The Bertie Project

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “I’ll be all right,” muttered Stuart.

  “Well, take this handkerchief—it’s unused. You don’t want to ruin your jacket, and you can keep the hanky.”

  It would have been churlish to refuse, and he took the handkerchief offered him.

  “I feel so stupid,” he said.

  “Nonsense. We all spill soup on ourselves. Everyone does. All the time.”

  Oddly, he thought of the Belgians. They presumably spilled soup on themselves in the home—and then fell off ladders. That was called piling Pelion upon Ossa. Strange. Ridiculous.

  He smiled, and wiped at the stains. Then he looked at her—and fell, metaphorically, of course, and there are no statistics for metaphorical falls.

  Deceit and Concealment

  Stuart felt a certain embarrassment in speaking to somebody when he had a soup stain on his shirt-front. The attempts to deal with it with the donated handkerchief had merely succeeded in spreading the stain across a wider area of fabric, although they had been a bit more effective on the darker material of the jacket.

  The young woman looked concerned. “I’m afraid that’s only gone and made it worse.”

  Stuart was quick to reassure her. “But food stains are natural. It’s only recently that we started to wear clean clothes. A few hundred years ago everybody was covered in stains.”

  She nodded. “Well, they didn’t have many clothes, did they? Many people had only the set they stood up in.”

  Stuart agreed. “I read somewhere that a reasonably prosperous farmer’s wife in Scotland back in the…seventeen-hundreds, I think it was, would have only one decent dress.” He paused. “My name’s Stuart, by the way. And I do have another shirt.”

  “I’m Katie,” she said.

  As he unfolded the paper napkin encasing his cutlery, he stole a glance at Katie. He felt flushed, no longer anything to do with the soup but with the way he was feeling. He was aware that his pulse was racing. Adrenaline, he thought. But why should he feel that in this perfectly innocent social encounter—in Henderson’s, of all places, a restaurant that was synonymous with health and openness, not some place of subdued lighting and seductive couches, some louche dive where every second table hosted a furtive assignation? Vegetarianism did not go with all of that, although vegetarians undoubtedly had their moments, as everyone did…The answer, of course, was that if it was a perfectly innocent social encounter, then it had been that only for a minute or two before it had transformed into something rather different.

  He looked at her again, and this time it coincided with a look she was giving him—a look of reciprocated interest. And at that Stuart caught his breath and for the briefest of moments closed his eyes. What he experienced then was something he had not experienced for years, a stirring of interest—that sort of interest. This was a sexually charged situation. Somewhere, deep in the socio-biological hinterland, some switch had been tripped, some instigator of chemistry had engaged. He breathed out. That made it no better. He breathed in. It was worse.

  “I like this place,” said Katie.

  “Oh, so do I,” said Stuart quickly; so quickly, in fact, that she had barely finished speaking before he replied.

  “Not that I’m a vegetarian,” continued Katie. “I eat quite a lot of fish, but I hardly ever have red meat.”

  “Me neither,” said Stuart. “Although I must admit I miss bacon. We’ve been told that we shouldn’t eat too much bacon or processed meat anyway. Did you see that stuff from the World Health Organization? They said that we ate far too much processed meat—burgers, bacon, that sort of thing.”

  She nodded. “I read it. And if that comes from the World Health Organization then I suppose indirectly it has the authority of the UN behind it. And we should listen to the UN, I suppose.”

  “The Security Council is probably going to tell us not to eat bacon or salamis,” said Stuart, and laughed. “It’s only a question of time.”

  He relaxed. The burning sensation around his neck had abated now and he felt that his pulse was slowing down. But he was still very much aware of a feeling of excitement—a joy that was close to exhilaration—that had come over him.

  “Where do you live?” he asked, and immediately regretted the question. It was not what one should say immediately to somebody one meets in a restaurant. “I mean, do you live here in Edinburgh?”

  Katie did not seem to mind the question. “Howe Street,” she said. “And you?”

  He thought of lying. Could he tell her? Could he utter the words: Scotland Street? To do so would be to admit to his actual home in a way that seemed quite inappropriate in this context. But honesty prevailed—at least to some extent—and he replied, “I have a flat in Scotland Street.” I, not we.

  It was the first piece of subterfuge, the very beginning. I have a flat in Scotland Street. That sounded like a bachelor establishment—a flat occupied not by three other people, one of them his wife and the other two his progeny. He swallowed hard. It was very easy to mislead simply by not mentioning something, even something as important as one’s marital status. And then he remembered that he was wearing a wedding ring, and the presence or absence of a wedding ring was something that people noticed; he did not, but then there were things of which men were perhaps less observant than women.

  He glanced at her left hand. There was no ring. And then he saw that she was looking at his hand, even as he had at hers.

  “My wife and I…” he blurted out. “Well, we’re…”

  He had no idea why he spoke, and he immediately felt a burning sense of disappointment. Why had he mentioned Irene—and what was the unspoken ellipsis meant to signify?

  She said: “I understand. Don’t worry.”

  He felt a surge of relief. She had interpreted his Delphic utterance as meaning that he was separated or at least in a marriage that was not working. Perhaps he had sighed, or she thought he had sighed, after saying well, we’re…It was just the sort of moment when people might sigh after saying Well, we’re no longer together or Well, we’re going our separate ways, you know how it is (sigh)…

  He asked her, “What do you do, Katie? Do you mind my asking?”

  She seemed pleased that the conversation was going no further into status issues. “What do I do? Well, I suppose that by profession I’m a teacher—or that’s what I’m qualified to do. I used to teach English—now I’m doing a PhD in literature. I’ve just started.”

  He wondered about her age. Thirty-three, thirty-four? It was difficult to tell.

  “And you?”

  “I work for the Scottish Government.” He should have said that he was a statistician—he knew that—but it seemed so dull beside a PhD.

  But she asked, “What sort of work?”

  Now he had to confess. “Figures,” he said. “Actually, statistics. I make up figures for them.”

  She laughed. “I thought they invented them themselves.”

  “No,” said Stuart. “Governments always have people to advise them on how to invent figures.” Then he added, “It’s not easy to hide the truth. You have to be expert at it.”

  His words hung in the air, as if in reproach. He looked up, expecting to see them there, flashing in neon, declaring to the world, or at least to that section of the world present in Henderson’s, that here was a man embarking on a course of deceit and concealment, and really rather thrilled about doing so.

  Squtlandiyah

  “Why are you doing a PhD?” Stuart asked, and then added, “Actually, I don’t mean to be rude. That sounds a bit rude—but why are you doing it?”

  She explained that she hated teaching. “The idea of teaching is fine, but the reality, I’m afraid, was quite different. I trained in Scotland, you see, and then went down south. I found a job in Cambridge.”

  “Why Cambridge?”

  She hesitated. “I followed somebody.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  “It didn’t work out—the relationship, and the job, for that matter. We were bot
h…how shall I put it, rather different. I think he wasn’t quite sure whether he liked men or women. There are plenty of people like that, you know—they just aren’t sure.”

  “Somerset Maugham had something to say on that, you know. He told his nephew, Robin Maugham, that if he was in any doubt about his inclinations he should just walk down the street and see where his eyes went.”

  “I suppose that’s right. I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “Although,” mused Stuart, “one’s eyes could go places for entirely innocent reasons. You might be interested in what people are wearing, for example. You might look at them for that reason.”

  “Possibly. But in his case, I think he decided he liked women—but not me.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Thank you. Anyway, he went off with a woman who designed handbags. Can you believe it? There he was, an astrophysicist, and she designed handbags!”

  Stuart smiled. “Handbags can be much more than…than mere handbags. Handbags can be a weapon—look at Maggie Thatcher. Or a protection if you’re in the public eye. Look at the Queen—she always carries a handbag, although she doesn’t need to.”

  “She could have somebody else carry it for her, I suppose.”

  “Exactly,” said Stuart. “Like those maharajas who had so many jewels that they couldn’t wear it all themselves. There was one who used to dress quite simply—well, in simple silks, put it that way—and he had somebody who walked behind him wearing all his jewellery for him—some retainer who was laden down with massive rubies and so on.”

  “This handbag woman was a real…Sorry, I was about to use bad language—and you mustn’t use bad language in vegetarian restaurants.”

  “Well, you certainly shouldn’t say bloody…”

  She laughed. “I won’t. But you just did.”

  “For illustrative purposes. Solely for illustrative purposes.”

  “I can’t stand swearing,” she said. “It’s such an excuse for thinking. It just fills the air, like radio jamming. And it’s an act of aggression. It’s rubbing somebody’s nose in things.”

  “Tell me more about the handbag designer,” said Stuart.

  Katie had been toying with a bowl of pasta, now half eaten. She pushed it away. “I enjoyed that, but I took too much. The handbag designer? She was awful. She was called, believe it or not, Amaryllis. How pathetic. If you’re going to have a botanical name, then you could at least have something that wasn’t as…as vapid as Amaryllis. You may as well have a Latin botanical name, like Magnolia stellata or something like that.”

  Stuart remembered something. “Bertie has a boy in his class…” He trailed off.

  She looked at him enquiringly. “Bertie?”

  He tried to read her expression, but reached no conclusion. “My wee boy. I have a young son. Bertie. He’s seven. Anyway he goes to the Steiner School and the kids there all have unconventional names. There’s a boy called Tofu, and then there’s a Hiawatha and a Larch. And what made me think of it was your mentioning botanical names. I suppose Larch is botanical enough, but there’s a little boy who’s just started there—he’s in Bertie’s class—who’s called Knotweed.”

  “Knotweed! Is he Japanese?”

  “No, he’s Scottish. You’d think that people would have more sense than to land a child with a name like that.” He paused. “But this Amaryllis?”

  “Oh, she was tall—very thin—long legs. And she had a sort of drawly voice—you know those voices you come across, those condescending voices that sound as if they’re so very bored with everything. Well, that’s what she sounded like. And she called everybody darling.”

  “Actors do that,” said Stuart. “Perhaps handbag designers too.”

  “He fell for her. He said he couldn’t help it. He was quite apologetic, actually, but he said that they looked at the world in the same way.”

  Weltanschauung, thought Stuart. It helps to have the same Weltanschauung.

  “What were her handbags like?”

  “Ghastly. Tiny little things that cost at least eight hundred pounds each—usually more. I saw one that cost two thousand.”

  “Ridiculous.”

  He wanted to get off the subject of handbags. “So you taught down there in Cambridge?”

  “Yes, I taught English in a senior school. The kids were ghastly—really ghastly. They had no manners at all. None. They looked at you with a jaded, knowing expression on their face. They were illiterate at the age of fifteen. Nobody had taught them any grammar. Nobody had taught them anything, as far as I could make out.”

  “Oh dear.”

  “The teachers were all defeated. They sat in the staff room and stared into space, summoning up their energy for the next stage of the fray. I felt so sorry for them.”

  “You couldn’t bear it?”

  “No, so I came back to Scotland and decided to do a PhD. You can call that escapism if you wish, but…”

  “I’d never call it that,” said Stuart. He was curious what exactly the PhD was about.

  “Scottish poetry,” she said. “I’m looking at images of the landscape in twentieth-century Scottish poetry.”

  “What poets have to say…”

  “…about the earth on which they stand,” she supplied. “Yes, how they relate to the Scottish landscape. Do you know MacDiarmid’s ‘Island Funeral’? He talks about it being a grey world, with the sea and sky being as without colour as the stones. It’s a sombre description, and I suppose sometimes Scotland is grey. Or dark.” She smiled at him. “You might have heard of the description that an Arab geographer gave of Scotland, which he called Squtlandiyah. He wrote that back in the eleventh century. He said that Scotland was uninhabited although there had been three towns until the people living there had fought one another to extinction. The sea round the country, he said, was called the Sea of Darkness. ‘The waves are enormous and the sea is deep. Darkness reigns continually…’ That’s what he wrote.”

  Stuart laughed. “It’s dangerous to describe a place you’ve never been to. He might at least have tried to verify his description.”

  “Too perilous,” said Katie. “Too dark.”

  “Spirit of Lenin, light up this city now,” mused Stuart. “Who wrote that again?”

  “MacDiarmid. I suppose that he was momentarily forgetting that Lenin encouraged the public hanging of recalcitrant kulaks. He wrote some wonderful things, though, and then—well some not so wonderful, contrary stuff—during his Rubbish Period. I have a theory that many great artists have a rubbish period.”

  “And perhaps some never get out of it,” ventured Stuart.

  “Perhaps,” said Katie. And then she said, “Look, I have to go. I’ve got the electrician coming to the flat. Would you like to continue this conversation there? In Howe Street?”

  It was a choice between the Belgian health statistician and…and what? Freedom? Stuart felt his pulse race. It’s not my fault, he thought. I’ve tried and tried to put up with Irene. But now I’ve had enough. My rubbish period is about to end.

  Shed Issues

  Stuart walked back to Howe Street with Katie, barely conscious of where he was or where they were going. He left Queen Street behind him with scarcely a thought of the conference he was abandoning in the Royal College of Physicians; printed versions of the papers had already been distributed to the delegates—a fatal mistake at any conference, particularly for those presenting their contributions after lunch. There would be an audience, of course: not everybody would have met somebody in a restaurant and failed to return to the conference; nor would more than a small proportion of the audience be asleep.

  His lack of awareness of his journey was not so much distraction as sheer elation. His conversation in Henderson’s with Katie had been a brief one, but it seemed to him that every word had been blessed, had been weighted with significance. And then there was that other factor—the undeniable current of physical attraction that ran between them, that crackled and sparked like a live wire d
etached from a terminal. It was a current that ran both ways: although he was quite unaware of it, Stuart was considered good-looking. One might have expected his face to be lined with anxiety, as the face of one who is sair hauden-doon by domestic circumstances can be. But this was not the case; the years of living with Irene had made no real impact on the way he looked, and he could still pass for somebody in his late twenties—in the right light.

  That was Stuart. As for Katie, regularity of features, a clear skin, and something in the colour of her eyes all served to resonate with Stuart, as did the timbre of her voice. He was used to Irene’s tones, which were sharp, strident and, of course, utterly politically correct. Katie’s voice was very different; she spoke softly, but with an intonation that was almost seductive, that would be quite capable of saying flattering things about men. Complimentary remarks about men normally incur derision; but even withering scorn does not change the fact that many men secretly want women to admire them and to whisper that they find them strong and decisive. Of course nobody will actually say that any more, but men so yearn for it, hopelessly, nostalgically. Listen carefully to what men mutter to themselves, sotto voce, as they gaze into the shaving mirror in the morning: My name’s Bond…Many wives and girlfriends do not realise this, but listen they should and they will hear it slip out, this strange, laughable fantasy that men have.

  In no time at all—or so it seemed to the newly struck Stuart—they were in Howe Street and climbing the stair to her top-floor flat.

  “I live in an eyrie,” she said apologetically. “I haven’t dared count the stairs.”

  “It keeps one fit,” said Stuart. “I’m a couple of floors up in Scotland Street.”

  Once again he had used the first person singular, but this time he had not reproached himself.

  “You know,” said Katie, “I’ve just read somewhere or other that the average New Yorker walks four miles a day. Four miles! That’s why they’re all so slender in New York. They walk.”

  “We walk in Edinburgh too,” said Stuart. “I love…just walking about. I don’t have to have somewhere to go, I just like walking.”