The World According to Bertie

by Alexander McCall Smith

  ‘Olive said that she was going to come to my house,’ he said.

  ‘Our house,’ corrected Irene. ‘Bertie lives there with Mummy and Daddy and, of course, dear little Ulysses. And yes, è vero, I have invited Olive. I spoke to her mummy at the school gate and suggested that Olive should come down to Scotland Street one afternoon a week. This will suit her mummy, who is doing a degree course at the university, you see. And it will be nice to have somebody for you to play with. You’ll have a lot of fun.’

  Bertie stared at his mother. ‘I don’t want to play with Olive, Mummy. She’s very bossy.’

  Irene laughed. ‘Bossy? Olive? Come now, Bertie, she’s a charming little girl. You two will get on like a house on fire.’

  ‘I want to play with other boys,’ said Bertie.

  Irene patted him on the shoulder. ‘There’ll be time for that later on, Bertie. You’ll find that Olive is plenty of fun to play with – more fun, in fact, than boys. And, anyway, we have agreed and we can hardly uninvite Olive, can we?’

  Bertie said nothing. Long experience of his mother – all six years of it – had taught him that there was no point in arguing. He looked at Ulysses, who had now woken up and had opened his eyes. The baby was staring at Bertie with that steady, intense stare that only babies can manage. Bertie looked back at his little brother. Poor little boy, he thought. Just you wait. Just you wait until she starts on you. Mozart. Yoga. Melanie Klein . . .

  Ulysses’ gaze drifted away from Bertie and up towards Irene. Immediately, he began to cry.

  ‘He’s hungry,’ said Irene. And with that she loosened the sling and began to unbutton her blouse.

  ‘Can’t he wait, Mummy?’ whispered Bertie. ‘Please let him wait.’

  ‘Babies can’t,’ said Irene, now exposing her breast. ‘Here, darling. Mummy’s ready.’

  Bertie froze. He dared not look across the aisle to where that boy was sitting, but then he snatched a quick glance and saw the boy staring at the scene, his face full of disgust. Bertie looked away quickly. I want to die, he thought suddenly. I just don’t want to be here.

  Ulysses was making guzzling sounds, and then burped.

  24. Slip/lapse Errors

  Angus Lordie, of course, did not yet know of his apparent good fortune. Had he known, his mood might have lifted, but then again it might not: Cyril was still detained, and life without Cyril was proving hard.

  Cyril had been a constant presence in his life for the last six years. When he was working in his studio, Cyril would be there, lying in the basket provided for him in a corner, watching Angus with half an eye, ready to respond to the slightest sign that it was time for a walk. And when he went down to the Cumberland Bar to sit at his usual table and pass the time in conversation, Cyril would accompany him, lying under the table, guarding the small dish of beer which was his ration for the night. Cyril did not disagree with anything that Angus said or did; Cyril would wait for hours for the slightest acknowledgement of his presence by his master, wagging his tail with undisguised enthusiasm whenever his name was uttered. Cyril never complained; never indicated that he wanted things to be otherwise than they were as disposed by Angus. And now that Cyril was gone, there was a great, yawning void in Angus Lordie’s life.

  Ever since Cyril’s arrest, on suspicion of biting, Angus had done his utmost for him. He had immediately contacted his lawyer, who had been extremely supportive.

  ‘We’ll get him out,’ the lawyer had said. ‘They need proof that he’s the one who did the biting. And I don’t see what proof they have.’

  ‘Find an advocate,’ said Angus. ‘Get the best. I don’t care what it costs.’

  The lawyer nodded. ‘If that’s what you want.’

  It was, and now Angus was preparing for a consultation with the advocate who had been engaged to represent Cyril. They were to meet that morning, in the premises of the Faculty of Advocates, to discuss the case and the strategy that would be adopted. As Angus trudged up the Mound to attend this meeting, his mind was full of foreboding. He had seen an item in The Scotsman that morning about a sheepdog that had been ordered to be destroyed after it had herded a group of Japanese tourists into the waters of Loch Lomond. Would a similar order be made in respect of Cyril? Could dogs effectively be executed these days? Surely that was too cruel a punishment, even if a dog had bitten somebody. And that sheepdog was just doing what it thought was its duty.

  He walked across Parliament Square, past the front of St Giles’, the High Kirk, that scene of so many of Edinburgh’s dramas. The streets here were steeped in history: here traitors, criminals, simple heretics had been dragged on their last journey; here the Edinburgh mob had howled its protests against its masters; here Charles Edward Stuart himself had ridden past in his vain attempt at the regaining of a kingdom; here Hume had walked with his friends. And now here was he in his private misery, going to the seat of justice to plead for the life of a dog whom he loved, who was his friend.

  He walked into Parliament Hall and watched as lawyers strolled up and down the hall, deep in conversation with one another, going over their pleadings, strategies, possible settlements. He was early for the consultation – he had at least half an hour in hand – and he decided to sit down on a bench at the side. He looked up at the high, hammerbeam roof with its great arches of Scandinavian oak, and at the portraits which surrounded the hall; such dignity, such grandeur; and yet behind it all were the ordinary, stubborn facts of human existence – grinding labour, power, vanity. We dressed our affairs in splendour, but they remained at root grubby little mixtures of hope and tragedy and failure; while round about the foundations of this human world ran the dogs, enthusiasts all, pursuing their own doggy lives in the shadow of their masters; free, but only until they collided with human aims. And then the dogs were smacked or locked up, or, if they overstepped a mark they knew nothing about, given a sharp little injection that put an end to it all for them.

  He was still looking up at the ceiling when he became aware of the fact that somebody had sat down on the bench beside him. Angus glanced at his neighbour – a man a bit younger than himself, wearing a suit and tie, and looking at that moment at his wristwatch.

  Angus decided to strike up a conversation; anything was better than thinking about Cyril and durance vile. ‘You’re giving evidence?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. I’m a so-called expert.’ The other man laughed. ‘Actually, I suppose I am an expert – it’s just that I never call myself that. I’m a psychologist, you see. I specialise in how people do things, in particular how they make mistakes.’

  Angus was interested. ‘So what’s going on today?’

  ‘Oh, it’s the usual thing,’ said the psychologist. ‘Somebody made a mistake over something. They’ve called me to give evidence on how the mistake was made. They want to find out who’s responsible. That’s what they do up here.’

  ‘Whose fault?’

  The psychologist smiled. ‘Well, yes. But what these people,’ he indicated the lawyers, ‘what they don’t understand is that mistakes, human error, may have nothing to do with fault. We all make mistakes – however careful we are.’

  ‘Yes,’ mused Angus. ‘This morning I put tea in the coffee pot . . .’

  ‘But of course you would!’ said the psychologist. ‘That’s exactly the sort of mistake that people make. We call it a slip/lapse error. We do that sort of thing mostly when we’re doing things that we are very used to doing. We’re wearing our glasses and we look for them. Or we dial one familiar number when we mean to dial another. I know somebody who thought he had dialled his lover and had dialled his wife. He launched straight into the conversation and said: “I can’t see you tonight – she’s invited people to dinner.” And his wife said: “Good. So you’ve remembered.”’

  Angus laughed, although the story, he thought, was a sad one.

  ‘And you?’ asked the psychologist. ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘Because of my god,’ Angus replied.

  The psyc
hologist frowned. Then his expression lightened. ‘You mean dog! Another slip/lapse error! The transposing of g and d.’ He paused. ‘Mind you,’ he said, ‘if one were a theist, your statement would be correct. Unless, of course, one removed the space between “a” and “theist”, in which case it would be incorrect.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Angus.

  25. Cyril’s Case

  The advocate instructed by Angus Lordie’s lawyer was in his late thirties, a man with fine, rather aquiline features. As a portrait painter, Angus was sensitive to such matters, and he approved of this man’s face. He liked people, and particularly faces, to suit occupations and often found himself feeling vaguely disappointed when face and profession were not in harmony. He had occasionally attended stock sales with a farming friend and had been struck by the faces of the Border farmers, by the ruddy complexions, by the features that gave every impression of having been left out overnight in the rain. One man, he thought, had looked like a haystack, with his hair sticking out in all directions – his skin the colour of well-dried hay, too, he observed; another, with a thick neck and heavy shoulders, looked to all intents and purposes like an Aberdeen Angus bull. These men were gifts to the portrait painter, he told himself, as was the face of the librarian who occasionally came into the Cumberland Bar, a man whose skin was like parchment, whose scholarly eyes looked out at the world from behind the lenses of small, unframed spectacles – perfect.

  And now here was this advocate, in his strippit breeks, with his sharp, legal face that would not have been out of place in an eighteenth-century engraving, a John Kay miniature – though Kay preferred his subjects wirlie, and this man would take a good twenty years to become truly wirlie.

  ‘This is a very sad affair,’ said the advocate, looking down at the file of papers before him. ‘Your agent here tells me that you’re very fond of your dog, Mr Lordie.’

  Angus looked at his lawyer, who smiled at him; a smile of sympathy, of regret.

  ‘Yes, I am,’ he said. ‘I am. And I simply can’t believe that I find myself . . . that my dog finds himself in this position.’

  The advocate sighed. ‘I suppose that even the best-behaved of dogs have their . . . their – how should one put it? – atavistic moments.’

  Angus stared at the lawyer, noticing the slight touch of redness that was beginning to colour the side of the aquiline nose. That was the effect of claret, he thought; an occupational hazard for Edinburgh lawyers. The observation distracted him for a moment, but he soon remembered where he was and what the advocate had just said. Cyril was not atavistic; he had not bitten anybody. But the advocate had implied that he was guilty – on what grounds? The mere assumption that any dog was capable of biting?

  ‘That might apply to other dogs,’ he said. ‘But it certainly does not apply to mine. My dog is innocent.’

  Silence descended on the room. In the background, a large wall-clock could be heard ticking.

  ‘How can you be so sure?’ asked the advocate.

  ‘Because I know him well,’ said Angus. ‘One knows one’s dog. He is not a biter.’

  The advocate looked down at his papers. ‘I see here that your dog has a gold tooth,’ he said. ‘May I ask: how did that come about? How did he lose the original tooth?’

  ‘He bit another . . .’ Angus stopped. The two lawyers were looking at him.

  ‘Please go on,’ said the advocate. ‘He bit another . . . person?’

  ‘He bit another dog,’ said Angus hotly. ‘And the fight in question was certainly not his fault.’

  ‘Yet he did bite, didn’t he?’ pressed the advocate. ‘You see, Mr Lordie, the situation looks a bit bleak. Your dog has bitten . . .’

  Angus did not allow him to continue. ‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I misunderstand the situation. I assumed that we had engaged you to help us establish Cyril’s innocence. Aren’t you meant to believe in that? Aren’t you meant to argue that?’

  The advocate sighed. ‘There is a difference between what I believe, Mr Lordie,’ he said, ‘and what I know to be the case. I can believe a large number of things which have yet to be established, either to my satisfaction or to the satisfaction of others.’

  Angus felt his neck getting warm. There was some truth in the expression getting hot under the collar; he was. ‘What if you know that somebody you’re defending is guilty?’ he began. ‘Can you defend him?’

  The advocate looked unperturbed by the question. ‘It all depends on how I know that,’ he answered. ‘If I know that he’s guilty because he’s suddenly told me so in a consultation and because he wants me to put him in the box so that he can lie to the court – as sometimes happens – then I must ask him to get somebody else to defend him. I cannot stand up in court and let him lie. But if I just think he’s guilty, then it’s a different matter. He’s entitled to have his story put before the court, whatever my personal suspicions may be.’

  Angus frowned. ‘But Cyril can’t talk,’ he said. ‘He’s a dog.’

  Again there was silence. Then the advocate spoke. ‘That is something that we can all agree we know to be the case.’

  ‘And since he can’t give any story at all – because of his . . .’

  ‘His canine condition,’ supplied the advocate.

  Angus nodded. ‘Yes, because of his canine condition, then surely we must give him the benefit of the doubt.’

  ‘Of course we must,’ the advocate conceded. He gestured at the papers in front of him. ‘Except for the fact that there is rather a lot of evidence against him. This is why I believe we might be better to accept that he did it – that he bit these unfortunate people– and concentrate on how we can ensure that the outcome for him is the best one. In other words, we should think about making recommendations as to his supervision that the sheriff will see as reasonable. And it will be a sheriff court matter.’

  ‘Evidence?’ Angus asked nervously.

  ‘Yes,’ said the advocate. ‘Your solicitor has obtained various statements, Mr Lordie, and it seems that there are three people who say that they recognised your dog as the biter. They each say that they knew it was your dog because they had seen him with you in . . .’ He looked down at a piece of paper. ‘In the Cumberland Bar. Drinking, I might add.’ He paused, and looked searchingly at Angus. ‘Do you think your dog might have been drunk when he bit these people, Mr Lordie?’

  Angus did not reply. He was looking up at the ceiling. Cyril is going to be put down, he thought. This is the end.

  26. Paternity

  On several occasions, Bertie had asked his mother whether he might stop psychotherapy, but the answer had always been the same – he could not.

  ‘I don’t need to see Dr Fairbairn,’ he said to Irene. ‘You could still see him, though, Mummy. You could go up there and I could sit in the waiting room and read Scottish Field. You know that magazine. I could even look after Ulysses while you went in to see Dr Fairbairn. Ulysses could look at Scottish Field with me.’

  Irene laughed. ‘Dear Bertie,’ she said. ‘Why should I want to see Dr Fairbairn? It’s you who are his patient, not Mummy.’

  ‘But you like him, don’t you?’ said Bertie. ‘You like him a lot, Mummy. I know you do.’

  Irene laughed again – slightly more nervously this time. ‘Well, it’s true that I don’t mind Dr Fairbairn. I certainly don’t dislike him. Mummy doesn’t dislike many people, Bertie. Mummy is what we call tolerant.’

  Bertie thought about this for a moment. It seemed to him that much of what his mother said was simply not true. And yet she was always telling him that it was wrong to tell fibs – which of course he never did. She was the one who was fibbing now, he thought. ‘But there are lots of people you don’t like, Mummy,’ he protested. ‘There’s that lady at the advanced kindergarten, Mrs Macfadzean. You didn’t like her.’

  ‘Miss Macfadzean,’ Irene corrected. ‘She was Miss Macfadzean because no man in his right mind would ever have married her, poor woman.’

  ‘But you di
dn’t like her, did you, Mummy?’ Bertie asked again.

  ‘It was not a question of disliking her, Bertie,’ said Irene. ‘It was more a question of feeling sorry for her. Those are two different things, you know. Mummy felt pity for Miss Macfadzean because of her limited vision. That’s all. And her conservative outlook. But that’s quite different from disliking her. Quite different.’

  Bertie thought about this. It had seemed very much like dislike to him, but then adults, he noticed, had a way of making subtle distinctions in the meaning of words. But even if his mother claimed not to have disliked Miss Macfadzean, then there were still other people whom he was sure she did not like at all. One of these was Tofu, Bertie’s friend – of sorts – from school.

  ‘What about Tofu?’ he asked. ‘You don’t like him, Mummy. You hate him, don’t you?’

  Irene gasped. ‘But Bertie, you mustn’t ever say things like that! Mummy certainly does not hate Tofu. Mummy just thinks . . .’ She trailed off.

  ‘Thinks what, Mummy?’ Bertie asked.

  ‘I think that Tofu is just a little bit aggressive,’ Irene said. ‘I don’t want you to grow up being aggressive, Bertie. I want you to grow up to be the sort of person who is aware of the feelings of others. The sort of boy who knows about the pain of other people. I want you to be simpatico, Bertie. That’s what I want.’

  Bertie looked thoughtful. ‘And you don’t like Hiawatha,’ he said. ‘That other boy in my class. You said you didn’t like him. You told me so yourself, Mummy.’

  Irene glanced away. ‘Bertie,’ she said, ‘you really mustn’t put words into my mouth. I did not say that I disliked Hiawatha. All I said was that I didn’t like the way Hiawatha . . . well, not to beat about the bush, I didn’t like the way that Hiawatha smelled. He really is a rather unsavoury little boy.’

  ‘But if you don’t like somebody’s smell,’ said Bertie, ‘doesn’t that mean that you don’t like them?’