A Time of Love and Tartan by Smith Alexander McCall

Author:Smith, Alexander McCall [Smith, Alexander McCall]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Humour, Mystery, Contemporary, Adult
ISBN: 9781846973826
Amazon: 1846973821
Goodreads: 35512561
Publisher: Polygon An Imprint of Birlinn Limited
Published: 2017-07-27T07:00:00+00:00

31

A Conversation under the Night Sky

Elspeth said goodnight to the Duke at the end of dinner, leaving Matthew to see their guest to his car. Padruig had already arrived and was parked under the oak tree at the front of the house. Emerging from the car as they approached, he opened the rear passenger door for his employer.

“You and Elspeth are very good to me,” said the Duke as he shook Matthew’s hand. “It’s not easy, you know.”

Matthew was not sure how to respond. He was not quite sure what was not easy, and so he simply made a non-committal noise – something that could have been agreement or simply an acknowledgment of having heard.

But if elucidation was necessary, it was provided by what the Duke said next. “We live in difficult times, Matthew – very difficult times.”

Matthew felt he could agree with that; and yet, he reflected, people had always thought they lived in difficult times. He thought of his father’s generation, and his grandfather’s before that. His paternal grandfather had lived through the Depression as a boy, at a time when the family had had very little money. Matthew had never known him, as he had died before he was born, but he had heard how hard it had been. Then there had been the War, in which his grandfather had served with the Cameronians. His entire life, it seemed to Matthew, had been overshadowed by crisis and the moral disaster of war – difficult times by any standards. And his father? He had been born in the post-war period when, for a brief time, it looked as if the sunny uplands might have been reached, but then there had been the Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation. His father had been twelve at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis and even at that age had understood that at any moment the country might have been reduced to ashes – difficult times again.

“Haven’t we always lived in times of crisis?” he said to the Duke.

The Duke, about to climb into the car, pushed the door shut, indicating that he wanted to finish their conversation before he left.

“That’s all right, Padruig,” he said. “I’ll just be a few minutes.”

He turned to Matthew. “You’re right, of course – every generation thinks its situation is uniquely worrying – but the world has always been on the brink of disaster. Yes, that’s right, but that doesn’t detract from the particular difficulty of specific times.” He paused, appearing to think through the next stage of his argument. “All that I’m saying, I suppose, is that there appear to be some periods where the dilemmas seem greater than those experienced a few years previously, or where there is a marked decline in something we value. That’s what I was thinking about.”

Matthew waited for the Duke to continue.

“It’s the destruction of civility,” said the Duke. “Twenty years ago, people may have had their differences of opinion – of course they did – but they did not abuse one another for it.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.