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

The disagreement between Ecuador and Peru had resulted in a state of armed tension between the two countries. Every so often, in the war season, as it became known, when the weather allowed for good flying, this would flare up into an exchange of actual hostilities, during which the Ecuadorians would shoot down a few Peruvian MIG fighters, and vice versa. Eventually better sense prevailed and the issue was resolved by the World Court – largely in favour of Peru, a decision that did not meet with wide support in Ecuador. (It is still possible to engage the taxi drivers of Quito in discussion of this matter, making the Ecuadorian capital one of the few cities in the world where taxi drivers are prepared to discuss the jurisprudence of the World Court. London taxi drivers, although opinionated in some areas, are not known for the strength of their views on the decisions of the Hague court.)

There had never been open hostilities between Barbara and Rupert, who restricted themselves to the occasional slightly needling remark – just enough to keep the matter alive but not sufficient to lead to actual conflict. There was one such exchange that morning, as Rupert came into the meeting room at the Ragg Porter Agency to find Barbara flicking through an unsolicited manuscript, a look of amusement on her face.

“I see you’re enjoying that,” Rupert observed. “I took a manuscript home last night and left it there, I’m afraid. There’s so much clutter in my study in the flat, you see – not quite enough room. The manuscript disappeared under a pile of papers.”

Barbara picked up the inference immediately. What Rupert was saying here was that her flat – to which he did not think her entitled – was much roomier; had he lived in the flat to which he was morally entitled (hers) he would not mislay manuscripts.

So she looked up and replied: “You really should think about moving some time, Rupert. I hear that this is quite a good time to buy. There are quite a few for sale signs in our street, you know. Not that I would ever think of moving myself.”

Rupert, of course, understood perfectly what this meant, which was: You should forget the past and stop moaning about things that happened a long time ago. You should find a larger flat because I’m never going to move out of the flat that you think is yours, so just forget it and shut up. So there.

Rupert pursed his lips. The subject would not be discussed further now, and possibly not again that entire week, but it would not be dropped. Oh no. When one was as certain of the rectitude of one’s cause as he was it would take more than a cheap salvo about moving and for sale signs to take the subject off the agenda altogether. But for now there was business to be done.

He sat down. The directors usually spent half an hour or so talking about agency affairs before the firm’s three other agents, who were not on the board, joined the meeting. This gave them an opportunity to catch up on who was doing what, and also to exchange odd bits of publishing gossip that might be useful in negotiations on their clients’ behalf.

“Your man, Great … What’s his name again?” said Rupert.

“Greatorex. Errol Greatorex.”

“Yes, him. Where are we? Has he delivered the final manuscript yet?”

Barbara tossed aside the manuscript she had been reading. It would never do. “Unpublishable,” she said, and added quickly, “This one, not Greatorex’s. This is by a man who set out to sail from Southampton to Istanbul in a small yacht barely the size of a bathtub.”

Rupert smiled. “And?”

“It all went terribly well, as far as I can make out. There were no storms, no incidents with larger vessels, and the Turks were terribly good to him when he arrived. It makes for dull literature when the Turks are kind to one. We can’t have books like that.”

“But what about Greatorex?”

Barbara sighed. “He’s in London at the moment,” she said. “He says that he’s still putting the finishing touches to the manuscript. He promised me that it would be ready soon, but I’m having great difficulty in getting it out of him.”

Rupert sighed. There had been a lot of talk – hype even – about the launch of Errol Greatorex’s Autobiography of a Yeti, a story dictated to the author by a yeti who worked as a schoolteacher in a remote Himalayan village. But they had been waiting for some time now, and he was beginning to wonder whether the author would ever deliver.

“Are you sure that he’s genuine?” Rupert asked. ‘The whole thing seems a little bit …. How should I put it? Dubious.”

“Oh, I think he’s the real thing,” Barbara assured him. “I had lunch with him the other day, when he came back from Tibet. He gave me a lovely Tibetan knitted hat. He picked it up in Lhasa.”

“Generous of him,” said Rupert. “It’s nice when you meet an author who isn’t selfish – rare though it unfortunately be.”

Barbara was impressed. “I love your subjunctives,” she said.

And she was sincere in her praise. She did love a man who used the subjunctive mood, as Hughhad done that very morning when he kissed her goodbye at the door of the flat. “Were I to search for twenty years,” he had said, “I would never find somebody as lovely as you.”

It made her feel warm just to think of it. A beautiful subjunctive, as warm, as loving as a caress.

It was not only Barbara Ragg’s remark about the subjunctive that made Rupert wonder about her; there were other things he had noticed, little things, perhaps, but which taken together indicated that something was afoot. She was engaged, of course, and he asked himself whether the mere fact of engagement could make a person dreamy and distracted. He tried to remember what he had felt like when he had become engaged himself, but found it difficult even to recall when that was, and in what circumstances, let alone how he had felt at the time.

Of course Rupert knew that Barbara’s private life was none of his business, and he would never have dreamed of prying, but if her state of mind was affecting her work, then that was a different matter altogether. And there had been signs of it. A few days previously, Barbara had written to an author and told him that not only had his manuscript been accepted for publication by a well-known publisher but that a sizeable advance had been negotiated. This must have been good news for the author in question, who had not been published before and whose work, although worthy, was on the very margins of what was commercially viable.

Her discovery two days later that she had written to the wrong author could hardly have been comfortable. The manuscript that had been offered for was by a quite different author – one who was widely published already and would barely have noticed yet another publisher’s advance.

“La Ragg,” Rupert had said to his wife that evening, “made an absolutely colossal blunder. Colossal. She told somebody that his novel had been accepted for publication when it hadn’t. She got the wrong author. Stupid cow.”

Gloria Porter smiled. “How dim can you get?”

“Not much dimmer,” said Rupert. “And you know what? The story gets better.”

“Difficult to imagine,” said his wife. “Tell all.” She liked to hear stories of Barbara Ragg’s ineptitude; she, too, had come round to resenting Barbara’s enjoyment of the flat that surely had been meant for her Rupert, and ergo for her. She had tried to get Rupert to stop going on about the issue, but eventually decided that it would be simpler to join in his campaign. So now she found a curious satisfaction in his diatribes against Barbara and indeed came up with her own contributions to the feud. Well, it was all very well having the larger drawing room, she pointed out, but how could one possibly benefit from it when one’s life was such a mess in other respects? Barbara’s affair with the odious Oedipus Snark, for instance. It was as if the Recording Angel was punishing her for her occupying a flat that was not, by rights, hers.