What If... a story by Alexander McCall Smith

They chose that week to avoid the period towards the middle of the month when people suddenly remembered their annual office lunches and descended en masse on the restaurants of Edinburgh. This, of course, was a blessing for restaurateurs, accustomed as they were throughout the rest of the year to empty tables at lunchtime – empty tables that all sorts of attractive offers failed to fill.

“It’s the abolition of lunch that’s the problem,” said Tom as the three friends enjoyed a pre-prandial drink at the bar. “The abolition of lunch by the Protestant work culture. In New York, I gather, lunch is now actually illegal.”

Douglas laughed. “Don’t joke about it. That’ll come here. The new Puritanism: no lunch, nothing to drink, no unhealthy foods etcetera etcetera.”

“Don’t use the word etcetera as a substitute for reasoned argument,” said Robert. “You’ve always done that.”

He knew, of course; he knew a great deal about Douglas and Douglas knew a great deal about him, as did Tom about both of them, and they about Tom. They were old friends – flatmates back in their days at the University of Edinburgh, when for three years they had shared a student flat in Marchmont. “The parties!” said Tom, and they smiled, knowing exactly what he meant: the parties, the student squalor, the feeling that the world lay before you – which it did, of course.

Now, twenty years later, life had drawn in; enthusiasm had become caution, optimism had given way to scepticism, risk-taking had slowly transformed itself into risk aversion. They were all married, all had children, and mortgages – etcetera, as Douglas said to express the sheer baggage of life. But if they had these responsibilities, they also had good fortune in the shape of successful careers. Tom was in public relations, and was now a partner in his firm; Douglas was a doctor, and the author, to his immense pride, of three poems published in one of the small poetry magazines; and Robert was an investment manager who had been named in one of the Sunday papers as Scots financial guru of the year. He had been a mathematician at university and put his success down to the ability to hear figures. “They speak to me,” he said.

“Sounds sinister,” said Douglas. “Auditory delusions, if you ask me.”

Robert smiled. “Medicalize it as much as you like,” he retorted. “But it works.”

Now their table was ready and they were seated around it while a waitress brought them water, an unruly fasces of Italian bread sticks, and a small bowl of olive oil into which the bread could be dipped. The conversation at the bar had largely been concerned with catching up; with whose children were doing what, with who had heard from whom, and with who had gone where for their summer holidays. Now there  was a temporary lull in conversation, but not a serious one – being in the company of those you lived with in your early twenties allows for easy talk and for equally easy silence.

Then Tom said: “Do you know that six degrees of separation game. We were at a dinner party the other night and …”

Douglas interrupted him. “A dinner party? Does anybody actually hold dinner parties?”

Tom shrugged. “They used to. Some still do, I think. We don’t.”

Tom said: “As I was saying before we started to talk about changes in social habits – we were at a dinner party the other night …”

“Where?” Douglas asked.

“A client’s place. Out at Lasswade somewhere. Anyway, there were eight of us and somebody started talking about that six degrees of separation thing – about how you can get from one person to virtually anybody in the world within six links. We tried it.”

“And?”

Tom laughed. “It worked. Every time. Me to the Pope – four steps. Ella to the Reverend Ian Paisley – two steps.”

“The President of Nigeria?” asked Douglas.

Tom thought for a moment. “Okay. Me to one of my clients who’s on the board of the Royal Africa Society. One step. Then him to the Secretary-General of the Commonwealth – I know he knows her because my client happened to mention it to me when we were discussing the Commonwealth Games. Two steps. Secretary-General of the Commonwealth to the President of Nigeria – she must know him because she meets all these Commonwealth heads of state. Three steps.” He looked triumphant. “See?”

“You’re very well connected,” mocked Robert. “But I find that a rather pointless game.”

Tom looked at him sideways. “Aren’t all games pointless? Have you ever worked out the point of golf?”

“To get the ball into the hole,” said Robert drily. “Or at least that’s what it appears to be.”

Tom reached for a bread-stick. “What if is much more interesting,” he said. “It’s not exactly a game, of course – more a speculation.”

Douglas passed him the olive oil. “About?”

“About what would have happened if a particular event had not happened, or had gone the other way.”

They waited for further explanation. The waitress returned. “If youses have made up your minds, I’ll take your order.”

“Two minutes,” said Douglas, and then, when she had gone, he said, “She’s under stress.”

“I’m not surprised,” said Tom. “Look over there.”

They looked at the party seated at a table near the door. Eight people had arrived, donned paper hats, and were beginning to raise their voices.

“I don’t know why,” said Douglas, “but I find the sight of people in paper hats really sad. It just looks sad.”

For a moment, they were all silent, reflecting, perhaps, on the sadness of lunch in general. Then Tom continued. “Let’s choose. Then I’ll say something more about What If.”

‘A ll right,” said Tom. “Think about it: think about some event in your life that changed everything. And think about how random that event was.”

“Meeting Ella,” said Robert. “If I hadn’t gone to that party with you …” He turned to Douglas. “Remember it? It was in that flat your sister lived in – remember? That place in Stockbridge. You said that your sister was having a party and I could come and I almost said no – almost. It was just before finals and I had a whole stack of work but then you said something about how parties cleared the mind before an exam …”

“Did I? I don’t remember it.”

“Well, you did, and so I went and there was that chap there who had trousers with pictures of Mickey Mouse on them and your sister thought he was terrific and kept pointing out his trousers …”

“Maybe. She had very bad taste. Always did.”

“Anyway,” Robert continued, “and that’s where I met Ella and asked her to come out to the pub the next day and she said she would.”

“And now you have three children etcetera,” said Douglas.

Robert nodded. “But what if I hadn’t decided to go to that particular party?”

“Exactly,” said Tom. ‘That’s the point. A small, unimportant decision can change the whole course of your life. I’ll give you another example. There’s this chap I know who works for one of the oil companies. He’s an engineer of some sort. Well, he told me that if he hadn’t picked up a newspaper somebody had left on the bus and started to read it his life would have been completely different.” He paused. “There was an ad in it, in the employment section, offering jobs to new graduates in engineering. The jobs were based in Jakarta, and the conditions were good. He applied, and went.”

They waited. “And?” asked Douglas.

“And when he was out there he met this Indonesian woman and married her. They went off on honeymoon to Western Australia – to Perth – because it’s pretty close to Indonesia and they wanted to see it. He went swimming off a beach down the coast and … well, a shark ate his leg. You wouldn’t know these days, because he’s got an artificial leg and walks really well on it. He plays golf at my club. But that all came from picking up the paper. If the person who had been reading the paper had taken it with him, then he wouldn’t have seen the ad and, well, everything would have been different.”

Douglas was not impressed. “It’s not surprising,” he said. “Everything in our lives is a matter of chance.”

“Maybe,” said Tom. “But What If becomes interesting if you apply it to major historical events.”

Robert frowned. “Such as ‘what if Hitler had died at birth?’ That sort of thing.”

“Yes,” said Tom. “That’s an example. But there are much less well-known ones. You mention Hitler, what about Churchill? When he was in the United States, well before the War, he was almost run over. Somebody reached out to stop him from stepping out in front of a car. If he had been run over and killed, then it’s perfectly possible that London would have folded up in the face of the Berlin and …”

Robert shook his head. “The Great Man theory of history? Historians don’t take that seriously, you know. Somebody else …”

“Maybe,” said Tom. “But I still think one person can make all the difference.”

Douglas had been thinking. “Do you know what Chairman Mao said? I read it somewhere. He was asked what would have happened had it been Krushchev who was shot rather than Kennedy. And you know what his answer was? He said: One thing’s certain – Mrs Krushchev wouldn’t have married Aristotle Onassis.”

Tom and Robert laughed. Then Tom continued: “Of course we would have been having this conversation in Spanish if the wind had blown in a different direction back in fifteen-whenever-it-was. The Spanish Armada was at a disadvantage, as it was – if the wind had been in their favour they might have won and taken England. Scotland would have been gobbled up in due course.”

“Such a small thing,” mused Douglas. “The wind.”

“Human affairs themselves are small things,” said Tom.

Douglas looked up at the ceiling. “As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods …”

Tom nodded. “Exactly. And yet we convince ourselves that we matter.”

“Which we do,” said Robert. “We do matter.”

“To ourselves,” Tom retorted.

Robert persisted. “That’s good enough. Mattering makes sense within a defined narrow context. Of course we don’t matter in terms of … in terms of infinite space, or whatever you want to call it. But that’s not the point, is it?”

“Were we happier when we thought the universe revolved around us?” asked Tom.

Douglas thought that some people still believed that. He had been approached that morning by a young man in the street who had invited him to hear a story about ancient Egyptians and gold plates. “What do you say in such circumstances?” he asked. “They’re so evidently sincere.”

“You decline.”

“And they look at you and they’re clearly thinking you’ve got a closed mind.”

The main course arrived. The waitress asked, “You gents enjoying yourselves?”

“We are,” said Tom. “We’ve been discussing what the world would have been like if some things hadn’t happened.”

The waitress rolled her eyes upwards. “Don’t even go there,” she said.

A t the end of the lunch, after coffee and soggy petit-fours, Tom looked at his watch and announced that he had to get over to Glasgow. “The Prime Minister’s making a statement about that referendum of his,” he said.

“In Parliament?” asked Douglas. “In Kelvinside?”

Tom shook his head. “No. A speech at a dinner for business people. I’m going with one of the clients. It’s going to be important.”

Robert looked thoughtful. “What sort of Prime Minister is he going to be, do you think?”

“Sheridan? Interesting, I think. But he’ll have a tough time, I think. After all, he’s the first Conservative prime minister in Scotland for quite some time.”

“We’ll see,” said Douglas. “So this referendum is going to go ahead? They’re going to ask us whether we want to enter into a union with England? Three hundred years after that last close shave.”

Tom nodded. “So it seems. It’s going to be in 2014 some time, apparently.”

“Does he think he’ll get the result he wants?” asked Douglas.

“Maybe,” said Tom. “Maybe not.”

They paid and went outside. It was a crisp winter’s afternoon. The sky that morning had been bright and cloudless, but now the light was beginning to fade into a soft, attenuated blue. Our days are short, thought Douglas, who alone of the three, read poetry and was sensitive to beauty. Our days are short etcetera.

They shook hands.

“What if we hadn’t shared a flat together all those years ago?” said Tom. “I suppose we wouldn’t be having this lunch.”

“We wouldn’t,” said Robert.

Douglas sighed. “What did that waitress say?” he asked.

“Don’t go there.”

“Yes. Don’t.”

They began to walk off in their different directions. Tom looked back once, on impulse, to see the familiar figures of his friends, about to merge with the other people on the pavement, the crowds of Christmas shoppers. He felt a momentary pang and thought of how life might be without those friends one already had, those whom one liked, or loved, for better or for worse – as the wording of the marriage service had it. Then he turned back and began to make his way to Stevenson Station, and the train that awaited him there.

• Alexander McCall Smith is the author of 44 Scotland Street. His latest novel, Trains and Lovers: The Heart’s Journey (Polygon, £9.99) is available now. Scotsman readers can buy it for the special price of £7.99 plus free p&p in the UK. Just call 0845 370 0067 (office hours) and quote reference SMTL. Allow 3-5 working days for delivery.