The dealer nodded. “Of course. If you hold on a moment, I’ll get the key.”
Bruce moved his hands gently up and down the steering wheel and then felt the gear lever. The head of the lever was covered with leather and silver, with a little Porsche symbol on the top.
The dealer came back, lowered himself into the passenger seat and passed the keys over to Bruce. “It’s all yours,” he said.
Bruce switched on the engine and listened appreciatively to the throaty roar which resulted. “You can get that sound as a ring-tone for your mobile phone,” said the dealer. “That’s what I have on my own phone.”
“Great,” said Bruce.
“All right,” said the dealer. “Let’s take her out.”
The silver car slipped out onto the road outside the showroom.
Bruce felt the power of the engine as he pressed down on the accelerator, a strong, throbbing feeling, as if there were something live within the machine, some great, stirring creature. He pressed the accelerator down farther, and the roar, and the power, grew.
They soon found themselves up in the Braids, where the comparatively empty roads allowed Bruce to increase his speed.
This was heady, intoxicating.
“Feel the G-forces!” said Bruce, giving the engine its head for a few seconds.
“Serious,” said the dealer. “Really serious G-forces.”
They turned round, the car engine making a satisfactory growl even at idling speed. Then they drove back to the showroom.
“Fantastic,” said Bruce. “That’s the one.”
The salesman looked awkward, and Bruce frowned. Had he already sold that model – in which case, what was the point of letting him take the vehicle out for a test drive?
“Well, actually,” the dealer began, “your father-in-law, if I may call him that, has already chosen something for you.”
Bruce looked puzzled. “Chosen?”
“Yes,” said the dealer. “You’re to get a GT3, I’m afraid. The red one over there.”
Bruce bit his lip. “Then why let me drive the Turbo?”
The dealer smiled. “I wanted you to have the best Porsche experience you could,” he said. “And that’s with the Turbo. But the GT3 is still a great car.”
Bruce turned away. It had suddenly occurred to him that he was walking into something for which he might not have bargained.
Trapped, he thought; I’m trapped. But was it better, he wondered, to be trapped with a Porsche or not trapped without a Porsche?
The former, he decided.
Domenica Macdonald looked at her watch. Five o’clock in the afternoon. As Lorca observed, she thought, at that terrible five in the afternoon.
Ah, that terrible three-thirty in the afternoon! Three o’clock seemed somehow more innocent, less brooding, than five, as Rupert Brooke sensed when he referred to the church clock standing at ten-to-three. Nothing ominous happened at ten-to-three, as opposed to five minutes to midnight (a dreadful, worrying time) or, of course, five in the afternoon.
She looked out of her window onto Scotland Street, where the evening shadows were beginning to lengthen. It was a fine evening, something for which she was grateful, as she had chosen it for the dinner party she had long been planning to mark her safe return from the Malacca Straits, back to Edinburgh, into the bosom of the New Town and those who made up her circle of friends. She remembered how, before she had left for Malaysia, she had been joined in this very room by those self-same friends. She remembered how Angus had made a speech, as he always did on such occasions, and how his speech – which was quite touching – had modulated into a poem about small places, as she recalled. The poem had said something about being grateful for the small scale, for the local, for the minor things that gave meaning to life. And Angus was right: these things were being forgotten in the headlong rush into globalisation, which drained identity out of life, rendered it distant, impersonal. Thank heavens, thought Domenica, for the Royal Bank of Scotland, which still had people round the corner to whom one could speak on the telephone, unlike others, who put one through to India, or Sri Lanka, or even Wales. That was a good object lesson for the
rest: the Royal Bank of Scotland was a global bank, but they still knew how important it was to remain rooted. That made Domenica proud. People made a big fuss about sporting heroes – some of whom were pretty ghastly, she thought – but nobody seemed to make a fuss of bankers. And yet they did great things and made piles of money. The big challenge, though, was to get them to share it . . . and also to make sure that they were nice to people with overdrafts.
Domenica herself had no overdraft, but she suspected that virtually everybody else had one. An overdraft was a rite of passage, in a sense; one went from pocket-money as a child straight into the world of overdraft as a student. And many people remained there, never graduating to the really adult phase when their bank account was in credit. Anthropology had paid little attention to this, she reflected. There were plenty of studies on debt bondage patterns elsewhere, but few, if any, on such bondage in urban Western societies. In some countries, one might be reduced to virtual slavery, saddled with debts incurred by one’s grandfather, and labouring endlessly just to pay the interest. But here, for many, the sentence was not all that dissimilar, even if the debt was not inherited.
