Bertie's Guide to Life and Mothers

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Matthew and Elspeth did not fall into any of these categories of reader. They perused the property pages together, taking it in turns to guess what the value of each house might be. Elspeth was extremely good at that, and often got the figure exactly right, while Matthew tended to underestimate the value of the properties she described to him.

  “Here’s an interesting one, Matthew,” she said that day. “Moray Place. Two bedrooms. Second floor. A good view of the gardens. What would you guess?”

  Matthew suggested a sum, and Elspeth laughed. “Way out,” she said. “You might have got it for that ten years ago, but not today. Not Moray Place.”

  “What about the nudists?” Matthew asked.

  Elspeth looked doubtful. “They probably make no difference to the people living there. Not all that many people know that Moray Place is the centre of the Scottish nudist movement.”

  “Odd, that,” mused Matthew. “I suppose it’s a nice place for nudists to live. The gardens give them a bit of cover, I should imagine. And nudists don’t do any harm, after all. They probably make rather pleasant neighbours. They won’t have rowdy parties at weekends because they’ll all be off at their nudist camps in the dunes in East Lothian, or wherever they like to go.”

  Elspeth’s attention was distracted by another advertisement. “What about this?” she said, and then read: “ ‘An attractive house near Nine Mile Burn with an unrivalled view of the Pentland Hills. Well away from the main Biggar Road, this charming old farmhouse (c. early eighteenth century) has hosted an array of Scottish notables of the past (David Hume stayed here as a visitor, as did Burns and Robert Louis Stevenson). Seven bedrooms, four public rooms, and considerable attic space. Wine cellar and ice-house in the grounds. The property has ten acres of land attached to it, with stabling for two horses, and a byre in need of some attention. There are several stands of mature trees, and a small walled garden. Within easy reach of Edinburgh.’ ”

  She stopped and looked at Matthew, who was gazing up at the ceiling.

  “Let me think,” said Matthew. “I suppose it depends on the state of repair. Some of these old houses …”

  “Matthew,” Elspeth said quietly. “Forget about guessing. This house would suit us. Us, Matthew! This could be our new home. Seven bedrooms, and we could put Anna and Birgitte in the byre—once we’d done it up, of course. And the boys could have a wire slide, once they’re a bit bigger, from one of the mature trees …”

  Matthew transferred his gaze from the ceiling to Elspeth. “Are you serious?”

  “Never more so,” she said, passing him The Scotsman. “Look at the picture. Isn’t it lovely?”

  He looked at the picture of the house. It was a good-sized gentleman-farmer’s house, made of stone but with harling that had been painted ochre. He could see the mature trees over to the side of the house, beyond the lawn, which had been neatly cut in stripes. People selling houses know when photographers are coming to take their promotional pictures and they cut the lawn in stripes in time for the photograph. Nobody else has their lawn in stripes—no real people, thought Matthew.

  “It looks rather lovely,” he said. “But it doesn’t say what the price is.”

  “Doesn’t it?” asked Elspeth.

  “No,” said Matthew. “It’s rather odd. All it says after the word price is: ‘guess.’ ”

  38. Birgitte Becomes Irritating

  Matthew had his misgivings about moving from India Street, but he was carried along on the wave of enthusiasm that seemed to embrace not only Elspeth but the two Danish au pairs as well. Birgitte, it transpired, was a country girl at heart, and she raised the question of whether she could possibly keep a pony in one of the fields attached to the house. She could teach the boys to ride, she said, and she would do all the work of feeding and grooming.

  “All of it,” she said. “You will not have to lift a thumb.”

  “A finger,” muttered Matthew.

  “Nor that,” said Birgitte.

  He looked at her in astonishment; the boys were still very small, not even a year old, which made him wonder how long she was thinking of staying with them. You could put a three-year-old on a docile pony, he imagined, but surely it would be dangerous to try it with a child any younger than that. Did she intend to be here for the next two years—or even longer?

  “But you’ll be going back to Denmark,” he said mildly. “So I don’t know if …”

  Birgitte waved a hand airily in what she took to be the general direction of Denmark. “Oh, there’s no hurry to do that,” she said. “Denmark will still be there.”

  Anna nodded her agreement. “Denmark is not as exciting as Scotland,” she said. “I don’t think I shall ever return. I am sure that many more Danish people will be coming over here, once they find out how nice it is.”

  This conversation took place after Elspeth had organised a viewing time with the selling agents. Matthew tried to catch her eye, to signal his concern over the assumptions being made by both au pairs, but Elspeth was too enthused to notice.

  “We’ll all go,” she said. “Everybody can have a look round.”

  “Perfect,” said Birgitte. “But Anna must stay to look after the boys. I shall have to go so that I can advise on the horse angle.”

  “We haven’t actually decided about …” began Matthew.

  “It may be necessary to build new stables,” Birgitte continued. “But we can decide about that later.”

  “I’m not sure …” Matthew said.

  “Never have just one pony,” advised Birgitte. “Horses get terribly lonely. They pine for a friend.”

  They made the trip in the late morning, Birgitte sitting in the back of the car offering advice on a range of topics as they drove out of Edinburgh. “I do hope that the house faces west,” she said. “Then you get the morning light at the back and the evening light on the front. When I was in Jutland I stayed in a place that was completely the wrong way round. It was very uncomfortable. You knew you were the wrong way round the moment you went in. Mind you, there are some countries that are the wrong way round altogether. France is like that, you know. It faces north and south; it would be far better if it faced east and west, as America does.”

  By the time they reached Fairmilehead, Matthew was silently fuming. He had almost said something—something like “You certainly appear to know quite a lot—for somebody who’s just left school”—but stopped himself and kept his silence. He remembered what it was like to be eighteen or nineteen—you are so confident of yourself at that stage and you are so sure that you are right, and yet the world seems not to appreciate your talents. And people in their thirties or forties were just so out of touch, so irrelevant, and yet did not seem to know it. I was every bit as bad as you, he told himself. It helped.

  As they drew level with the Hillend ski-slope, his feelings had softened. It was a clear, bright day and the air blowing in through the open window of the car smelled faintly of gorse and newly cut grass. He looked at Birgitte in the rearview mirror, at the solid, slightly square Scandinavian face framed by its long blonde hair, and smiled. He and Elspeth were secure enough not to be irritated by the pushiness of somebody of the Danish girl’s age; they would smile at her ways rather than snarl at them. She was far away from home, too, and she was also their guest—in a sense—which meant that it would have been quite wrong to treat her with anything but gentleness and understanding.

  Birgitte was looking out of her window towards the slopes of the Pentlands that rose high beside the road.

  “Look at those Munros,” she said, pointing.

  Matthew looked in the mirror. “No, Birgitte, those are not Munros.”

  “Yes, they are,” she said. “I have read all about Munros.”

  Matthew saw Elspeth suppressing a grin.

  “Munros are mountains over 3,000 feet,” said Matthew patiently. “Then there are Corbetts, which are between 2,500 and 3,000 feet, and Grahams, which are between 2,000 and 2,500 feet.” He paused, glanc
ing off towards the unambitious slopes of Caerketton Hill. “That hill, for instance, is only just over 1,500 feet.”

  Birgitte stared back at him in the mirror. Their eyes locked.

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “It will be much higher than that. I am very sure it’s a Munro.”

  “I’m telling you, it’s not,” insisted Matthew.

  “I think you’re wrong.”

  Matthew looked at the road ahead of him, checked what was behind him, and then pulled into a parking place off the side of the road. Elspeth glanced at him enquiringly and was about to say something, but he signalled for her to keep quiet.

  Once the car was stopped, but with the engine still running, he swivelled round in his seat and looked at Birgitte. “Listen,” he said. “We don’t want to be rude to you, Birgitte, but you’re going to have to accept that you are not in Denmark now—you are in Scotland. If I went to Denmark, I would not—I repeat not—lecture you on the height of your Danish hills—if you have any, that is. Understand?”

  Birgitte’s eyes widened. “You say we have no hills in Denmark …”

  Elspeth glanced at Matthew. “Matthew! Don’t be unkind!”

  “It’s not unkind to say that somebody hasn’t got any hills,” snapped Matthew. “For heaven’s sake! There are plenty of people without hills. It’s just an observation.”

  “How do you know Denmark hasn’t got any hills?” asked Elspeth mildly. “You’ve never been there, have you? It could be a very hilly country, for all you know.”

  Suddenly Birgitte began to sob. “Yes,” she said. “You condemn my poor country before you’ve even visited it. You’re very cruel, Matthew.”

  39. “I love it. I want to live here.”

  The argument about hills in Denmark, as absurd as it was unnecessary, did not persist. Elspeth, who as a teacher had been able to handle Tofu and Olive, not to mention Larch, now used the same techniques to put an end to the unseemly dispute between Matthew and Birgitte.

  “Now listen,” she said, “we’re not here to fight with one another about how high any particular hills are, or whether there are any hills at all.”

  “That’s right,” muttered Birgitte. “We are not.”

  Matthew drew in his breath sharply. “I didn’t start it,” he protested. “I was merely driving along …”

  “Nobody started it,” Elspeth interrupted. “Nobody’s to blame.”

  “That’s right,” said Birgitte.

  Matthew received a warning glance from Elspeth. “And so,” she went on, “I suggest that we just carry on with our journey. The more time we sit here arguing about Munros and things like that, the less time we’ll have to look at this house we’re buying.”

  Matthew frowned. “We haven’t decided yet,” he said. “We’re just looking.”

  Elspeth acknowledged that this was so. At the same time, she had a strong feeling about the house, she revealed—an instinct, in fact. “I really liked the photograph,” she said. “And I’ve always liked Nine Mile Burn. It’s the light, I think.”

  She was right about the light, Matthew thought. He had always liked the light on that side of the Pentlands—a light that came from the south-west, that seemed to grow softer and bluer as one looked down towards the Lammermuirs. And the thought of living out of town appealed to him, especially as this stretch of country was so close to Edinburgh as to be virtually its back yard. He liked the villages hidden in the tiny, crooked glens that one found on these fringes of the Borders. He liked the short horizons in these glens; the occasional views of higher hills in the distance; the secrets of small villages that seemed to have changed so little over the years; the names that spoke of distances and colours and the points of the compass—Nine Mile Burn, Silverburn, West Linton. One might turn a corner here and move from a timeless world of agriculture—from cultivated crops or sheep pasture—to a landscape on which quite other human uses had left their mark: old mines, disused shafts, flattened, ancient bings—mounds dug out by men whose lives had been spent in darkness, danger, and poverty. He imagined how, in a hundred years from now, our own tenancy of this part of Scotland might be similarly written across the land. Would there be broken piles where once had stood our ugly, scarring wind farms—monuments to the temporary, to the thoughtless destruction of natural beauty, to the vainglorious pursuit of quick returns? Would there be great bundles of knitted wire where power cables once had marched across the sky? Would there be …

  “That’s it,” said Elspeth. “Just up ahead.”

  Matthew abandoned his reflections on the fate of the Scottish countryside to concentrate on identifying the turning that would lead them off to their new house. The road down which he turned was a paved one, but had not fared well in the severe winter of the previous year; here and there potholes made it necessary for them to slow to walking pace, while at the edges the grass, untamed, encroached on the tar.

  A hedge, unkempt and now sprouting skywards, initially obscured the view on either side but this now gave way to a bedraggled sheep fence. And there, at the end of an unpaved branch off the road, was the house they had seen in the newspaper advertisement.

  Elspeth gasped. “I love it,” she whispered. “I want to live here.”

  Matthew took one hand off the wheel and rested it momentarily on her knee. “Darling,” he whispered, “if this is where you want to be, then so do I.”

  “What was that?” asked Birgitte from the back of the car. “What did you say? I didn’t hear you.”

  “I was talking to Elspeth,” said Matthew, through clenched teeth.

  “I know that,” said Birgitte. “But I didn’t hear you. What did you say?”

  Elspeth now turned in her seat and smiled at Birgitte. She made a gesture of silence, placing an upraised finger to her lips.

  The house was approached by a long drive that culminated in a small turning circle before the front door. There was another car there already, an old Bristol in British Racing Green, and Matthew drew up behind this. “That’ll be the owner,” he said.

  They got out of the car and approached the door. Matthew looked up at the roof—sound grey slate, he noted—and at the guttering that ran along the front. This looked solid and in good enough condition, he thought. At each end it led into a hopper, a lead tray that served to collect the water before consigning it to a downpipe. These hoppers were decorated with a small ornamental thistle that had been cut out of lead, layered to give relief, and then stuck on.

  “Look,” he said, nudging Elspeth. “Look at the thistles.”

  Elspeth glanced up, and smiled at Matthew. “Don’t you love them?” she asked.

  He nodded. He did. He loved thistles.

  The front door had a thistle too—a large brass thistle made into a knocker. As Matthew leaned forward to examine this, the door was suddenly opened by an impressive-looking man in a kilt. They looked at one another in momentary astonishment. Then Matthew recovered his composure.

  “Oh,” he said. “Is this … is this your place? We hadn’t expected …”

  He did not finish. The Duke of Johannesburg burst out laughing. “What a pleasant surprise,” he said, gesturing for them to enter. “I had no idea when the agents phoned that it would be you coming out to view the property. Well, it just goes to show, doesn’t it?”

  Birgitte looked puzzled. “Excuse me,” she said. “What does it go to show?”

  The Duke looked enquiringly at Matthew.

  “This young lady,” Matthew said, “is Birgitte. She’s an au pair.”

  The Duke inclined his head courteously in Birgitte’s direction.

  “She’s Danish,” Matthew went on. “Birgitte, this is His Grace the Duke of Johannesburg.”

  Birgitte’s face revealed her surprise. “A duke?” she said. “That is very exciting. I have never met a duke before. I’ve met a count, of course, but …”

  “But they don’t count,” interjected the Duke, and laughed.

  “Excuse me?” said Birgitte
.

  “British humour,” said the Duke airily. “Pay no attention to it. That’s what I always tell people who visit this country. Pay no attention to the humour.”

  40. Jock Tamson’s Bairns

  Matthew and Elspeth knew the Duke of Johannesburg, of course. Matthew had first met him some years earlier when he had gone to a party at Single-Malt House, the Duke’s seat. Most of us have houses or flats, but dukes have seats, which conjures up an altogether more comfortable set of domestic arrangements. Professors have chairs, which are not necessarily as comfortable as seats, but better, perhaps, than the mere benches on which judges have to spend their working hours. Least fortunate, of course, are people who have posts or slots—arrangements suggestive of impermanence and discomfort. To say of somebody that “he occupies the post of” is to imply that he has a place, but that he should not become too ensconced as there are others only too ready to take his place, with all the enthusiasm of the would-be stylite, on that post.

  At that first meeting, the Duke had explained to Matthew the origin of his title, which appeared in none of the acknowledged works on the ancestry of the various swells who adorn Scottish society. The Duke’s real name was Maclean, and he came from a long line of Highlanders, traceable back to an early Irish chieftain who enlarged his suzerainty to embrace a number of Scottish islands and some ill-defended parts of the Scottish mainland. Some genealogies claimed to be able to trace the Maclean ancestry even further back, going as far as Julius Caesar and, in some cases, admittedly more tendentiously, to the ancient Celtic god of the sun. Such claims are dubious, but this does not stop their being made; genealogy is an aspirational, rather than exact, science. But what’s the point? Ultimately, as Professor Sykes, the population geneticist, has suggested, all of us have an ancestry traceable back to a handful of ancient ur-mothers, which makes distant cousins of us all.