A Time of Love and Tartan (44 Scotland Street Series #12)

by Alexander McCall Smith Narrated by Robert Ian Mackenzie

Overview

The latest installment of Alexander McCall Smith's perennially popular and irresistibly charming 44 Scotland Street series. When Pat accepts her narcissistic ex-boyfriend Bruce's invitation for coffee, she has no idea of the complications in her romantic and professional life that will follow. Meanwhile, Matthew, her boss at the art gallery, attracts the attention of the police after a misunderstanding at the local bookstore. Whether caused by small things such as a cup of coffee and a book, or major events such as Stuart's application for promotion and his wife Irene's decision to pursue a PhD in Aberdeen, change is coming to Scotland Street. But for three seven-year-old boy-Bertie Pollock, Ranald, and Big Lou's foster son, Finlay-it also means getting a glimpse of perfect happiness. Alexander McCall Smith's delightfully witty, wise and sometimes surreal comedy spirals out in surprising ways in this new installment, but its heart remains where it has always been at the center of life in Edinburgh's New Town.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

12/18/2017
Smith’s spirited 12th 44 Scotland Street novel (after 2017’s The Bertie Project) sees the residents of Edinburgh’s Scotland Street and their associates grapple with domestic problems great and small. Anthropologist Domenica Macdonald wonders about the viability of her marriage to artist Angus Lordie while preparing for a visit from Rwandan pygmies; government statistician Stuart Pollock faces intense competition for a promotion and a difficult wife with other priorities in Aberdeen; art gallery assistant Pat Macgregor finds it hard to shake an egotistical ex-boyfriend who has plans for her; and gallery owner Matthew Duncan deals with the fallout of an uncomfortable encounter with his former English teacher and the demands of his two-year-old triplets. Meanwhile, Stuart’s seven-year-old son, Bertie, makes a significant discovery in Drummond Place Gardens and contends with his know-it-all classmate, Olive. Despite the lack of any mystery, fans of Smith’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series will enjoy the stimulating and often comic company of Scotland Street’s inviting neighbors. (Feb.)

From the Publisher

"Powerfully addicting fiction. . . . Delightful. . . . [A] graceful and always amusing depiction of the pleasures and problems of everyday life." —Entertainment Weekly

"As colorful as a tartan. . . . Entertaining and witty." —Orlando Sentinel

Kirkus Reviews

2017-11-12
Momentous crises loom for several denizens of 44 Scotland St. and environs—and this time, a few of them find momentous resolutions.As 7-year-old Bertie Pollock submits meekly to more rounds of abuse by his horrid classmate, Olive, his statistician father, Stuart, is angling for a big promotion that pits him against two strident but incompetent women, and his formidable mother, Irene, is plotting to leave Edinburgh to begin a Ph.D. program in Aberdeen with her sometime lover, psychiatrist-turned-professor Hugo Fairbairn. Bruce Anderson, God's gift to women, has a bizarre proposal to offer his old girlfriend Pat Macgregor, who, despite her acute awareness of his hopeless narcissism, can't help being smitten with him all over again. Pat's boss, gallery owner Matthew, and his wife, Elspeth, fret over replacing their triplet sons' unsuitable Danish au pairs, whom they fired for cause (The Bertie Project, 2017)—and Matthew's attempt to avoid an embarrassing meeting with his old teacher Mrs. Patterson Cowie lands him in trouble with the police. Anthropologist Domenica MacDonald wonders whether she really loves her bridegroom, painter Angus Lordie, or whether she's just going through the motions for the sake of quiet and convenience. The author's special gift in this long-running franchise is to take each of these moral dilemmas equally seriously, so it's anyone's guess which of them will turn out to be consequential and which merely agreeably vexing.Shorter and less digressive than earlier installments, with most of the complications wrapped up in an even more suspiciously tidy way than usual. But readers who've come to know and love these characters can only rejoice in their rescue from trivial problems that can suddenly balloon to monstrous size.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170472666
Publisher:	Recorded Books, LLC
Publication date:	02/06/2018
Series:	44 Scotland Street Series , #12
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

1
An Invitation to the Elephant House
 
When Pat Macgregor received an invitation from Bruce Anderson to meet him for coffee at the Elephant House on George IV Bridge, her first reaction was to delete it. That is one of the great advantages of electronic communications – one can simply delete them. And one can do the same to people – in their electronic incarnation, of course; at the press of a button, or the equivalent, one can send them off into some vast soup of disassembled digital data, reducing them to floating ones and zeroes, consigned to a Dantean world of echoes, a shadowy underworld of fading impulses.
 
And that, thought Pat, was the fate that Bruce so richly deserved. A few years earlier he had played with her affections, as he had toyed with those of so many other young women, believing that to pay attention to this rather shy young student of art history was to confer on her a benison for which, if she knew anything about the world, she should be profoundly grateful. The expression God’s gift to women came into all this – somewhere. It was usually uttered sarcastically, as in He thinks he’s God’s gift to women, but in Bruce’s case this was exactly what he did think of himself. In his view he was one of those people who existed to give pleasure to others – not through anything he actually did – although that, of course, entered into it – but simply by being.
 
Auden said that the blessed had no reason to care from what angle they were regarded, having nothing to hide. This was true of Bruce: whether you looked at him from the front, the back, or from either side, the inescapable conclusion was that he was egregiously good-looking. As he pointed out to Catriona, a young woman with whom he once visited Florence, “There’s a statue of my double in this city, you know.”
 
She had looked puzzled. “Your double, Bruce? Here in Florence?”
 
Bruce smirked. “Yes, right here. Would you like to see it?”
 
She nodded. This was some sort of game, she suspected; but then Bruce was so playful. That was one of the things that attracted her to him – his playfulness. That and, of course, the way he made a girl feel special; now that was a very considerable talent. And then there was his hair gel, that strange, clove-scented potion that tickled her nose when she smelled it, and added, in such a curious way, an erotic charge to the most mundane of situations.
 
Bruce and Catriona had already visited the Uffizi and had stood for some minutes before Botticelli’s Birth of Venus before Bruce said, “That’s Venus, you know. That’s her standing in the shell.”
 
Catriona nodded. “She’s very beautiful, isn’t she?”
 
Bruce thought about this for a few moments before he replied. “Her neck’s a bit long, but, yes, she’s beautiful all right.” Then, after a short pause, he had observed, “Beauty’s an interesting thing, isn’t it? You either have it, or you don’t. And that’s all there is to it.”
 
Catriona looked at Bruce. He returned her gaze with all the confidence of one who knew that he stood on the right side of the divide he had just described.
 
That was in the Uffizi; now they found themselves in the Galleria dell’Accademia, looking up at Michelangelo’s great masterpiece, the towering statue of David.
 
“There,” said Bruce. “Feast your eyes on that.”
 
The contemplation of Michelangelo’s David is not easy for everybody, but Catriona looked.
 
“Lookalike?” whispered Bruce.
 
She stared at the line of David’s nose and brow: it was undoubtedly Bruce. Her eye followed the sweep of his arms and the musculature of his torso. And she had to admit it:
Bruce could have been Michelangelo’s young model.
 
“I don’t tell everybody about this,” confided Bruce. “But I remember when I first saw a photograph of David, I thought: ‘Jeez, that’s me.’ I was about sixteen at the time. In Crieff. I was at Morrison’s, you know, and one of the girls in the class stuck a picture of David up in a corridor and wrote underneath it Bruce Anderson. It was so immature, but somehow …”
 
Pat, of course, had soon detected Bruce’s narcissism. But in her state of infatuation – for that, she acknowledged, was what it was – she had persuaded herself that his self-obsession was a harmless quirk, a hangover from adolescence, a passing phase. After all, there were plenty of young females who were just as fascinated by their appearance, spending hours in front of the mirror. It was more unusual amongst males, perhaps, but what was sauce for the goose should surely be sauce for the gander. If women were to indulge themselves in the contemplation of their own beauty, then why should men not do the same?
 
For a few months, she had circled Bruce, caught in his gravitational field as a moon might be in that of a planet, until at last she managed to extricate herself. When that happened, her father’s relief at her escape had been palpable. “Men like that are very dangerous,” he said to her. “The only thing to do is to tear yourself away. Believe me – I’ve seen it in so many of my patients.”
 
Pat’s father, Dr Macgregor, a self-deprecating and scholarly man, was a psychiatrist, and was particularly close to his daughter. He and Pat’s mother had divorced after she had gone off to restore a walled garden in Perthshire and had never returned. He had done nothing to deserve the desertion, but had been generous in his response. “Your mother has found herself elsewhere,” he explained to Pat. “Il faut cultiver notre jardin, as Candide (I think) pointed out. The important thing is her self-fulfillment – that’s all that counts.”
 
But there was something else that counted for him, and that was Pat’s own happiness. He doted on his daughter and when he realized that she had taken up with Bruce, he had been tipped into depression. At the end of Pat’s affair with Bruce – an end that he, at least, had realized was inevitable – he had tried to explain to her that however low she might feel after the break-up, it was as nothing when compared with the risk she would take in staying with him.
 
And that was why, when she received this invitation to meet Bruce in the Elephant House, Pat said nothing about it to her father. And it was also why she almost deleted it from her e-mail in-box without a reply. Almost, but not quite: she moved the cursor to hover over the delete symbol, hesitated, and then moved it to Reply.
 
“See you there,” she wrote. She added no emoticon – for what emoticon is there to express anticipation of the sort she was feeling?

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