Chapter one

The man in the brown Harris tweed overcoat --- double-breasted with
three small leather-covered buttons on the cuffs --- made his way
slowly along the street that led down the spine of Edinburgh. He
was aware of the seagulls which had drifted in from the shore and
which were swooping down onto the cobblestones, picking up
fragments dropped by somebody who had been careless with a fish.
Their mews were the loudest sound in the street at that moment, as
there was little traffic and the city was unusually quiet. It was
October, it was mid-morning, and there were few people about. A boy
on the other side of the road, scruffy and tousle-haired, was
leading a dog along with a makeshift leash --- a length of string.
The dog, a small Scottish terrier, seemed unwilling to follow the
boy and glanced for a moment at the man as if imploring him to
intervene to stop the tugging and the pulling. There must be a
saint for such dogs, thought the man; a saint for such dogs in
their small prisons.

The man reached the St. Mary's Street crossroads. On the corner on
his right was a pub, the World's End, a place of resort for
fiddlers and singers; on his left, Jeffrey Street curved round and
dipped under the great arch of the North Bridge. Through the gap in
the buildings, he could see the flags on top of the Balmoral Hotel:
the white-on-blue cross of the Saltire, the Scottish flag, the
familiar diagonal stripes of the Union Jack. There was a stiff
breeze from the north, from Fife, which made the flags stand out
from their poles with pride, like the flags on the prow of a ship
ploughing into the wind. And that, he thought, was what Scotland
was like: a small vessel pointed out to sea, a small vessel
buffeted by the wind.

He crossed the street and continued down the hill. He walked past a
fishmonger, with its gilt fish sign suspended over the street, and
the entrance to a close, one of those small stone passages that ran
off the street underneath the tenements. And then he was where he
wanted to be, outside the Canongate Kirk, the high-gabled church
set just a few paces off the High Street. At the top of the gable,
stark against the light blue of the sky, the arms of the kirk, a
stag's antlers, gilded, against the background of a similarly
golden cross.

He entered the gate and looked up. One might be in Holland, he
thought, with that gable; but there were too many reminders of
Scotland --- the wind, the sky, the grey stone. And there was what
he had come to see, the stone which he visited every year on this
day, this day when the poet had died at the age of twenty-four. He
walked across the grass towards the stone, its shape reflecting the
gable of the kirk, its lettering still clear after two hundred
years. Robert Burns himself had paid for this stone to be erected,
in homage to his brother in the muse, and had written the lines of
its inscription: This simple stone directs Pale Scotia's way/To
pour her sorrows o'er her poet's dust.

He stood quite still. There were others who could be visited here.
Adam Smith, whose days had been filled with thoughts of markets and
economics and who had coined an entire science, had his stone here,
more impressive than this, more ornate; but this was the one that
made one weep.

He reached into a pocket of his overcoat and took out a small black
notebook of the sort that used to advertise itself as waterproof.
Opening it, he read the lines that he had written out himself,
copied from a collection of Robert Garioch's poems. He read aloud,
but in a low voice, although there was nobody present save for him
and the dead:

Canongait kirkyaird in the failing year

Is auld and grey, the wee roseirs are bare,

Five gulls leem white agin the dirty air.

Why are they here? There's naething for them here

Why are we here oursels?

Yes, he thought. Why am I here myself? Because I admire this man,
this Robert Fergusson, who wrote such beautiful words in the few
years given him, and because at least somebody should remember and
come here on this day each year. And this, he told himself, was the
last time that he would be able to do this. This was his final
visit. If their predictions were correct, and unless something
turned up, which he thought was unlikely, this was the last of his
pilgrimages.

He looked down at his notebook again. He continued to read out
loud. The chiselled Scots words were taken up by the wind and
carried away:

Strang, present dool

Ruggs at my hairt. Lichtlie this gin ye daur:

Here Robert Burns knelt and kissed the mool.

Strong, present sorrow

Tugs at my heart. Treat this lightly if you dare:

Here Robert Burns knelt and kissed the soil.

He took a step back. There was nobody there to observe the tears
which had come to his eyes, but he wiped them away in
embarrassment. Strang, present dool. Yes. And then he nodded
towards the stone and turned round, and that was when the woman
came running up the path. He saw her almost trip as the heel of a
shoe caught in a crack between two paving stones, and he cried out.
But she recovered herself and came on towards him, waving her
hands.

"Ian. Ian." She was breathless. And he knew immediately what news
she had brought him, and he looked at her gravely. She said, "Yes."
And then she smiled, and leant forward to embrace him.

"When?" he asked, stuffing the notebook back into his pocket.

"Right away," she said. "Now. Right now. They'll take you down
there straightaway."

They began to walk back along the path, away from the stone. He had
been warned not to run, and could not, as he would rapidly become
breathless. But he could walk quite fast on the flat, and they were
soon back at the gate to the kirk, where the black taxi was
waiting, ready to take them.

"Whatever happens," he said as they climbed into the taxi, "come
back to this place for me. It's the one thing I do every year. On
this day."

"You'll be back next year," she said, reaching out to take his
hand.

On the other side of Edinburgh, in another season, Cat, an
attractive young woman in her mid-twenties, stood at Isabel
Dalhousie's front door, her finger poised over the bell. She gazed
at the stonework. She noticed that in parts the discoloration was
becoming more pronounced. Above the triangular gable of her aunt's
bedroom window, the stone was flaking slightly, and a patch had
fallen off here and there, like a ripened scab, exposing fresh skin
below. This slow decline had its own charms; a house, like anything
else, should not be denied the dignity of natural ageing --- within
reason, of course.

For the most part, the house was in good order; a discreet and
sympathetic house, in spite of its size. And it was known, too, for
its hospitality. Everyone who called there --- irrespective of
their mission --- would be courteously received and offered, if the
time was appropriate, a glass of dry white wine in spring and
summer and red in autumn and winter. They would then be listened
to, again with courtesy, for Isabel believed in giv- ing moral
attention to everyone. This made her profoundly egalitarian, though
not in the non-discriminating sense of many contemporary
egalitarians, who sometimes ignore the real moral differences
between people (good and evil are not the same, Isabel would say).
She felt uncomfortable with moral relativists and their penchant
for non-judgementalism. But of course we must be judgemental, she
said, when there is something to be judged.

Isabel had studied philosophy and had a part-time job as general
editor of the Review of Applied Ethics. It was not a demanding job
in terms of the time it required, and it was badly paid; in fact,
at Isabel's own suggestion, rising production costs had been partly
offset by a cut in her own salary. Not that payment mattered; her
share of the Louisiana and Gulf Land Company, left to her by her
mother --- her sainted American mother, as she called her ---
provided more than she could possibly need. Isabel was, in fact,
wealthy, although that was a word that she did not like to use,
especially of herself. She was indifferent to material wealth,
although she was attentive to what she described, with
characteristic modesty, as her minor projects of giving (which were
actually very generous).

"And what are these projects?" Cat had once asked.

Isabel looked embarrassed. "Charitable ones, I suppose. Or
eleemosynary if you prefer long words. Nice word that ---
eleemosynary . . . But I don't normally talk about it."

Cat frowned. There were things about her aunt that puzzled her. If
one gave to charity, then why not mention it?

"One must be discreet," Isabel continued. She was not one for
circumlocution, but she believed that one should never refer to
one's own good works. A good work, once drawn at- tention to by its
author, inevitably became an exercise in self-congratulation. That
was what was wrong with the lists of names of donors in the opera
programmes. Would they have given if their generosity was not going
to be recorded in the programme? Isabel thought that in many cases
they would not. Of course, if the only way one could raise money
for the arts was through appealing to vanity, then it was probably
worth doing. But her own name never appeared in such lists, a fact
which had not gone unnoticed in Edinburgh.

"She's mean," whispered some. "She gives nothing away."

They were wrong, of course, as the uncharitable so often are. In
one year, Isabel, unrecorded by name in any programme and amongst
numerous other donations, had given eight thousand pounds to
Scottish Opera: three thousand towards a production of Hansel and
Gretel, and five thousand to help secure a fine Italian tenor for a
Cavalleria Rusticana performed in the ill-fitting costumes of
nineteen-thirties Italy, complete with brown-shirted Fascisti in
the chorus.

Excerpted from FRIENDS, LOVERS, CHOCOLATE © Copyright 2005
by Alexander McCall Smith. Reprinted with permission by Pantheon, a
division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.