The World According to Bertie

by Alexander McCall Smith

  The subject now had to be changed. James wanted to show Domenica the list of anthropologists, and that would entail going up to his office above the coffee room. He suggested that they do this, and they left.

  ‘Such a nice smell of cooking,’ observed Domenica as they made their way up the small staircase that led to the director’s office.

  James laughed. ‘They’re doing something with coriander today. I suspect that this is the only gallery in the world where the director works immediately above the kitchen,’ he said. ‘A great privilege.’

  They sat at the large conference table in James’s office. There were two other members of the gallery staff there – Anne Backhouse, who extracted the list of anthropologists from a large file marked Anthropologists, and Nicola Kalinsky, the chief curator, who had been waiting to see James about another matter.

  ‘Nicola knows all about Jacobite glass,’ said James as he introduced Domenica. ‘And Gainsborough, of course. She’s been putting things together for the Drambuie collection which we’re showing.’

  Domenica looked at a large photograph which Nicola had on the table in front of her. A wine glass, long-stemmed and elegant, stood against a dark background. The glass was engraved with a rose, intertwined with leaves, behind which there was what looked like a field of stars.

  ‘That dates from about 1750,’ said Nicola. ‘Not too long after the Forty-Five. I suppose that whoever had it then might be drowning his sorrows over the fate of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the attempt at the Stuart restoration. The rose is a Jacobite symbol, as you know. And this is a particularly attractive one.’

  Domenica picked up the photograph. ‘I’m always surprised that old glass survives,’ she said. ‘You’d think that over a couple of centuries somebody might fumble and drop it.’

  ‘Ah, but these Jacobite glasses were special,’ said James. ‘And special things have a way of surviving. These glasses were tucked away for use in secret – they would not have been everyday ware.’

  ‘I don’t have a particularly high opinion of the Stuarts,’ said Domenica. ‘Apart from Mary, Queen of Scots, of course, who had such a difficult cousin, after all. And Charles II, of course, had what we might today call an enlightened arts policy . . . But as for Charlie . . . Well, that was a narrow escape for Scotland, if you ask me.’

  She examined the photograph more closely. ‘Those stars are so delicately engraved,’ she said. ‘Look at them all.’

  ‘Yes,’ said James. ‘But that’s the extraordinary thing. That glass is part of a set of six – or it looks like a set. Usually, one comes across only one or two together, but there are six with that design. Very strange, wouldn’t you agree, Nicola?’

  Nicola nodded. ‘There’s something very unusual about it. Normally, one finds only one star on these glasses, if there is a star at all. But here we have hundreds of little stars – it’s very strange.’

  ‘And you have no idea of the meaning?’ asked Domenica.

  ‘None, I’m afraid,’ said Nicola. ‘I’ve looked through the literature on the subject – and there’s quite a bit on Jacobite glass – but these particular glasses seem to be completely unusual. We just don’t know what the stars mean.’

  For a few moments the room became silent; outside in Queen Street, the vague hum of traffic; light slanted in through a window, pure, thin, northern light. Domenica felt the presence of the gallery around her; the repository of a nation’s memory, now distilled into this precious object depicted in the photograph – a moment of contact between the hands that had made the glass and engraved it so finely, and her.

  James broke the silence. ‘There seems to us to be some pattern to the stars,’ he said. ‘Look. Here and here. And again here. They’re in clusters. Shapes.’

  ‘I wondered if they could make a coded message of some sort,’ said Anne from her desk at the side of the room.

  Domenica looked at the photograph. She would mention it to Angus, who had said something about Jacobites to her recently – what was it? She could not remember, but it was something about modern Jacobites sounding off even now about the Stuarts, still wanting them back.

  ‘Of course, there are modern sympathisers of the cause, are there not?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said James. ‘They have their pretender, Francis II, who lives in Bavaria, I believe. Not that he has ever made any claim to the throne. But there are one or two people who still claim that he is the real king of Scotland.’

  ‘How colourful,’ said Domenica. She was still trying to remember what Angus had said. She had not been paying particular attention, but it involved Big Lou for some reason. What possible connection could Big Lou have with Prince Charlie and Francis II and the whole arcane Stuart dynasty?

  James tapped the photograph with his finger. ‘If there were a coded message on the glasses, it would be rather interesting to find out what it is,’ he said. ‘Perhaps we could get Bletchley Park, or whoever cracks codes these days, to work out what it says.’

  Domenica laughed. ‘Let’s not let our imaginations run away with us,’ she said. ‘Codes only occur in ridiculous novels. The real world is much more prosaic.’

  The photograph was slipped back into a large envelope and Domenica turned her attention to the list of anthropologists.

  Fifteen minutes later, James Holloway escorted her to the front door of the gallery and said goodbye to her there. They would see one another again soon, he said; Domenica suggested lunch with their mutual friend, Dilly Emslie, and James agreed. Then she walked down the hill towards Drummond Place and Scotland Street. As she passed Queen Street Gardens, the wind moved the branches of the trees against the sky, gently, almost imperceptibly. This city is so beautiful, she thought, so intriguing. If one had it, the city, as one’s lover, that would be almost enough, almost enough.

  56. Bruce Moves

  Moving, thought Bruce, had become rather familiar. Within the space of a year there had been his move from Edinburgh to London, where there were several moves, and then the move back to Edinburgh. His first flat in London had been a shared one in Fulham. He had liked that, and would have been prepared to stay there longer, but had been unable to resist an offer he had received to move in with friends in Notting Hill. That had suited him perfectly; the flat was a couple of doors from an Italian restaurant and a small set of film studios. The film people often ate in the restaurant, along with other creative types, and this appealed greatly to Bruce. They had been stand-offish, though, and had not welcomed an overture which Bruce had once made, when he had offered their table an olive from a plate of olives on his own table. Bruce had thought this rude; there was something symbolic about rejecting an olive – or was the symbolism attached purely to whole olive branches? In spite of that, he still felt that by living there, and eating from time to time in that particular restaurant, he was at the heart of this fashionable and vibrant part of London. Je suis arrivé, he said to himself, and reflected on how unimportant and far away Scotland now seemed.

  But things in London had not worked out quite as Bruce had planned. The flat in Notting Hill was expensive, even when the rent was divided three ways, and Bruce soon found that the money he had brought with him – most of it from that highly lucrative Chateau Petrus deal – soon haemorrhaged away, as money has a habit of doing in London. There was no shortage of work there, of course, but not all of it was the sort of work that Bruce wanted to do, and he began to think with a degree of regret of the job with Macaulay Holmes Richardson Black, the Edinburgh surveyors. It had been time to move on from that, of course, and he could not imagine himself doing that sort of work for the rest of his life, but it had been steady and reasonably well paid, and often involved free tickets to Murrayfield for the rugby, even for the popular game against England, for which tickets were always in such short supply.

  It was all the fault of that awful Todd woman, thought Bruce. She had accosted him – yes, accosted – in that bookshop in George Street and virtually forced him to take her
to lunch at the Café St Honoré. Of course I should have been on my guard, he thought: Edinburgh was full of women like that who were itching for an affair with a younger man, particularly somebody like me, and I should have shown a little bit more savvy. But what made it all so unjust was that nothing had happened, and it was only because her husband had come into the restaurant at the precise moment that this rapacious woman had seized his hand that the situation had become awkward.

  Nothing like that had happened in London, of course, but over the months it had become apparent to Bruce that the reality of life in London was one of struggle; people worked hard, put up with cramped conditions, and had to travel miles to conduct their social lives – they struggled. With the inherent good nature of the English, they generally remained remarkably cheerful about all this, but such hardships began to wear Bruce down. He looked back with longing to the days when he had been able to walk to work – even to go home for lunch or for a quick dalliance with a girlfriend if he so desired; that was impossible in London. He remembered how he could walk from the Cumberland Bar to Murrayfield Stadium in half an hour, with his friends, and then walk with them to a dinner and a party thereafter. And he remembered those friends: Gordon, Hamish, Iain, Simon, Fergus . . . and he found that he missed them.

  So there had been the move back to Edinburgh and into the flat in Comely Bank owned by his friend, Neil. Now there was the move out of that flat and into the flat in Howe Street owned by Julia Donald. So many moves . . . He zipped up his suitcase and moved it off the bed and onto the floor. Caroline, Neil’s wife, was standing in the doorway, watching him, and Bruce turned round to face her.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘That’s more or less it. I hope I haven’t left anything. If I have, give it to the Oxfam shop.’ He paused. He did not like the way that Caroline watched him; it was distinctly disconcerting, and he wondered if she did it to Neil too. I could never put up with being married to somebody like her, thought Bruce; poor Neil.

  ‘Neil said that I should offer to drive you over there,’ Caroline said. ‘Would you like me to do that?’

  Bruce considered the offer for a moment. It was significant, he thought, that she had said that Neil had made the suggestion. She was not making the offer; her husband was. ‘No thanks,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t want to put you out. I’ll phone for a cab.’

  She nodded. ‘Do you want to leave anything for the phone?’ she said.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘For your phone calls,’ she said. ‘Sometimes when one stays somewhere one leaves money for one’s share of the phone bill. That sometimes happens.’

  Bruce blushed. This woman was the end. She was la fin, he thought.

  ‘I haven’t kept a note,’ he said. ‘Sorry. Maybe I should have noted down the length of the calls. You know, something like: Edinburgh to Glasgow, two minutes ten seconds. That sort of thing.’ His lip curled as he spoke; she would hardly understand sarcasm, he thought; such people rarely do.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Maybe you should have.’

  Bruce looked down at his suitcase. ‘You’ve got a problem, Caroline,’ he said. ‘You’ve got a big problem. Maybe with phones, but also with men, I’d say, and I’m sorry about that, because there are lots of men about, you know.’

  Caroline’s reply came quickly. ‘Not with all men,’ she said. ‘Just some.’

  Bruce shrugged. ‘Whatever,’ he said. He picked up his suitcase; there was no point in prolonging this. ‘You’ve been very kind,’ he said. ‘Thanks for everything.’

  Caroline did not move from the doorway. ‘My conditioner,’ she said, between clenched teeth. ‘Put it back in the shower! You’ve moved it again, and I told you, I told you. I want it in the shower, on that little shelf. That’s where it lives. That conditioner lives there.’

  57. In the Shower Again

  ‘It’s amazing how petty some people are,’ said Bruce. ‘They get really, really upset about tiny things. You know, really tiny things.’

  Julia Donald looked at him adoringly. ‘Such as?’ she asked.

  Bruce leaned back in his chair. ‘Well, Caroline was one of these OCD types – you know, obsessive-compulsive disorder. She used to line the conditioner bottles up in the shower just like this, plonk plonk plonk, and she would go absolutely mental if you touched any of them. And of course you have to have a bit of room to move in a shower . . .’ At this, he winked at Julia. ‘Ideally, showers should have enough room for two. Saves energy.’

  Julia giggled. ‘And it’s somehow more . . . more friendly.’

  ‘Precisely,’ said Bruce, glancing for a finely timed moment in the direction of the bathroom, which lay behind him in Julia’s flat. ‘Anyway, Caroline would go through the roof if any of her stupid conditioner bottles was moved. Ballistic. Stupid woman.’

  ‘You’d think that she’d have better things to do,’ said Julia. ‘I can’t bear obsessively tidy people.’

  Bruce glanced around her sitting room – their sitting room now. In the New Town, of course, he knew it would be called a drawing room, depending on how one defined oneself. As a surveyor, he had prided himself on being able to tell exactly when a living room would be described as such, or as a lounge (never), or when it would be a drawing room. It was not always easy, but there were many clues. A drawing room was genteel, and there were many drawing rooms in Edinburgh; this, he was sure, was one.

  ‘It’s so comfortable,’ he said, smiling at Julia. ‘It’s so comfortable, sitting here in the . . . in the . . .’

  ‘Drawing room,’ she supplied.

  Well, thought Bruce, that settles that. There were few surprises in life if one had fine social antennae, which, he thought, I have. He looked at Julia. She was very attractive – in a slightly outdoorsy way; and by that he did not mean rustic, or agricultural, but more . . . well, grouse-moorish. There was a breed of women who frequented grouse moors, standing around outside Land Rovers while their husbands and boyfriends peppered birds with lead shot, an activity which, in an atavistic, tribal way appeared to give them pleasure. Some of these women themselves actually shot – ladies who shoot their lunch, as Country Life had so wittily put it. These women wore green down-filled jackets and green welling-tons, and liked dogs – although they only seemed to have one breed of dog, which was a Labrador. They liked Labradors and Aga cookers, thought Bruce, and smiled at the thought. That was Julia.

  And Julia, looking at Bruce, thought: he is so gorgeous, so hunkalato. It’s his shape, really – the whole shape of him. And that cleft in his chin. Do men have plastic surgery to put clefts in? Why not? Silly thought. I can just see him standing in his dressing gown in front of the Aga, cup of coffee in his hand, hair still wet from the shower, and mine, all mine! But who’s going to make the first move? He will, of course. Or he’d better. He won’t wait long.

  And what if he says to me: are you, you know . . . What should I say? No, it’s not wrong, not really. If I don’t get him, then some girl is going to get her claws into him and he may not be as happy with her as he is with me. I’ll make him happy – of course I will. He’ll be really happy with me, and the baby. Baby! A real little baby! Mine. Mr and Mrs Bruce Anderson. Or, rather, Bruce and Julia Anderson. And little Rory Anderson? Charlotte Anderson? And we can still have lots of fun because we’ll get somebody to help. A Swedish girl, maybe. No. Not a Swede. They’re pretty and we want somebody homely. So it’ll have to be a girl from . . . (And here she mentally named a town in Scotland, known for its homely girls.)

  Bruce stretched out his arms. ‘Yes, it’s really great being here, Julia. Thanks a lot.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I thought that I might have a shower, and then how about I cook some pasta?’

  ‘Great,’ said Julia. ‘Fab idea.’

  Bruce rose to his feet. ‘Where’s the shower?’ he asked.

  Julia gestured to the corridor. ‘Along there.’ She paused. ‘It’s a bit temperamental,’ she said. ‘I need to get the plumber to come and take a look at it. But there’s a trick
to working it. You have to turn the lever all the way to the right and then a little bit to the left. I can show you how to do it.’

  Bruce smiled. ‘But won’t you get wet? Unless . . .’

  She smiled encouragingly. ‘Unless what, Brucie?’

  ‘Unless . . .’

  She rose to her feet, kicking off her shoes as she did so. ‘You go,’ she said. ‘I’ll just be a sec.’

  Bruce went through to his bedroom and stood for a moment in front of his window. Julia was all right, he supposed, but it was clear to him that she would keep him occupied. There were some women who were simply high maintenance, in his terms, and she, he imagined, was one of them. That could be managed, he thought, but it could become difficult if they started to cling. That was the point at which one had to make it clear to them that men were not there to be used, and that they should not be tied down too much. And that, thought Bruce, was the problem. Women get hold of a man and then they think they own him. That would not happen to him, and if Julia had ideas along those lines, then she would have to be disabused of them. He was happy to keep Julia happy, but he was not going to be tied down. That would have to be made quite clear – a little bit later.

  He gazed out of the window, which overlooked Howe Street, a street that sloped down sharply to sweep round into the elegant crescents of Royal Circus. It was one of Bruce’s favourite streets in that part of Edinburgh, and he felt a wave of contentment come over him. Here I am, he thought, exactly where I want to be. I have a place to live. I have a woman who is wild keen on me. I have no rent to pay and probably no electricity bills, etc., etc. And I even have a job, financed by Julia, bless her. Perfection.

  He moved away from the window. In the background, down the corridor, he could hear the shower being run. Duty calls, he said to himself.