Chance Developments by Alexander Mccall Smith

Author:Alexander Mccall Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2016-07-12T00:00:00+00:00

2

Hope persuaded him to apply for a job with the postal service. He was interviewed in Kingston, and she accompanied him to his appointment, sitting in the waiting room while he went inside. She had only ten minutes to wait before he came out, picked up his hat, and walked out on to the street without giving her a glance.

The chairman of the interview panel emerged and looked at her anxiously. She knew him from the church they both attended. He held out his hands in a gesture of resignation and, she thought, apology.

“I’m very sorry, Mrs. Beaulieu.”

She bit her lip. “It didn’t go well?”

“I did my best, but he didn’t really answer the questions the board asked him.”

“He refused? He refused to speak?”

The chairman shook his head. “No, it was the opposite problem, really. He spoke rather too much, but about the wrong things. He went on about this…this…”

“Pelmanism?”

There was flicker of a smile on the chairman’s lips. “Yes, that’s it. He seemed to think it relevant to our questions, but frankly it wasn’t. So we more or less dried up, I’m afraid.”

She shook her head. “I’m very sorry, Mr. Andrews. You know how young people are these days—they get ideas. He’s a good boy, Eddie, and he’s a hard worker, you know. He’s never been afraid of hard work.”

“I’m sure. Bobby Henderson speaks highly of him—always has.”

“It’s just that he has these odd interests. He loves telling fortunes; card tricks too. And this Pelmanism…it’s a sort of hocus-pocus memory course as far as I can make out.”

The chairman looked at his hands. “He’ll find something. I always say to my boys that whatever shape of peg you are, there’s a hole for you somewhere.” He paused. He knew that was only partly true, and an aphorism that was only partly true was hardly an aphorism at all.

She walked home and told her husband what had happened. He rose from his desk and walked to the window. His breathing was shallow—a sign of the anger that was welling up within him. Why couldn’t Eddie be like his sisters? Where did he come from? Why did he feel that he had to spend the evening—every evening—practising his conjuring tricks on them, making them listen to his endless lectures on Pelmanism? How many times had he himself fled the house on the pretext of having work to do in the office, leaving his wife to bear the brunt? “I’m going to give him an ultimatum. I’m going to tell him we have to start charging him rent.”

“But he can’t pay much.”

“Then we tell him he’s going to have to go.”

She drew in her breath. She was as frustrated as her husband was, but she was a mother. “No, Aristide, we can’t tell Eddie to go. He’s our flesh and blood. You can’t tell your own flesh and blood to go. You just can’t.”

He was silent for a few moments, but then his anger subsided; he had never been able to sustain it.

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