The Importance of Being Seven

by Alexander McCall Smith

  From the comfort of the matrimonial bed, Elspeth would look up at her husband in his tartan dressing gown and smile. She knew that he would now go into the bathroom, shower, dress and then make breakfast for the two of them. By the time that she emerged, the breakfast table in the kitchen would be laid, the muesli jar would be in position, and a pan of water would be boiling on the Aga, ready for a free-range egg. The Aga, a rich red, had been a wedding present from Matthew’s father, along with a matching Aga fridge and freezer.

  ‘Couples with an Aga stay together,’ her new father-in-law had observed, jokingly, she thought. But he was serious.

  ‘How do people know that?’ she asked.

  ‘They just do. It’s the attitude that does it. A person who buys an Aga is going to be … how should one put it, solid. They want a solid and reliable cooker because they are solid and reliable themselves.’ He paused. ‘Do you get flashy types buying Agas? How many flashy types do you know who have an Aga?’

  She thought for a moment. Did she know any flashy types? Did she know anybody who had an Aga? Her own parents might have liked one but could not have afforded it, she thought. Agas were expensive, and even an Aga fridge cost about £5,000 or, if one chose the option with the built-in freezer compartment, £7,000. So none of her colleagues had an Aga, and indeed neither did any of her friends, or even acquaintances.

  ‘Do you know anybody who has an Aga?’ she had asked Matthew after that conversation with his father.

  ‘Hundreds,’ said Matthew. ‘Why?’

  Elspeth frowned. ‘Do you really know hundreds of people who have one?’

  Matthew nodded. ‘Yes. I thought they were pretty common. They’re very nice things, you know. They make for a lovely warm place. You can put your wet washing on the rail, socks, underpants, the works. They get dry in no time.’

  Elspeth looked thoughtful. Matthew’s comment – made so innocently – spoke to the very different circumstances in which they had been brought up. Elspeth’s father, Jim Harmony, had been a good provider, but had never been able to provide an Aga. She had been brought up in circles where people had modest means; where the overseas holiday was a treat rather than an expectation; where money was tight, as it is for the overwhelming majority of people. Now she found herself married to a man who had a considerable amount of money, and was used to moving in circles where that was the norm. Not that Matthew was any sort of snob – quite the opposite, in fact, as he seemed completely indifferent to wealth or position in others. That was an endearing quality, and she could not have been happy with a man who thought the value of others was determined by their means. But Matthew’s world was certainly different.

  So it was upon an Aga that Elspeth’s breakfast egg was cooked. And once again, Matthew took great pains to make sure that he did everything he could to please her. When she had told him that she was quite happy to have her boiled egg ‘as it comes’, he had insisted on having a trial boiling of four eggs for different periods and then asking her to state a preference. She had chosen an egg in which the white was solid, rather than hard, and in which the yolk had at least some motility. Thereafter every egg he boiled her was done for that exact length of time; and every bath, which he ran for her while she ate her perfectly timed egg, was brought to just the right temperature. That temperature had been ascertained by the running of a trial bath in which she had lain while Matthew had gradually brought the temperature up, stirring the water with a large wooden spoon from the kitchen to ensure even distribution of the heat.

  After her bath, he would bring her a large towel that he would have specially heated on the towel rail.

  ‘It really is very kind of you,’ Elspeth said. ‘But I think I can manage. Why don’t you go for a run in Queen Street Gardens?’

  The suggestion had been intended to be a helpful one – Matthew liked going for a run in the mornings – but he had taken this badly.

  ‘But I want to be here to help you,’ he said. ‘Don’t you like what I do for you?’

  She had reached out to embrace him, dropping the towel. Matthew shivered with delight. ‘Of course I do, my darling,’ she whispered. ‘Of course I do. You do whatever you like.’

  She realised how fortunate she was. Many women had husbands who were not in the least attentive – husbands who never ran their wives’ baths, nor made their breakfast, nor sent roses to the flat during the day, as Matthew often did. She was so lucky, but of course one needed a bit of space in a marriage, and she knew that sooner or later she would have to talk to Matthew about that. The problem, though, was that people often misunderstood a mention of space, and interpreted it as a suggestion to go away.

  3. At Big Lou’s

  Elspeth need not have worried; of course Matthew understood all about space within a marriage and it was for this reason that he had not suggested that Elspeth help in the gallery. It would be better, he thought, for each of them to have a separate career: ‘I’ve seen too many couples come unstuck because they were working together,’ he said to Angus Lordie. He made this remark without really thinking, and even as he said it he realised that he could not think of a single marriage in which that had happened. On the contrary – all the marriages of that sort that he had seen were rather successful.

  ‘Or perhaps not,’ he added lamely.

  Angus had nodded wisely at Matthew’s original observation, and had not really heard the retraction. He knew very little about this as he had never been sufficiently stuck to become unstuck. It was a mystery to him how anybody lived with anybody else let alone worked with them too, and he could imagine nothing worse than having another person in his studio, painting her own paintings while he worked on his. He found that painting required complete silence – an artistic stillness – and the muse, fickle as she was at the best of times, would surely retreat in a huff if she had to contend with two painters in the same studio.

  ‘So I’m not going to ask Elspeth to help me in the gallery,’ Matthew went on. ‘I couldn’t bear it if we disagreed.’

  ‘That girl you had,’ said Angus. ‘Pat Macgregor. Did you disagree with her at all?’

  Matthew looked over Angus Lordie’s shoulder. They were sitting in Big Lou’s coffee house during this conversation and he was watching Big Lou wiping the stainless-steel counter with her cloth, or cloot as she called it. Had he seen eye to eye with Pat on matters artistic? He thought that he had, but then that was before he knew very much about anything, and he had probably not been in a position to challenge her views. It would be different now; Matthew had opinions, and some knowledge of art to back them up. He watched Big Lou at work. She was a handsome woman, in a big-boned, rather rural sort of way (Big Lou, of course, came from Arbroath, a part of Scotland noted for its handsome people). Now, as she polished away at the counter, a seemingly Sisyphean task, he saw her as she might appear in a painting by Bonnard, or possibly Vuillard.

  Those artists were exponents of intimism, in which small domestic scenes were captured and placed at the heart of a painting: interiors showing a woman sewing, or arranging flowers; a girl picking up a soup spoon at a table; a woman lying in the bath. Bonnard would have loved Big Lou, and had he been there would have depicted her in the act of polishing, her head down, intent on her task. And he would have caught the sun that filtered in through the window – the cold, Edinburgh sun, so unlike the light that he found in the south of France – and the colour of her dress, and the faded apron that she had tied carelessly about her waist. Bonnard would have captured all that and in so doing would have portrayed Big Lou in all her essential Arbroathheit.

  ‘No,’ Matthew said to Angus Lordie. ‘Pat and I did not dis agree. Not then. It might be different now.’

  ‘You’ll find somebody else to help you,’ said Angus. ‘There must be plenty of people looking for a job like that. You’d probably not even have to pay them.’

  Matthew looked doubtful. ‘I couldn’t take advantage of somebody,’ he said. ‘I know people do it, but …’

>   ‘You’re right,’ said Angus. ‘They do it all the time. They call it the internship system. Interns are usually unpaid labour.’

  ‘A grand name for an old system,’ said Matthew. ‘It used to be called slavery.’

  Angus laughed. ‘Slaves were never volunteers. Interns are.’

  ‘I still disagree with it,’ said Matthew. ‘I would always pay.’

  Angus thought for a moment. ‘How about Domenica? How about asking her whether she’d like to help?’

  Matthew did not warm to this suggestion. ‘I know you like Domenica,’ he said, ‘but do you really think she’d be easy to work with?’

  ‘No, I suppose not,’ mused Angus.

  Matthew looked at him quizzically. ‘Could you work with her?’

  ‘The occasion has never arisen,’ said Angus. ‘But I imagine that I could. On the other hand, I think that she would have to be the boss. I don’t think she would play second fiddle.’

  ‘No,’ said Matthew. He looked at Angus with interest, and continued, ‘Angus, don’t you think that you and Domenica are … are an event waiting to happen?’

  Angus looked at him in astonishment. ‘You mean …’

  ‘Yes,’ said Matthew. ‘Listen, I can tell you about marriage – it’s great, it really is. You feel somehow so complete. Yes, that’s the word for it – complete. It’s like having two moieties united.’

  ‘Moieties?’

  ‘A moiety is a portion or a part. A half.’

  ‘I see.’ Angus wondered whether one might call one’s spouse one’s ‘better moiety’. That sounded better than ‘better half’, which was an expression he did not like at all. It reminded him of golf clubs. Not that there was anything wrong with golf clubs – it was just that sometimes one heard things in the bar of a golf club that sounded as if they belonged there. Not that I’ve ever been in a golf club, he thought. ‘So you are happy being married?’ Angus asked.

  ‘Yes. Blissfully.’ Matthew reached out and touched Angus on the forearm. ‘Why don’t you give it a try, Angus? You’d love it.’

  ‘She’d never look at me,’ he said. ‘Not in that way.’

  Matthew shook his head vigorously. ‘Of course she would! You’re a handsome man, Angus. You’re talented, witty. She would hardly be able to believe her luck.’

  Angus raised his head. Big Lou had sniggered at the counter. He had heard it.

  ‘So what’s funny about that?’ he called over to her.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Big Lou quickly. ‘It’s just that you men need to think twice before you assume that we women are grateful for your company. It’s not always like that, I can tell you.’

  ‘Don’t listen to her,’ whispered Matthew. But Angus was listening.

  4. Auden and Burns, and Bertie

  Irene Pollock stood at the window of her flat at 44 Scotland Street and thought about identity. She had recently walked past a sign outside a church that read: Consider your Life; Think of who you are. Irene had little time for churches, which she regarded as hotbeds of reaction – if reaction can have hotbeds – but she found this message curiously affecting. Yes, perhaps it was something that we all should do from time to time – examine our lives. And now, back in her flat, with Bertie at school and little Ulysses halfway through his morning sleep, her thoughts focused on who she was.

  I am, first and foremost, she thought, Irene Pollock, a person to whom the first name Irene had been given, who had then married a man called Stuart Pollock. That made her Irene Pollock, although she had always had her reservations about women adopting their husbands’ surnames. That was changing, of course, and more women were retaining their maiden names, but it would be a little bit complicated now to do that because Bertie was Bertie Pollock and Ulysses was Ulysses Pollock. She had her reservations, too, about the term maiden name. What a ridiculous notion that one was a maiden of all things before one got married. It would be far better, she felt, to use the term woman’s name, or possibly birth name, rather than maiden name. Or possibly authentic name; that had a good ring to it. You would have your authentic name, and then you would have your secondary name, another good term.

  She knew of the old Scottish habit of calling women by their maiden names – or authentic names – first, and then writing or and giving their married, or secondary, name. This was the way legal documents had always been worded. So she was Irene Burgess or Pollock, which was better than being Irene Pollock née Burgess, because this form put the authentic name after the secondary name, which gave the wrong message. That implied that the state of being married – the state of being a Pollock – was more important than the state of being a person with an authentic identity – that of a Burgess. And then there was always the problem of people being unable to spell, which would mean that she might be described as Irene Pollock, nay Burgess. Of course, that at least had the merit of suggesting that Pollock was the less important identity, the nay negating its pretensions.

  Had she retained her authentic name, of course, there would have been a question of what Bertie and Ulysses were called. Bertie’s full name was Bertie Wystan Pollock, but in a more egalitarian, less patriarchal society, he could as easily be called Bertie Wystan Burgess. Bertie Burgess, however, was rather too alliterative, and she had been determined not to burden her children with awkward or embarrassing names. What was that girl at school called? She cast her mind back to the roll call at the Mary Erskine School for Girls: Lorna Anderson, present, Nicola Ross, present, Mhairi Smellie, present … Poor Mhairi Smellie. Her first name, a Scots Gaelic name, was pronounced ‘vary’, which sounded close to very. The name Smellie was common enough in Scotland, but to be called something which sounded like ‘very smelly’ was a singular misfortune, and indicative, surely, of a lack of parental foresight.

  The Wystan in Bertie’s name was, of course, after Wystan Hugh Auden, or W. H. Auden as he was usually known. Irene admired Auden’s work and liked the name. Bertie did not. She had introduced him to Auden, of course, concentrating on the more accessible poems, but Bertie had not responded as warmly as she might have wished. She had read him ‘If I Could Tell You’, and he had listened intently, but then he had shown by his questions that he had clearly missed the point.

  ‘Why does Mr Auden,’ he asked, ‘say that all the brooks and soldiers will run away, Mummy? How can brooks run away if they haven’t got legs?’

  ‘Auden used something called personalisation, Bertie,’ Irene explained. ‘He makes inanimate things talk, or have attitudes. It’s very clever.’

  Bertie thought about this. ‘And then he says that perhaps the roses really want to grow. How can roses want to do anything, Mummy? They haven’t got brains, have they?’

  ‘Mr Auden is very clever,’ said Irene patiently. ‘He makes us think about the world by making the world think. That’s frightfully clever, Bertie.’

  Bertie looked thoughtful. ‘We learned some poems at school,’ he said. ‘There was one about some daffodils. It was when Miss Harmony was still there. She told us to close our eyes while she read it and try to think of daffodils. And then she taught us some Burns.’

  Irene was silent for a moment. ‘Burns is a folk poet, Bertie. He really isn’t very deep.’

  ‘She read us a poem about two dogs,’ Bertie went on. ‘There was this very grand dog, you see, and this other dog …’

  Irene looked pained. ‘I know all about that one, Bertie. It’s very sentimental, you know. A lot of Burns is.’

  Bertie remembered something that his friend, Tofu, had said. ‘Tofu asked Miss Harmony whether she could read something from another of Mr Burns’s books. He said that there was a book called The Merry Muses of Caledonia and the poems were very rude. Miss Harmony said no and went very red.’

  Irene glared at Bertie. ‘That boy, Tofu, is …’ She did not complete her sentence. She disapproved of Tofu and would have preferred it if Bertie had chosen some other friend: Olive, for example, to whom she had given every encouragement, and whose mother was a memb
er of her Melanie Klein Reading Group. But Bertie seemed to have set his face against Olive, and even went so far as to say that he hated her. Children were always saying such things, of course, and then deciding the next moment that the hated person is their best friend.

  If Bertie disliked Olive, he also did not particularly like Tofu, who was always getting him into trouble. Bertie was a kind boy, though, and he felt that he could not really abandon the other boy, particularly since Tofu had lost his mother, a prominent vegan, who had unfortunately died of starvation. Bertie felt that Tofu needed him, and was loyal, in spite of the other boy’s selfish and sometimes alarming behaviour. Bertie, for instance, did not approve of Tofu’s spitting at people, but when he had raised the subject with him, Tofu’s response had been to laugh, and then to spit at him. So the subject was dropped and not taken up again.

  5. Pre-Natal Classroom – for Babies

  Irene’s process of self-examination – her stocktaking – now proceeded from names to relationships. She had married Stuart Pollock because he was the first man who had ever paid any attention to her. She liked him, and was so moved by his crestfallen look after she had initially turned him down that she subsequently relented and agreed. Bertie had arrived a few years later, when Irene was just about to embark on a master’s course in social theory at the University of Edinburgh. The pregnancy had not been an easy one – Bertie had been unusually active in utero, kicking with some force, ‘as if he wanted to get away from me’, as Irene put it to her doctor.

  ‘Oh?’ said the doctor. ‘I’m sure he’s not doing that!’ And then he had paused, and asked Irene whether she was doing anything that might be making the baby uncomfortable. ‘You aren’t drinking too much, are you?’