The Comfort of Saturdays by Alexander McCall Smith

Author:Alexander McCall Smith
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Edinburgh (Scotland), Fiction, Women Sleuths, Mystery & Detective
ISBN: 9780349120553
Publisher: Abacus
Published: 2009-10-09T06:12:43+00:00

10

Jamie was playing that evening at the Festival Theatre. Scottish Opera was doing Don Pasquale, and although Isabel had seen the production when they had first performed it in Glasgow, she had been invited to the opera, and a reception beforehand, by Turcan Connel, the firm of lawyers who represented her in such legal business as she had. It was one of their partners, Simon Mackintosh, who had purchased the Review of Applied Ethics on her behalf the previous year, and he said that this transaction entitled her to at least some corporate hospitality.

Champagne was served in one of the suites alongside the grand circle. Isabel saw that she knew a number of the guests, but for some reason she did not feel much like socialising, so busied herself looking at the framed theatrical memorabilia on the wall. There was the programme for a concert by Harry Lauder, the Scottish vaudeville artist of the 1920s, with a picture of the famous bekilted figure with one of the twisted walking sticks that became his trademark. He had opened the show with ‘Will Ye Stop Your Tickling, Jock’ and had ended it with ‘Keep Right On to the End of the Road’. Isabel smiled; her father had loved Harry Lauder and had sung his songs to Isabel and her brother when they were children. ‘Keep Right On to the End of the Road’ moved her still, mawkish though the words were in cold print. Every road through life is a long, long road/Filled with joys and sorrow too. Trite? Yes, it was, but then the truth was often trite, and nonetheless true for that. And had Harry Lauder not sung those lines on the very day that he heard of the death of his only son in the trenches of France? And he had insisted on going on stage to sing it when his heart must have been broken within him. People did that back then. They were brave.

Or were they too brave, Isabel wondered; too brave, with the result that they were imposed upon in the name of vainglorious patriotism, chauvinism, easily led to the slaughter? Should one be brave about the loss of one’s only son, or should one break down and weep for the waste, the pointlessness of the loss; rail against the whole monstrous system that sent young men off in droves to climb up those ladders and stumble through the mud into veils of machinegun fire? Why should anyone be brave about that?

She remembered the Latin teacher at school translating ‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’ – it is a sweet and decorous thing to die for one’s country. ‘Horace, girls,’ she said. ‘That’s from Horace’s Odes. Horace was a poet who wrote about the pleasures of living in the country.’

‘Who died for his country?’ asked one of the girls.

And the teacher had said, ‘No. He was talking about other people.’ And left it at that.

She turned away from the Lauder programme and raised her champagne glass to her lips.

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