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

suggested William, reaching for another. “Poor woman. It would be like Wordsworth eating daffodils. One just can’t.”
    William went on to tell Marcia about Angelica’s visit and the assignation that he had the next day. Marcia put down the plate of herring and listened intently.
    “This is ridiculous,” she said, when he had described the incredible conversation for the second time. “I take it you won’t be going.”
    William shook his head. “No. I mean, yes, I am going.”
    Marcia stared at him incredulously. “But this is a lot of nonsense,William. You can’t get involved in these ridiculous schoolboy games. Get a grip, for heaven’s sake!”
    William looked away. He did not like Marcia telling him what to do, and he felt that this really was none of her business. But she was a difficult person to argue with and he had to admit that it was a rather absurd situation.
    “But I told them I’d come,” he said. “They’re expecting me.”
    “Then stand them up,” she retorted.
    He looked at her reproachfully. Marcia might have been a friend but there were times when he realised that there lay between them a gulf of difference in attitudes to things both large and small. One of these was their attitude to obligation: if William said that he was going to do something, he did it. Marcia, although not unreliable, was more flexible. That was the difference between them.
    Marcia stared back at William. She knew what he was thinking, which would be something to do with doing what one said one was going to do; she could read him so very easily.
    “Don’t go, William,” she said quietly. “You’re going to regret it if you do.”

18. Freddie de la Hay Goes to the Park
    M ARCIA HAD PUT IT BLUNTLY . “Listen, William,” she said, “you haven’t crossed the … the Nile yet.”
    “Rubicon, Marcia,” corrected William. “One crosses the Rubicon.” He paused. “And then, if one is
really
into mixing metaphors, one burns one’s boats.”
    “Rubicon, Nile—whatever,” said Marcia breezily. “The point is you’ve crossed nothing yet. So you can still get out of this. Don’t go. Just don’t go.”
    But he had ignored her advice, and found himself taking a delicious, almost perverse pleasure in doing so. The problem with Marcia, he thought, is that she thinks she’s my
mother
. For some men, of course, that would be a positive recommendation, the many men whose deepest ambition is to find their mother in another woman; but for William exactly the opposite was true. His mother had sought to run his life for him, and he had engaged wholeheartedly in both a conscious and subconscious cutting of apron strings. So any suggestions from Marcia were viewed through the very strong antimaternal filter developed over time. This filter had led William to become a wine merchant precisely because his mother had been a teetotaller; it had prompted him to apply—unsuccessfully—to the University of Cambridge because his mother had set her heart on his going to Oxford; and it had resulted in his living in Pimlico because his mother had once expressed an antipathy for that part of London.
    The trip from which Marcia sought to dissuade him was hardly a dangerous one. William was no Mungo Park, setting off into uncharted regions of the upper Senegal Basin; Mungo Park’s mother, he imagined, was probably dead set against her son wandering off to Africa like that—as, no doubt, was Mrs. Livingstone. But if they had advised their sons not to go, then they had been ignored. And likewise William would take no notice of Marcia’s advice, even though he was only proposing to take a taxi to Birdcage Walk, stroll across the road into St. James’s Park, and then along a footpath in the direction of the Mall. At the point where the path skirted the ornamental lake, he was told, he would come across a bench facing a copper beech tree, and that was where he was to sit until he was approached.
    He left the flat with Freddie de