Alexander McCall Smith - Love Over Scotland: A 44 Scotland Street Novel (3)

books by alexander mccall smith

in the no. 1 ladies detective agency series
The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency
Tears of the Giraffe
Morality for Beautiful Girls
The Kalahari Typing School for Men
The Full Cupboard of Life
In the Company of Cheerful Ladies
Blue Shoes and Happiness
The Good Husband of Zebra Drive

in the isabel dalhousie series
The Sunday Philosophy Club
Friends, Lovers, Chocolate
The Right Attitude to Rain
The Careful Use of Compliments

in the portuguese irregular verbs series
Portuguese Irregular Verbs
The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs
At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances

in the 44 scotland street series
44 Scotland Street
Espresso Tales
Love Over Scotland

The Girl Who Married a Lion and Other Tales from Africa

alexander mccall smith

LOVE OVER SCOTLAND

Alexander McCall Smith is the author of the international phenomenon The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series, the Isabel Dalhousie series, the Portuguese Irregular Verbs series, and the 44 Scotland Street series. He is Professor Emeritus of medical law at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and has served on many national and international bodies concerned with bioethics. He was born in what is now known as Zimbabwe, and he was a law professor at the University of Botswana.

Visit his Web site at
www.alexandermccallsmith.com .

LOVE OVER

SCOTLAND

ALEXANDER McCALL SMITH

Illustrations by
IAIN McINTOSH

anchor books
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York

F I R S T A N C H O R B O O K S E D I T I O N , N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 7

Copyright 2006 by Alexander McCall Smith Illustrations copyright 2006 by Iain McIntosh

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published
in Great Britain by Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn, Ltd.,
Edinburgh, in 2006.

Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks
of Random House, Inc.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,

events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book is excerpted from a series that originally

appeared in The Scotsman newspaper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McCall Smith, Alexander, 1948.
Love over Scotland / Alexander McCall Smith.
1st Anchor Books ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-38759-2
1. Edinburgh (Scotland)Fiction. 2. Apartment houses
Fiction. I. Title.
PR6063.C326L68 2007
823.914dc22
2007022072

Author illustration Iain McIntosh

w w w . a n c h o r b o o k s . c o m

v1.0

This book is for David and Joyce Robinson

Scotland Street: The Story So Far

At the end of the second series of 44 Scotland Street we saw Domenica leaving for the Malacca Straits for the purposes of anthropological research. We saw Bruce safely departed for London. Now Pat is about to start her course in history of art at the University of Edinburgh. She moves out of Scotland Street to the South Side, but this does not mean that she breaks off all connections with the New Town.

Poor Matthew. Even with the recent substantial gift which his father has given him, he is still restless and unfulfilled. Matthew, of course, would like to be fulfilled with Pat, but Pat does not wish to find fulfilment with Matthew.

In the second series, Angus Lordie got nowhere. He is missing Domenica, though, and hopes that the part which she played in his life will be taken by Antonia Collie, a friend whom Domenica has allowed to move into her flat in her absence. However, Antonia proves to be a somewhat difficult character.

We saw Bertie spending more time with his father, Stuart, who had managed to wring some concessions out of Irene, but some dawns, alas, are false. Irene does not change; to change her would be to deprive this story of the strong air of reality which has pervaded it thus far. For this is no fanciful picture of Edinburgh life, this is exactly as it is.

Pat Distracted on a Tedious Art Course

Pat let her gaze move slowly round the room, over the figures seated at the table in the seminar room. There were ten of them; eleven if one counted Dr Fantouse himself, although he was exactly the sort of person one wouldnt count. Dr Fantouse, reader in the history of art and author of The Discerning Gaze in the Quattrocento was a mild, rather mousy man, who for some reason invariably evoked the pity of students. It was not that they disliked him he was too kind and courteous for that they just felt a vague, inexpressible regret that he existed, with his shabby jacket and his dull Paisley ties; no discernment there, one of them had said, with some satisfaction at the wit of the remark. And then there was the name, which sounded so like that marvellous, but under-used, Scots word which Pats father used to describe the overly flashy fantoosh. Dr Fantouse was not fantoosh in any respect; but neither was Pats gaze had gone all the way round the table, over all ten, skipping over Dr Fantouse quickly, as in sympathy, and now returned to the boy sitting opposite her.

He was called Wolf, she had discovered. At the first meeting of the class they had all introduced themselves round the table, at the suggestion of Dr Fantouse himself (Im Geoffrey Fantouse, as you may know; Im the Quattrocento really, but I have a strong interest in aesthetics, which, I hardly need to remind you, is what we shall be discussing in this course). And then had come a succession of names: Ginny, Karen, Mark, Greg, Alice, and so on until, at the end, Wolf, looking down at the table in modesty, had said, Wolf , and Pat had seen the barely disguised appreciative glances of Karen and Ginny.

Wolf. It was a very good name for a boy, thought Pat; ideal, in fact. Wolf was a name filled with promise. And this Wolf, sitting opposite her, fitted the name perfectly. He was tall, broadshouldered, with a shock of golden hair and a broad smile. Boys like that could look and be vacuous surfing types with a limited vocabulary and an off-putting empty-headedness. But not this Wolf. There was a lambent intelligence in his face, a light in the eyes that revealed the mind behind the appealing features.

Now, at the second meeting of the seminar group, Pat struggled to follow the debate which Dr Fantouse was trying to encourage. They had been invited to consider the contention of Joseph Beuys that the distinction between what is art in the products of our human activity and what is not art, is a pernicious and pointless one. The discussion, which could have been so passionate, had never risen above the bland; there had been long silences, even after the name of Damien Hirst had been raised and Dr Fantouse, in an attempt to provoke controversy, had expressed doubts over the display of half a cow in formaldehyde. I am not sure, he had ventured, whether an artist of another period, let us say Donatello, would have considered this art. Butchery, maybe, or even science, but perhaps not art.

This remark had been greeted with silence. Then the thinfaced girl sitting next to Pat had spoken. Can Damien Hirst actually draw? she asked. I mean, if you asked him to draw a house, would he be able to do so? Would it look like a house?

They stared at her. I dont see what that began a young man.

That raises an interesting issue of representation, interrupted Dr Fantouse. Im not sure that the essence of art is its ability to represent. May I suggest, perhaps, that we turn to the ideas of Benedetto Croce and see whether he can throw any light on the subject. As you know, Croce believed in the existence of an aesthetic function built into, so to speak, the human mind. This function