The Dog Who Came in From the Cold

The Dog Who Came in From the Cold

1. What Our Furniture Says About Us  William French, wine merchant, Master of Wine (failed), somewhere in his early fifties (hardly noticeably, particularly in the right light), loyal subscriber to Rural Living (although he lived quite happily in central London), longtime supporter of several good causes (he was a kind man at heart, with a strong sense of fairness), widower, dog-owner, and much else besides; the same William French looked about his flat in Corduroy Mansions, as anybody might survey his or her flat in a moment of self-assessment, of stock­taking.
There was a lot wrong with it, he decided, just as he felt there was a lot that was not quite right with his life in general. Sorting out one’s flat, though, is often easier than sorting out oneself, and there is a great deal to be said for first getting one’s flat in order before attempt­ing the same thing with one’s life. Perhaps there was an adage for this—a pithy Latin expression akin to mens sana in corpore sano. Which made him think . . . Everybody knew that particular expres­sion, of course; everybody, that is, except William’s twenty-eight-­year-old son, Eddie, who had once rendered it within his father’s hearing as “men’s saunas lead to a healthy body.” William had been about to laugh at this ingenious translation, redolent, as it was, of the cod Latin he had found so achingly funny as a twelve-year-old boy: Caesar adsum iam forte, Pompey ad erat. Pompey sic in omnibus, Caesar sic in at. Caesar had some jam for tea, Pompey had a rat . . . and so on. But then he realised that Eddie was serious.

The discovery that Eddie had no knowledge of Latin had depressed him. He

knew that the overwhelming majority of people had no Latin and did not feel the

lack of it. The problem with Eddie, though, was that not only did he not have

Latin, he had virtually nothing else either: no mathematics worthy of the name, no

geogra­phy beyond a knowledge of the location of various London pubs, no

knowledge of biology or any of the other natural sciences, no grasp of history.

When it came to making an inventory of what Eddie knew, there was really very

little to list.

Excerpted from The Dog Who Came in from the Cold by Alexander McCall Smith. Copyright © 2011 by Alexander McCall Smith. Excerpted by permission of Pantheon, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.