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

"You're sensitive,” she said. “It's a great advantage to be sensitive. Most men are … well, they're just insensitive. But you aren't. You feel things, James.”

James thought about this. “But what if I don't want to feel things?”

Caroline shook her head. “That's not an option,” she said. “You can't decide to be insensitive. You can't unknow things.”

“What do you mean unknow?”

Caroline thought it perfectly obvious. “You can't put the genie back in the bottle. Once you have knowledge - whatever knowledge it may be - you can't go back to a state of innocent ignorance. It's like any attempt to return to childhood - we can't.”

“Pity,” said James.

“Maybe. But the point is this: you are a very sensitive, sympathetic man. That makes you extraordinary. And there's nothing that you can do to change the fact of your sensitivity - it's who you are, James.”

That conversation had left James feeling vaguely dissatisfied. What Caroline had said about him was complimentary, indeed flattering, but he was not sure that he wanted to be a sensitive, sympathetic man. He wanted to be able to identify with the ordinary men he saw every day travelling on the tube or chatting to one another outside the pub - men who seemed to enjoy an easy camaraderie, who appeared not in the least troubled by what other people thought about them. He wanted to stop thinking about other people's feelings. He wanted to stop being so vulnerable to hurt.

But he would not be able to do it without Caroline's help, and he had decided that the only way of securing it was to formalise the relationship between them. He would ask her to be his girlfriend - that was what he would do. He would simply ask her.

When James raised the topic, Caroline was ill-prepared for it, but quickly concealed her surprise.

She reached out and took his hand. “Is that what you really want, James? Are you sure?”

He was sure. Lowering his voice, he said, “Yes, I'm sure. I want us to be lovers.” Lovers - it was such a luscious, dangerous word, and he could hardly believe that he had used it.

Caroline looked at him. “Have you got a sore throat?” she asked.

James shook his head. “Oh, Caroline,” he said, his voice returning to its normal pitch. “I really do love you, you know. You're everything to me.”

Caroline looked at him in disbelief. She was not everything to him, she knew that. What about art? What about the paintings of Nicolas Poussin? What about a whole lot of other things? And yet it was only a figure of speech, of course, and she knew that too.

The issue for Caroline was not just a simple choice between Man A and Man B, a choice with which some women might very much have liked to be faced; her choice went beyond that to embrace a third possibility, namely: neither.

“I just don't know what to do,” she confided in her mother when she returned to Cheltenham for a weekend with her parents. “ There are these two men, you see, and I really don't know which one to choose. But maybe I shouldn't choose either.”

Caroline's mother had always felt rather irritated by her daughter's indecision in these matters. Her philosophy was uncomplicated: find a man, satisfy yourself as to his suitability, and solvency, of course, and then, if everything was in order, proceed with all dispatch to tie him down. It was a clear programme, and one which many of Jane Austen's heroines would have recognised as being highly practical, and indeed the only thing to do.

The option of choosing to remain by oneself was not one which her mother's friends would have entertained at all seriously; for most of them there had never been any question but that one should get married if one possibly could. They appreciated, of course, that life did not always work out as one wished, but single women, they felt, were single for a reason. This could be demographic, as when there were simply not enough young men to go round, or it could be a concomitant other misfortune, of looks, perhaps, or attitude. Some women, it had to be accepted, were just too mousy to attract a flicker of interest from men, even from men who were themselves on the shelf, or virtually there - men with pebble-lensed spectacles and sloping shoulders; slightly seedy army officers of questionable tastes; dusty accountants with possessive mothers. Such men were hopeless, it was generally accepted, although there were always women - noble women - who looked beyond these drawbacks, took these men on, and thought of England when necessary. Did such women, Caroline wondered, sometimes utter in medio rerum the word England? It would be cause for disappointment for the men, she imagined; but better, of course, than the uttering of the name of another man, a known cause of matrimonial discord.

Her mother's generation had simply not understood that women might choose to remain by themselves because they thought the single life better. Of course in their day it was not better - at least not for women, whose career choices were still so unfairly limited by the dominance of men. Caroline, however, belonged to a generation for which there were all sorts of interesting jobs available to women, and indeed many of these jobs were now increasingly a female preserve. Medicine, for instance, was a fallen citadel - so much so that soon the majority of doctors would be women. The law was a harder nut to crack, but cracked it would duly be, as would the worlds of finance, aviation, broadcasting, and so on. Soon there would be no place for men in any of these callings, although there would always be secretarial positions, of course.

So deciding that she did not need a man was a real option. And yet, and yet … The problem was that in spite of the persuasive voices claiming that men were not necessary, she still had the feeling that men were really rather nice, and that by and large most women were happier if they had a man to come home to, or a man to come home to them. It sounded tremendously old-fashioned, but it was true. Her mother, of course, would have been unsurprised by this proposition, but for Caroline it ran counter to the received wisdom to which she had been exposed ever since she first started her studies at university; a received wisdom which stressed independence and liberation from the shackles of heterosexual domesticity. Caroline found herself reaching a conclusion that was the polar opposite of all that: most women needed men, and most men needed women.

If she fell within the majority - and she thought she did - then it precluded the single state - the third option she had identified - and meant that she came back to the choice between A (James) and B (Tim Something, the photographer). Tim Something was very attractive - suave, and handsome - of course, but in James's favour there was, first and foremost, the fact that he was easy company. Like an old pair of sandals or a battered straw hat, or even a comfortable domestic cat. None of these analogies would have flattered him, and yet Caroline thought that they were undoubtedly apt.

She and James could talk together for hours about the most mundane of subjects; and if conversation failed they could contentedly sit in silence in each other's company. They could telephone one another - as they often did - even if there was really nothing to say beyond a comment on the state of the weather. James had once telephoned Caroline to tell her that it was raining, and she, on looking out of the window, had confirmed that indeed it was true. To have such a pointless conversation with another and nevertheless feel that it was worthwhile showed a level of communication and empathy quite strong enough to sustain years and years of being together. Caroline knew that, and realised that James would be an easy and reassuring partner.