Free Chance Developments by Alexander McCall Smith Page A

problem, Harry, is that you will never have done anything that makes you feel that way.”
    He looked at him. “How can you tell?”
    The medical student laughed. “Because if you had, I could see it in your eyes.”
    Harry held his gaze.
    “I believe I might see something,” said the medical student. “What is it, old fellow? Something to confess?”
    “No.”
    “That tells me everything. People who say they have nothing to confess have everything to confess.”
    In a dream that night he saw his baby. It came to him and stretched out a hand. It was wearing white, a
mort claith
, he thought, the Scots term for a shroud. It tried to say something to him, but was taken away by a woman in a blue tunic. And suddenly the child was no longer there, but had been replaced by a man in a grey suit who said, “Draw everything twice, Mr. MacGregor.”
    —
    In 1940, at the age of twenty, he left the art college and enlisted in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. “You’re doing the right thing,” said the college principal. “Your place will be open when hostilities are over.” It was shortly after Dunkirk, and he had none of the illusions of the previous year.
    “You’ll be an officer, I take it,” said the principal.
    He shrugged.
    “But of course you will be. Were you in the Corps at school? Yes? Because that’s what they look at.”
    “I’m not sure that I’m cut out for that.”
    “For leadership? But of course you are. Listen, one of the things we do here is instil self-discipline. Drawing class at eight thirty in the morning is exactly the sort of thing that develops that…that ability to cope with the world. The average young man won’t have that, you know.”
    “Miners start early…”
    “That’s not the point. Miners are not officer material.”
    The principal was right. He was sent off on a week’s selection course and emerged an officer cadet. Four months later he was commissioned, and found himself in charge of a platoon of men recruited from rural Argyll. Some of them seemed to be no more than boys—sixteen-year-olds taken from the farms where they were starting their lives as stockmen, shepherds, gamekeepers. They looked at him as if he came from another world, accepting an authority that for his part he felt he had no right to exercise.
    He was sent to North Africa. In 1942, he was at El Alamein. He had been seconded to a camouflage unit, and his skill at creating the illusion of tanks and fuel dumps out of netting and wood had been noticed by his superiors. He was promoted to captain and mentioned in despatches. He saw Monty himself, who inspected one of his bogus tanks and pronounced it good. “I’m not fooled, of course,” he said. “But let’s hope that General Rommel is.”
    A few days after the victory, he was in Cairo. In Shepheard’s Hotel a man in the uniform of a lieutenant in the Royal Scots Greys came up and introduced himself. The lieutenant offered to buy him a drink. “I feel I almost know you,” he said. “But not quite. My cousin, you see, is Jenny Currie—you two were quite friendly, I believe.”
    When the other man returned from the bar, Harry’s hand trembled as he took the drink. They exchanged toasts.
    “Somebody said that you were up at El Alamein,” said the lieutenant. “Well done. I hear you were one of the camouflage chaps. Magicians, people said. You made things disappear.”
    “They remained exactly where they were,” he said. “We just made it look as if they were something they weren’t. The human eye will believe what it wants to see.”
    “Oh, I know that,” said the lieutenant. “Try looking out of a tank in the desert.”
    They had lapsed into silence before he summoned up his courage. “What news of Jenny, then?”
    The cousin visibly relaxed. “I thought you were never going to ask.” He paused. “You see, I do know about…” He left the sentence unfinished.
    Harry felt himself blushing, and the younger man noticed