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Chapter title
a
praise for the
4 4 S C O T L A N D S T R E E T S E R I E S
“A characteristically sly and eccentric portrait of Edinburgh society.” — Entertainment Weekly
“[McCall Smith’s] sense of gentle but pointed humor is once again afoot.”
— The Seattle Times
“Soulful [and] sweet. . . . Will make you feel as though you live in Edinburgh, if only for a short while, and it’s a fine place to visit indeed. . . . Long live the folks on Scotland Street.”
— The Times-Picayune (New Orleans)
“It is McCall Smith’s particular genius to be able to look on the brighter side of life, and he’s seldom done so more enjoyably.”
— The Scotsman
“A lively new series.”
— The Washington Post
“Alexander McCall Smith is the most genial of writers and the most gentle of satirists. . . . [The] characters are great fun . . .
[and] McCall Smith treats all of them with affection.”
— Rocky Mountain News
b o o k s b y a l e x a n d e r m cc a l l s m i t h i n t h e n o . 1 l a d i e s ’ d e t e c t i v e a g e n cy s e r i e s 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
i n t h e i s a b e l d a l h o u s i e s e r i e s The Sunday Philosophy Club
Friends, Lovers, Chocolate
The Right Attitude to Rain
The Careful Use of Compliments
i n t h e p o rt u g u e s e i r r e g u l a r v e r b s s e r i e s Portuguese Irregular Verbs
The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs
At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances i n t h e 44 s c o t l a n d s t r e e t s e r i e s 44 Scotland Street
Espresso Tales
Love Over Scotland
The Girl Who Married a Lion and Other Tales from Africa alexander mccall smith
L O V E O V E R S C O T L A N D
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
A L E X A N D E R M c C A L L S M I T H
Illustrations b y
I A I N M c I N TO S H
a n c h o r b o o k s
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 author’s 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'.914—dc22
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 44 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.
1. 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 wouldn’t 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 Pat’s father used to describe the overly flashy – fantoosh. Dr Fantouse was not fantoosh in any respect; but neither was . . . Pat’s 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 (“I’m Geoffrey Fantouse, as you may know; I’m 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”).