The Importance of Being Seven by Alexander McCall Smith Read Free Book Online Page A

awkwardly by the side of an older, seated man. The older man was holding a letter that had been given to him and was looking up from it. His gaze was not directed at his visitor, but went somewhere off to the side, in annoyance and suspicion.
    ‘He doesn’t like him,’ she observed. ‘That man sitting down isn’t pleased that the other man has come to see him.’
    ‘Exactly,’ said Dr Macgregor. ‘And we know that from his eyes, don’t we? And look at his dog. Even his dog is suspicious. You can more or less hear him sniffing.’
    She had no idea then, of course, that she would return nine years later and, standing in front of the same painting, have an idea for a dissertation. ‘Space and Emotion in Painting’ would be the title, and the subject would be exactly that: how a painter can reveal the emotion that space evokes. The visitor intrudes on the space – and the life – of the other man in the Wilkie painting; cold hostility leaps from the canvas. In other paintings, the slight attenuation of space underlines the emotion of a parting. There would be so much to explore, and perhaps an insight might come along. Surely it was not too much to hope for just one insight; even if only a small one.

11. Pat’s Flat
     
    Pat had lived for the last year or so in a student flat on the top floor of a Warrender Park tenement. Her room overlooked the Meadows,and for this reason was the most sought-after bedroom in the flat. But it was not just the view that made it so attractive; it was the shape, which was perfectly circular, determined by the fact that the room nestled below one of the conical roof-towers gracing that eccentric piece of skyline. To live in a circular room, Pat felt, made one rather more interesting; after all, few of us knew people who lived in circular rooms, and there could be little doubt that the room in which one lived defined one in the eyes of others – to an extent.
    The small community in which Pat lived – the four students who shared the flat in Warrender Park Terrace – had every bit as much a pecking order as any group of people will inevitably have. It was not a formally constituted pecking order – only a society with a fixed order of precedence will have such a thing formally laid out, and in no society will the official order of precedence represent the real order. So while Scotland has an order of precedence, it is never enforced and people may walk through doors in front of others who really should be allowed to go through the door before them. That, of course, is how things should be; who would wish to live in a society in which the order of walking through doors was something that anybody cared about? The important thing is that traffic through doors should flow freely, and that there should not be awkward moments when people hesitate, politely ushering another before them, who demurs, and invites the other to go before. Such a situation can result in small knots of people building up in front of a door, with very little through traffic.
    The answer, of course, is a system based on common courtesy and consideration, mixed with a measure of sheer practicality. In general, women should be invited to precede men, not because this in any way endorses chivalric notions that many may now find awkward or even condescending, but because it provides a totally arbitrary rule that at least minimises the chances of congestion. It may be viewed, then, in the same light as the rule that states one should drive on the left of the road rather than the right. There is no real reason for that: countries in which people drive on the right are in no way different from those where people drive on the left, or, if they are – and they may be – then that is for historical reasons quite unconnected with driving on the left or the right. So the fact that historically women have been invited to go through doors before men provides a basis for a contemporary rule that this should continue to be