The Dog Who Came in From the Cold by Alexander McCall Smith

Author:Alexander McCall Smith [Smith, Alexander McCall]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Humorous, Urban, Fiction
ISBN: 9780307379849
Google: DmxFaEMH508C
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-06-20T13:00:00+00:00

42. Behind the Arras

POLONIUS HAD AN ARRAS behind which to hide—not that it did him much good. Berthea Snark had no such cover as she stood on the first-floor landing of her brother Terence Moongrove’s Queen Anne house. The unfortunate Polonius brought Hamlet’s wrath upon him through an ill-timed call for help; Berthea would make no such mistake. She stood motionless, and unless she were to sneeze—which she had no plans to do—the only threat lay in the squeaky floorboard she had just trodden upon. That was silent now, and if the owners of the voices murmuring within the room off the landing had been momentarily disturbed, they were no longer on the alert as their conversation had resumed.

If there is one thing which one can always make out in an otherwise indistinctly heard conversation it is one’s name. Being professionally interested in such phenomena, Berthea had been fascinated to read in the psychological literature of how people in certain stages of sleep may not react to stimulus but upon hearing their name being called may wake up quite quickly. She had experienced this herself while sleeping through a meeting of a committee of the Royal College of Psychiatrists; she had awoken at precisely the moment the chairman mentioned her name, and fortunately had been able to respond to his question quite satisfactorily. Sleeping in meetings, of course, was nothing to reproach oneself for, even though it could be occasionally embarrassing; many meetings were unnecessarily long, or indeed completely uncalled for, and if they provided an opportunity to catch up on much-needed sleep, that at least gave them some purpose. Berthea had once been at a meeting where everybody was asleep except her and the chairman, and the two of them alone had dispatched a great deal of business in a very efficient and appropriate manner. That same chairman, one of the great chairmen of his generation, was himself an accomplished napper, famous for being able to sleep through an entire meeting, only waking at the end, whereupon he would provide an excellent summary of everything that had happened during the meeting. Various explanations had been suggested, one being that he had a rare and useful ability to hear while he was asleep; another, more plausible explanation, was that he knew the members of the many committees very well, and knew that they were unlikely to come up with any novel remarks, and therefore he had no difficulty at all in imagining what they had said.

Berthea was aware that inside the bedroom off the landing, presumably preparing to go downstairs for their seven o’clock martinis mixed by Terence, were the two other guests in the house, Roger and Claire. She had seen Roger as she arrived at the house earlier that day, hanging about in the rhododendron bushes near the drive, and had on the spot identified him as a charlatan. What, she wondered, was he doing in the rhododendron bushes? But, more pertinently, what was he doing exploiting poor,

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