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The Borough Press
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2014
Copyright © Alexander McCall Smith 2014
Cover illustration © Iain McIntosh 2014
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015
Alexander McCall Smith asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780007553884
Ebook Edition © June 2015 ISBN: 9780007553877
Version: 2019-03-01
For my daughters, Lucy and Emily
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
About the Author
Also by Alexander McCall Smith
About the Publisher
Emma Woodhouse’s father was brought into this world, blinking and confused, on one of those final nail-biting days of the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was a time of sustained anxiety for anybody who read a newspaper or listened to the news on the radio, and that included his mother, Mrs Florence Woodhouse, who was anxious at the best of times and even more so at the worst. What was the point of continuing the human race when nuclear self-immolation seemed to be such a real and imminent possibility? That was the question that occurred to Florence as she was admitted to the delivery ward of a small country hospital in Norfolk. American air bases lay not far away, making that part of England a prime target; their bombers, she had heard, were on the runway, ready to take off on missions that would bring about an end that would be as swift as it was awful, a matter of sudden blinding light, of dust and of darkness. Quite understandably, though, she had other, more pressing concerns at the time, and did not come up with an answer to her own question. Or perhaps her response was the act of giving birth itself, and the embracing, through tears of joy, of the small bundle of humanity presented to her by the midwife.
There are plenty of theories – not all of them supported by evidence – that the mother’s state of mind during pregnancy may affect the personality of the infant. There are also those who believe that playing Mozart to unborn children will lead to greater musicality, or reciting poetry through the mother’s stomach will increase the chances of having linguistically gifted children. That anxiety may be transmitted from mother to unborn baby is an altogether more believable claim, and indeed Henry Woodhouse appeared to be proof of this. From an early age he showed himself to be a fretful child, unwilling to take the risks that other boys delighted in and always interested in the results when his mother took his temperature with the clinical thermometer given to her by the district nurse.
‘Is it normal?’ was one the first sentences he uttered after he had begun to speak.
‘Absolutely normal,’ his mother would reply. ‘Ninety-eight point four. See.’
This disappointed him, and he always showed satisfaction when a doubtful reading required the insertion of the mercury bulb under his tongue a second time.
In due course this anxiety took the form of dietary fads, one after another, involving the rejection of various common foodstuffs (wheat, dairy products, and so on) and the enthusiastic embracing of rather more esoteric fare (royal jelly and malt biscuits being early favourites). These fads tended not to last long; by the time he was eighteen and ready to go to university, he was prepared to eat a normal vegetarian diet, provided it was supplemented by a pharmacopoeia of vitamin pills, omega oils, and assorted enzymes.
‘My son’, said his mother with a certain pride, ‘is a valetudinarian.’
That sent her friends to the dictionary, which gave her additional satisfaction. To dispatch one’s friends to a dictionary from time to time is one of the more sophisticated pleasures of life, but it is one that must be indulged in sparingly: to do it too often may result in accusations of having swallowed one’s own dictionary, which is not a compliment, whichever way one looks at it.
Henry Woodhouse – known to most as Mr Woodhouse – did not follow the career that had been expected of generations of young Woodhouses. While his father had assumed that his son would farm – in an entirely gentlemanly way – the six hundred acres that surrounded their house, Hartfield, the young man had other plans for himself.
‘I know what you expect,’ he said. ‘I know we’ve been here for the last four hundred years …’
‘Four hundred and eighteen,’ interjected his father.
‘Four hundred and eighteen, then. I know that. And I’m not saying that I want to go away altogether; it’s