – and there were many, he imagined, who met friends at midday outside Fortnum & Mason – it would not require a great deal of skill to identify a yeti, or a soi-disant yeti, among them.

Rupert smirked. If he went there himself, he could see this impostor. He could then tackle la Ragg when she came back from her jaunt to Scotland and reveal to her that he had investigated her so-called literary scoop and discovered it to be a squalid fraud – like so many much-vaunted publishing sensations.

Shortly before twelve, he left the office. As he walked past Andrea’s desk, he stopped, on impulse, and told her where he was going.

“I’m just off to Fortnum & Mason,” he said. “I might bump into that … person who was here with Errol Greatorex.”