“Yes, Elie.”
“What about it?”
Bruce persisted. She was being deliberately unpleasant, he thought. She’s a real . . . What was she? A man- hater? Was that the problem? “Do you know it?” he asked. “Have you ever been to Elie?”
“No.”
Ramsey Dunbarton had been following the exchange with
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polite interest and now resumed with further observations on Elie. “When I was a bit younger than you,” he said, nodding in Bruce’s direction, “I used to have a friend whose parents had a place over there. They went there for the summer. His mother was quite a well-known figure in Edinburgh society. And I remember I used to go over there with my friend and we’d stay there for a few days and then come back to Edinburgh. Well, I always remember that they had a very large fridge in the basement of their Elie house and my friend opened it one day and showed me what it contained. And what do you think it was?”
Bruce looked at Lizzie to see if she was willing to provide an answer, but she was looking up at the ceiling. This was unnecessarily rude, he thought. All right, so this old boy was boring them stiff but it was meant to be a ball and it was probably the highlight of his year and it would cost her nothing to be civil, at least.
“I really can’t imagine.” He paused. “Explosives?”
Ramsey Dunbarton laughed. “Explosives? No, goodness me.
Furs. Fur coats. If you keep them in the fridge the fur is less likely to drop out. The fridge was full of fur coats. People used to buy them from the Dominion Fur Company in Churchill.
This lady had about ten of them. Beautiful fur coats. Mink and the like.”
“Well, well,” said Bruce.
“Yes,” said Ramsey Dunbarton. “The Dominion Fur Company was just over the road from the Churchhill Theatre. We used to do Gilbert and Sullivan there. First in the University Savoy Opera Group and then in the Morningside Light Opera. I played the Duke of Plaza-Toro, you know. A wonderful role. I was jolly lucky to get it because there was a very good baritone that year who was after the part and I thought he would get it. I really did. And then the casting director came up to me in George Street one day, just outside the Edinburgh Bookshop, and said that I was to get the part. It was a wonderful bit of news.”
Sasha, who was seated beside Bruce, and who had been talking to Betty Dunbarton, had now disengaged and switched her attention to the conversation between Bruce and Ramsey.
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But in the course of this change, she had heard only the mention of the Duke of Plaza-Toro.
“The Duke of Plaza-Toro – do you know him?” she asked.
Ramsey Dunbarton laughed politely. “Heavens no! He’s in
Sasha blushed. “I thought . . .” she began.
“There aren’t all that many dukes in Scotland,” Ramsey Dunbarton observed, laying down his soup spoon. “There’s the Duke of Roxburghe, our southernmost duke, so to speak. No, hold on, hold on, is the Duke of Buccleuch more to the south?
I think he may be, you know, come to think of it. Is Bowhill to the south of Kelso? I think it may be. If it is, then it would be, starting from the south, Buccleuch, Roxburghe. . . let me think . . . Hamilton, then Montrose (because he sits on the edge of Loch Lomond, doesn’t he, nowhere near Montrose itself), Atholl, Argyll, and then Sutherland. Hold your horses! Doesn’t the Duke of Sutherland live in the Borders? I think he does. So, he would have to go in that list between . . .”
Bruce looked around the table. All eyes had been fixed on Ramsey Dunbarton, but now they had shifted. Todd, who was still smarting over the moving together of the tables – against his explicit instructions – was glowering at Sasha, who was looking at Bruce, but in a way that he had not noticed; for he was looking at Betty Dunbarton, whose eyes, he saw, went in slightly different directions, and so could have been looking at anything; while Lizzie looked at the waiter who was watching the bowls of soup, ready to whisk them away and allow the service of the next course, and the course after that, so that the dancing could begin.
“Tories,” muttered Jim Smellie, leader of Jim Smellie’s Ceilidh Band. “And gey few of them too! Look, one two . . . six altogether. See that, Mungo? Six!”
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Mungo Brown, accordionist and occasional percussionist, drew on a cigarette as he looked across the dance floor to the table where the guests were sitting, waiting for the arrival of their coffee. “Don’t complain,” he said, smiling. “This bunch won’t stay up late. We’ll be out of here by eleven-thirty.”
“Aye,” said Jim, gazing across the empty dance floor. They were still deep in conversation, it seemed, and he wondered what they were talking about. In his experience there were two topics of conversation that dominated bourgeois Edinburgh: schools and house prices.
At the table, Betty Dunbarton turned to Todd, who was looking about anxiously, waiting for the coffee to be served. The service had been very good – one could not fault the Braid Hills Hotel, which was an excellent hotel, and it was certainly nothing to do with them that the two tables had been placed together – but it was now time for coffee, distinctly so, and then they could get out on the dance floor and he could get away from this woman at last.
“I do hope that we get a piece of shortbread with our coffee,” Betty remarked. “Although, you know, I had a very bad experience with a bit of shortbread only last week. Ramsey was down at Muirfield . . .”
