The Bertie Project

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “Nervous?” the interrogator would say, but half-jokingly.

  “Why should I be nervous? I have nothing to hide.” Spoken by one, of course, who had everything to hide…

  “Why were you in Great King Street when you said you would be at the office? Great King Street is not exactly on the way from Victoria Quay.”

  He would look about furtively, and she would nod to a tough-looking assistant whose fists, he had noticed, were clenching; a woman, not a man, of course, because this was woman’s business, this exposing of the meretricious doings of men.

  “Were you by any chance going to see somebody, Stuart? You don’t mind if I call you Stuart, do you—after all, we’ve been married for years…”

  He felt his neck becoming warm, and he loosened his collar. This was absurd, and he would make a conscious effort to control these fanciful, unsettling thoughts. There was no possibility of his being seen by Irene, or by anybody for that matter. He might as well be in Shanghai or…

  “Stuart…well, well, good evening. And what brings you here?”

  He looked up sharply. It was Angus Lordie, who had walked round the corner from Howe Street, with his dog, Cyril, panting on his lead. Cyril liked Stuart, who had, from the canine point of view, a particularly attractive smell, and he jumped up appreciatively to lick Stuart’s hands.

  “Down, Cyril!” commanded Angus, and the dog obeyed, sitting quietly at Stuart’s feet, looking up at him with undisguised olfactory adoration.

  “Good dog,” muttered Stuart, and then, to Angus, “Just taking a walk. It’s such a nice evening.” And that, he thought, was not a lie either. He was taking a walk, even if he had a clear destination in mind.

  Now he remembered that Angus had just been discharged from hospital after his defenestration.

  “I’m so glad to see you back on your feet,” he said. “After what happened. It must have been a terrible shock.”

  Angus smiled. “The actual process happened very quickly,” he said. “One moment I was standing at the window, trying to get it open, and the next…well, I was upside down, and then I was vaguely conscious of the tree and of being manipulated. Then I was in the Infirmary.”

  “Where they looked after you well?”

  Angus nodded. “Extremely well, apart from an initial shock. The nurse called me sweetheart. I’d never met her before and there I was, more or less out for the count, and she called me sweetheart.”

  “She was probably trying to be friendly—trying to reassure you.”

  “Perhaps. But do you think that in a formal setting like that—nurse and patient, after all—terms like that shouldn’t be used?”

  Stuart shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know…Sweetheart is like darling, I suppose, or love. That’s what people call one another. Or pal, if you’re addressing a man. Or Jim. One of the security guards down at the office calls me Jim—it’s a sort of honorific here, don’t you think?”

  Angus wondered whether nurses should call patients Jim. “This won’t hurt, Jim, I’m just going to take a wee blood sample.” To which the patient might reply, “Oh dinnae bother about that, hen”—in the case of a female nurse, or, in the case of a male nurse, “You go right ahead, pal.” He had always liked the term of address hen, common between women in Scotland but becoming less so. There was something reassuring about it—an assumption of comfortable intimacy, the equivalent of the English term ducks or ducky. But this was not the point: the point was that the state—in the shape of a nurse or doctor—should not address you as a sweetheart; it just shouldn’t. What was wrong with sir, or madam? Those terms indicated respect, and surely the state—or its health service in this case—should respect those for whom it cared, even if they were vulnerable, or confused, or, as in his case, recently defenestrated. But perhaps that was an old-fashioned view.

  Stuart looked at his watch. “I must dash,” he said. “I have to see somebody.”

  It slipped out, but Angus, of course, was not to know. Or so Stuart thought, at least for a second or two; he reckoned without Nicola’s having told Domenica and Domenica’s having passed the information on to Angus. So he knew, and his expression showed he knew. “Of course,” he said, and smiled—a smile of patent disbelief. And Stuart, noticing this, knew that his secret was no secret, and his heart sank, as does the heart of anybody whose fond illusions are destroyed before his eyes.

  A Cry of Freedom and Defiance

  Stuart almost turned back, but did not. As Angus said goodbye and continued his walk, Cyril glanced over his shoulder and gave Stuart one of those canine glances into which one might read either nothing or everything. Looking into the eyes of an animal may be like looking into a mirror: one usually sees nothing but the returned stare; or it may, for a brief and wonderful moment, be like looking into the soul of the world. The eye of the animal is nature; is the world itself, stripped of the human meaning with which we clutter everything around us. Pure being. Simplicity. Acceptance.

  Stuart was ready for reproach. He had realised that Angus had sensed—though heaven knew how that had happened—that he was engaged in a clandestine errand. Perhaps it was the guilt that he felt; perhaps that shone out of him—if guilt can shine. Of course the light that guilt generates is a low one; it casts a weak beam, one that requires that we look hard to see its features; whereas confidence and self-satisfaction glow with bright, unambiguous light.

  Cyril had looked at him and, in so far as a dog might smile, he had done just that. And as he did so, the sun had caught his gold tooth—that rare attribute possessed by no other dog in Scotland—a gold tooth implanted one memorable evening by a dentist in the Scottish Arts Club after a convivial dinner. Cyril’s tooth had broken and he was in some discomfort, and the dentist, who happened to have his emergency repair kit in the downstairs cloakroom, had fashioned the tooth from a small brooch donated there and then by one of the party. That gold tooth now sent a small flash of reflected sunlight back to Stuart, and it was the signal that he needed.

  I shall not turn back. I shall not go home to the servitude imposed upon me.

  Servitude, he realised even as he mentally uttered it, was too strong a word for his circumstances. There was real servitude in the world—it was still the lot of countless millions—and it should not be cheapened by those whose condition was infinitely better than theirs. No, he was not in servitude, but his position was still one of…of what? Of restriction? Of humiliation?

  Perhaps that was it. It was humiliating to be disagreed with on almost everything. It was particularly humiliating to be told what to think; to be told that everything you said—or almost everything—was somehow wrong—an inadmissible view that was somehow inferior to the set of opinions held by Irene. That set of opinions had an imprimatur from some body, some grand council as it were, of the enlightened. These were the people who told other people what they might think and say. These were the people who told you what words you could use, what opinions you could express, what views you might form of the world about you. And if you deviated from this imposed consensus, then you were roundly condemned, ostracised, denied a hearing. How subtly and with such stealth did freedom of speech drain away.

  That was what Irene stood for. She stood for intolerance and domination. She stood for those people—those nameless people, who would dictate to others. She was a tyrant, just as all those people who crushed others into silence were tyrants.

  And then a terrible realisation dawned on Stuart. It came to him naturally, perhaps even inevitably, once he had dared to entertain those first thoughts of rebellion. He was married to a fascist.

  He felt immediately ashamed. He could not think that, even if the word came to him unannounced, unsought-out. But it was true: Irene was a fascist. She wanted so many of the things that fascists wanted—the same powerful state, the same unanimity of opinion and purpose, the same imposition of ideology, the same suppression of free debate that those grubby bullies wanted. There was little difference when you were on the receiving en
d as to whether such hectoring and oppression came from left or right. Herbert Marcuse, who preached the silencing of those who disagreed with his agenda, was a name that crossed Irene’s lips with approval. What company did Marcuse keep?

  He heard a strange sound. He knew it was not there, not in the real world that was the corner of Howe Street and St. Vincent Street on this innocent Edinburgh evening; it was there somewhere in his mind. It was a rushing sound—the sound of a waterfall or a wind. It came upon him like some divine and benign tinnitus, and for a few moments obliterated much of the other evidence of his senses. It consumed him, and strengthened him. It clothed him with resolve.

  Why, he thought, should I accept it? Why should I sit there and listen to her going on? Why should I let her push my son around, making him the receptacle of her views, her prejudices, her enthusiasms? All that psychotherapy, that yoga, that Italian conversazione…all of that being forced down the throat of a little boy who really wants to go fishing, to own a Swiss Army penknife, to take the train to Glasgow. Glasgow! In Bertie’s mind Glasgow was some sort of promised land, a place where freedom existed; a place free of psychotherapy and Italian conversazione; a place where every boy, or almost every boy, possessed a Swiss Army penknife. It was the shining city upon the hill that was denied him, but he would take Bertie to live there, in a metaphorical sense, of course, although there could even be real trips to Glasgow on the Queen Street train, father and son together, going to Glasgow just because they felt like it. And Bertie could bring that little friend of his, Ranald Braveheart Macpherson, that rather wistful little boy with his spindly legs, but who seemed so loyal and appreciative. The three of them could go to Glasgow for the afternoon and eat unhealthy food before returning to Edinburgh.

  But that was not the immediate issue. The immediate issue was whether or not to walk fifty yards or so up Howe Street and ring a particular doorbell that would sound in a particular flat. He hesitated for a further minute or so, and then made his decision. The pressing of that bell would be an act of resistance, a cry—or perhaps a ring—of freedom and defiance.

  It was the bell of the young woman whom Stuart had met in Henderson’s Salad Bar when he had spilled his soup and she had offered him a handkerchief; a young woman with whom, in the space of less than four minutes, he had fallen completely in love.

  Hipster Pyjamas

  In general, the demands of the hipsterdom into which Bruce had been propelled by Clare were not such as to make much of a difference to his daily life—except for the extremely tight jeans, of course: these were an important part of being a hipster, it appeared, and as such could not be exchanged for something more comfortable. Even more challenging were hipster pyjamas, a pair of which were ordered online by Clare. The sizing chart for hipster clothes is unlike that of normal clothes; there is no S/M/L and XL with which most people are familiar, rather there is SC/C and XC, standing for Slightly Cool, Cool, and Extra Cool. This option was to be combined with a further choice, pertaining to size, which was H/2H and 3H. Bruce was initially puzzled by this, but Clare knew exactly what it meant. “H stands for hunk,” she said. “It’s simple, really. You’re an XC/3H. No probs.”

  Bruce was unsure about pyjamas. He normally slept in boxer shorts and a T-shirt that bore the legend Aviemore in faded print; a comfortable form of night garb. He had had pyjamas when he was a boy in Crieff, but had abandoned them in favour of this new choice when he left home for university. Nobody, he had been told, wore pyjamas at university—except perhaps the sad, the tragic, and the lonely.

  “Are pyjamas in these days?” he asked Clare. In was a convenient code word for hip, as Bruce had discovered when he read a newspaper article about hipsterdom.

  “Sure,” said Clare. “Provided they’re cool pyjamas. Nobody wears those old-fashioned ones—you know, the stripy flannelette things our granddads wore.”

  “I see,” said Bruce. “But those flannelette shirts—those shirts you call flannies…”

  “Different,” retorted Clare. “Those are in, big time.” She paused. “You know, Bruce, sometimes I think you just don’t get it. No offence. It’s something to do with being Scottish, I suppose. I’m not sure that anybody in Scotland really gets it. Odd, isn’t it?”

  “Do Australians get it?” asked Bruce. “All of them?”

  Clare considered the question. “Some don’t, fair enough, but I’d say most Australians get it right from the beginning. We get it as kids and then we carry on getting it as adults. Does that answer your question?”

  The pyjamas arrived at Clare’s flat in Newington, and Bruce was encouraged to try them on immediately.

  “It feels odd getting into my pyjamas in the middle of the day,” he said. “Can’t it wait?”

  “You know something, Bruce?” Clare said. “You’ve got serious hang-ups. You need to loosen up.”

  “I don’t think you can…”

  He was not allowed to finish. “I suppose it’s not your fault. You’ve been brought up like that, and you can’t help your upbringing. You come from…Where’s that place? Grief?”

  “Crieff,” said Bruce. “And it’s quite a nice place, actually.”

  “Oh, I’m sure it is. And that school of yours…What was it called?”

  “Morrison’s Academy. And it’s pretty good, actually.”

  “Oh. I’m sure it is,” said Clare.

  Bruce decided to fight back. “But what about you?”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Yes, what about me?”

  “You come from Perth, don’t you? Isn’t that in the sticks somewhere?”

  Clare’s eyes narrowed. “You ever been to Perth, Bruce?”

  He was undeterred. “And that school you went to? Presbyterian Ladies’ or whatever it was. That doesn’t sound very cool to me.”

  “You ever been there?” snapped Clare. “You ever seen it? But, look, let’s not argue. You can’t help being who you are, and I can’t help being who I am. On balance, I’m happy that I’m me and not you, but then you’re a man, aren’t you, and that’s your issue.”

  “I don’t want to fight,” muttered Bruce.

  “Then try on the pyjamas. Go on. I’ll close my eyes. Or go into the bedroom. Be my guest.”

  He left the room, the freshly unwrapped parcel in his hand. He looked at the label: XC/3H, just as she had said it would be.

  The pyjamas were made of a cloth that imitated, but was not, denim. Unwrapping the trousers, he noticed that there were two neat rents in the knees, carefully placed as fashion rents tend to be. And now the lower section of the legs…He frowned. These were every bit as narrow as the legs of his new jeans, if not narrower. The night, therefore, would be as uncomfortable as the day. Could he turn in bed in these pyjamas? Probably not: he would have to swing his legs out of the bed, stand up, and then lower himself back on the other side.

  He squeezed himself into the new garment and then, walking with some effort and not a little discomfort, he made his way back into the living room.

  Clare whistled. “Fab!” she said. “Seriously fab!”

  “They’re not very comfortable,” said Bruce. “They’re a bit tight.”

  Clare sighed. “But I’ve told you, Bruce—I’ve told you hundreds of times: clothes give. They start off a bit tight but they’re designed to give. You’ll be fine in those.”

  He sat down, with effort—and with a rather alarming tearing sound.

  “See,” said Clare. “They’re giving already.”

  She looked at her watch. “I think you should go back and get dressed,” she said. “Aren’t we expected soon at those friends of yours?”

  “Matt and Elspeth? Yes. In an hour or so.”

  He stood up, almost prepared for the further sound of ripping and the feeling of cool air about him. That was better. When clothes gave, one obviously felt much cooler. And he felt cooler yet when, in the vintage Triumph sports car that he had recently acquired, he drove Clare off to Nine Mile Burn, the car-roof folded back, the light a
ir of summer in their hair. He glanced at her as he took the car down the long stretch of road past Flotterstone. I’m lucky, he thought; I have this fantastic girlfriend, this car, this empty road; I could be old, middle-aged even; I could be short and overweight; I could be everything I’m not; instead of which I’m me, here in this car, with this girl, with my future stretching out ahead of me. That’s what counted.

  An Eighty-four Horse-power, Six-cylinder Narcissist

  Elspeth was at the end of her tether. Since the departure of the two Danish au pairs, she had struggled to cope with the sheer physical labour involved in managing three energetic and increasingly mobile young boys. She looked back with nostalgic longing to the days when the triplets were immobile, when they could be placed on a mat and would be unable to do much about it. Even when they worked out how to turn themselves over—a major stage in a baby’s life—they were containable; but then came crawling, when they would shoot off at different speeds and in different directions, and finally walking, when she found that she was frankly unable to manage without help.

  It had given her cause for thought. She was fortunate: she could afford help in the shape of Birgitte and her friend; there were plenty of mothers of twins or triplets—the vast majority—who had to cope without any help at all, not even that of a nearby grandmother. And it was not just those mothers who had experienced a multiple birth whose life was one long battle; most women who had more than one small child led lives that were dominated by the relentless demands of their offspring; mothers who struggled to find a moment to themselves; mothers who had to develop an ability to deal with one small child with one hand and another with the other hand. Amongst such there must be so many lives of quiet desperation; Elspeth knew that and did not take her good fortune for granted.