44 Scotland Street - Alexander McCall Smith [93]
An Evening with Bruce
had looked him up and down appraisingly and had smiled at him, which was no more than he expected, of course.
“Yo!” Bruce said.
“Ya!” came the reply, and with these short, potent words the compact had been sealed. They had talked enthusiastically. Sally was American, and in Edinburgh for a year – “long enough,” thought Bruce – and was studying for a master’s degree in economics.
“Cool!” Bruce said, and she had nodded.
“Yeah,” she said. “Cool.”
At the end of the evening they had agreed to meet the following evening, and now Bruce stood in the Cumberland Bar awaiting her arrival. There were one or two people he recognised in the bar, but he did not feel like talking to them. He had put the row with Pat out of his mind, and he was now thinking about something rather more important – his job. He was becoming bored with surveying, and was particularly disenchanted with Raeburn Todd, his boss, and the firm of Macaulay Holmes Richardson Black. This feeling had been building up and had been brought to a head by his experiences at the Conservative Ball. That had been a particularly depressing occasion from Bruce’s point of view, as it had given him a vision of what might become of him if he did not make a change. Todd was the warning incarnate, thought Bruce: that is how I shall talk and behave if I remain where I am. I shall become exactly like Todd, with a wife exactly like Sasha, and a house in the Braids. No, that would not do: there must be an alternative.
But the identification of the rut was one thing; the finding of a way out was quite another. Bruce had thought of other possibilities, only to reject them. Many of his friends were accountants or lawyers – the Cumberland Bar was full of them. But it would take too long now for him to qualify for either of these professions, and the accountancy examinations were notoriously stressful. So those two options at least were firmly ruled out. What else was there? Finance was a possibility, but that was ruthlessly competitive and dominated by people with a background in mathematics. Bruce acknowledged that he was not very good with numbers, and so he would need to go for
An Evening with Bruce
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something where he could use his social skills. He looked about the bar, and at that moment the idea occurred. The wine trade. He knew a few people in wine, and they struck him as being very much his type. If they could do it, then there was no reason why he should not make a go of it. Bruce Anderson, MW, he muttered under his breath. Specialist in Bordeaux and California. He caught a glimpse of himself in a mirror behind the bar and he smiled. MW – Master of Wines. It would be considerably more impressive than being a surveyor.
He was still smiling when Sally came into the bar.
“You’re looking great,” he said.
“You too.”
“Gracias.” He would normally have said merci to a compliment of this sort, but he remembered that she was American and that Americans tended to speak Spanish rather than French. He bought her a drink – a glass of Margaret River Chardonnay
– and they chatted easily, perched on stools at the bar. Half an hour later, Bruce looked at his watch.
“Do you feel like eating?”
Sally looked him up and down. “I could eat you up,” she said. Bruce laughed. “Cool.”
71. At the Scottish National Portrait Gallery While Bruce and Sally were engaged in culinary self-appraisal in the Cumberland Bar, Domenica and Pat were making their way up the stairs at the National Portrait Gallery in Queen Street.
“Such an edifying building,” observed Domenica. “A wonderful mixture of Gothic and Italianate. There are two galleries I really love – this one and the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Do you know New York?”
Pat did not. “In which