Unusual Uses for Olive Oil by Alexander McCall Smith Page A

anxiety creeping into his voice. ‘I have read some very promising reviews of that restaurant.’
    Frau Benz looked at him. ‘Dinner? Oh, yes. I’m terribly sorry but I’ve just remembered that I have a dental appointment. We shall have to have dinner some other time. I’m so sorry.’
    Von Igelfeld frowned. ‘A dental appointment? But dentists don’t work at night.’
    Frau Benz looked away. ‘We should never be too dogmatic,’ she said quietly. ‘About the hours that dentists work, or … or about other things.’
    He stepped out. Behind him the door clanged shut,a sound so final as to drive away all thoughts of living in a
Schloss
; of having a wife; of pursuing a life of quiet scholarship in a private library; of not having to listen to Herr Huber going on and on; of being somehow free in a world where freedom was a prize that most of us would never achieve, given that we were ourselves, and usually, if not always, had to remain ourselves for all our days, such as they were.
    He frowned once again. Had he spoken out of turn about something? Women were unfathomable beings – even somebody as charming and pleasant as Frau Benz. She had seemed to be very taken with his witticisms – which had flowed quickly and easily for the entire visit – and then it was as if she had suddenly developed a headache. That was it: a headache. He would telephone her the next day and he was sure that he would discover that her good humour had completely returned. They would go out for dinner and then he would come back here for lunch, and all would be back to normal again. There was no need to worry.
    He walked down the driveway towards the gate. It was not far from the nearest village and he could ask the people at the local inn to call a car for him. The exercise would do him good, he thought, after that excellent lunch.
    There was a path off to the right – a short path that culminated in a paved stone circle on which a sundialhad been erected. It was a most unusual sundial, von Igelfeld thought – a metal circle trisected into triangles: a strangely familiar symbol, but quite unexpected in such a setting.
    Odd, he thought. Very odd.



Reading Party
    A lesser man – one who, unlike von Igelfeld, had not written a twelve-hundred-page treatise on Portuguese irregular verbs – might have been cast down by such a rebuff as he received at the hands of Frau Benz. A lesser man, not having the history of the von Igelfeld family behind him – a history of insouciance in the face of adversity – might have become dispirited and might have thought that perhaps this social failure was his own doing. Not von Igelfeld: it was true that he felt a momentary disappointment at the frustration of his plans to marry Frau Benz and become the owner of the Schloss Dunkelberg, but this disappointment was moderated by the conviction that what the entire experience demonstrated was the unpredictability andinconstancy of women. And if that was the way that Frau Benz behaved, then he decided that he had had a narrow escape from marriage to such a difficult woman. It would have been all very well having the library at the Schloss Dunkelberg at his disposal, but what pleasure would it have been had he had to worry about what his wife would think and do next? There would be no peace in that, he thought; how much better to remain a bachelor and live in what was, after all, a perfectly comfortable flat with a view that, even if it was not of fertile acres of land which pertained to it, none the less encompassed a perfectly respectable public park. Frau Benz! Who had heard of the Benzes, whoever they were? Where were they in the sixteenth century? And as for the owl in their escutcheon – what a ridiculous device when compared with the hedgehog, whose role as an embodiment of wisdom was well known to anybody with even the slightest knowledge of iconography. And as for the apotheosis of Herr Benz – what an assumption to make that such a person, a mere