Bertie's Guide to Life and Mothers

by Alexander McCall Smith

  As she waited for the social worker’s arrival, she set about some last minute tidying, and rearranged the tea things that had been sitting on her table since she left for work that morning. She had baked a cake and a whole plate of shortbread, and these she now took out of their tins and laid carefully on two of her best china serving plates. But even as she did so, it occurred to her that this was the wrong thing to do. She knew that children liked sugary things—she herself had always had a sweet tooth—but did social workers like sweet things? The thought worried her. People disapproved of others eating unhealthy food, and the social worker could well take the view that it was a bad thing to give children cake and shortbread. So what should she serve them? Carrots? Sandwiches with a slice of lettuce in the middle? Fruit juice? Or was fruit juice too sweet, too acidic?

  She looked at her watch. It was too late now; they were due to arrive at four, and it was already three forty-five. She sat down and reflected on the story that Marjory, the social worker, had told her; of how the two children had been effectively abandoned by their feckless, drug-abusing mother and their irresponsible, disappearing father; of how their grandmother had done her best to make a home for them but had died; of how they had withdrawn within themselves and become uncommunicative—poor bairns, she said to herself, of course they would! They would have had none of what she herself had had as a child, of which the first and greatest thing was love, just that—the love of a parent. Well, she would offer them that and she would see what happened; she would get through to them in their turned-in-upon-itself world and lead them out into the open. She would do that.

  The bell at her front door rang, and she gave a start. Her heart was beating loud within her; she stood up, and for a moment she felt faint, as one does sometimes when one has been crouching and then stands up too quickly. But the feeling passed, and she made her way through her hall to open the door onto the landing outside.

  “Good afternoon, Lou,” said Marjory. “We’re a little bit early, but I thought you wouldn’t mind.”

  Lou looked at Marjory and then at the child standing half beside, half behind her. She looked down the stair behind her visitor; was the girl still coming up? She transferred her gaze to the boy at Marjory’s side. He looked as if he was about nine; not very tall for his age, but not too short. He had a broad, open face and he was smiling at her. He had a tooth missing, and she thought, Of course: they lose their milk teeth—and I had forgotten.

  “May we come in?” said Marjory.

  “Of course. Of course.” Lou moved aside to let her visitors pass.

  “Change of plan,” whispered Marjory. “I’ll tell you all about it after we’ve settled Finlay here. Can he sit in your living room for a wee moment? You and I …” She glanced towards the open door of the kitchen. “This is Finlay, by the way. And Finlay, this is Lou.”

  “Big Lou,” said Lou. “Everybody calls me Big Lou.”

  “It’s a nice name,” said Finlay. “I wouldn’t mind being called Big Finlay, but I’m no a’ that big.”

  Marjory patted him on the shoulder. “You’re growing, Finlay. You’ll be Big Finlay before you know it.”

  Marjory took Finlay into the living room and then joined Big Lou in the kitchen.

  “I thought there were two …” began Lou.

  Marjory shut the kitchen door behind her. “No. I did tell you about a very difficult brother and sister we had, but … well, I didn’t really intend to bring them to you.”

  “What happened? Have they gone elsewhere?”

  Marjory looked bashful, but a smile played around her lips. “Those children existed, but they’re grown up now. I used their case to … Well, have you ever heard of a love test?”

  “Where people come up with something that will test their lover’s real feelings?”

  “Exactly. I know that social workers shouldn’t do this sort of thing, but I’ve found that it works really well. I need to be sure, you see, that your heart is really in this. And you showed me that it was. If you had been lukewarm you would have made some excuse after I told you about the difficulties of those poor children. But you didn’t. You did exactly the opposite. You showed me that you’re up to the task.”

  Big Lou said nothing.

  “I hope you’re not cross with me,” Marjory went on. “You don’t seem the type to bear a grudge.”

  Big Lou shook her head. “No, I’m not cross.” She paused. “That wee boy through there …”

  “Finlay is looking for a foster home. He’s had a bit of bad luck too in his young life, but he’s a great wee chap. If you think that …”

  “That I can take him?”

  Marjory nodded. “He’s very keen to get somewhere secure. His last foster home was very fond of him, but the woman there retired. She’d had eighteen foster children over the years—she was a real heroine. But she and her husband were moving over to Fife, to a cottage near Crail, and they wouldn’t have the room.”

  “Of course I’ll take him,” said Big Lou. “Of course I will.”

  “Good,” said Marjory.

  50. “They were kind to me.”

  Finlay was in an armchair, swinging his legs, when Marjory and Big Lou went back into the sitting room. Big Lou looked in his direction uncertainly—she felt awkward and somewhat unsure, even if her earlier anxiety had been completely assuaged by Marjory’s friendliness. She had never had any difficulty in talking to children, but then she had never had to talk to a child for whom she was responsible, or about to become responsible.

  She knew that one had to be consistent; she knew that one had to set boundaries; she knew that you had to convey love and affection without smothering the child; but exactly how one did it when one had no experience of parenthood was something of which she realised she was ignorant. Nobody taught you to be a parent—friends with children had often said that to her—you simply had to rely on your instincts and hope that you got it right. In many cases that worked, but in many it did not, and it was so very easy to blight a life by doing the wrong thing or doing the right thing in the wrong way, or by doing nothing when you should be doing something, or something when you should be doing nothing. Big Lou knew all that, and now she was faced with this little boy who was looking at her expectantly and waiting, she thought, for her to say something.

  “Cake,” said Big Lou. “Cake and shortbread. Do you like them, Finlay? Maybe …”

  She stopped herself abruptly, but then, almost immediately, Marjory said: “Does Finlay like cake? Does Finlay like shortbread? You bet he does, don’t you, Finlay?”

  Finlay nodded vigorously. “Lots,” he said. “I like them lots, Big Lou.”

  Lou smiled at the way he used her name. It sounded a bit odd, but she had invited him. “In that case,” she said, “let’s all have a piece of cake and a cup of tea … unless, Finlay, you’d like some …” She hesitated. Irn Bru might be a bridge too far, but he was looking at her quizzically, and she continued, “Irn Bru.”

  The nodding became even more vigorous. Marjory laughed. “I think you understand boys, Lou. Hollow legs, et cetera et cetera.”

  They sat at the table, Finlay in the middle, while Big Lou poured tea for herself and Marjory and Irn Bru for Finlay. She cut slices of the cake, which was a sponge with a thick layer of strawberry jam in the middle, and placed them on plates. Finlay watched her every move, his eyes wide with anticipation.

  “You should start, Finlay,” said Big Lou. “You should start so that I’ll be able to give you a second slice.”

  The boy reached out and took the cake in his fingers. Lou noticed that his fingernails were dirty; but that was what a boy’s fingernails were meant to be. And she remembered how, when she was a girl back in Arbroath, a boy from a neighbouring farm, a boy called Alastair who had a thick thatch of jet black hair and whose nose always seemed to be running, had taken a splinter out of her father’s collie’s paw, and she had watched and noticed that the fingers that performed the deft operation had nails under w
hich thick dirt was encrusted. She saw it still; a boy’s nails, and a picture of them lodged somewhere in her brain, a memory ready to be invoked now, decades later, in such a different place.

  Finlay talked. He told her about his last foster home and what they had given him for breakfast each day. He told them how they had taken him with them to their caravan, which they kept in a park outside Callander, and how they had stayed there for weeks at a time in the summer and how he had swum in the river that flowed out of the nearby loch. “They were kind to me,” he said.

  Marjory and Big Lou exchanged glances. “Yes,” said Marjory. “They were kind to you, Finlay. There are lots of kind people, you know. Sometimes we don’t meet them right at the beginning of our lives, but then we do later on.”

  The boy was scraping up the crumbs of cake on his plate. Big Lou reached for her knife, cut another slice of cake, and passed it to him. Then she poured Marjory another cup of tea and they talked about the zoo. Finlay had never been there and Big Lou said she would take him. The boy turned to Marjory and said, “She says she’ll take me.”

  “Then I imagine she will,” said Marjory.

  Big Lou looked at her watch. She did not want them to go.

  “I’d better be on my way,” said Marjory.

  “I can give Finlay a bag to put some cake in. He’ll be able to take it away with him.”

  Marjory frowned. “But he’s staying.”

  Big Lou looked momentarily confused, but recovered quickly. “Oh, of course.”

  “His things are in that bag I had with me,” went on Marjory. “I left it in the hall.”

  Marjory said goodbye to Finlay and left. Big Lou returned to the boy and sat down opposite him at the table. She smiled at him, and he returned her smile with a broad grin.

  “Enough cake?” she asked.

  He nodded. “Thanks.”

  They sat in silence for a moment. Then Big Lou said, “We could go and take a look at the Water of Leith, if you like. Then we could get some chips from the chippie on the way back.”

  Finlay said he would like that, and they did as Big Lou promised. When they returned to the flat later, Finlay took a bath, changed into pyjamas, and was installed in the spare bedroom. As she turned out his light, he said, “I’m a bit scared of the dark, you know, Big Lou. Still.”

  She did not ask him why, nor did she ask what the still meant.

  “Then I’ll stay with you,” she said. “You don’t have to worry, Finlay.”

  She brought a chair into the room and placed it alongside the top of his bed. Then she held his hand as he drifted off to sleep. It was so small in her own hand, and it felt warm and dry. She pressed his hand gently, and his fingers returned the pressure, but only just, as he was almost asleep by then. She remembered, but not very well, what it was like to fall asleep holding the hand of another; how precious such an experience, how fortunate those to whom it was vouchsafed by the gods of Friendship, or of Love. She thought she had forgotten that, but now she remembered.

  51. “We are dust before the wind.”

  On the day that Finlay moved in with Big Lou, Antonia Collie, author of an as yet unpublished book on the lives of the early Scottish saints and survivor of a nasty attack of Stendhal Syndrome that had come over her in the Uffizi Gallery, moved in with Domenica and Angus. Antonia’s move was on a more short-term basis, of course; while Finlay hoped to stay forever, Antonia knew that she was merely a guest for the next three weeks. This had not discouraged her, though, from bringing with her one of the sisters from the convent to which she had become attached as a resident lay member—the Convent of the Holy Flowers, tucked away in a small village not far from the hill town of Montalcino, in Tuscany. It was this nun, Sister Maria-Fiore dei Fiori di Montagna, who, suitcase in hand, now stood beside Antonia on Domenica’s landing in Scotland Street.

  Antonia paused before ringing the doorbell. “This is all so familiar to me,” she said to her companion. “I used to live here, you know. That was my door.” She pointed to the door on the right, now disused since Domenica and Angus had acquired her old flat and knocked the two flats into one.

  Sister Maria-Fiore dei Fiori di Montagna smiled benignly. “The doors we have used in this life are very important,” she said. “They are the way we got into places.”

  Antonia nodded absent-mindedly. Sister Maria-Fiore dei Fiori di Montagna had a tendency to make philosophical remarks, and she had become accustomed to them, whether issued in the nun’s native Italian or, as now, in her passable, though sometimes halting, English. There had been one such remark when they had arrived at Edinburgh Airport. There, as they walked through the door into the arrivals hall, she had said, “Airports are the places where we land—where we come to earth.” In Antonia’s view, this observation, although incontrovertibly true, was not one that was pressing to be made. But she was tolerant of the sisters and their occasional failings; they had been egregiously kind to her in her time of need, and she now rewarded them with fierce loyalty.

  Antonia had noticed something. Leaning forward, she peered at the side of her old doorway. “There used to be a brass plate there,” she said. “It had my name on. It was not very big and it just said Collie.” She paused, and turned to look at her friend. “Now it’s gone. They’ve removed it.”

  Sister Maria-Fiore dei Fiori di Montagna frowned. “You must be very sad,” she said. “When our names are removed, they are removed. There is no going back.”

  “You’d think that they might have left it,” said Antonia. “It would not have cost them anything to leave it—as a sort of … as a sort of reminder of the fact that I lived here. Now it’s as if there’s no trace of me.”

  “We are dust before the wind,” said Sister Maria-Fiore dei Fiori di Montagna. “That is what we are.”

  Antonia shook her head sadly. “It would have been a gesture,” she said. “A gesture to my past.”

  She reached forward and pressed the bell on the other door. As she did so, she noticed the shining new brass plate screwed firmly in the middle of that door. Macdonald-Lordie, it said. She smiled bitterly.

  Angus answered the bell. “Well, well,” he said. “Antonia! Here you are!”

  He stepped forward and embraced her, kissing her on each cheek. There was real warmth in his welcome in spite of everything; he had decided that Antonia and her friend were his guests, whatever the background of self-invitation, and it was incumbent on him to behave as a good host. This was not surprising, of course; Angus was a man with good manners, who never expressed himself in any extreme way—except, of course, when it came to the Turner Prize, which was another matter altogether. And in that respect, he felt he was entirely justified in becoming animated; how anybody could be taken in by that ridiculous, pretentious, absurd display of utterly banal posturing was beyond him; how anybody could fail to see the complete lack of artistry of any sort in collecting quotidian objects and piling them up, one upon another, and then calling it art, was equally beyond him. But that was not on his mind as he now turned to Sister Maria-Fiore dei Fiori di Montagna and offered her his hand to shake.

  “This is Sister Maria-Fiore dei Fiori di Montagna,” said Antonia. “It’s her first time in Scotland.”

  “The first of many visits,” said Angus warmly, although it occurred to him that this was perhaps slightly unwise. If one said that sort of thing to Antonia, it could certainly be interpreted as an invitation that was really meant, as opposed to being a remark made purely out of politeness.

  “I’m looking forward to seeing Scozia,” said the nun. “And you are so kind to receive us.”

  “The pleasure is entirely mine,” said Angus. And realised, as he spoke, that this was probably more true than one might imagine: the pleasure was entirely his in the sense that Domenica had not appeared to take any pleasure at all in the prospect of this visit. Still, Angus thought, this Sister Maria-Fiore of the something or other seems nice enough, and perhaps Domenica will be able to regard the whole visit as
some sort of anthropological field trip in which the subjects of research visit you rather than you visit them. One never knew.

  Angus helped them with the suitcases, which were left in the hall while Domenica, who had appeared from her study, greeted Antonia and was introduced to Sister Maria-Fiore dei Fiori di Montagna.

  “You’re looking so well,” said Domenica, as politely as she could.

  “Not surprising,” said Antonia briskly. “In view of my life. We have a very simple existence in the convent, you know. We rise early—four o’clock in the summer. We eat simple fare.”

  “And nothing to drink?” asked Angus, slightly wistfully.

  Antonia allowed herself to smile. “We have the occasional glass of wine. One of the sisters is a very good wine maker, and we have our own vineyard. We are very close to Montalcino, of course.”

  Angus rolled his eyes. “Brunello territory!”

  “We just produce a simple Rosso di Montalcino,” said Antonia. “Nothing grand.”

  “Wine is wine,” said Sister Maria-Fiore dei Fiori di Montagna.

  This remark was delivered with a great air of authority, and Angus looked at her with interest. “Of course,” he said. “You’re absolutely right.”

  Domenica looked at the suitcases. “We must get those through to your rooms,” she said. “Please follow me.”

  52. A Case of Blue Spode Again

  Domenica knew that it would be tricky, and now, as she led Antonia and her friend through the door they had made to allow them access to what had been Antonia’s next-door flat, she found that her misgivings had been well placed.

  “So,” said Antonia, as they approached the new doorway. “So, this is where you punched your way through.”

  Domenica bit her tongue. “We didn’t exactly punch,” she said. “It’s not as if we hired a tank and drove it through the wall.”