Bertie's Guide to Life and Mothers

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “Maybe, Bertie,” said Stuart. “But Ulysses doesn’t always smell.”

  “Most of the time he does,” said Bertie. He paused. “I’m not being unkind, Daddy. I really like him. But I don’t really like the way he smells. He’s going to have big problems in life if he carries on smelling like that.”

  They drove out onto the motorway that led back into the heart of Glasgow. Bertie watched the unfolding panorama of the city pass them by; this was, in his mind, the promised land, the great beacon of freedom; this was where he would live when he was eighteen and could leave Edinburgh. He looked at the houses. There were Glaswegian boys living there, he assumed—presumably unaware of their great good fortune. There would be no yoga classes in Glasgow, no girls like Olive or Pansy, and certainly no psychotherapy.

  “Are they happy in Glasgow?” he asked his father.

  Stuart glanced at his son and smiled. “Are they happy in Glasgow? That’s an odd question, Bertie. But I think that by and large they are. They’re quite cheerful people, the Glaswegians. They have a very good sense of humour—if you like that sort of thing.”

  By now they were in the tunnel under the Clyde, and Stuart explained to Bertie that they were directly underneath one of Scotland’s greatest rivers. Bertie marvelled at the thought but was distracted shortly afterwards by a sign pointing to an exit from the motorway. “Can’t we go down there, Daddy?” he asked. “Can’t we go and take a look at a bit of Glasgow?”

  Stuart hesitated. He had made no plans beyond returning to Edinburgh, and it seemed to him that a brief diversion off the most direct route would do nobody any harm. It ought to be possible, he thought, to strike off to the left and then work up towards Balfron or Drymen or somewhere like that. Then they could return to Edinburgh by Stirling—a more picturesque route than the dull and rather bleak journey along the spine of the Central Belt.

  He made up his mind. “All right, Bertie,” he said. “Let’s go and take a look at a bit of this dear green place.” He used the name traditionally applied to Glasgow, and Bertie repeated it under his breath. “Dear green place; dear green place.” The words, powerful and affecting, were like a shibboleth. “Dear green place: have you got room for me too? Dear green place.”

  They slipped off the motorway and into a side street. Stuart had no map with him, and was uncertain as to where exactly they were, but he thought that they were headed in the general direction of the university. Once they were there they could meander off in a generally northerly direction and would eventually get to Bearsden or somewhere like that. They could always stop and ask somebody for directions, if they needed to. And they were in no hurry, after all.

  They drove through Kelvinside and into Maryhill. By now he was even less sure where he was, although he was aware of the fact that the urban scenery had changed. After a while he turned off onto a side road and brought the car to a halt in a parking place that had conveniently appeared outside a pizza restaurant. Bertie stared out of the car at the large notice that advertised the pizzas within. “P I Z Z A,” he read.

  Stuart looked down at his son and smiled. “Would you like one, Bertie? I’m feeling a bit peckish myself.”

  Bertie’s face broke into a broad smile of delight. Irene did not let him have pizzas, which she described as unhealthy (which they undoubtedly were), vulgar (which was a matter of opinion), and inappropriate (which was unintelligible). Bertie’s friend, Ranald Braveheart Macpherson, by contrast, had pizza at home every Friday and sometimes on other days too. “They’re delivered on a motorbike,” Ranald explained to Bertie. “And you can have all the toppings you like. Salami. Pineapple. Tons of cheese. The works, Bertie. It’s a pity you aren’t allowed to eat them. I’ll try to bring a slice into school for you one day, just to show you what you’re missing.”

  It seemed to Bertie that there could be no greater pleasure in life than to have your food delivered on a motorbike. That surely was the height, the very pinnacle, of privilege. “I must get ready for dinner,” you would say. “The motorbike will be here any moment.”

  And then it would arrive, and the man delivering it would get off his motorbike and take your dinner out of the insulated hot-box on the back of the bike and carry it into the house just as those armed guards deliver boxes of money to the bank. He would put it down on your table, and you would open the box and there would be your dinner. Not the healthy fare you were normally enjoined to eat, but a great, vivid pizza, oozing oil, a burst of colour, carrying with it a whiff of everything that was excluded from your life, everything that you could not have but wanted so desperately. And the delivery man would get back on his motorbike and start it noisily; and the roar of its engine would be the sound of freedom, and the smell of the melted cheese would be the odour of happiness.

  47. The Association of Scottish Nudists

  While Bertie and his father were enjoying their first few hours of freedom—as was Ulysses, although, being so young, he had no idea why exactly he should suddenly feel so liberated—back in Edinburgh a meeting was being convened in the Moray Place headquarters of the Association of Scottish Nudists. This meeting was an extraordinary one, called under a provision of the Association’s constitution allowing for at least twenty-five members to call a meeting about any matter “affecting the vital interests of the Association or of any section of the Scottish nudist community, whether or not the persons affected were members of the Association.” The committee had tried to take a narrow view of this provision, and, sensing that their running of the Association’s affairs was being called into question, had attempted to prevent the calling of the meeting. It soon became clear, however, that the determination of those wishing to call the meeting was such that any attempt to thwart them would result in mass resignations. In the light of this, the Chairman very reluctantly agreed that the meeting should be held and notified the four hundred and eighteen members of the Association accordingly.

  Voting rights within the Association were far from simple. The constitution, drawn up by an Edinburgh solicitor in 1958, provided for four categories of membership: Edinburgh nudist, resident nudist, non-resident nudist, and emeritus nudist. Edinburgh nudists were defined as “any nudist living wholly or in part within the City of Edinburgh.” A resident nudist was any nudist having a place of residence in Scotland, while a non-resident nudist was “a nudist who does not have a residence in Scotland.” An emeritus nudist was one who, “although no longer a member of the Association, has served the interests of Scottish nudism to such an extent as to merit special recognition.”

  Each category of nudist had historically been given different voting rights. Edinburgh nudists had three votes each; resident nudists had two, non-resident one, and emeritus nudists half a vote. This inevitably meant that the affairs of the Association could be entirely controlled by Edinburgh members, effectively destroying the political fortunes of any candidate for office of whom the Edinburgh nudists disapproved. The practical result of this was that no Glasgow nudist was ever elected to the committee, in spite of the Association’s claim to speak for all of Scotland—or, rather, for all nudists in Scotland.

  But it was not just this fundamentally undemocratic feature of the Association’s constitution that rankled with the malcontents; there was a whole raft of issues that they wished to take up with the committee. They had tried to raise these at previous meetings of the Association but had been prevented from doing so by arcane provisions within the constitution that required matters for discussion to be tabled with the committee at a separate meeting to discuss the agenda for future meetings. The trouble was that since that meeting had to be called by the Chairman at his sole discretion, if he did not wish to call it then there was no means of ever getting an item on the agenda. And that is exactly what had happened.

  The calling of the meeting had attracted considerable attention. A diarist writing in one of the Sunday papers had referred to “trouble in the Garden of Eden,” and had speculated on the possible ramifications of t
he dispute. Another journalist talked about entryism and had speculated that a good number of the members calling for the special meeting had joined the Association with a view to winding it up and distributing the assets to the membership. The book value of the Association was, in fact, quite substantial, as it owned its premises in Moray Place along with two other flats in Ainslie Place. If these were disposed of and the proceeds divided amongst the four hundred or so members, each member would be entitled to several thousand pounds—a tempting target for an asset stripper. And if all that one had to do to get this pay-out was to pretend to be a nudist and to pay the five pounds required for membership of the Association, then that was not much of a burden and well worth any concomitant embarrassment.

  But it was not asset stripping that motivated the objectors, as became apparent shortly after the meeting had begun. There were at least one hundred and fifty people present—all clad, as was customary at the Association’s formal meetings. Behind a table at the head of the room sat the Chairman, an influential Edinburgh accountant, flanked by the four other members of the committee: the Treasurer, the Secretary, the Social Secretary, and the Chairman of the Premises Sub-Committee.

  The Chairman looked out over the rows of heads before him. It was difficult to recognise faces, he thought—it was easier to work out who was who when people were unclothed. However … the troublemakers would be in the front, he thought, having arrived early to get the best seats and to be in a position to make things as awkward as possible for the committee. He scanned the front row; he recognised nobody—a bad sign, as were the one or two hostile stares that were returned to him.

  He called the meeting to order and made his introductory remarks. “I don’t think this meeting will need to be very long,” he said. “Indeed, the committee is of the view that it will probably prove to be unnecessary.”

  There were murmurs from the front two rows. The Chairman looked over the top of his glasses.

  “That’s what you think,” muttered one of the members.

  The Chairman hesitated. Had his ears deceived him, or was that a Glasgow accent? He turned to the Secretary, seated beside him, and whispered: “I think we may be in for a bit of … how shall I put it … trouble from our dear friends the Weegies.”

  “Aye, you definitely are,” came another mutter from the front.

  The way that definitely was pronounced, with each syllable being detached from its neighbour and given full value, gave the game away.

  “We’ve had various requests to speak at this meeting,” said the Chairman. “Mrs. Maclehose? Is Mrs. Maclehose with us today?”

  A woman seated in the second row rose to her feet. “That’s me,” she said.

  “Well, madam?”

  “The thing I want to know,” she said, “is this: why have Edinburgh folk got three votes and most of the rest of us—not just me, there’s plenty others in the same position here today—have got only one?”

  “Yes,” echoed another voice. “How come?”

  48. Defeated

  It was a tricky moment for the Chairman of the Association of Scottish Nudists. But he was not one to give up lightly; as an accountant he had faced hostile meetings before—in winding-up proceedings, for instance, when anxious creditors could become quite forceful in drawing his attention to their claims—and he had never shirked the task of holding his ground. Now, as he surveyed a sea of hostile faces, he realised that his only hope of turning away wrath would be, if not in a soft answer, then at least in a courteous attempt to explain the intricacies of the Association’s constitution.

  “Look,” he began, “Mrs.… Mrs. er …”

  “Maclehose. That’s M A …”

  “Mrs. Maclehose, of course. You see the point is, Mrs. Maclehose, this association is a very old one. We were actually founded in 1931, and for many years there was no constitution at all. We shared premises in those days with the Scottish Ladies’ Mountaineering Alliance in Albany Place, and we mainly used the Queen Street Gardens for our outdoor meetings. Those were heady days, I believe, and also not without their difficulties.

  “We carried on through the war and we had that big period of growth in the membership in the years immediately afterwards. But it was still a small association and, frankly, people didn’t think that a constitution was necessary. The world was different in those days. People ran things more informally.

  “But then in the mid-fifties it was felt that things had to change and so in 1958 the then chairman thought that it was time to have a constitution drawn up. One of the members then was a partner in one of the big law firms—it wasn’t Shepherd & Wedderburn, as I recall. He’s long dead, I’m afraid, but he was a very fine lawyer. He drew up our current constitution in the belief that it would give the society a certain amount of stability if it were very clearly run by people who knew one another. And you can see the argument, can’t you? If people know one another they know their failings, and that means that you’ll never get the wrong sort elected to a committee.

  “Now some people seem to think that this is just a bit too cosy, but I really don’t think they understand the real reason for having this system of preferred Edinburgh votes. If they did, they’d realise that it’s for the best.” He paused. “And that, I suggest, is where we should leave the matter. I know that some people may feel hard done by—insulted perhaps—by having fewer votes than others, but you really must understand that it’s for the good of the Association. Stability is the goal. Stability, stability, stability. If the Association is being well run by Edinburgh people, then surely it’s best to leave it that way.”

  The Chairman sat back in his seat, looking to either side of him for support from his fellow committee members. They nodded their heads sagely: the case for leaving things as they were had been rather well put, they thought.

  A man in the middle of the room stood up. “Oh no you don’t,” he bellowed out. “You haven’t answered Mrs.… Mrs.…”

  “Maclehose,” said Mrs. Maclehose.

  “Yes, her. You haven’t answered her, sir.”

  The Chairman shook his head. “I thought it was a perfectly good answer. What more do you expect me to say?”

  The man sat down, only to be replaced by a woman sitting a few seats away. “Excuse me,” she said, “but you suggested that everything was being very well run by the people elected under the current provisions. Well, some of us would beg to differ.”

  This brought a chorus of approval.

  “You see,” the woman continued, “I have heard a whole string of complaints from fellow members. Everybody’s saying the same thing.”

  The Chairman frowned. “No complaints have reached us,” he said.

  “Because you never listen to them,” snapped back the woman. “Take the case of that outing to Glencoe last year. Remember? Remember how some of us warned you—warned you again and again—that it was not a good idea to go there in the midge season? And remember what happened? Some of us were so badly bitten as we tried to climb that mountain that we had to run back to the bus. We had to run and get dressed as quickly as we could.”

  “I remember that,” shouted somebody from the back. “I was covered in red blotches for days after that.”

  “And then there is the issue of the raincoats,” said somebody else. “Since when have nudists had to wear raincoats? What’s the point of being a nudist if you have to wear a plastic mac all the time? We’re the laughing stock of the international movement—the laughing stock!”

  The Chairman shook his head vigorously. “That’s just part of being a nudist in Scotland,” he said. “Everybody understands that our weather’s so difficult that we have to wear these macs. Nobody laughs at us for it. And the same goes for the midges. That’s something that Scottish nudists just have to bear.”

  There were some expressions of agreement with this, but rather few. The feeling of the meeting was now unambiguous.

  “We need a complete change,” said a man with a strong Borders accent. �
�Selkirk, Kelso, Jedburgh—all these places need to be represented. There are more and more nudists in the Borders these days. It’s our association too.”

  The Chairman glanced anxiously at the Secretary, who looked away. “Do I take it that this meeting has no confidence in the current committee?” he asked.

  There came a resounding yes.

  “In that case,” said the Chairman, “I offer you my resignation.”

  “Thank you,” said Mrs. Maclehose. “And thank you for all the work you’ve done for the Association.”

  The meeting dissolved. Half an hour later, the Chairman, now the former Chairman, sat with the former Secretary in a small tea-room in the West End. “It’s very sad,” he said. “It’s very sad to see the world change so much.”

  The former Secretary toyed with an edge of the gingham tablecloth. “Edinburgh’s changing too,” he said. “You’d think that there would be at least one place that would be able to … able to hold out. But no …”

  They were sitting at a table near the window. The light that came in was weak, washed out—the light of a late afternoon, late in the day.

  49. Big Day for Big Lou

  Big Lou rarely felt nervous. “There is nothing you need to be afraid of,” her mother had repeatedly said to her as a child. “Nothing at all. Bogles and the like—other bairns may tell you about these things, but they’re nothing to worry about. Nothing.” That had been sage advice, and it had made her fearless in most circumstances; but now, waiting for the supervised visit of the brother and sister she was to foster, she felt a raw, gnawing anxiety that, if it was not fear itself, was as close to fear as to make very little difference. And it was not the meeting that worried her—that event she had been looking forward to for some time—it was the fact that the children who were coming to see her would be accompanied by a social worker and this social worker would have the power to take them from her; to find her in some way inadequate as a foster parent. That was what frightened her.