The Dog Who Came in from the Cold by Alexander McCall Smith

premier literary prize and had recently been translated into Finnish. Marcia had risen to the challenge and served herring rolls, cod roe, and a great deal of smoked salmon. Some of it had been left uneaten and was not wanted by the embassy, so Marcia dropped round to deliver it to William. He always welcomed the surplus snacks that Marcia brought him, and indeed had once remarked that he could live almost entirely off the scraps from her table. This pleased Marcia. She had been brought up by her very domesticated mother to believe that of all the satisfactions open to women, feeding men was ultimately the most profound. She knew that this was, quite simply,wrong, but the beliefs instilled in childhood and youth are hard to dislodge, and Marcia had eventually stopped fighting the convictions that lay deep within her.
    “I know I’m pathetic,” she once said to a friend. “I know I should be all independent and self-sufficient and so on, but that’s just not
me
. I want to feed men. I just love putting large plates of food in front of them. I love it.” She paused. “Does that mean there’s something wrong with me?”
    Her friend looked at her pityingly. “Yes,” she said. “It makes you inauthentic, Marcia.”
    Marcia winced. “Does it really?”
    The friend nodded. “Yes, it does. You have to live for yourself, you know. You have to do things that fulfil you, not others. Women are not there to look after men.”
    Marcia thought about this. “But who’ll look after them if we don’t?” she asked.
    Her friend rolled her eyes. “Marcia, dear …”
    Marcia tried another approach. “But what if you’re fulfilled by doing things for other people? Why can’t I feel fulfilled by making food for other people …” She corrected herself. It was not the feeding of people that gave her pleasure, it was the feeding of
men
. “Making food for men, that is.”
    The friend’s frustration showed itself. “That’s really sad,” she said. “It’s sad because you don’t know that you’re being used by a system—the old, deep-rooted system of male domination. Of course men want us to feed them. Who wouldn’t?” She looked at Marcia, as if to challenge her to contradict this. But Marcia just listened, and so the friend continued: “Most men, you see, don’t grow up; they’re fed by their mothers when they’re little boys and they realise how satisfactory that is. And being fed by somebody else
is
really very comfortable. So they manipulate women into carrying on doing it for the rest of their lives.”
    “But if women want …”
    “No, Marcia, that’s not going to work. Women
think
they want to make food for men, but that’s false consciousness. You know what that is? No? Well, I’ll explain it to you some other time. The point is that women are made to think that they like doing things, but they don’t really. They want to do their own things, things for themselves.”
    The conversation had ended at that point, and Marcia had gone about her business, which was feeding people. Her friend might have been right but she felt that there was not much she could do about the state of inauthenticity that her friend had diagnosed. And now that she came to think of it, perhaps it was quite pleasant to be inauthentic, and if one was happy in one’s inauthenticity, why should one try to change it? It was an interesting question, but there were canapés to be prepared and that was a more immediate task than the rectification of false consciousness.
    Now, as she removed the cover from a dish of rolled herring, she felt a warm glow of satisfaction at William’s obvious pleasure.
    “My absolute favourite!” he exclaimed, picking up one of the strips of herring on its cocktail-stick skewer.
    Marcia smiled. “Well, I’m glad. The Icelandic poet turned up her nose at these. And yet her poems are all about cod and herring, apparently.”
    “Perhaps she couldn’t bring herself to eat the subject of her poems,”