The World According to Bertie

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Reaching for the champagne, Matthew topped up Pat’s glass. We’re arguing again, he thought. It seems to happen rather too often recently. We’re like two boxers dancing around one another in the ring, waiting to land a blow. This thought depressed him, and he did not want to be depressed; not tonight, with the Bollinger on the table and the prospect of a party at the Duke’s house. He decided to change the subject.

  ‘What should we call the Duke?’ he asked. ‘Your Grace?’

  ‘No,’ said Pat. ‘That’s far too formal. I think that we should probably just call him Johannesburg.’

  ‘Is that what dukes are called by their friends?’

  Pat shrugged. ‘No, they use their first names. Harry, or Jim, or whatever. But he called himself Johannesburg.’

  ‘I see,’ said Matthew. He paused. ‘Do you think that he’s a real duke, Pat? I looked him up in Who’s Who in Scotland, and he wasn’t there. He wasn’t there under Johannesburg or Duke. Nothing.’

  ‘I think he’s a fraud,’ said Pat. ‘His real name is probably Smellie, or something like that.’

  ‘We’ll find out,’ said Matthew.

  ‘Will we?’

  ‘Maybe not.’ Then he asked: ‘I wonder who else will be there, Pat? Le tout Edimbourg?’

  44. A Crumpled Linen Suit

  Single-Malt House was a comfortable, rather rambling farmhouse on the very edge of town. It stood on the lower slopes of the Pentland Hills, those misty presences that provide the southern backdrop to Edinburgh. To the east, dropping slowly towards the North Sea, lay the rich farmland of East Lothian, broken here and there by pocket glens sheltering the remnants of old coal mines – the villages of miners’ cottages, the occasional tower, the scars that coal can leave on a landscape.

  The house itself was not large, but was flanked by a byre, behind which a garden sloped up to a stand of oaks; and beyond the oaks, the steeper parts of the hillside itself, pines, scree, the sky.

  ‘I’ve driven past this place hundreds of times,’ said Matthew, as he and Pat alighted from the taxi in the driveway. ‘And never noticed it. That’s the Biggar road out there. We used to go out to Flotterstone Inn when I was a boy. We’d have sandwiches and cakes from one of those three-tiered plate things and then go for a walk up to the Glencorse reservoir.’

  ‘So did we,’ said Pat. ‘And there were always crows in those trees near the reservoir wall. Remember them? Crows in the trees, and sheep always on the wrong side of the dyke.’

  They stood for a moment under the night sky, the taxi reversing down the drive behind them. Matthew reached out and put his arm around Pat’s waist. ‘We could walk over there now,’ he said. ‘We could go over the top of the hill, then down past the firing ranges.’ He wanted to be alone with her, away from distraction, to have her full attention, which he thought he never had.

  She shivered. ‘Too cold,’ she said. ‘And we’ve been invited to a party.’

  They looked up at the house behind them. There was clearly a party going on inside, as lights spilled out of the front windows and the murmur of many conversations could be heard coming from within.

  ‘Somehow, I don’t imagine him living here,’ said Matthew. ‘I don’t know why. I just don’t.’

  ‘They don’t all live in grand houses,’ Pat said. ‘Some dukes are probably pretty hard up these days.’

  Matthew raised an eyebrow. ‘But this one paid thirty-two thousand for a plain white canvas. That doesn’t sound like penury.’ He paused. ‘Of course, he hasn’t paid yet.’

  They walked to the front door and Matthew pulled at the old-fashioned bell-tug.

  ‘They’ll never hear that inside,’ said Pat. ‘Let’s just go in.’

  Matthew was reluctant. ‘Should we?’

  ‘Why not? Look, nobody’s answered. We can’t just stand here.’

  They pushed the door open and entered a narrow hall. At the side of this hall was an umbrella and walking-stick stand of the sort which is always to be seen in country houses – a jumble of cromachs, a couple of golf umbrellas; and to the side, along with a boot scraper, mud-encrusted wellingtons, a pair of hiking boots for a child, a tossed-aside dog collar and lead.

  The hall became a corridor which ran off towards the back of the house. The sound of conversation was louder now – laughter, a tap being run somewhere in the background – and then, from a door to their right, a man emerged. He was wearing a crumpled linen suit and a forest-green shirt, open at the neck.

  ‘So, there you are,’ said the Duke of Johannesburg. ‘Hoped for, but not entirely expected.’ He came up to Pat and kissed her lightly on each cheek – a delicate gesture for a large man. Then he turned to Matthew and extended his hand.

  Matthew, flustered, said: ‘Your Grace.’

  ‘Please!’ protested the Duke. ‘Just call me Johannesburg. We’re all very New Labour round here.’ He turned to Pat as he said this and winked. ‘Hardly,’ he added.

  Pat smiled at the Duke. ‘Where exactly is Johannesburg?’ she asked.

  The Duke looked at her in surprise. ‘Over there,’ he said, waving his hand out of the window. ‘A long way away, thank God.’ He paused. ‘Do I shock you? I think I do. That’s the problem these days – nobody speaks their mind. No, don’t smile. They really don’t. We’ve been browbeaten into conformity by all sorts of people who tell us what we can and cannot say. Haven’t you noticed it? The tyranny of political correctness. Don’t pass any judgement on anything. Don’t open your trap in case you offend somebody or other.’

  He led them through the door into the room from which he had just emerged.

  ‘Everybody knows,’ he went on, ‘that there are some places which are, quite frankly, awful, but nobody says that out loud. Except some bravely spoken journalists now and then. Do let me get you a drink.’

  He reached for a couple of glasses from a library shelf to his side. ‘Some years ago,’ he continued, ‘The Oldie ran a series called Great Dumps of the World – a brilliant idea. They got a rather clever friend of mine, Lance Butler, to write about Monaco, and he did a brilliant job. What a dump that place is! All those rich people busy not wanting to pay tax and living in chi-chi little apartments above glove and perfume shops. Disgusting place! And their funny wee monarchy with its clockwork soldiers and the princess who took up with a lion tamer – can you believe it? What a dump! But they didn’t like it at all. There was an awful fuss. These people take themselves so seriously.

  ‘Come to think of it,’ the Duke continued, ‘Johannesburg isn’t all that bad. Once they get crime under control, it’ll be rather nice, in fact. That beautiful, invigorating highveld air. Marvellous. And nice people. They put up with an awful lot in the bad old days – oppression, cruelty et cetera – but they came out smiling, which says a lot for them. So I hope things turn out well.’

  He handed Pat and Matthew their glasses. ‘You may be wondering why I’m the Duke of Johannesburg. Well, the reason is that my grandfather gave an awful lot of money to a political party a long time ago on the express understanding that they would make him a duke. He had visited Jo’burg years before when he was in the Scots Greys and he rather liked the place, so he chose that as his title. And then they went and ratted on their agreement and said they didn’t go in for creating dukedoms any more and would he be satisfied with an ordinary peerage? He said no, and used the moniker thereafter, as did my old man, on the grounds that he was morally entitled to it. So that’s how it came about. There are some pedants who claim that I shouldn’t call myself what I do, but I ignore them. Pedants!’

  He raised his glass. ‘Slàinte!’

  45. Minimalism

  But there were others in the room. Matthew and Pat had hardly noticed them, so engaged had they been by the flow of their host’s conversation. So that was the reason why there was no mention of a Duke of Johannesburg in Who’s Who in Scotland – there was no such duke, at least not in the sense that one would be recognised by the Lord Lyon. Yet what did such recognition amount
to? Matthew asked himself. All that it did was to give a stamp of purely conventional authenticity; conventional in the sense of agreed, or settled, and ultimately that was merely a question of arbitrary social arrangements. There was no real difference between this duke and any other better-known duke; just as there was no real difference between a real duke and any one of Jock Tamson’s bairns. We were all just people who chose to call ourselves by curious things known as names, and the only significant difference between any of us lay in what we did with our lives.

  Matthew found himself drawn to the Duke of Johannesburg, with his easy-going conviviality and his cheerful demeanour. This was a man, he thought, who dared, and like most men, Matthew admired men who dared. He himself did not exactly dare, but he would like to dare, if he dared.

  ‘Yes,’ said the Duke, looking around the room. ‘There are a couple of other guests. And I’m ignoring my social responsibilities by not introducing you. I shouldn’t go on about these old and irrelevant matters. Nobody’s interested in any of that.’

  ‘Oh, but we are!’ said a man standing near the fireplace. ‘That’s where you’re mistaken, Johannesburg. We all like to hear about these things.’

  ‘That’s my Greek chorus over there,’ said the Duke, nodding in the direction of the man by the fireplace. ‘You must meet him.’

  The Duke drew Matthew and Pat over to the other guest and made introductions.

  ‘Humphrey Holmes,’ said the Duke.

  Matthew looked at Humphrey. He had seen him before – and heard of him – but he had never actually met him. He was a dapper man, wearing a black velvet jacket and bow tie.

  ‘I hear you sold Johannesburg a painting,’ said Humphrey. ‘He was telling me about it. Something very minimalist, I gather.’

  Matthew laughed. ‘Very.’ He glanced around the room, at the pictures on the walls. There were several family portraits – a picture of three boys in kilts, in almost sepia tones, from a long time ago; one looked a bit like the Duke, but it was hard to tell. Then there was a powerful James Howie landscape, one of those glowing pictures that the artist scraped away at for years in order to get the light just as he wanted it to be. Matthew knew his work and sold it occasionally, when Howie, a perfectionist, could be persuaded to part with a painting.

  ‘I was surprised when he said he’d bought something minimalist,’ remarked Humphrey. ‘As you can see, this isn’t exactly a minimalist room.’

  ‘Perhaps he’ll hang it somewhere else,’ said Pat.

  Humphrey turned to her and smiled politely. ‘Perhaps. Perhaps there are minimalist things here already – it’s just that we can’t see them. But, tell me, do you like minimalism in music?’

  Matthew looked down at his feet. ‘Well, I’m not sure . . .’

  ‘You mean people like Glass and Adams?’ Pat interjected.

  ‘Yes,’ said Humphrey. ‘Some people are very sniffy about them. I heard somebody say the other day that it’s amazing how people like Adams make so much out of three notes. Which isn’t exactly fair. There’s quite a lot there, you know, if you start to look at Pärt and people like that.’

  ‘I like Pärt,’ said Pat.

  ‘Oh, so do I,’ said Humphrey.

  ‘And then there’s Max Richter,’ said Pat. ‘Do you know that he lives in Edinburgh? His music’s wonderful. Really haunting.’

  ‘I shall look out for him,’ said Humphrey. ‘Johannesburg wouldn’t be interested, of course. He listens to the pipes mostly. And some nineteenth-century stuff. Italian operas and so on. One of his boys is shaping up to be quite a good piper. That’s him coming in now.’

  They looked in the direction of a boy who had entered the room, holding a plate of smoked salmon on small squares of bread. From behind a blonde fringe, the boy looked back at them.

  ‘Will you play for us, East Lothian?’ asked Humphrey.

  ‘Yes,’ answered the boy. ‘Later.’

  ‘Good boy,’ said Humphrey. ‘Johannesburg has three boys, you know. That lad’s East Lothian. Then there’s West Lothian and Midlothian. Real boys. And he’s taught them to do things that boys used to know how to do. How to make a sporran out of a badger you find run over on the road. How to repair a lobster creel. Things like that. I think—’

  He was interrupted by the return of the Duke, who had gone out of the room once he had made the introductions.

  ‘I have my cheque book,’ said the Duke, holding up a rectangular green leather wallet. ‘If I don’t pay for the painting now, I shall forget. So . . .’ He unfolded the wallet, and leaning it on Humphrey’s back, scribbled out a cheque, which he handed to Matthew with a flourish.

  Matthew looked at the cheque. The Duke’s handwriting was firm and clear – strong, masculine down-strokes. Three hundred and twenty pounds.

  Matthew’s expression gave it away.

  ‘Something wrong?’ asked the Duke. There was concern in his voice.

  ‘I . . .’ Matthew began.

  Pat took the cheque from him and glanced at it. ‘Actually, the painting was thirty-two thousand pounds,’ she said.

  ‘Good heavens!’ said the Duke. ‘I thought . . . Well I must have assumed that there was a decimal point before the last two zeros. Thirty-two thousand pounds! Sorry. The exchequer can’t rise to that.’

  ‘This’ll do,’ said Pat firmly. ‘Our mistake. This’ll do fine, won’t it, Matthew?’

  Matthew glanced at Humphrey, who was smiling benignly. Elsewhere in the room, there was silence, as other guests had realised what was going on. It was easy to imagine a mistake of this nature being made. And three hundred and twenty pounds was quite enough for that particular painting; far too much, really.

  ‘I shall be more careful in my labelling in future,’ Matthew said magnanimously. ‘Of course that’s all right.’

  The tension which had suffused the room now dissipated. People began to talk again freely, and the Duke reached for a bottle of wine to refill glasses.

  ‘That was good of you,’ murmured Humphrey.

  ‘It was nothing,’ said Matthew. ‘It really was.’

  ‘But it wasn’t,’ protested Humphrey.

  ‘I meant the painting was nothing,’ said Matthew; which was true.

  46. Mist-covered Mountains

  Later in the evening, Matthew, wanting, he said, to get some air, suggested that they go out into the garden. Pat nodded, and followed him out through the hall. She had gone out into gardens with boys before this and knew what it meant. Boys were usually not very interested in gardens, except at night, when their interest sharpened. Outside, the evening was unusually warm for the time of the year, almost balmy; the air was still, the branches of the oak trees further up the steeply sloping garden were motionless.

  For a few moments, they stood on the driveway. Matthew reached for Pat’s hand. ‘Look at that,’ he said, gesturing up at the sky. ‘We don’t often see that in town, do we? All that?’

  The sky was a dark, black velvet, rich and deep, studded here and there with small points of starlight, one or two of which seemed to burn with great intensity.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘All those yellow streetlights. Light pollution.’

  Matthew squeezed her hand. This time, she returned the pressure; did not let go of his hand.

  ‘Whenever I look up there,’ he said, ‘I think the same thing. I think of how small we are and how all our concerns, our anxieties and all the rest of it, are so irrelevant, so tiny. Not that we think they are – but they are, aren’t they?’

  She looked at him. ‘I suppose they are.’

  ‘And I also think of how we make one another miserable by worrying about these small things, when we should really just hug one another and say thank you to somebody, to something, for the great privilege of being alive – when everything up there’ – he nodded in the direction of the sky – ‘when everything up there is cold and dead. Dead stars. Collapsing stars. Suns that are going out, dying.’

  She was silent. She wanted to say to him:
‘I think so too.’ But she did not.

  He began to walk over towards the byre, leading her gently by the hand. ‘You know, a long time ago, when I had just left school, I had a friendship with another boy. It was the most intense friendship I ever had. I really loved my friend. And why not? It was pure– it really was. Nothing happened. It was completely innocent. Do you understand about that?’

  ‘Of course I do,’ she replied. ‘Women are much easier about loving their friends. It’s only men who have difficulty with that.’

  ‘Yes. Anyway, we were in Perthshire once, fishing, and we sat down on the rocks beside the river and I looked up at the sky, which was completely empty, and I suddenly had the feeling that I wasn’t alone any more. I can’t explain it in any other way. I suppose it was one of those moments that people sometimes call mystical. A moment of insight. And I never forgot it. I still think of it. I still think of it.’

  They were outside the byre now. It had been converted, and appeared to be used as some sort of office. A French window, framed by creepers, was open, and they could see into the room on the other side of the window.

  ‘Come,’ said Matthew. ‘Come on, I don’t think they’ll mind.’

  They pushed open one of the French windows and stepped inside the room. Through a large window in the roof there was enough light coming in from outside, from the glow that spilled out from the main house, from the light of the sky itself, to reveal a cluttered desk, a wall of bookshelves and a sofa. In the far corner of the room, a squat, dark shape revealed the presence of a wood-burning stove. There was, about the room, an air of wood-smoke that had settled, a reassuring, comfortable smell that had also been present in the house, with its open fires.

  ‘This looks like his study,’ said Matthew. His voice was lowered, almost to a sepulchral whisper, although there was nobody about.

  ‘It’s so quiet after the din back there,’ Pat said.

  They sat down on the sofa. Matthew felt his heart beating within him and knew that even if he had not made up his mind in a conscious sense, at the level of the subconscious there was certainty.