The Charming Quirks of Others by Alexander McCall Smith Page B

that these people do is lend money to people who actually do things.” She gestured towards the well-set façades of the classical square before continuing. “But they—these people in these offices—end up having far greater status than those who actually do things with that money. Odd, isn’t it?”
    Jamie agreed. He had no interest in money. “We should be more like the Germans,” he said. “They show more respect for engineers than they do for accountants.”
    Isabel said that she was not sure that respect should be based on a person’s job alone. A good and conscientious emptier of rubbish bins, she suggested, was better in moral terms, surely, than a self-serving accountant. Yet a job might say somethingabout a person’s character: a nurse was likely to be more sympathetic than a futures trader, although not inevitably so.
    What she had said clearly interested Jamie, who now made a remark about musicians and their position in society. “And nobody really respects musicians all that much,” he said. “We’re very far down the pecking order.”
    They were now within sight of the Caledonian Hotel, that great red-stone edifice at the end of Princes Street, a battleship made of gingerbread, Isabel thought. She remembered seeing a crowd outside the hotel one day when some rock star had been staying there and word had got out to the fans. Were musicians all that low in the pecking order? Did people wait outside hotels for accountants, or engineers, or architects?
    “Are you sure?”
    He half turned to her. There was a piper outside the Caledonian, welcoming somebody or sending them off; or possibly just standing there, playing the pipes. Isabel recognised the tune, “Mist-covered Mountains,” a tune that she always found evocative—of what? Of Morven, she thought, or Ardnamurchan, those wild, mountainous parts of western Scotland on the edge of the Atlantic, the last land before the Hebrides, and beyond them the cloud banks, the green cliffs of Newfoundland.
    She remembered how she had once been in the Old Town of Edinburgh, near the Canongate, when she had heard from somewhere in the vicinity, echoing through the small wynds and closes, the muffled thumping of a great drum. And she had turned the corner to find herself face-to-face with a pipe band, the pipers draped in dark-green tartan, on the point of striking up “Mist-covered Mountains.” And she had stood on the pavement,close to the wall to allow the band to get by, and watched them as they slow-marched past her. She had noticed the white spats that each kilted piper wore; she had seen the faces of the young men in the ranks of the band, clean-shaven, smartly turned out, like boy-soldiers. Which is what they were, she learned from a woman standing beside her on the pavement. “Just laddies,” said the woman, shaking her head as she spoke. “Just laddies. And now they’re away to the ermy.” She pronounced
army
in the Scots way, as mothers had done for generations, watching their sons going away.
    A couple emerged from the hotel, followed by a gaggle of guests. The couple got into a car, and a young man from the group of friends sat on the bonnet of the car, preventing it from driving away. “Newlyweds,” said Isabel. “That explains the piper.”
    The piper had struck up a different tune, a quicker one; a woman reached out to drag the young man off the car. There were cries of mirth and then applause as the car began to move off towards Rutland Square.
    They walked on. Jamie reached for her hand. “Like us,” he said. “Soon.”
    “Yes.” She paused. “Are you sure that you want to go ahead … so quickly?”
    He did not hesitate. “Of course I’m sure.” He looked at her. His expression was anxious. “Why do you ask? Are you having doubts?”
    She said that she was not. “It’s just that I’ve become more or less accustomed to how things are at the moment. I haven’t really thought about the next stage.”
    “But we agreed