Free Espresso Tales by Alexander McCall Smith

at all. I think that’s a bit extreme. But don’t expect too much change.”
    Pat frowned. Surely people did change. They changed as they matured. She remembered herself at fourteen. She was a different person now. “People grow up, though,” she said. “They change as they grow up. We all do.”
    Domenica waved a hand in the air. “Oh, we all grow up. But once the personality is formed, I don’t think that you get a great deal of change. Bruce is a narcissist, as we’ve all agreed. Do you see him becoming something different? Can you imagine him not looking in mirrors and worrying about his hair? Can you imagine him thinking that people don’t fancy him? I can’t. Not for the moment.” She put her glass down on the table and looked at Pat. “How old is Bruce, by the way?”
    â€œHe’s twenty-five,” said Pat. “Or just twenty-six. Somewhere around there.”
    Domenica looked thoughtful. “Well, that’s rather interesting. Men are slower, you know. They mature rather later than we do. We get there in our early twenties, but they take rather longer than that. Indeed, I believe that there’s a school of psychology that holds that men are not fully responsible until they reach the age of twenty-eight.”
    Pat thought this was rather late. And what did it mean to say that men were not fully responsible until that age? Could they not be blamed for what they did? “Isn’t that a bit late?” she asked. “I thought that we were held responsible from…” From what age were we held responsible? Was it sixteen? Or eighteen? Young people ended up in court, did they not, and were held to account for what they had done? But at what age did all that start?
    Domenica noticed Pat’s surprise. “Twenty-eight does seem a bit late,” she said. “But there’s at least something to it. If you look at the crime figures they seem to bear this out. Young men commit crimes–ones that get noticed–between seventeen and twenty-four, twenty-five. Then they stop.” She thought for a moment and smiled at some recollection. “I knew a fiscal,” she went on. “He spent his time prosecuting young men up in Dunfermline. Day in, day out. The same things. Assault. Theft. So on. And he said that he saw the same people, from the same families, all the time. Then he said something very funny, which I shall always remember. He said that the fiscals saw the same young men regularly between the age of seventeen and twenty-six, and then the next time they saw them was when they were forty-five and they had hit somebody at their daughter’s wedding! What a comment!”
    â€œBut probably true?”
    â€œUndoubtedly true,” agreed Domenica. “On two counts. Weddings can be violent affairs, and everything runs in families. You’ve heard me on genetic determinism before, haven’t you? But that’s another topic. Let’s get back to excuses, and change, and Bruce. If you think that twenty-eight is a bit late for responsibility–true responsibility–to appear, then what would you say to forty?”
    â€œVery late.”
    Domenica laughed. “Yes, maybe. But again, if you ask people to describe how they’ve behaved over the years, you will often find that they say they’ve looked at it very differently, according to the stage of life that they’re at. Here I am, for example, sitting here with all the wisdom of my sixty years–what a thought, sixty!–and I can definitely see how I’ve looked at things differently after forty. I’m less tolerant of bad behaviour, I think, than I used to be. And why do you think that is?”
    Pat shrugged. “You get a bit more set in your ways? You become more judgmental?”
    â€œAnd what is wrong with being judgmental?” Domenica asked indignantly. “It drives me mad to hear people say: