“That looks just terrific!”
He was standing in front of the mirror in the bathroom, waiting for the bath to fill. It was a favourite mirror of his, full-length – unlike most bathroom mirrors – which made it possible to inspect at close quarters the benefits of his thrice-weekly sessions in the gym. And the benefits were very evident, in whatever light they were viewed.
He pulled the shirt up over his head and flung it down on the top of the wicker laundry basket. Flexing his biceps, he stared back at the mirror and liked what he saw. Next, by crouching slightly, as if poised to leap forward, the muscles that ran down the side of his trunk – he had no idea what they were called, but could look them up in the chart his personal trainer had given him – these muscles tensed like a series of small skiing moguls.
Moguls, in fact, might be a good word for them, he thought.
Biceps, pecs, moguls.
He removed the rest of his clothes and looked again in the mirror. Very satisfactory, he thought – very satisfactory. Reaching up, he ran his fingers lightly across the top of his en brosse haircut. Perhaps a little off round the sides next week, or, again, perhaps not. He might ask his new flatmate what she thought.
Would I look better with longer hair? What do you think, Pat?
He was not sure about this new girl. She was not going to be any trouble – she could pay the rent and he knew that she would keep the place clean. He had seen her look of concern over the state of the room, and that had been a good sign. But she was a bit young, and that might be problematic. The four years that separated them were crucial ones, in Bruce’s mind. It was not that he had no time for twenty-year-olds, it was just that they talked about different things and listened to different music. He had often had to hammer on Anna’s door late at night when he was being kept awake by the constant thump thump of her music.
She played the same music all the time, day-in day-out, and when he had suggested that she might get something different, 12
We See a Bit More of Bruce
she had looked at him with what was meant to be a patient expression, as one might look at somebody who simply did not understand.
And of course Bruce could never think of anything to say to her. He would have loved to have been able to come up with a suitable put-down, but it never seemed to be there at the right time, or at any other time, when he came to think of it.
He tested the temperature of the bath and then lowered himself into the water. The cleaning of Anna’s room had made him feel dirty, but a good soak in the bath would deal with that. It was a wonderful bath in which to soak; one of the best features of the flat. It must have been there for fifty years, or even more; a great, generous tub, standing on four claw-feet, and filled from large-mouthed silver taps. He very rarely saw a bath like that when he did a valuation, but when he did, he always drew it to the attention of the client. Fine bathroom fittings, he would write, knowing that he could be writing the epitaph of the bath, which would be removed and replaced by something half its weight and dura-bility.
He lay back in the water and thought of Pat. He had decided that she was not his type, and in general he preferred to keep relationships with flatmates on a platonic basis, but one should not make absolute rules on these matters, he thought. She was attractive enough, he reflected, although she would not necessarily turn his head in the street. Comfortable, perhaps, was the word. Undisturbing. Average.
Perhaps she would be worth a little attention. He was, after all, between girlfriends, now that Laura had gone down to London. They had agreed that she would come up to Edinburgh once a month and he would go down to London with the same frequency, but it had not worked out. She had made the journey three months in a row, but he had been unable to find the time to do the same. And she had been most unreasonable about it, he thought.
“If you cared anything about me, you would have made the effort,” she had said to him. “But you don’t and you didn’t.”
He had been appalled by this attack. There had been very Fathers and Sons
13
good reasons why he could not go to London, apart from the expense, of course. And he had had every justification for cancelling that weekend: he had entered the wrong date for the Irish international at Murrayfield in his diary and had only discovered his error four days before the event. If she thought that he was going to miss that just to go down for a weekend which could be rearranged for any time, then she was going to have to think again, which she did.
He stood up and stepped out of the bath. As he did so, he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror, and smiled.
4. Fathers and Sons
Somebody had pushed a bundle of advertisements into the mail box of the Something Special Gallery, which irritated Matthew Duncan. It was Tuesday morning, and the beginning of another working week for Matthew, who took Sundays and Mondays off.
He was early that morning – normally he opened at ten o’clock, as it was unheard of to sell a painting before ten, or even eleven.
He believed that the best time to make a sale was just before lunch, on a Saturday, to a client who had accepted a glass of sherry. Of course, private views were even better than that, because crowd behaviour then entered into the equation and red spots could proliferate like measles. That, at least, was what he had been told when he had taken over the gallery a few weeks previously. But he could not be sure, as he had so far sold nothing. Not one painting; not one print; nothing at all had been bought by any of the people who had drifted in, looked about them, and then, almost regretfully in some cases, almost apologetically in others, had walked back out of the front door.
Matthew flung the advertisements into the wastepaper bin and walked into the back of the gallery to deal with the alarm, which had picked up his presence and was giving its first warning pips.
14
Fathers and Sons
The code keyed in, he flicked the light switches, bringing to life the spotlights that were trained on the larger paintings on the walls.
He enjoyed doing this because it seemed to transform the room so entirely, from a cold, rather gloomy place, inadequately lit by natural light from the front window, into a place of warmth and colour.
It was not a large gallery. The main room, or space as Matthew had learned to call it, stretched back about thirty feet from the two wide display windows that looked out onto the street.
Halfway down one side of this room there was a desk, which faced outwards, with a telephone and a discreet computer terminal.
Beside the desk there was a revolving bookcase in which twenty or thirty books were stacked; a Dictionary of Scottish Artists, bound catalogues of retrospectives, a guide to prices at auction. These were the working tools of the dealer and, like everything else, had been left there by the former owner.
Matthew had acquired the gallery on impulse, not an impulse of his, but that of his father, who owned the building and who had repossessed it from the tenant. Matthew’s father, who was normally unbending in his business deals, had been an uncharacteristically tolerant landlord to the gallery. He had allowed unpaid rent to mount up to the point where the tenant had been quite incapable of paying. Even then, rather than claim what had been owing for more than two years, he had accepted gallery stock in settlement of the debt and had paid rather generously for the rest.
Matthew’s father, despaired of his son ever amounting to much in the world of business. He had started Matthew off in a variety of enterprises, all of which had failed. Finally, after two near-bankrupt stores, there had been a travel agency, a business with a promising turnover, but which under Matthew’s management had rapidly lost customers. His father had been puzzled by this, and had eventually realised that the problem was not laziness on his son’s part, but a complete inability to organise and moti-vate staff. He simply could not give directions. He was a completely incompetent manager. This was a bitter conclusion for a father who had dreamed of a son who would turn a small Scottish business empire, the result of decades of hard work, Attributions and Provenances