44 Scotland Street - Alexander McCall Smith [148]
Lunch at the Café St Honoré
was not a spendthrift, though, and this minor shopping spree in George Street had made her feel vaguely uncomfortable. If she spent two hundred pounds a day, every day, she wondered, how long would it take her to get through her fortune? About eight years, she calculated, allowing for the accumulation of interest. She thought for a moment of what eight years of profligacy might be like. She could buy a new pair of shoes every day, and have at the end of that eight-year period more than two thousand pairs of shoes. But what could one do with such a mountain of shoes? This was the problem; there was a limit to what one could do with money. And yet here I am, she thought, feeling guilty about spending two hundred pounds.
She was thinking of this when she wandered into Ottakars Bookshop. Sasha was not a particularly keen reader, but she belonged to a book group that met every other month and she needed to buy the choice for their next meeting: Ronald Frame. At their last meeting they had discussed a novel by Ian Rankin, and one or two of the members had been slightly frightened. Sasha had been able to reassure them, though: nothing to worry about, she had said. Very well written, but nothing like that ever happens in Edinburgh. Or at least not in the Braids. She moved to the Frame section in Ottakars. There was The Lantern Bearers, and there was Time in Carnbeg, the book group’s choice. She picked it up and looked for a picture of the author. Sasha liked to know what the author looked like when she read a book. She did not like the look of Somerset Maugham, and had not read him for that reason. And she did not like the look of some of the younger woman novelists, who did nothing, it would seem, with their hair. If they do nothing with their hair, then will they do much more with their prose? she asked herself. And answered the question by avoiding these writers altogether. Such frumps. And always going on about how awful things were. Well, they weren’t awful – and certainly not if one had four hundred and eighty thousand pounds (minus two hundred).
It was while she was examining the Carnbeg book for a picture of Ronald Frame that she became aware of another customer Lunch at the Café St Honoré
311
standing on her right, examining a shelf of wine books. And a further glance revealed that it was Bruce, the young man from the firm who had come to the Edinburgh South Conservative Association Ball at the Braid Hills Hotel. She had liked him even before the ball and his courteous behaviour on that evening – he had been extremely polite to Ramsey Dunbarton when he was going on about having been the Duke of Plaza-Toro in some dreadful operetta back in the year dot – had endeared him further to her. And he was terribly good-looking too, bearing in mind that he came from somewhere like Dunfermline, or was it Crieff?
She moved towards him and he looked up from the wine atlas he had been studying.
“Mrs Todd!”
“Please, not Mrs Todd,” she said. “Please – Sasha.”
Bruce smiled. “Sasha.”
“You’re looking at wine books,” she said, peering at the atlas.
“I wish I knew more about wine. Raeburn is quite informed, but I’m not.”
Bruce smirked. Raeburn Todd would know nothing about wine, in his view. He would drink – what would he drink? Chardonnay!
“I find the subject very interesting,” said Bruce. “And this atlas looks really