Bertie Plays the Blues

by Alexander McCall Smith

  For a moment Mathew felt a pang of regret. Life had been simpler in those days, when he and Pat were together. Now here he was a married man with three sons. No, he should put those days out of his mind; everything had changed – changed completely.

  As they made their way over the road to the coffee bar, Pat asked Matthew how Big Lou was. “Same as ever,” he replied. “She looks the same. She says the same things … As all of us do, of course. I’m not suggesting that I’ve got anything new to say.”

  “That’s good,” said Pat. “Too many things are different. If Big Lou is the same, then that’s good as far as I’m concerned.”

  “But not necessarily from her point of view,” said Matthew. “Maybe it’s a mistake to think that people who don’t have much change in their lives are happy with that. Big Lou would like to have a boyfriend, I think. In fact, I was wondering about treating her to a dating agency.”

  Pat looked at him sideways. “Be careful. Big Lou may be more vulnerable than you think.”

  “She’s strong,” said Matthew. “Remember where she comes from. Arbroath. They’re strong in Arbroath.”

  “Strong people are just as vulnerable as the rest of us, Matthew.”

  They began to descend the steps that led down to Big Lou’s basement café. Halfway down this stone staircase, it was possible to see through one of the windows into the café’s interior. As Pat glanced in, she saw the familiar figure of Big Lou leaning over her counter writing something on a sheet of paper. At that precise moment, Big Lou looked up, alerted, perhaps, by the shadows cast by Pat and Matthew. She looked up, saw Pat, and waved.

  Pat felt a sudden surge of emotion, and she realised that she loved this woman, with her matter-of-fact manner and her no-nonsense approach to life. And she realised that there was something missing in her life: something absolutely basic and essential. A mother. Big Lou is my mother, she thought. And she’s Matthew’s mother too. And Angus Lordie’s. And, in an odd, anthropomorphic way, Cyril’s mother as well.

  Matthew noticed that something had crossed Pat’s mind.

  “What are you thinking of?” he asked. “You look very serious.”

  She reached for the handle. “My mother,” she said.

  Matthew raised an eyebrow. “I thought you never saw her.”

  Pat was silent. Then she said, “She’s in a submarine.” And added, “Metaphorically.”

  12. The Ceilings of Edinburgh

  Angus did not say much about Domenica’s plan to buy Antonia’s flat and join it to hers. He knew that Domenica came up with impractical ideas from time to time, and his policy had always been to ignore them; sooner or later they would be forgotten, to be replaced by some other scheme that would also get nowhere. Domenica was a wise woman, he felt – far more intellectually accomplished than he was himself – but not all her ideas had the ring of practicality about them.

  His lukewarm response was the result of his unwillingness to abandon his flat and studio in Drummond Place – something he thought would be necessary if they were to buy out Antonia. It was all very well for Domenica to reassure him that he would be able to paint just as well in Scotland Street – she did not understand that an artist needed space to work properly, and space was a question of ceiling height as much as it was one of the length and breadth of a room.

  He had explained this to her once, but she had probably not been listening, or had forgotten. “Edinburgh is uniquely well suited to artists because of its high ceilings,” he said. “We need that height; we just do. Look at James Pryde. Look at his wonderful paintings of Edinburgh interiors with their great high ceilings and curtains of a length and grandeur that would do La Scala proud.”

  To make his point, he had shown Domenica a picture of one of Pryde’s paintings, but she had simply shuddered, and said, “How gloomy! How could anybody sleep in a bedroom like that, Angus?”

  No, she did not understand that need for ceiling height, and that was why she thought he would have no difficulty in adjusting to painting in her flat, or its planned extension, with its considerably more modest head-room.

  Of course he could simply refuse; the flat was in his name and could not be sold without his consent. He could tell Domenica that he needed it and that was that, but he thought this would not be a particularly good start to their marriage. But then her trying to sell Drummond Place from under his feet was equally uncollegiate – if one could think of the married state in collegiate terms.

  These thoughts gave rise to the issue of the form of words to be used in their marriage ceremony. Angus was Episcopalian and hoped that Domenica would agree to the use of the Scottish Book of Common Prayer for their wedding service. He liked the language, which was beautifully resonant, and even if Charles I – still regarded by some, but not many of them in Scotland, as a martyr – had been a little pushy in expecting his Scottish subjects to embrace a prayer book that gave an order on its first page, that lack of political tact should not have obscured the essential linguistic merit of the Book of Common Prayer, and also, Angus felt, that of the Authorised Version of Jamie Saxt.

  Angus knew that the wording of the traditional marriage vows was not to everyone’s taste. There was nothing wrong with promising to love the other and to endow him or her with all one’s worldly goods – including, in a modern context, one assumed, all necessary passwords and PINs. That was very much in the spirit of modern marriage, but one strayed onto controversial ground once one started to talk about honouring and obeying. No modern woman would promise to “love, honour and obey” her husband, and these words were being deleted from most wedding services. But if one threw out obedience, as the metaphorical bathwater, did one also throw out loving and honouring? Honouring one’s husband sounded a bit servile, and would be objected to on those grounds, but surely one could still promise to love him? That raised the interesting question of whether one could really promise to love somebody: could love be called up, commanded, as a matter of will?

  Angus wondered about this: there were people, he supposed, who loved others because they knew it was their Christian duty to do so, but the love one was talking about in that context was a different matter. It was a sort of agape – a form of brotherly love that was quite capable of being willed into existence. Romantic love – the love that one might expect between lovers – was something different. It was an emotion rather than an intellectual idea; it was a disposition that the person experiencing it could not control. One did not decide to be in love – rather, one realised that one had fallen into the state.

  If Angus thought that Domenica would browbeat him into selling his flat, then his fears were misplaced. That had never been Domenica’s intention. She hoped that he would sell it, as a result of her putting a persuasive case for that to happen; she would never have forced him to do so, and would certainly have withdrawn the suggestion had she known of his unhappiness with it. Having been in one marriage where she had encountered overbearing attitudes – on the part of her in-laws, her late husband’s co-owners of the family’s small electricity factory in Kerala – she had no wish to start her second marriage on such a footing. And if Angus did not wish to sell Drummond Place, it would still be possible to buy Antonia’s flat by realising some investments of her own. It would not be the best place for the money, as it would provide no income, but the investments in question showed no signs of doing that anyway and would not be missed if they were to be transformed into bricks and mortar – or, in the case of Scotland Street, into stone and pointing.

  So it was that Domenica found herself telephoning McKay Norwell and arranging for her solicitor, Lesley Kerr, to come round to Scotland Street with her measuring tape, her notebook, and her unsurpassed expertise in the marketing and selling of flats. They would look at Antonia’s flat together and then Domenica would ask the question that had been worrying her since the idea had been conceived. If the owner of a flat asks you to sell it for her, could you sell it to yourself? It was a question worthy of the Lord Chance
llor in Iolanthe, she thought, a suitable subject for a chorus of assorted fairies and peers to debate in song. She wanted the answer to be yes – and an un -ambiguous yes at that – as this was something that Domenica now wanted with some intensity. She had to have it; she just had to.

  13. Facility and Circumvention

  “What I would advise,” said Lesley Kerr, “is this. You should tell Antonia that you are interested in purchasing her flat. You should then suggest that she consults another solicitor and asks him to act for her. You can then approach her lawyer with an offer for the flat, and he will advise her as to whether to accept. That would all be quite proper.”

  The three of them – Domenica, Lesley and Angus – were sitting in Domenica’s kitchen, a cup of tea on the table before them. Next to her cup of tea, Lesley’s tape measure and black Moleskine notebook were laid; the tools of her trade of buying and selling houses.

  Domenica listened to this advice. Although she did not say so, she was secretly rather disappointed that it would not be possible to act as both seller and buyer at the same time. She would have offered Antonia a fair price, and she would have been spared the stress of having to participate in blind bidding for the property – something that made the business of buying a house or flat in Scotland an exercise in nerves and inflationary zeal. Lesley’s compromise seemed very attractive: she could make an offer, but it would not be an offer that was competing with numerous others, and surely it would be attractive from Antonia’s point of view to have an arrangement that would obviate the need for a great deal of showing of the property. Of course Antonia did not have to worry about any of that, as she had delegated the selling of the house to Domenica, but she should at least consider Domenica’s convenience, now that she was a nun, or almost a nun, and should be thinking of others perhaps a little bit more than she used to.

  Perhaps the most appropriate thing for Antonia to do – one view at least – would be for her to give the flat away. If one was going into a convent, as Antonia was on the verge of doing, then surely one did not want to be encumbered by material possessions, and great spiritual credit was surely obtained if one divested oneself of those things that tie us most to the outside world. One should give things to the deserving poor, and even if Domenica could hardly be described as poor, she could still be said to be deserving …

  The deserving poor: she thought of this patronising concept and wondered, for a moment, who they were, these deserving recipients of charity. Presumably there was some notion of desert at work in the phrase: the deserving poor were deserving because they had done nothing to merit their indigence – at least in the view of the smug middle classes who had coined the expression. And if the deserving poor existed there must be those who were, by contrast, clearly undeserving. These must be those who had brought their situation upon themselves by a failure to work, those who were feckless or extravagant, or, more simply, those who had it coming to them all along.

  And the deserving rich – what about them, or were all rich people undeserving? What about these bankers with their inflated, provocative bonuses – if anybody could be called the undeserving rich, then surely it was them. Yet there must be rich people who had earned what they had, and had done it in such a way as not to trample over others. Would their good fortune be recognised, or were we so accustomed in Scotland to resenting people with money that they simply could never be accepted as deserving of their financial good fortune?

  “I wish that Antonia would just give me the flat,” sighed Domenica. “She says she doesn’t need it – then why not make a gift of it?” She turned to Angus. “Should we suggest that to her, do you think?”

  “It’s not a bad idea …” Angus began. “She’s half away with the fairies, anyway. She’d probably say yes.”

  Lesley held up a hand. “Please! Please! You can’t do that sort of thing. Even if Antonia agreed, there would be a major question mark over the transaction and I wouldn’t be in the slightest bit surprised if her relatives were to challenge it. And if they did, then I’m afraid there could be a strong case for having the contract reduced on the grounds of facility and circumvention.”

  “Facility and what?” asked Angus.

  “Facility and circumvention is a doctrine in Scots law that means that a contract with somebody who is weak and vulnerable can be set aside on the grounds that the weak and vulnerable person would never have entered into it had he been stronger.”

  “But that’s ridiculous,” protested Domenica. “Of course you have to help people who don’t know what on earth’s going on. You have to help them make up their minds, otherwise they’d never be able to do anything.”

  “I’m afraid not,” said Lesley. “You simply can’t make up somebody’s mind for them.”

  Domenica was not prepared to concede this point. Antonia was impossible – she had no idea of what was good for her, and probably never had. “Well, I must say that I feel I know exactly what Antonia’s best interests are. They’re for her to stay with those Italian sisters and pursue her interest in bee-keeping. She’s perfectly happy out there, and she can write to her heart’s content about those early Scottish saints of hers. She does not need this flat and she can hardly claim that she needs the money from its sale. I think she should be assisted in whatever way possible to make a decision that reflects well on her new-found vocation. And anyway, she’s not right in the head – that’s been obvious for years now, and this bout of Stendhal Syndrome merely underlines all that. Perhaps we should just have her committed – maybe that would be simplest.”

  Angus thought this was going a bit far. “Antonia may go on a bit,” he said. “But she’s not round the bend.” He looked at Domenica reproachfully. “You can’t have people committed just because they live next door to you and won’t sell you their flat. You really can’t do that, Domenica.”

  “Well, we could argue at some length about that,” said Domenica. “And we might never reach a resolution. I suggest that we go in there, measure up, and then consider how best to proceed once we know the dimensions of the rooms.”

  14. Senior Moments

  “Now pay attention for a moment, boys and girls,” said Bertie’s teacher, Miss Maclaren Hope. “I would like to tell you about a very special project we are about to embark upon. It’s a very exciting one, and I want to see everybody looking at me and listening to every word I have to say! And that includes you, Tofu dear. And you, Hiawatha, while we’re about it. I want every little face turned this way, every brow wrinkled in concentration, just as Somerled’s brave warriors listened to him as he explained the dangers that lurked along the perilous shores of Morvern, or those courageous and noble Highlanders hung on every word of Prince Charlie as he explained to them the route they would follow to Victory!”

  Miss Maclaren Hope, a Highlander herself, had a habit of making such references at odd moments, and the children had become accustomed to the West Highlands being brought into most of the subjects they studied, including mathematics. “Bonnie Prince Charlie never made a mistake in calculating the number of miles he had walked,” she announced, “just as we ourselves must never make a mistake in the wee sums we do!” And in addition to these historical asides, the members of Bertie’s class were now all word-perfect in Gaelic and other Highland classics, in “Fear a’ Bhàta”, in “The Eriskay Love Lilt”, and in “Ho Ro, My Nut-Brown Maiden”. They had also performed a two-hour play, written by Miss Maclaren Hope, entitled The Leaving of Lochaber. That performance, which had been presented to the rest of the school in fifteen-minute instalments over a period of eight days, had been compared by Bertie to the Oberammergau Passion Play, which he had read about in the Encyclopaedia Britannica. “It goes on for hours,” he said. “And it’s made the little village where they perform it really famous.”

  Olive, who had been standing nearby when Bertie made this remark, did not take kindly to the mention of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. She was aware that Bertie’s reading ability was considerably better than h
ers, just as she was aware that Bertie seemed to know far more about the world than she did. And she resented both of these facts deeply. “You think you know everything,” she said. “Well you don’t, Bertie Pollock. You know hardly anything.”

  “I’ve never said I know everything,” protested Bertie. “And I don’t, Olive. There are still lots of encyclopaedias I haven’t read – bags of them.”

  Olive ignored this. “And here’s another thing,” she said. “Your mother forgot to fetch you yesterday, didn’t she? It’s no good denying it, Bertie. My mummy said it was quite shocking seeing you standing at the school gate for twenty minutes like that. She said that next time it happened she was going to phone the social services and have you taken into care!”

  “It wasn’t really my mummy’s fault,” said Bertie mildly. “Ulysses was sick all over her just as they got into the bus. She had to go home and change.”

  Olive looked at Bertie with pity. “A likely story, Bertie,” she said. “No, Bertie, your mother’s problem is far more serious than that, you know. You do know that, don’t you, Bertie? You seem to know everything else, don’t you? Well, you do know about your mother, I take it?”

  Bertie hesitated. He was accustomed to Olive’s vague taunts, which he normally accepted quite philosophically, but it seemed now that she had special knowledge of some sort. He was defensive of his mother too: a loyal little boy, he did not like to hear her disparaged by others, especially by Olive, or even by his friend Tofu, who regularly reminded Bertie that his mother was, in Tofu’s view, a cow.

  “She’s just a cow, Bertie,” said Tofu. “I know it’s not your fault, but there it is. She’s a real cow. Everybody in Edinburgh thinks that. It’s official.”