to a tribunal.”
Bruce opened his mouth to speak, and then closed it again.
It was difficult to know what to say. Then the words came to
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him. “You have a ridiculous name, you know, Mr Todd. Raeburn!
That’s the name of a gas cooker, you know. That’s what you are, Mr Todd – you’re just a gas cooker.”
Raeburn Todd appeared undisturbed by the insult. “A gas cooker, am I?” he said quietly. “Well, I’ve just cooked your goose for you, young man, would you not say?”
After he had lost his job – or resigned, as he put it – Bruce went home to Crieff for several days to lick his wounds. His parents had been concerned over his resignation, and they had quizzed him as to what lay behind it.
“It’s not much of a firm,” Bruce had explained airily. “I found myself – how shall I put it? – a bit thwarted. The job didn’t stretch me enough.”
His mother had nodded. “You thrive on new challenges, Brucie,” she said. “As a little boy you were like that. You were a very creative child.”
Bruce’s father had looked at him over the top of his spectacles. He was an accountant who specialised in the winding-up of companies, and he had a strong nose for lies and obfusca-tion. The trouble with my son, he thought, is that he’s vain.
He’s lost this job of his and he can’t bring himself to tell us.
Poor boy. I suppose I can’t blame him for that, but I wish he wouldn’t lie to us.
“What are you going to do?” asked his father. “How are things in surveying at the moment? Are they tight?”
Bruce shrugged, and looked out of the window of
“Lochnagar”, the family’s two-storey granite house in Crieff.
One thing one has to say about the parental house, he thought, is that it has a good view, down into the strath, over all that good farming land. I should marry the daughter of one of those farmers down there – those comfortable farmers (minor lairds, really, some of them) – and then things would be all right. I
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could raise Blackface sheep, in a small way, and some cattle, some arable. It would be an easy life.
But then there was the problem of the farmer’s daughter –
whoever she turned out to be. Some of them were all right, it had to be said, but then the ones he might find worth looking at tended to move to Edinburgh, or even to London, where they had jobs in public relations or possibly at Christie’s. At Christie’s, they were the ones who were sometimes allowed to hold up the vases and paintings at the auctions (provided, of course, that they had studied history of art at university, although sometimes a declared intention to study history of art was sufficient qualification). That was the problem; they had no desire to remain in Perthshire. That was until they became broody; things changed then, and the idea of living in the country with dogs (Labradors, usually, the dog of choice for such persons) and children suddenly became an attractive one.
Bruce sighed. Life seemed very predictable, whatever choice one made.
He looked back at his father, and held his gaze for a few moments. Then he looked away again. He knows, he thought.
He knows exactly what has happened. “I think I’ll try something different,” he replied quietly. “The wine business is interesting.
I might try that.”
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“You always had a good nose for wine, Brucie,” said his mother. “And for sniffing things out in general.” She cast a glance at her son’s hair. “Is that cloves, I smell, by the way? I love the scent of cloves. I think it’s marvellous that boys have all those different things to choose from at the chemist’s these days. Hair things and shaving things, that is.”
Over the next few days, he was looked after by his mother, and felt reassured. It still riled him to think of Todd and the injustice that had been done him, but after three days in Crieff the pain seemed to ease – unconditional maternal affirmation had its effect – and he found himself in a position to make decisions. He would return to Edinburgh, plan a holiday – a month or two perhaps, since he had the opportunity – and then he could start seriously to look for a job in the wine trade. He had some leads there. Will Lyons had more or less guaranteed that he would find something, and so, with any luck, he would be fixed up by, say, late September. That would be a good time to start in the wine trade, with Christmas and New Year sales coming up.
Bruce felt positively buoyed by the thought of a couple of months off, and spent the first few days after returning to Scotland Street in deciding where he would go. He had never been in the Far East, and he spoke to one or two people in the Cumberland Bar who had been to Thailand.
“Terrific country,” one of them said. “Just terrific. South –
terrific. North – terrific. Unconditionally terrific.”
That helped Bruce a bit, but gave him very little concrete information. What about Vietnam?
