Love Over Scotland - Alexander Hanchett Smith [166]
“Such as?” asked Dilly.
Domenica talks to Dilly 347
“Well, mostly pictures by Jack Vettriano,” said Domenica.
“The Singing Butler is very popular out there. The pirate chief had it on his back. I noticed it immediately.”
“How extraordinary,” remarked Dilly.
They were both silent as they thought about the implications of this. Then Domenica continued: “Right at the end of my stay I followed the pirates, you know. I followed them all the way to a little town down the coast. They tied up outside a warehouse, a sort of godown, as they call them out there.”
“And?” said Dilly.
Domenica smiled. “Well, I crept up the jetty and managed to find a small window I could look through. I had my friend, Henry, with me. He gave me a leg-up so that I could look through the window.”
There was now complete silence, not only at their table, but at neighbouring tables, where they had overheard the conversation.
“The window was rather dirty,” Domenica went on, “so I had to give it a wipe. But once I had done that, I could see perfectly well what was going on inside.”
348 Matthew Bears Gifts
Dilly held her breath.
The denouement came quickly. “It was a pirate CD factory,”
said Domenica. “That’s what they did, those pirates of mine. They made pirate CDs.”
For a moment nobody said anything. Then Domenica began to laugh, and the laughter spread. “It was terribly funny,” she said. “I had imagined that they were still holding up ships and so on. But they’ve adapted really well to the new global economy.”
“And the CDs?” asked Dilly. “What sort of pirate CDs were they making?”
“Mostly Italian tenors,” said Domenica. “As far as I could see. But I noticed some Scottish Chamber Orchestra recordings and one or two other things.” She paused. “I didn’t see The Pirates of Penzance . . .”
This was tremendously funny, and they both laughed, as did one or two people at neighbouring tables who had heard the joke and who were, strictly speaking, not entitled to laugh. 111. Matthew Bears Gifts
That afternoon, Matthew closed his gallery early – at two o’clock, in fact. He had sold two paintings at lunch time – one an early Tim Cockburn, painted during his Italian period, depicting an Umbrian pergola – and the other a luminous study of light and land by James Howie. He had felt almost reluctant to let the paintings go, as he had placed them on the wall immediately opposite his desk and had become very fond of them. But they had been taken down, cosseted in bubble wrap, and passed on to their new owners. And then, looking out of the window, Matthew had decided that it was time to go shopping. Matthew had done his arithmetic. The four million pounds which he had had invested on his behalf produced, as far as he could ascertain, a return of round about four per cent. That meant that his income – if one ignored the gallery – was, after tax had Matthew Bears Gifts 349
been taken off at forty per cent, ninety six thousand pounds per annum, or eight thousand pounds a month. Matthew had no mortgage, and no car; he had very few outgoings. With eight thousand pounds a month, he had an income of two hundred and fifty-eight pounds a day. On average, over the last few months, he had spent about seven pounds a day, apart from the occasion on which he had gone to the outfitters in Queen Street and bought his new coat and the distressed-oatmeal cashmere sweater, now languishing in a dark corner of his wardrobe. There had also been an expensive dinner to celebrate Scotland’s victory over England in the Calcutta Cup, an occasion on which Matthew paid for a celebratory meal for six new acquaintances he had met in the Cumberland Bar on the evening of that great rugby triumph. It was only after the dinner had been consumed that one of the guests inadvertently disclosed that they were in fact supporters of England rather than Scotland, but Matthew, with typical decency, had laughed at this and insisted that he had been happy to act as host to the opposition. At which point a further disclosure revealed that one of the party was actually Turkish, and had no idea what