Chance Developments by Alexander McCall Smith Read Free Book Online

marginally about guilt. For the rest it’s cheerfully pagan—plaster saints, miracles, superstition, feast days. People love ceremony, and there’s bags of ceremony and dressing up in Catholicism.”
    She picked up the photograph again. “Look at him,” she said fondly. “Look at me. Fifty-whatever years ago, when it was all about to begin.
    “And that hat I’m wearing,” she mused. “I was so proud of it. It was a great, floppy thing. I’ve been carrying that hat with me—metaphorically, of course—for decades, for all my adult life.” She pointed to it. Her expression was one that he found hard to interpret. Resentment? Regret? “We carry with us the clothes of childhood, don’t we? We keep them on long after they have ceased to fit.”
    He looked at her with sympathy. “Yes,” he said. “I haven’t heard it put that way before, but yes.”
    She became brisk. “May I ask you something, Mr. Summers? This article you’re writing for
The Burlington Magazine
?”
    “Yes?”
    “What exactly is it?”
    “It’s a profile. As you probably know,
The Burlington
’s
period is usually somewhat earlier. We do very little on twentieth-century artists. But in his case, the editor thought it appropriate, because of the neo-classical nature of the later work.”
    She sounded slightly impatient. “Yes, I understand all that. What I want to know is this: Are you going to be kind to Harry?”
    The question seemed to surprise him. “But of course we are. It’s a tribute, really.”
    “Because so many things you read now are infected with a spirit of unkindness. People feel they have to show how clever they are by debunking others—by belittling them.”
    “I would never do that. I give you my word.”
    She smiled. “The fact that nobody says
I give you my word
any more tells me all I need to know about you. And I trust you.”
    “I have nothing but admiration for his work. I have no other motive.”
    “In that case, I can tell you the story that nobody else knows. You may or may not wish to mention it in your…your profile. But it’s the key to everything.”
    “Then I’m very grateful to you. I’d like you to know that.”
    She barely acknowledged his thanks. “Look at the photograph,” she said. “I’ll start from there.”
    “Do you mind if I make notes?”
    “No, that’s what you people do. You have to take notes.”
    He began to write as she talked. Later he wrote it out, at far greater length than was required for his article, filling in the details of how he imagined the protagonists thought, of how they felt. It became a story in its own right; his version of what must have transpired. An omniscient narrator, were he or she to read what he wrote, would say, “Yes, that is exactly right. That is exactly how it happened.” For it was.
    2
    The photograph was taken in Argyll, he wrote, on one of those mountainous peninsulas on the western edge of Scotland. In the nineteenth century it was fashionable to put the proceeds of money made elsewhere—from all the pain and exploitation that lay behind Victorian fortunes—into the construction of large houses, inserted into the wildly romantic Scottish landscape. Remote glens, stripped of their human population during the Highland Clearances of the previous century, now became the backdrop to stone-built fantasies, complete with turrets and towers. Scots baronial, a whole new architectural style, evolved to cater for this enthusiasm—and its accompanying pretensions. On that particular peninsula, an adventurer who had made his fortune in the goldfields of southern Africa built a rambling and unlikely castle solely for the use of his guests, an affirmation in stone of the sheer power of money.
    More modest houses—still large, though—met the needs of smaller landed proprietors. These people did not aspire to vast estates; they were drawn from professional and business circles in Edinburgh or Glasgow, or farther afield, that fancied a toehold in