Chapter 6 of Alexander Mccall Smith’s latest series
Big Lou had been unsettled by an article in the business section of The Scotsman newspaper. “Any business that is not going forwards,” the writer of this article warned, “is going backwards. That’s a law of business physics. If you don’t go forwards, you go backwards.”
These two sentences had made her stop and frown. It was a proposition that she had heard time and time again: a business had to expand if it was to succeed; you could never stand still; you had to grow. It was essentially the same advice, however it was dressed up: here it was being presented as an immutable law, of the order of the laws of gravity, or of Boyle’s law …
Boyle’s law … in the same way in which Proust’s madeleine cake took him back to those mornings on which he went to say good-day to his Aunt Léonie in her Combray bedroom, the thought of Boyle’s law triggered memories in Big Lou’s mind of her classroom at Arbroath Academy. That was where she had learned physics, taught to her by Mr Donaldson, who seemed so attached to Boyle’s law, while outside the sun was on the grass and the sky was filled with light, and that Gordon Thompson, who had smiled at her at assembly – he had definitely smiled, and she was absolutely certain that the smile had been directed at her – that Gordon Thompson she now spotted walking between classroom blocks and he was carrying a pile of books for somebody, presumably one of the teachers … That Gordon Thompson, whose uncle had a fishing boat in Stonehaven and who had once said to her that he liked tall girls and Big Lou must be the tallest girl he knew. And there, on the board, chalked up by Mr Donaldson, who always seemed so sad about something or other – perhaps it was physics itself, the sheer inevitability of it, that made him feel that way – there on the board was Boyle’s law reduced to a few letters: P1V1 = P2V2. Propositions like that were so firm and, in a curious way, ultimately so reassuring: the world may be in a state of crisis, established orders might be crumbling; the country might be divided against itself, but P1V1 still equalled P2V2. That would never change.
The image of Mr Donaldson faded, as did that of Gordon Thompson, whom she had not seen since, eight years earlier, she had driven past him in Arbroath High Street and he had looked at her and then quickly looked away, as if embarrassed by something. She had wondered about that and decided that it must have been shame; she had noticed the same thing with a number of her old schoolfriends who had stayed in the area. If you had gone elsewhere, and then come back, they seemed apologetic about their continued presence, as if by staying in the place they had grown up they had somehow failed. People who went off to Edinburgh or London were adventurous – they showed ambition, they were prepared to swim in a larger pond. People who stayed in Arbroath were stickin-the-muds, people who could not face the competition they would encounter in one of the cities. That was the feeling, anyway – that was the way some people thought about it. Of course, it was not true: it was harder, Big Lou, thought to find a job in a small place; there were plenty of jobs in Edinburgh or Glasgow, and you could always find something if you made a minimal effort. It was not so easy in the country; you had to be prepared to do anything and you had to be ready to hold several part-time jobs at the same time. In the city you could reinvent yourself; in the country you had to get along with who you already were, because everybody knew just who that was.
Big Lou had got away from Arbroath. She had given up the life she led on the family farm, Snell Mains, and gone up to Aberdeen to work in the Granite Nursing Home. A legacy from one of her charges there had allowed her to go to Edinburgh and buy the former bookshop that became her coffee bar. She had bought the shop’s entire stock of second-hand books too, and had been reading her way through those since their acquisition. She wondered what Gordon Thompson would have made of that. He was a keen reader, she recalled, and was always getting into trouble with the school library for borrowing more books than he could read, and then taking too long to return them. She wondered whether he was still a keen reader and, if they were to meet again, whether they would find that they shared tastes in literature. They had read Lewis Grassic Gibbon at school because it was a novel of their place, their surroundings, and now she remembered what Gordon Thompson had said about it when they discussed it in the classroom. He had said, “I feel sorry for those people”. She had been unsure what he meant. Was it because of the war, or the hardship of their lives, or because they were trapped in their small corner of rural Scotland where nothing would ever change? Would anybody ever feel sorry for her – stuck in her coffee bar day after day, seeing the same people, talking to them about the same things and getting the same views expressed back to her?
Was that what life entailed: not doing very much, and doing it every day, in the same place, following the same procedures and rules until you were told you were no longer needed? Big Lou sighed, and turned her attention back to the issue of business expansion. According to conventional wisdom, the fact that her coffee shop was not going forwards meant that it was condemned to go backwards. And if things went backwards, they would undoubtedly contract, and possibly collapse altogether.
Big Lou sighed again. She did not think that bald proposition about the need for expansion applied to her own business. She would ask Matthew about that, though, because he had a good understanding of business and knew how to read a balance sheet. Matthew was due to come in later that day and she could ask him then. He would be bound to know, as he read the business pages more assiduously than she did. He would tell her, and would settle this dispute about expansion. She hoped that he would say, “Lou – there’s no need for a small business like yours to expand.” But she feared he might shake his head and repeat the verdict of so many accountants and finance managers. He might well say, “Lou, you simply have to accept that the world has changed and that there’s less room for small coffee bars like yours.”
If she said that – and it was a possibility – Big Lou would stand up for herself. She had learned to look after herself, a long time ago, in the playground. She could do it again.
Was that what life entailed: not doing very much, and doing it every day, in the same place, following the same procedures and rules until you were told you were no longer needed?