A Room with a Smell
7
Bruce laughed. “You’re right. She was a real slut, that girl. We were all pleased when she decided to go over to Glasgow. I encouraged her. I said that the job she had been offered sounded just fine. A real opportunity.”
“And was it?”
Bruce shrugged. “She fancied herself getting into television journalism. She had been offered a job making tea for some producer over there. Great job. Great tea possibilities.”
Pat moved towards the desk. One of the drawers was half-open and she could see papers inside.
“It almost looks as if she’s planning to come back,” she said.
“Maybe she hasn’t moved out altogether.”
Bruce glanced at the drawer. He would throw all this out as soon as Pat went. And he would stop forwarding her mail too.
“If there’s any danger of her coming back,” he said, smiling,
“we’ll change the locks.”
Later, when Pat had left, he went back to the room and opened the window. Then he crossed the room to the wardrobe and looked inside. The right-hand side was empty, but on the left, in the hanging section, there was a large plastic bag, stuffed full of clothes. This was the source of the musty odour, and, handling it gingerly, he took it out. Underneath the bag was a pair of abandoned shoes, the soles curling off. He picked these up, looked at them with disgust, and dropped them into the open mouth of the plastic bag.
He moved over to the desk. The top drawer looked as if it had been cleared out, apart from a few paper clips and a chipped plastic ruler. The drawer beneath that, half-open, had papers in it. He picked up the paper on the top and looked at it. It was a letter from a political party asking for a donation to a fighting fund. A smiling politician beamed out from a photograph. I know you care, said the politician, in bold type, I know you care enough to help me care for our common future. Bruce grimaced, crumpled up the letter, and tossed it into the black plastic bag. He picked up the next piece of paper and began to read it. It was hand-written, the second or subsequent page of a letter as it began halfway through a sentence: which was not very clever of me! Still, 8
A Room with a Smell
I wasn’t going to see them again and so I suppose it made no difference. And what about you? I don’t know how you put up with those people you live with. Come through to Glasgow. I know somebody who’s got a spare room in her flat and who’s looking for somebody. That guy Bruce sounds a creep. I couldn’t believe it when you said that you thought he read your letters. You reading this one, Bruce?
It was settled. Pat had agreed to move in, and would pay rent from the following Monday. The room was not cheap, in spite of the musty smell (which Bruce pointed out was temporary) and the general dinginess of the décor (which Bruce had ignored).
After all, as he pointed out to Pat, she was staying in the New Town, and the New Town was expensive whether you lived in a basement in East Claremont Street (barely New Town, Bruce said) or in a drawing-room flat in Heriot Row. And he should know, he said. He was a surveyor.
“You have found a job, haven’t you?” he asked tentatively. “The rent . . .”
She assured him that she would pay in advance, and he relaxed.
Anna had left rent unpaid and he and the rest of them had been obliged to make up the shortfall. But it was worth it to get rid of her, he thought.
A Room with a Smell
9
He showed Pat to the door and gave her a key. “For you. Now you can bring your things over any time.” He paused. “I think you’re going to like this place.”
Pat smiled, and she continued to smile as she made her way down the stair. After the disaster of last year, staying put was exactly what she wanted. And Bruce seemed fine. In fact, he reminded her of a cousin who had also been keen on rugby and who used to take her to pubs on international nights with all his friends, who sang raucously and kissed her beerily on the cheek.
Men like that were very unthreatening; they tended not to be moody, or brood, or make emotional demands – they just were.
Not that she ever envisaged herself becoming emotionally involved with one of them. Her man – when she found him –
would be . . .
“Very distressing! Very, very distressing!”
Pat looked up. She had reached the bottom of the stair and had opened the front door to find a middle-aged woman standing before her, rummaging through a voluminous handbag.
“It’s very distressing,” continued the woman, looking at Pat over half-moon spectacles. “This is the second time this month that I have come out without my outside key. There are two keys, you see. One to the flat and one to the outside door. And if I come out without my outside key, then I have to disturb one of the other residents to let me in, and I don’t like doing that.
That’s why I’m so pleased to see you.”
“Well-timed,” said Pat, moving to let the woman in.
“Oh yes. But Bruce will usually let me in, or one of his friends . . .” She paused. “Are you one of Bruce’s friends?”
“I’ve just met him.”
The woman nodded. “One never knows. He has so many girlfriends that I lose track of them. Just when I’ve got used to one, a quite different girl turns up. Some men are like that, you know.”
Pat said nothing. Perhaps wholesome, the word which she had previously alighted upon to describe Bruce, was not the right choice.
The woman adjusted her spectacles and stared directly at Pat.
10
A Room with a Smell
“Some men, you see, have inordinate appetites,” she remarked.
“They seem to be genetically programmed to have a rather large number of partners. And if they’re genetically predisposed to do that sort of thing, then I wonder whether we can actually blame them for it. What do you think?”
Pat hesitated. “They could try a bit harder not to cheat.”
The woman shook her head. “Not easy,” she said. “I believe that we have much less free will than we think. Quite frankly, we delude ourselves if we think that we are completely free. We aren’t. And that means if dear Bruce must have rather a lot of girlfriends, then there’s not very much he can do about it.”
Pat said nothing. Bruce had said nothing about the neighbours, and perhaps this was the reason.
“But this is very rude of me,” the woman said. “I’ve been talking away without introducing myself. And you’ll be wondering: Who is this deterministic person? Well, I’m Domenica Macdonald, and I live in the flat opposite Bruce and his friends. That’s who I am.”
Pat gave the woman her name and they shook hands. Her explanation that she had just agreed to take the spare room in Bruce’s flat brought a broad smile to Domenica’s face.
“I’m very pleased to hear that,” she said. “That last girl – the girl whose room you’ll be taking . . .” She shook her head.
“Genetically programmed to have lots of boyfriends, I think.”
“A slut? That’s what Bruce called her to me.”
This surprised the woman. “Male double standards,” said Domenica sharply, adding: “Of course, Edinburgh’s full of double standards, isn’t it? Hypocrisy is built into the stonework here.”
“I’m not sure,” ventured Pat. Edinburgh seemed much like anywhere else to her. Why should there be more hypocrisy in Edinburgh than anywhere else?
“Oh, you’ll find out,” said Domenica. “You’ll find out.”
3. We See a Bit More of Bruce
“Terrific!” said Bruce, unbuttoning his Triple Crown rugby shirt.