He had decided to eat the breakfast that Jonathan would have eaten, his double having helpfully left a small red Moleskine notebook in which he had written an account of his routines. “I have a bowl of muesli,” he had written. “No sugar added type. Then a boiled egg and a slice of toast. I don’t take milk in my coffee at breakfast, but I do during the day.”
Bruce had found it strangely fascinating reading. “The Scotsman gets delivered before I leave for work,” the notes had continued. “I do the Sudoku and I read Allan Massie and George Kerevan, if they’re in. They’ve got it totally sussed. I look at the sports pages and the car ads (I love car ads!). Then I walk to work along Queen Street (south side). When I get to the office I go straight to my desk. I always say hello to the receptionist, Jenny, and ask her about her boyfriend, who’s in Saughton Prison but who’s due out in about six months. He’s a forger – quite a good one, apparently.
“My office is the second door along the corridor. It’s got my name on it, so you can’t go wrong. I go in, sit down, and look at the mail, which the secretaries will have opened and put in the in-tray. The letters I get are enquiries about our firm, acting for people. I look at them and arrange appointments to see them to discuss what we can do. You will see that there’s a big lever-arch file on the shelf behind my chair – that has a whole stack of papers in it that describe what the firm can offer. Read through that, and then you can tell any of the prospective clients what we can do. It’s totally easy. Totally.
“My immediate boss – or shall I say, your immediate boss – is Bill Fleming. You have to go and see him once a day – usually just after eleven – to tell him what enquiries have come in. You find out a bit about the firms and he will tell you anything he knows about them. Then you make contact with them, give them our literature, and arrange for them to come in and see Bill, or for him to go and see them. That’s my job. The other bit of it is helping a woman called Andrea arrange events. I don’t like her very much as she’s homophobic, I think. But she may come in and ask you to do something about some publicity event she’s organising. A product launch maybe. Just do what she says and she’ll keep out of your hair.
“Finally, there are three other people there who are about my level. They’re great. They share a large office at the back. Freddie does accounts, Grant does press liaison, and Janine is in charge of all office administration. Janine’s secretly in love with Freddie, but he doesn’t reciprocate. Grant likes Janine, but there’s no chemistry as far as she’s concerned. Sad, but they’re a really nice group. You (i.e. me) like them and they like you (i.e. me).
“I leave the office at six on the dot and come home. Sometimes I go to the Blue Moon or Habana. You might not. Each to his own! Then I make a meal or eat out. I like Italian but can’t stand Chinese food. I think I’m allergic to monosodium glutamate or noodles, or both. So if you tell anybody you’re going to a Chinese restaurant they’ll smell a rat. Mind you, if you go to some restaurants you’ll be eating a rat! Only joking.”
Bruce closed the notebook, and smiled. He was beginning to like Jonathan now that he was in his shoes, metaphorically and otherwise. He might be a Svengali, but he was an amusing one, as Svengalis often are.
56. The Hazards of Industrial Espionage
Bruce made his way along Queen Street, following the route identified by Jonathan as his morning walk to work. His double’s shoes were comfortable, as were his clothes, which were less formal than those that Bruce normally wore to the office. When this was over, Bruce thought that he might perhaps buy clothes like this – comfortable navy chinos with a matching, loose-fitting jacket and open-neck sea-island cotton shirt – and wear them rather than the suit he habitually donned. The problem, though, was that everybody else at his firm, or at least all the men, dressed in the same dark suit: it was a uniform, really, although never described as such. There was no reason why he should not dress more casually, and more comfortably, but such attire would be bound to draw comments from the senior partner, who took a close interest in such things. These comments would be all about client expectations and confidence: “Clients simply won’t trust chinos, Bruce.” But what if clients wear chinos themselves? People do, you know; even clients. “The point stands.”
At the junction of Queen Street and North Charlotte Street, where the road from Charlotte Square dips down what would once have been a brae, a sloping meadow, somebody nodded to Bruce. He did not see the passerby properly, as he had half-turned his head to look out for cars turning at the traffic lights, and then the figure was gone; but he had nodded. Bruce had acknowledged the greeting with a nod in return, and then thought, Was that for me, or for Jonathan? Since he rarely walked that way – and certainly not at that hour – it must have been for Jonathan. And that realisation underlined the more worrying thought that his test had now begun in earnest. This, he imagined, was how a wartime spy must feel – dropped into enemy territory, so to speak, and on his guard against any slip of the tongue, any display of ignorance, even any grammatical error that would reveal that he was not who he claimed to be. Of course the spy would face the firing squad if exposed, and no such threat existed here … and yet, surely there would be some sort of consequence. Was it a criminal offence to impersonate another person? The answer to that must depend on whether one obtained any benefit from the impersonation. That would be fraud, Bruce assumed. He was obtaining nothing through this … this ridiculous exercise, other than a cup of office tea, perhaps, and access to office information.
But that worried him. What if he were to be exposed as an impostor and accused of industrial espionage? Were there virtual firing squads for industrial spies? Bruce smiled at the thought, in spite of his nervousness. He had read somewhere that there were people engaged in industrial espionage who went into rival supermarkets in order to note down the prices and the special offers. What if one of those intelligence gatherers were to be detained and bundled round to the parking lot at the back where a firing squad of cashiers and shelf-packers was lined up, ready to deal with the spy? The weapons, of course, would be those squeezy cleaning products that shot out a jet of window-cleaning liquid or something like that. Ready, aim, squeeze!
The absurd fantasy kept his mind off his situation until he had reached Queensferry Street. Now he was within yards of the office of Lothian Public Relations; he looked up at the windows of the Georgian building, at the neat panes of glass within their white astragals – one of those rooms was Jonathan’s office, with its name on the door and its in-tray and its shelf with the lever-arch file of information.
Bruce took a deep breath and stared at the doorway. There was a large brass plate fixed across its central panel: Lothian Public Relations Ltd. He tried to open the door, but it did not budge. He pushed again, with the same result. Then he noticed the intercom, tucked neatly away to the side. The legend above a small silver button announced: Reception: please push.
Bruce pressed the button. At first nothing happened, and then a female voice came out of a small speaker built into the plastic intercom box.
“Yes. Who is it?”
“Bruce.”
He spoke without thinking, but realised immediately what he had said. He opened his mouth to correct himself, but the receptionist was already saying something. “Bruce who?”
Bruce forced a laugh. “Fooled you! Jonathan.”
There was a slight pause. Then the tinny voice replied, “Very funny! So we’re Billy Connolly this morning.”
A buzzer sounded and the door moved slightly inwards. Bruce pushed it open and went inside. Now he was in a shared entrance hall at the bottom of a stone staircase. His surveyor’s eye, out of ingrained habit, ran over the décor. It was a well-maintained hall, and the stone treads of the stairs had been recently built up using matching stone composite. Nice.
He began to climb the stairs. On the first floor there was a landing exactly as described by Jonathan, and off this a door, once again marked with the name of the firm. This was unlocked.
Bruce went inside. There was the reception desk, and there was the young woman who must be Jenny. She was taking something out of a drawer and looked up to see him. She smiled.
“So,” she said. “You’re late.”
Bruce was momentarily taken aback, but recovered quickly. “Traffic,” he said.
“I don’t see why traffic should hold you up when you’re walking,” she said.
He could tell that she was not from Edinburgh; somewhere further west, he thought, because there was the lilt of Glasgow there, that leaning into the final syllable as if its presence were somehow to be resented.
“You have to wait much longer to cross the road if there are lots of cars,” he said. He decided to make a joke of it. “Even you must know that, Jenny.”
She stared at him. “Jenny? Why did you call me Jenny?”
Bruce froze. He had been in the office precisely one minute and already he had made a terrible mistake. Jonathan had said that she was called Jenny, had he not?
He forced himself to respond. “Just a joke.”
“Very funny,” she said, sarcastically. “So you’re Bruce, and I’m Jenny. Different names day, is that it? Like own clothes day, but different?”
Bruce gave a hollow laugh. “Why not? Anyway, where’s Jenny?”
“She’s helping Alice back there.” She nodded towards the back of the office. “And Freddie wants to see you. He’s got to go over to Falkirk at ten, and so you’d better see him before then.” She paused. “He’s got this great big boil on the back of his neck. He showed it to me. It’s gross – really gross. And it’s going to burst soon, I think. So don’t stand behind him.”
Bruce nodded, and began to make his way down the corridor. Offices were all the same.
People talk about traffic and boils and things like that. All the same.
57. The Tricks of the Documentary Trade
Bo looked at his watch.
“What happens now?” he asked.
From behind his desk, where he had finished examining the somewhat measly harvest of letters the morning post had yielded, Matthew looked back at the Danish filmmaker. Bo had trained his camera on Matthew’s hands while he opened the mail, moving to his eyes while he read the contents, and then to the letters themselves – such as they were – as they lay on the desk before him. Then he had asked Matthew to pretend to read them again so that he could record the scene from a different angle, and after that he had suggested a shot showing Matthew looking out of the window, one of the letters in his hand, as if ruminating on the contents.
“Think of your reply,” he said. “Think of the wording. Think of the … the subtleties.”
Matthew had frowned. “But there aren’t any,” he said. “The answer to the question in this letter is simply no. They ask if I have any paintings by Anne Redpath in stock, and I don’t. So there are no subtleties to be thought about.”
Bo stared at him. “But surely there could be,” he said. “If that letter said something different, then you might have to think quite intensely about what to say.”
“But it doesn’t,” says Matthew.
“People in Denmark won’t know that!” exclaimed Bo. “They won’t see what’s written in the letter.”
Matthew looked puzzled. “But I thought this was a documentary,” he said. “I thought that you were recording my life as it happens. Fly-on-the-wall stuff. I don’t want to mislead the whole of Denmark.”
“It is,” said Bo. “Fly-on-the-wall. Exactly!”
“Then surely it should only show what really happens,” Matthew said.
Bo laid his camera down on the catalogue table and walked towards the window. When he addressed Matthew, he did not talk to him directly, but spoke as if explaining something to an audience gathered on the pavement outside.
“Have you seen many documentaries?”
Matthew’s gaze followed Bo’s. Beyond the plate-glass window, light rain fell on the street, unexpected, a blip in an otherwise fine day. The rain, blown sideways by a puff of wind, touched the glass softly, ran in tiny rivulets downwards, lost momentum, welled.
Matthew thought. Had he seen many documentary films? How many was many? He had recently seen a film about a man who swam with crocodiles, which had struck him as a doubtful thing to do. And then there had been one about sumo wrestling that he had found strangely fascinating. “I’ve seen a few,” he said. “There was a film about sumo wrestling and …”
Bo seemed not to have heard him. “You see, you have to realise that not everything in a documentary happened in the way it claims to have happened. You can’t make films that way.”
Outside, the imaginary audience of passersby, now gathered to listen to Bo, looked at one another and then opened their mouths to protest.
“No,” Bo continued. “You see, the basic message a documentary conveys needs to be accurate – nobody disputes that – but in trying to put this message across it is usually necessary to stage things a bit. That’s all – just a bit of staging.”
The imaginary audience looked distinctly disapproving. We don’t expect to hear this sort of thing when walking down Dundas Street …
Matthew gave voice to their disapproval. “I’m surprised,” he began. “I thought that …”
Again he was interrupted by Bo. “Let me give you an example. You may have seen in the newspapers recently that a certain politician shot a tiger with a tranquillising dart. The news footage of this event suggested that the tiger he tranquillised was dangerous and that the event took place in the wild – in fact it was a very tame one from a zoo.”
“Oh.”
Bo now turned away from his outside audience and addressed Matthew once again. “Yes. I think that particular leader likes to portray himself as a bit of a strongman. And there have been others before him who have done exactly the same. Mussolini once astonished the Italian public by going into the lions’ den at Rome Zoo. It was later revealed that the lions had had their teeth taken out and had been given a heavy meal of macaroni. Then he was filmed courageously flying a biplane: in fact the real pilot was crouched down so that he couldn’t be seen at the controls. And then there are those polar bears.”
Matthew had heard about controversial filming of polar bears. “Oh, them. Weren’t they in a zoo rather than on ice floes?”
“Yes,” said Bo. “And when it came to filming the tiny, new-born polar bear, it was actually in a producer’s ice-box.” He paused. “I have never found myself filming in my own fridge.”
Matthew laughed. “All right, I’ll read the letter and pretend to think.”
He picked up the letter and read it again before looking out of the window in what he hoped was a thoughtful manner. Bo watched him.
“I’m not sure, Matthew; I’m just not sure. You see, the people in Denmark like long, boring sequences in their films – that is what reality is for us – but I’m not sure if this is going to work.”
Matthew felt a sudden pang of regret. Was Bo suggesting that his life was just not interesting enough to be a good subject for a documentary film? Was that the necessary inference?
Bo was now consulting his watch. “You said that you go over to a coffee bar at about this time. Could we do that instead?
Matthew rose to his feet. “Yes, that should be fine.”
“I’ll film you crossing the street,” said Bo. “And then I can film you drinking your coffee. The people in Denmark will be very interested in that.”
Matthew was not so sure. I’m actually rather boring, he thought. That’s the problem.
“Perhaps you can film Big Lou,” he said. “You could film Big Lou making my coffee.”
At the mention of Big Lou’s name, Bo perked up. “Who is this Big Lou person?” he asked.
“She comes from Arbroath,” said Matthew. “She is more representative of the real Scotland than I am.”
“Ah,” said Bo. “That’s what we need. Arbroath. The real Scotland. That’s what people in Denmark want – believe
me, that’s what they want.”
58. Big Lou Remembers MacDiarmid
There was nobody else in Big Lou’s cafe when Matthew and Bo came in. Big Lou watched in astonishment as Matthew ushered in Bo, who had his large video camera on his shoulder, the lens panning out to embrace a shot of the entire cafe. Big Lou’s astonishment was matched by Matthew’s embarrassment as he signalled to Lou that she should try to ignore what was happening. She took only a moment or two to pick up this message, quickly returning to what she had been doing when the two of them had entered – reading the book propped up on her counter. It was quiet time in the cafe – not a single other customer was present – and Big Lou, a voracious reader, usually took the opportunity such spells presented to dip into whatever book she was immersed in at the time.
“Ah,” said Matthew, trying his best to sound casual. “I see you’re reading, Big Lou.”
Big Lou looked up from her book, glancing briefly at the camera. “Aye, well, that’s what it looks like, I’d say.”
“Interesting,” said Matthew stiffly. “What book is it, Lou?”
The camera lens whirred as it changed focus.
“The Scots Kitchen,” said Lou, holding up the book for him to see. “Marian McNeill. You’ll not know it, Matthew.”
Matthew frowned. He resented it when Big Lou implied – as she often did – that there were gaps in his knowledge, and he found that he particularly resented that such imputation should be made on film.
“As it happens,” he said, “I know all about that. I’ve seen The Book of Breakfasts. She wrote that, didn’t she?”
Big Lou shrugged. “Maybe.”