The World According to Bertie

by Alexander McCall Smith

  ‘Yes,’ said Miss Harmony. ‘And we don’t laugh at the names of others, do we, Tofu? Especially . . .’ She hesitated. It was so tempting; impossible to resist, in fact. ‘Especially if we are called Tofu ourselves.’

  ‘Tofu’s a stupid name,’ volunteered Olive. ‘It’s that horrid white stuff that cranky people eat. It’s a stupid name. I’d far rather be called Ulysses than Tofu, any day of the week. And anyway, Tofu, it’s nice to hear that Miss Harmony thinks your name is stupid too.’

  ‘That is not what I said, Olive,’ said Miss Harmony quickly. ‘And let’s move on, boys and girls. We are all very pleased, I’m sure, to hear about Bertie’s new baby brother and we look forward to meeting him some day soon. I’m sure that Bertie is very proud of him and will bring him to the school to introduce us all. But in the meantime, boys and girls, we are going to start today with sums, just to see whether we’ve remembered what we learned last term!’

  Much had been forgotten, and the rest of the morning was devoted to the reinstallation of vanished knowledge. Bertie worked quietly, but he noticed Olive looking at him from time to time and the observation made him feel uneasy. Bertie was wary of Olive on several counts, but principally because she laboured under the delusion that she was his girlfriend. And at the end of the day, his doubts proved to be well founded.

  ‘I’m really looking forward to seeing your new baby brother,’ said Olive, as they left the classroom. ‘I’m coming to see him soon.’

  Bertie frowned. ‘Who said?’ he asked.

  ‘My mother has spoken to your mother,’ Olive answered. ‘And your mother says that I can come to play at your house once a week if I like. So I will.’

  ‘But I didn’t ask you,’ said Bertie.

  ‘No,’ said Olive. ‘But that makes no difference. Your mummy did – and that’s what counts.’ She paused. ‘And we’re going to play house.’

  21. The Duke of Johannesburg

  Bruce had been gone a good hour, but Pat was still smarting from her encounter with her newly returned former flatmate. Much of her anger focused on the fact that she had not responded adequately to his unpleasant story of his London experiences; didn’t-kiss-and-still-told was in her mind every bit as bad as kiss-and-tell. There was so much she could have said which would have indicated her disgust over his insensitive behaviour, so much, but, as was so often the case, the really pithy comments, those brilliant mots justes that might have deflated him, only occurred to her after he had left.

  And then she wondered whether anything could ever deflate Bruce, such was the sheer Zeppelin-scale volume of his self-satisfaction. At least their brief meeting had convinced her – if conviction were needed – that she disliked him intensely, and yet, and yet . . . when he had perched on her desk, uninvited, she found herself unable to ignore the brute fact of his extreme attractiveness. Bruce was, quite simply, devastatingly good-looking; an Adonis sent down to live among us. And the fact that she even noticed this worried her. She had already had a narrow escape with Wolf, who had similarly dazzled her, and here she was looking at Bruce again in that way. Am I, she wondered, one of those people who fall for the physically desirable irrespective of what they are like as people? In a moment of brutal honesty, she realised that the answer was probably: yes, I am. It was a bleak conclusion.

  She thought of Matthew; solid, dependable, predictable Matthew. These three epithets said it all; but they were words which had no excitement in them, no thrill. And yet when one compared Matthew with Bruce, Matthew’s merits were over-whelming. But then again, there was the distressed-oatmeal, the crushed-strawberry factor . . .

  The door of the gallery opened and Pat turned round. A man had entered the gallery, a largish man of rather elegant bearing, wearing grey slacks and a blazer; no tie, but a red silk bandanna tied around his neck. He sported a jaunty moustache. He smiled at Pat and gestured in the direction of the paintings. ‘Do you mind? May I?’

  ‘Of course. Please.’

  He nodded to her in a friendly way and made his way across the gallery to stand in front of one of Matthew’s recently acquired MacTaggart seascapes. Pat watched him from her desk. Some people who came into the gallery were merely passing the time, with no intention of buying anything; this man, though, with his urbane manner, had a different air about him.

  He moved closer to one of the MacTaggarts and peered at a section of the large canvas. Two children were sitting on the edge of a wide, windswept beach. The children were windswept too, their hair ruffled. They were playing with the sand, which streamed away from their hands, caught in the breeze, in thin lines of gold.

  The man turned round and addressed Pat across the floor. ‘Can you tell me anything about this?’

  Pat rose from her desk and walked across to join him. ‘It’s a MacTaggart,’ she said. ‘Do you know about him?’

  ‘Not much,’ said the man. ‘But I do know a little. I like his work. There’s a strange air about it. Something rather wind-blown, don’t you think?’

  Pat agreed. ‘It reminds me of places like Tantallon,’ she said. ‘Or Gullane beach, perhaps. That could be Fife on the other side of the water. Just there. There’s some land, you see.’

  The man turned and smiled at her. ‘It probably doesn’t matter much,’ he said. ‘Just Scotland. Quite some time ago now.’

  ‘Yes.’ She waited for him to say something else, but his gaze had shifted. Now he was looking at Angus Lordie’s painting. He moved forward and stared at the label beneath it; then he stood back and stared at it, his head slightly to one side.

  Pat watched him. She was about to say something, to tell him that this was not entirely serious, but he had now turned to face her.

  ‘Do you know “Four minutes thirty-three seconds”?’ he asked. ‘That piece by what’s his name? John Cage? Complete silence. That’s all it is – complete silence.’

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Yes, nothing at all. Often done on the piano, but an orchestra can play it too. The conductor stands there, turning pages of the score, but nobody plays a note. And that’s it.’

  ‘You’ve heard it?’

  The man nodded. ‘I suppose you might say that we’ve all heard it. I heard it in Glasgow. But if any of us has ever listened to four minutes of silence, anywhere, then I suppose you could say that we’ve heard what the composer wanted us to hear. But then, we don’t listen to silence, do we? We’re too preoccupied.’

  Pat looked at Angus Lordie’s painting. ‘Well . . .’ she began.

  It was as if the man had not heard her. ‘That performance in New York was extraordinary. The moment the orchestra had stopped, there was confusion in the audience. Some of them knew the piece, of course, and applauded. They understood. Some laughed. Others were silent, not really knowing what to do.

  ‘This painting is a bit like that,’ he said. ‘I like it, you know.’

  Pat stood quite still. One part of her wanted to tell him that it was absurd, that Matthew’s joke had gone far enough; the other imagined Matthew’s pleasure if she actually sold it. It was the sort of thing that would amuse him greatly, and, of course, there was Angus to think about. He was miserable over Cyril’s plight and he would appreciate some good news.

  ‘I don’t suppose you want to buy it,’ Pat said. She was hesitant. I’m not trying to persuade him, she thought. I’m really not. And the painting was so absurdly pricey – for what it was – that only somebody who did not have to worry about money would buy it. Such people, surely, could look after themselves.

  The man turned his head sideways to look at the painting from a slightly different angle. ‘Why not? My walls are a bit cluttered, you know. The usual stuff. I could do with a bit of minimalism. So, why not?’

  Pat waited. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Bung a red sticker under it. My name’s Johannesburg. Here’s my card.’

  He handed her his card. The Duke of Johannesburg, it read. Single-Malt House. And under that: Clubs: Scottish Arts (Edinburgh);
Savile (London); Gitchigumi (Duluth).

  22. A Little Argument

  Matthew did not like it when people said ‘Guess what?’ to him, which is the very expression with which Pat greeted him when he returned to the gallery. Being asked to guess what had happened struck him as pointless – one could never guess accurately in such circumstances, which was precisely why one was asked to do so.

  ‘I don’t see why I should try to guess,’ he said peevishly. ‘If I did, I would be completely wrong and you would just revel in your advantage over me. So I’m not going to guess.’

  Pat looked at him with surprise. He had been in a good mood when he left for his appointment; something must have gone wrong with that meeting to produce this irritable response. ‘I was only asking,’ she said.

  Matthew tossed the file that he was carrying down on the desk. ‘You weren’t asking,’ he said. ‘Asking me to guess isn’t really asking anything. You just want to show me that I don’t know what’s happened. That’s all.’

  Pat was not sure how to react to this. It seemed to her a completely unimportant matter – an argument over nothing. She had said ‘Guess what?’ but she was not really expecting him to try to guess. In fact, she had intended merely to point to the red sticker which now adorned Angus Lordie’s painting. It was good news, after all, not bad. Aggrieved, she decided that she would defend herself. ‘I don’t know why you’re so ratty,’ she said. ‘Lots of people say “Guess what?” when they have some news to give somebody else. It’s just a thing they say. They don’t really expect you to guess.’

  ‘Well, I’m not guessing,’ said Matthew.

  Pat looked away. ‘Then I’m not going to tell you,’ she said. She would not tell him; she would not.

  For a moment there was silence. Then Matthew spoke. ‘You have to,’ he said. ‘You can’t say something like that and then not tell me.’

  ‘Not if you’re going to be so rude,’ said Pat.

  Matthew raised his voice. ‘You’re the one who was being rude. Not me. You’re the one who wanted to expose my ignorance of whatever it is you know and I don’t. That’s hardly very friendly, is it?’

  Pat was still seated at the desk and now she looked up at Matthew. ‘You’re the one who’s not being friendly,’ she said. ‘All I was trying to do was to give you some good news and you bit my head off. Just like that.’

  Matthew’s expression remained impassive. ‘You sold a painting.’

  Pat had not expected this. ‘Maybe,’ she muttered.

  ‘There!’ crowed Matthew. ‘I guessed! Now, don’t say anything. No, let me guess.’

  ‘You said you didn’t want to guess,’ snapped Pat. ‘Now you’re saying you do. You should make up your mind, you know.’

  ‘I’m guessing because I’ve decided I want to guess,’ said Matthew. ‘That’s very different from being made to guess when you don’t want to. You should have said: “Would you like me to tell you something or would you prefer to guess?” That would have been much more polite.’ He paused. ‘Now, let me think. You’ve sold a painting. Right. So which painting would it be? One of the MacTaggarts? No, I don’t think so. It’s not the sort of day on which one sells a MacTaggart. No. So, let’s see.’

  Pat decided to put an end to this. If Matthew had been unprepared to guess when she had very politely offered him the chance, then she did not see why he should now have the privilege of guessing. ‘I’m going to tell you. It’s . . .’

  ‘No!’ interjected Matthew. ‘Don’t spoil it. You can’t get somebody guessing and then stop them. Come on, Pat – I’m going to guess. Let’s think. All right – you sold Angus Lordie’s painting. Yes! You sold the totally white one.’

  ‘You saw the sticker,’ said Pat. ‘That wasn’t a proper guess.’

  Matthew was injured innocence itself. ‘I did not see the sticker! I did not!’

  ‘You must have. You saw it when you came in and then you pretended not to. Well, I think that’s just pathetic, I really do.’

  ‘I did not see the sticker,’ shouted Matthew. ‘Who knows better what I saw or didn’t see? You or me? No, don’t look like that, just tell me? Who knows what I saw? You or me?’

  Pat recalled what her father had said about the mind and its tricks of perception. It was likely that Matthew had in fact seen the sticker when he came in, even if he did not know that he had seen it.

  ‘You don’t always know what you’ve seen,’ she said. ‘The mind registers things at a subconscious level. You may not know that you’ve seen something, but you have. The mind knows it subconsciously.’

  Matthew stared at her. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘let’s not fight. I’m sorry if I went on about guessing. I suppose I’m just a bit . . . Well, I don’t know, I’m just a bit.’

  She held out her hand and touched him briefly. ‘All right. Sorry too.’

  ‘I can hardly believe that you sold that painting,’ he said, adding: ‘If you can call it a painting. How did they pay?’

  Pat reached for the card she had been given. ‘Well, he hasn’t paid yet. But he did ask for a red sticker to be put up.’

  She handed him the card. He examined it and frowned. ‘The Duke of where?’

  ‘Johannesburg,’ said Pat. ‘He was a man with a moustache. About your height. He was wearing a red bandanna.’

  Matthew stared at the card. ‘I’ve never heard of him,’ he said. ‘Are you sure he exists? Are you sure this isn’t some sort of joke?’

  Pat felt defensive. She had begun to doubt herself now, and she wondered whether she should simply have taken the man’s card and put up a sticker. It did seem a bit trusting, but if one couldn’t trust dukes, then whom could one trust?

  ‘He seemed . . .’ She trailed off.

  Matthew looked doubtful. ‘It seems a bit unlikely,’ he said. ‘Why would Johannesburg have a duke? And what’s all this about these clubs? Where’s the Gitchigumi Club for heaven’s sake?’

  ‘Duluth,’ said Pat. ‘That’s what it says there. Duluth.’

  ‘And where exactly is that?’ asked Matthew.

  ‘Duluth?’

  ‘Yes. Where’s Duluth?’

  Pat thought for a moment. ‘Guess,’ she said. She had no idea, and could only guess herself. Minnesota?

  23. Parent/infant Issues

  When classes were over for the day and the children spilled out, Irene met Bertie at the school gate. This was not an ideal situation from Bertie’s point of view as it gave his mother the opportunity to make the sort of arrangement which had caused him such concern – of which the proposed visit, or series of visits, by Olive was a prime example. He had suggested that they meet further up the road, at the junction of Spylaw Road and Ettrick Road, well away from the eyes of his classmates, but this proposal had been greeted by Irene with an understanding smile.

  ‘Now, Bertie,’ she said, ‘Mummy knows that you’re ashamed of her! And you mustn’t feel ashamed of feeling ashamed. All children are embarrassed by their parents – it’s a perfectly normal stage through which you go. Melanie Klein . . .’ She paused. She could not recall precisely what Melanie Klein had written on the subject, but she was sure that there was something. It had to do with idealisation of the female parental figure, or mother, to use the vernacular. Or it was related to the need of the child to establish a socially visible persona which was defined in isolation from the mother’s personality. By distancing himself from her, Bertie thought that he might grow in stature in relation to those boys who were still under maternal skirts. Well, that was understandable enough, but the development of the young ego could still be assisted by saying it does not matter. In that way, the child would transcend the awkward stage of parent/infant uncoupling and develop a more integrated, self-sufficient ego.

  ‘It doesn’t matter, Bertie,’ Irene said. ‘It really doesn’t.’

  Bertie looked at his mother. It was difficult sometimes to make out what she was trying to say, and this was one of those occasions. ‘What doesn’t matter?’ he asked.<
br />
  Irene reached out and took his hand. They were travelling home on the 23 bus, with Bertie’s baby brother, Ulysses, fitted snugly round Irene’s front in a sling. Bertie liked to travel on the upper deck, but they were not there now as the concentration of germs there was greater, Irene said, than below, and Ulysses’ immune system was not yet as strong as it might be. Bertie tried to slip his hand out of his mother’s, but her grip was tight. He looked around him furtively, to see if anybody from school might see him holding hands with his mother on the bus; fortunately, there was nobody.

  ‘It doesn’t matter that you feel embarrassed about being seen with me at the school gate,’ she said. ‘Those feelings are natural. But it also doesn’t matter what other people think of you, Bertie. It really doesn’t.’

  Bertie’s face flushed. He looked down at the floor. ‘I’m not embarrassed, Mummy,’ he said.

  ‘Oh yes, you are!’ said Irene, her voice rising playfully. ‘Mummy can tell! Roberto è un poco imbarazzato!’

  ‘Non è vero,’ mumbled Bertie. He glanced out of the window; they were barely at Tollcross, which meant it was at least another ten minutes before they reached Dundas Street; ten minutes of agony. Ulysses, at least, was asleep, which meant that he was doing little to draw anybody’s attention, but then he suddenly made a loud, embarrassing noise. On the other side of the bus, a boy only a few years older than Bertie, a boy travelling by himself, glanced at Bertie and smirked. Bertie looked away.

  ‘You see, Bertie,’ Irene went on, ‘Mummy understands. And all I want is that you should be able to rise above the terrors of being your age. I know what it’s like. You think I don’t, because all children think that grown-ups know nothing. Well we know a lot – we really do. I know what it’s like to be small and to be worried about what other children are thinking. All I want is for you to be free of that, to be able to be yourself. Do you understand what I’m saying?’

  Bertie thought quickly. He found that one of the best strategies with his mother was to distract her in some way, to change the subject, and this is what he now did.