44 Scotland Street Read Online Free

understand.
    And of course Bruce could never think of anything to say to her. He would have loved to have been able to come up with a suitable put-down, but it never seemed to be there at the right time, or at any other time, when he came to think of it.
    He tested the temperature of the bath and then lowered himself into the water. The cleaning of Anna’s room had made him feel dirty, but a good soak in the bath would deal with that. It was a wonderful bath in which to soak; one of the best features of the flat. It must have been there for fifty years, or even more; a great, generous tub, standing on four claw-feet, and filled from largemouthed silver taps. He very rarely saw a bath like that when he did a valuation, but when he did, he always drew it to the attention of the client. Fine bathroom fittings , he would write, knowing that he could be writing the epitaph of the bath, which would be removed and replaced by something half its weight and durability.
    He lay back in the water and thought of Pat. He had decided that she was not his type, and in general he preferred to keep relationships with flatmates on a platonic basis, but one should not make absolute rules on these matters, he thought. She was attractive enough, he reflected, although she would not necessarily turn his head in the street. Comfortable, perhaps, was the word. Undisturbing. Average.
    Perhaps she would be worth a little attention. He was, after all, between girlfriends, now that Laura had gone down to London. They had agreed that she would come up to Edinburgh once a month and he would go down to London with the same frequency, but it had not worked out. She had made the journey three months in a row, but he had been unable to find the time to do the same. And she had been most unreasonable about it, he thought.
    “If you cared anything about me, you would have made the effort,” she had said to him. “But you don’t and you didn’t.”
    He had been appalled by this attack. There had been very

    good reasons why he could not go to London, apart from the expense, of course. And he had had every justification for cancelling that weekend: he had entered the wrong date for the Irish international at Murrayfield in his diary and had only discovered his error four days before the event. If she thought that he was going to miss that just to go down for a weekend which could be rearranged for any time, then she was going to have to think again, which she did.
    He stood up and stepped out of the bath. As he did so, he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror, and smiled.

 
     
     
     
    4. Fathers and Sons
     
    Somebody had pushed a bundle of advertisements into the mail box of the Something Special Gallery, which irritated Matthew Duncan. It was Tuesday morning, and the beginning of another working week for Matthew, who took Sundays and Mondays off. He was early that morning – normally he opened at ten o’clock, as it was unheard of to sell a painting before ten, or even eleven. He believed that the best time to make a sale was just before lunch, on a Saturday, to a client who had accepted a glass of sherry. Of course, private views were even better than that, because crowd behaviour then entered into the equation and red spots could proliferate like measles. That, at least, was what he had been told when he had taken over the gallery a few weeks previously. But he could not be sure, as he had so far sold nothing. Not one painting; not one print; nothing at all had been bought by any of the people who had drifted in, looked about them, and then, almost regretfully in some cases, almost apologetically in others, had walked back out of the front door.
    Matthew flung the advertisements into the wastepaper bin and walked into the back of the gallery to deal with the alarm, which had picked up his presence and was giving its first warning pips. The code keyed in, he flicked the light switches, bringing to life the spotlights that were trained on the