60. The Tombola
It was now time for the tombola at the Annual Ball of the South Edinburgh Conservative Association. Jim Smellie’s Ceilidh Band had made valiant efforts to provoke more dancing, but the guests, exhausted by the Gay Gordons and the Dashing White Sergeant had decided that they would dance no more. Jim Smellie and the band played a few more tunes and then, after a maudlin rendtion of Good-night Irene, sung by Mungo Brown in a curious nasal drone, the band had packed up and gone home.
At their combined table on the other side of the room, the 158
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six guests sat, still feeling rather lost in the vastness of the empty function room, but enjoying nonetheless the drinks which Todd had generously purchased everyone after the last dance.
“We’ve had a wonderful evening,” announced Sasha, looking around the table lest anybody venture to disagree.
Lizzie gave a snort, but not so loud that it could be heard by anyone other than Bruce, who was seated immediately beside her. “Speak for yourself,” she muttered.
Bruce turned to her. “She is, actually,” he said. “She is speaking for herself.”
Lizzie said nothing for a moment, digesting the barely-disguised rebuke. She had tolerated Bruce thus far – and it had been an effort – but she was not sure if she could continue to do so. There was something insufferable about him, an irritating self-confidence that begged for a put-down. The problem, though, was that it was far from easy to put down somebody who was quite so pleased with himself. And what could one say? Could anything penetrate the mantle of self-satisfaction that surrounded him, like a cloak of . . . like a cloak of . . . There was no simile, she decided, and then she thought cream.
She turned to him. “You’re like the cat who’s got the cream,”
she said.
Bruce met her gaze. “Thank you,” he said. And then he gave quite a passable imitation of a purr and rubbed his left leg against her, as might an affectionate cat. “Like that?” he asked.
Any response that Lizzie might have given was prevented by Sasha’s standing up and announcing that the time had come for the tombola.
“We have marvellous prizes,” she said. “And since it’s only a modest crowd here tonight, there’ll be plenty for everybody.”
“Hear, hear,” said Ramsey Dunbarton, raising his glass of whisky. “Plenty for everybody – the Party philosophy.”
“Quite,” agreed Sasha. “Now, to save the bother of a draw, I simply divided the tickets – on a totally random basis, of course
– into six groups. I then put each group in a separate envelope and wrote a name on the outside. On payment of six pounds –
one pound per ticket – you will each get your envelope. And The Tombola
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then you can open it up and when you tell me the numbers, I will tell you what you’ve won.”
“Sounds fair,” said Bruce, but he noticed that Ramsey Dunbarton looked doubtful. Did he suspect Sasha of cheating, Bruce wondered? Surely that would be inconceivable. And yet she would have had every opportunity to dictate which tickets went into which envelope, and thus effectively determine who won what.
The Ramsey Dunbartons, slightly reluctantly, handed over twelve pounds and were given two white envelopes with Ramsey and Betty written on the outside. Then Lizzie completed the same transaction, in her case with an ostentatious show of boredom. Bruce, by contrast, handed over six pounds with good grace and smiled as he took the envelope from Sasha.
“Right,” said Sasha. “Betty, if you would like to start by calling out the numbers on your tickets, I’ll tell you what you’ve won.”
While she was organising the tickets, Todd had gone out of the room and now he wheeled in a large trolley. This was covered with a sheet, which he took off with a theatrical gesture. There, stacked high in munificence, were the prizes – the silver fish knives and forks from Hamilton and Inches; the decanter from Jenners; the envelopes containing the vouchers for golf and dinner and other treats. All was laid out before them, and the guests immediately realised that this tombola represented remarkable value for the six pounds that each of them had been asked to pay.
The fish knives and forks went to Betty Dunbarton, who received them with exclamations of delight.
“Hamilton and Inches,” said Sasha knowingly.
“Wonderful,” said Betty. “Ramsey loves Hamilton and Inches.”
The other prizes she won were less exciting, but still represented a good haul. And when it came to Ramsey’s turn, although he was unmoved by the prize of the round of golf at Craiglockhart, he was extremely pleased with the two free tickets to the Lyceum Theatre to be followed by dinner (up 160
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to the value of twenty-five pounds) in the Lyceum Restaurant.
His final prize was the picture which Bruce had brought as his contribution.
“A view of somewhere over in the west,” announced Sasha as she handed the Peploe? over to him. “A very nice prize indeed, thanks to Bruce.”
Ramsey and Betty nodded in Bruce’s direction in acknowledgment of his generosity. Then they placed the Peploe? with the fish knives and forks and waited for the next stage of the draw.
This saw Lizzie win the dinner at Prestonfield (“too fattening,”
she said), a jar of pickled red peppers from Valvona and Crolla (“can’t stand red peppers,” she remarked) and a copy of the latest novel by a well known crime-writer (“Ian who?” she asked). When it came to Sasha’s turn, she won, of course, the lunch with Malcolm Rifkind and Lord James at the Balmoral Hotel. This brought some envious muttering from Ramsey Dunbarton, who clearly would have liked to have won that, but this merely confirmed Sasha’s conviction that she had done the right thing.
“I couldn’t have imposed him on them,” she said to Todd later.
“Imagine them having to sit there and listen to stories about North Berwick and broken teeth.”
Laden with prizes, the party began to break up. The Ramsey Dunbartons’ taxi arrived to take them the short distance back to Morningside Drive and Bruce telephoned for a cab back to Scotland Street. Then he remembered the underpants. He had intended to slip into them earlier on, but had almost forgotten his state of undress. Now, as he remembered that the pants were in his sporran, it occurred to him that the simplest way of returning them to their owner would be to put them in the pocket of Todd’s coat, which he knew had been hung in the cloakroom on the ground floor.
Making his excuses, Bruce left the small knot of guests around the table and made his way to the cloakroom. There, as he had expected, was Todd’s black Crombie coat with its velvet collar.
Bruce crossed the room quickly, extracting the underpants from his sporran as he did so. Then, fumbling in the folds of the coat, he slipped the pants into the right-hand pocket.
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“Did you enjoy yourself?”
It was Todd, standing at the door.
“That’s my coat,” said Todd. “Yours is over there, isn’t it?”
Bruce laughed nervously. “I must have had too much to drink,”
he said. “So it is!”
He moved over towards his coat and took it off the hook.
Then he turned and looked at Todd, who was watching him suspiciously. As he put on his coat, he felt Todd’s eyes remain on him. It was very disconcerting. Bruce was used to being looked at – in an admiring way – but this was different.
61. Bertie Begins Therapy
For Irene Pollock, the mother of that most talented five-year-old, Bertie, the decision to seek advice from the Scottish Institute of Human Relations was an entirely appropriate response to a trying set of circumstances. Bertie’s sudden outburst at the Floatarium – when he had so unexpectedly declared his opposition to speaking Italian and learning the saxophone – had been only the first sign of a worryingly rebellious attitude. Although it was difficult to put a finger on any particular incident or comment (other than his extraordinary behaviour at the Floatarium, which followed hard on the heels of the graffiti incident) there was no doubt that he was less co-operative than he used to be. An indication of this attitude was his subtle abandonment of the first names which he had been encouraged to use when addressing his parents; Irene and Stuart had come so naturally to him, and seemed so right; now it was Mummy and Daddy – terms which were acceptable when used by Irene or Stuart themselves, but which seemed disturbingly hierarchical – even reactionary – when uttered by Bertie.