Love in the Time of Bertie by Alexander McCall Smith

Author:Alexander McCall Smith [McCall Smith, Alexander]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2022-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

33

Sleeping Rough

Big Lou’s coffee bar had been a second-hand bookstore before she bought it, and with the purchase she acquired the complete remaining stock of books. She had disposed of some of these, bestowing on charity shops multiple copies of Edward Heath’s book on sailing, Delia Smith cooking tomes, stained by countless splashes and splodges, and any number of out-of-date guidebooks. Books of a more challenging nature were transferred to her flat in Canonmills, where she methodically made her way through piles of titles on philosophy, history, and theology, while making occasional sallies into nineteenth-century poetry, biography, and popular psychology. Her formal education had been limited, but now she made up for that with her voracious reading and her openness to new ideas. The autodidact always fears that the knowledge that he or she has taken such pains to acquire may prove to be pointless; Big Lou had no such concerns. She thought that the more you knew, the better, even if your mind came to be filled with irrelevant detail. Big Lou had no desire to impress anybody with the breadth of her learning: scholarship, of whatever nature, was a good in itself, she thought.

She had recently read rather a lot about life in the Royal Navy, having reached that region of her bookshelves where books on naval history were to be found. She had already read three of Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey novels, and was saving up the remaining seventeen for a later date. These books were full of naval detail, and she soon learned the difference between aloft and aloof and between astern and athwart. She learned about what went on in the gunroom and the captain’s cabin, about beating to quarters and bagpiping the mizzen, and about how press-gangs captured men of marine experience as well as those who had no desire to gain marine experience. She had assumed that sailors now were all volunteers, and was alarmed to hear that Bob might have been cajoled into a life at sea.

Bob sensed her concern. “Don’t worry,” he reassured her. “I wasn’t going to let myself be forced into anything. I removed myself that night.”

Big Lou was relieved. “You ran away?”

“Yes. I went along with Harry’s suggestion, trying to appear enthusiastic in case he should lock me in until such time as he could get me to the recruiting office. I waited until they had both gone to bed before I repacked my suitcase and slipped out of the flat. I tripped in the corridor, dropping my suitcase with a loud thud, and I froze where I was, in the darkness, my heart beating wildly in my chest. I thought my heartbeat alone would be enough to wake them up, but no sound came from their room, and I was able to make my escape.”

“Did you head for home?”

Bob said that he felt he could not do that. “It would have been a real humiliation to go straight home. Remember that I had gone off because I

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