Lobster à la Édimbourg

Bruce Anderson, property surveyor, alumnus of Morrison’s Acade - my in Crieff, where the girls voted him, three years in succession, the BestLooking Guy in Perthshire – with virtually no dissent, apart from those few whose hearts he had broken; sole user in Edinburgh of a proprietary clove-scented hair gel; owner of a desirable three-bedroom flat in Abercromby Place in the Georgian New Town; close follower of Scottish rugby; this same Bruce Anderson now stood in his kitchen and dipped his brand new red silica ladle into the lobster bisque he was preparing for his dinner guest.

“Lobster bisque,” he muttered, taking a sip from the ladle. Smiling, he added, “Lobster à la Édimbourg, prescriptiononly.”

It was a private joke, made all the more private by the fact that there was nobody else in the kitchen, or indeed in the flat. The reference was to something said by his university friend, Freddie Carruthers, a dab hand in the kitchen, who used to refer to the dishes he cooked up for various girlfriends as prescription-only aphrodisiacs. Freddie had been a great favourite of the girls, but had fallen into matrimony, as Bruce put it, earlier than any of the others in their immediate student circle. Freddie had married Cholestrola Lupo, a member of a highly-regarded Italian-scottish family, and had soon become the father of three children. He had changed his name to Federico Lupo, and had been set up by the family in a prosperous restaurant business on the Ayrshire coast.

“I swear it was lobster bisque that got me where I am,” Freddie said to Bruce when they met for dinner in the Ubiquitous Chip in Glasgow. “I gave it to Cholestrola and she was like, Wow! Never fails.”

Freddie had passed on the recipe, and Bruce had made it three or four times since then. It had been well-received by those for whom he had made it, although not always with the results that Bruce had anticipated. In every case, though, it seemed to trigger a release of emotion, whether through olfactory resonance or through some undiscoverable hormonal effect. One guest, a young woman whom Bruce had met in the Wally Dug and had then invited back to his flat for dinner, had been moved by the bisque to start talking about her last boyfriend, whom she hoped to recover. For a good half hour Bruce had listened to a long and intimate exposition of her relationship that included detailed discussion of strategies to get him back. The evening came to an end when she broke down in floods of tears and was only calmed by Bruce’s assurances that the former boyfriend was highly likely to grow tired of his new girlfriend.

“That’s what guys are like,” said Bruce. “They’re fickle.”

After that, the romantic possibilities of the evening were more or less destroyed, as was the case with the next guest for whom he made the bisque. She made short work of her first bowl of it and readily accepted a second. It was only towards the end of this second helping that she asked, quite casually, “What do you put in this soup? It’s terrific.”

Bruce grinned. “Actually, it’s not soup, it’s what we call bisque.”

“So, it’s bisque. But what’s in it? Lots of cream, obviously, I love cream. I seriously love cream.”

“It’s lobster. Your actual lobster. You know – those big critters with the claws. You have to watch the claws. My friend, Freddie Carruthers, although he’s Lupo now, he almost lost his middle finger when a lobster got hold of it. No, I’m not making this up: those claws are like giant nut-crackers.”

Bruce’s guest had paled. Her spoon dropped into her bowl.

Bruce noticed. “Sorry. I shouldn’t talk about fingers being crushed. He was all right, as it happens, because the lobster thought better of it, let go of his finger, and went for his nose – missed it, though – fortunately. You wouldn’t want a lobster to get your nose …”

He stopped. The young woman had brought her hands to her mouth.

“Are you all right?” Bruce asked.

She brought her hands down. “I can’t eat lobster,” she said, her voice wavering. “I can’t eat any seafood.”

And with that, she was copiously ill.

Bruce attended to the emergency as best he could, and she recovered after she had divested herself of the bisque. After that, Bruce busied himself in calling a taxi for her to be taken home to rest and drink the substantial quantity of water that she claimed would remove the last trace of lobster from her system.

It was best not to remember these incidents, he decided, and he put them out of his mind as he added the last ingredients of the complicated and time-consuming recipe with its call for Cognac, mirepoix, rice, tarragon, and stocks and pastes that needed to be prepared in advance. As he worked, his mind went to Katie, who would be arriving at seven-thirty, with a view to their sitting down to lobster bisque an hour later.

Bruce had enjoyed his lunch with Katie, and had asked her to dinner that evening. She had hesitated; she had regretted leaving Stuart in the National Portrait Gallery. She was not sure why she had done so, but had decided that it was a momentary revolt against being corralled. That’s what she disliked, she felt: being obliged to do things that she did not want to do simply because that was what a man wanted to do. So when Bruce had suggested lunch, she had, on impulse, accepted his invitation. She was not a chattel. She could do what she wanted.

And then, when he suggested dinner, she had said to herself, I shall say no, but somehow it had come out as yes. This was something to do with the way Bruce looked; that was the only possible explanation. There are some men, she thought, who are irresistible. That’s the only way of putting it. It was his eyes, perhaps. Or his skin, maybe. He was very slightly olive in colour; or not quite, but a bit, and she loved olive. And then there was his hair, which stood up at the front in a sort of wave that went nowhere because it was cut shortish, and he wore something in it, a gel of some sort, that made her remember her grandmother’s cupboards in her house in Ullapool, where you could sit in the front window and watch the ferry going out to the Outer Hebrides.

I have to stop thinking like this, she said to herself, as she made her way to Abercromby Place. I shall tell him that Stuart and I are … well, whatever we are, and he’ll understand, I’m sure. I shall bring this to an end before it’s started.

But then, as she climbed the stairs to Bruce’s flat, she smelled something in the air: lobster bisque, and the effect of lobster bisque is to weaken the resistance. She struggled, but failed, and knew that she was failing.

It was not until she was directly outside the door, though, that she remembered. She had been at Morrison’s Academy and although she was a few years younger than Bruce, she had been there when he had been voted the Best-looking Guy in Perthshire. This was that Bruce Anderson – of course it was! And she had voted for him.

© 2020 Alexander Mccall Smith Available in book form from November as A Promise of Ankles (hbk, £16.99). The Peppermint Tea Chronicles is available now in paperback.