Read Online Chance Developments by Alexander McCall Smith - Free Book Online

over to see him as he never made the journey to her house.
    “You could ride over on your bike,” she said. “It’s not all that far, especially on a bicycle. Or you could even walk. I walk over every day, you know. It only takes me forty-five minutes. Or you could ask your father to drive you over in his car. You could do that, you know.”
    “Maybe.”
    She sighed. “We could go on a picnic tomorrow. I could make sandwiches for both of us. And some chicken. I could get some roast chicken legs. We could have them cold. And cake too. We’ve got lots of cake because my mother likes baking and we can’t eat it all.”
    “Maybe.”
    Her frustration showed. “Don’t just say maybe. What if the Prime Minister said maybe to everything? What if they brought some new law for him to sign and he just said
maybe
?”
    “That’s not how it works. He has somebody to sign for him. He can’t sit there all the time signing papers. He’s got plenty of other things to do.”
    She shook her head. “You’re very wrong, Harry. You’re wrong about that—and a whole lot of other things. You still get things wrong.”
    He was silent for a while. Then he said, “Do you think there really are angels? Do you think they have wings like this?”
    He held out the dove’s wing, spreading the feathers.
    “I’m not sure about angels,” she said. “I don’t think they really exist. People talk about them, but if they existed, then surely we would have seen them.”
    “Or they would have found feathers,” he said. “We find eagle feathers, you know. Mr. Thompson found one the other day.”
    She had been confirmed in the Episcopal Church of Scotland, at her mother’s instance; her father had no time for bishops. There had been talk of saints, but nothing had been said about angels, as she far as she could recall. “Yes, you would have thought that there would be feathers. But there aren’t. So, no, I think angels are imaginary—like elves and fairies and so on. Only the weak-minded believe in such nonsense.”
    “And God?”
    She caught her breath. “You shouldn’t ask questions like that.”
    He busied himself with his sketchbook. “Surely we would have seen God by now. They’ve got those big telescopes. Surely we should have seen him.”
    “God is invisible,” she announced. “You can’t see him through a telescope.”
    “But if he’s all powerful—and you know that hymn that says that?
Almighty,
invisible God, la, la, la
…If he were so mighty, then he would be able to let people see him and then they’d behave better and we wouldn’t have had the Great War, would we? God would have stopped it. God would have stopped all those men killing one another. He would have deflected the bullet that went into your father’s leg…”
    He stopped himself. She was glaring at him. “I don’t know about that. And I don’t want to know. My father’s leg has nothing to do with it and I don’t think you should talk about it in that way. He, at least, was in the trenches…” Now it was her turn to feel that she had crossed some invisible line; her mother had told her it was tactless to talk about who went and who stayed behind. “Anyway. I’ve got enough to think of, Harry—you may not have anything to think about, but I’ve got plenty.”
    She rose to her feet. “We’ll have a picnic tomorrow, right? Up by the waterfall?”
    He agreed. He had finished the sketch of the dove and he showed it to her.
    The potentially awkward direction of the theological conversation was forgotten. She studied the shape of the pinions, traced with a transcendent delicacy. “You’re going to be really famous, Harry,” she said.
    “Oh, I don’t know…”
    “Yes, you are. You’re going to be very famous and I’m going to help you. You know that, don’t you? You’re going to be an artist of great distinction.” She liked the sound of the phrase, and repeated it. “An artist of great distinction.”
    He said nothing. He never