you know. You’re wrong about Crieff, completely wrong. Crieff is a great place.
I know people who live there who like it very much indeed. And these are people with rather better judgment than yours, Bruce.
By running Crieff down you tell me more about yourself than about Crieff. That’s true, you know.”
Bruce said nothing, while Pat fixed him with her stare. “The trouble with you, Bruce, is that you think nowhere and nobody is good enough for you. You think that you’re too good for Crieff. You think that you’re too good for your old friends. You think that this old friend of yours has let you down, but I suspect that it’s exactly the opposite. I suspect that you’ve been trying to use him.”
Bruce looked up abruptly. “And why do you think that, may I ask?”
Pat shrugged. “Because that’s the way you do things.” She paused. “But there’s no point in my talking to you like this, is there? I doubt if you’re going to change.”
Bruce stood up. “No,” he said. “There’s no point. Because I have no intention of listening to you, Patsy girl, thank you very much.”
And with that he left, crossed the hall into his room, and slammed the door behind him. Inside his room, though, the confidence which he had tried to show crumpled. He owed money, and he owed a great deal of it. The thought occurred to him that he could go back to his parents and ask them to lend him the money to pay the most immediate bills, including the one from Leith, but he simply could not face that. He could imagine what his father would say to him. He would be lectured
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about caution and misjudgment. He would be told that he should never have attempted go into business without getting the necessary experience first. And if he tried to explain about George, and how he had brought all this about, his father would probably just take George’s side. He had always liked him, Bruce recalled, and had said that he thought he was the best of his son’s friends. That shows how much judgment he has, thought Bruce.
He sat on his bed and considered his situation. Assets and liabilities – the fundamentals of business. He knew the assets and he knew the liabilities. The assets were the flat in Scotland Street, which was heavily mortgaged, a small amount of money in a deposit account at the bank, and . . . He had almost forgotten.
There were three cases of Petrus. It was only George’s view that these were not the real thing – but there was a chance, even if only a slim chance, that the Petrus was genuine and he remembered that he had read somewhere that there was a wine auction coming up in Edinburgh. They might be able to take late entries, and if the wine were genuine, then . . .
But who could advise him on that? If he asked the auction-eers, then that might plant a doubt in their mind. So he should seek a private opinion, and who better than Will Lyons! If anybody could distinguish between genuine and false wine then it would be him, and he had very generously given Bruce advice in the past. He would ask Will round for a glass of Petrus, not say anything to him about the price he had paid, and then see what the verdict was. It was a brilliant idea, and he would see if Will was free that very evening! How handy it was to live in Edinburgh, he reflected, and to have expertise so ready to hand.
Will Lyons had better things to do than to visit Bruce, but agreed, out of sheer kindness, to call in at 44 Scotland Street that evening shortly before eight. He would not be able to stay 292
long, he explained, as he had work to do. He had recently agreed to write a history of the Edinburgh wine trade, and the manuscript was growing slowly beneath his hands. It was a pleasant sensation seeing the pile of pages grow higher, but, like every author, he knew that he had to guard jealously the spare hours in which he could write. There were histories to be written about those whose histories had never progressed beyond chapter one, or indeed the introduction.
Will sighed as he made his way up the stairs to Bruce’s flat.
He did not particularly like Bruce, whom he found both opinionated and ignorant in equal measure. He had tried to warn him about the drawbacks of going into the wine trade, but his warn-ings had not been heeded. It was clear to him that Bruce did not have even the basic knowledge that would enable him to run a wine shop. Nor did he possess the specialised knowledge and taste that would be required to run a wine shop in somewhere like Edinburgh’s New Town, where the number of opinionated and demanding people was very high, and where many of these prided themselves on their knowledge of wine. Any enterprise of Bruce’s was bound to fail, the only question being how long the failure would take, and how spectacular it would be.
Bruce opened the door to his guest and ushered him into the flat. He had been preparing coffee and it was into the kitchen that they now went and took a seat at the large, scrubbed pine table.
“I see that you have the original flagstones,” said Will, pointing at the fine stone floor.
“For the time being,” said Bruce. “I haven’t got round to fixing that up yet.”
“Fixing it up?” asked Will. “It looks in quite good condition to me.”
“Modernising it,” said Bruce. “I want an oak-look effect.
There’s a new sort of flooring that looks just like oak. I’d challenge anybody to tell the difference. It’s a bit pricey, though.”
Will kept his counsel. His eye had been caught by a bottle standing on a nearby shelf. Could it be? Was it possible?
“Yes,” said Bruce jauntily, noticing the direction of his host’s gaze. “Petrus. Would you like to take a look?”
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“It’s a very fine wine,” said Will. “Many people would say that it’s the finest wine there is, you know.”
“Oh, I know that,” said Bruce. “That’s why I got in a supply.”
“A supply?”
