The Bertie Project

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Bertie felt he had to respond. “Tofu,” he whispered, “you shouldn’t say that teachers are old and tired—even if they are. That’s really unkind.”

  Olive, standing not far away, gasped. “Miss Campbell,” she blurted out. “Did you hear that? Bertie said that teachers are old and tired. I heard him.”

  Bertie defended himself. “I didn’t,” he wailed. “I didn’t say that, Olive.” And to Miss Campbell he said, “I promise you, Miss Campbell. I promise you I didn’t say you were old and tired.”

  “I’m sure you didn’t, Bertie,” said Miss Campbell, glancing discouragingly at Olive. “And anyway, we haven’t come here to argue about who said what; we’ve come here to explore this fascinating world we live in.”

  That settled, the group continued its progress up the stairs and into the nineteenth-century hall of the museum, a great white cathedral of light. High above them a vast glass roof was a window onto a whole slice of the sky, allowing the morning light to fill the hall below with brilliance. Behind the walkways that clung to the walls of this hall, the museum’s galleries stretched invitingly: science, the natural world, clothing; whales, rockets, pots and pans; medicine, heat, electricity. Awed by the sheer size of the hall, the children listened to their teacher’s plan: they would visit natural history first, then science, before seeing the display of Scottish history.

  In the science section, Miss Campbell pointed out a small glass inhaler, the product of Stevenson’s scientific instruments firm.

  “This was for chloroform,” she announced. “You see that bit there? That was put over the patient’s mouth so that they could breathe in the chloroform.”

  The children peered through the glass.

  “And does anybody know what chloroform was?” asked Miss Campbell.

  Bertie looked about him. He knew, but was aware, too, that one had to be careful about displaying knowledge in the presence of people like Tofu and Larch, who, as far as he could tell, knew very little and resented anything that revealed their comparative ignorance.

  Miss Campbell was looking in his direction. “I’m sure you know, Bertie,” she said. “In fact, I think you have the look of one who knows what chloroform was all about.”

  “He didn’t say he knew,” muttered Tofu.

  “No, he didn’t,” agreed Larch. “Bertie doesn’t know everything, do you, Bertie?”

  The look that Larch shot in his direction persuaded Bertie that he had been right not to disclose his knowledge. But now Miss Campbell was waiting for his answer and he could not tell a lie.

  “I sort of know,” he said, hoping that this ambiguous answer might deflect hostility. But Larch was staring at him, almost sneeringly, and he knew his strategy had not worked. He sighed. “It puts people to sleep.”

  “Exactly,” said Miss Campbell. “Well done, Bertie! And do we know who invented it—right here in Edinburgh? Do we know his name?”

  This was the signal for Tofu’s suggestion of a well-known Scottish politician, generally known to put people to sleep while talking to them.

  “No, Tofu,” said Miss Campbell. “Not him.” She turned to Bertie. “Well, Bertie?”

  “It was Mr. Simpson,” said Bertie.

  “Well done again, Bertie,” said Miss Campbell. “Yes, it was James Young Simpson. He had dinner parties in Queen Street where he showed his friends how it worked. They all sat round the table and breathed in chloroform. It put them to sleep.”

  Larch nodded. “My mum and dad have dinner parties like that,” he said. “They sit at the table and sniff…”

  Miss Campbell cut him off. “That’s enough, Larch.”

  “That’s different,” said Tofu. “They not sniffing chloroform, they’re…”

  Miss Campbell raised her voice. “I said that was quite enough, Tofu.”

  Olive now chimed in. “My father says that Larch’s parents are a disgrace, Miss Campbell. He says that he knows all about them.”

  “Shut your face, Olive Oyl,” snapped Larch.

  “Hush!” said Miss Campbell. “I will not have language like that, Larch! You apologise to Olive.”

  “What for?” asked Larch.

  “For telling her to shut her face,” intervened Pansy. “Look, Miss Campbell—look how upset Olive is.”

  Larch made a grudging apology, received in stony silence by Olive.

  “Dr. Simpson was a very brave man,” said Miss Campbell, eager to revert to history. “It’s called self-experimentation, and that means that rather than experimenting on other people, he used himself. That’s very brave. And of course it meant that people could have operations without feeling any pain. That made a big difference, as I’m sure you can imagine.” She paused. “And now, boys and girls, I think we can make our way to the Scottish history section, where we shall see how people lived a long time ago when Scotland was a very different place from what it is today.”

  They moved off, following the teacher in pairs. And it was while they were making their way down the stairs that led to the Scottish galleries, that Olive suddenly stopped, stared across the hall, and gave Bertie a nudge.

  “Isn’t that your dad, Bertie?” she said.

  Bertie looked in the direction in which Olive was now pointing.

  “I don’t think my dad’s here,” he said. “He goes to the office during the day.”

  Olive persisted. “But it is him, Bertie. Look, he’s over there.”

  Bertie looked again. Olive had been pointing in the direction of the museum café, with its open expanse of tables and chairs. The café, a popular drop-in place, was busy, and Bertie had difficulty in making out the man whom Olive was talking about. But then he did, and it was his father—he could tell that now.

  “And who’s the woman he’s with, Bertie?” asked Olive. “That’s not your mummy, is it? No, I don’t think it is, Bertie. So who is it?”

  The Intimacy of Tents

  Stuart was late home that evening, but was just in time to read Bertie his bedtime story, which currently was Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped, substituted by Stuart for Irene’s proposal of The Young Gandhi, an entirely worthy, but rather slow book on the early life of the Mahatma. There would be time enough, Stuart thought, for Bertie to learn about Gandhi; for the moment he would find more pleasure in the travails of David Balfour and his experiences in the Hebrides and the Highlands.

  Ulysses, of course, was already asleep; in spite of his gastric issues—he tended to be sick whenever Irene picked him up—when it came to matters of day-to-day routine he had proved to be a very easy baby, sleeping through the night from the age of four months onwards, and awaking promptly at seven each morning. This regularity had been of great assistance to Irene, who was never at her best in the early morning and who greatly appreciated the extra hour or two of sleep that this routine afforded her. Stuart, by contrast, was a light sleeper, and there were few nights during which he did not wake in the small hours, sometimes lying in the darkness for an hour or more before sleep returned.

  Had Ulysses required feeding or changing during the night, he would have been the obvious person to take that on, and would, as it happened, have enjoyed the distraction. He had done that when Bertie was an infant, and had never minded sitting there in the room they used as a nursery, his tiny son in his arms, watching the level of milky baby formula in the bottle slowly dropping as Bertie sucked his way through his untimely early breakfast. There was so much that he wanted to say to this tiny bundle of humanity—his son—and he often did so, talking to him as one might talk to an old friend, confiding much that he felt he could say to nobody else, indifferent to Bertie’s uncomprehending gaze. For Stuart, like many men, was lonely. He had long since stopped being able to say much to Irene; his conversation with her had become progressively more one-sided—any response he made to her observations was never really listened to, nor given much weight on the rare occasions that it was.

  He was not entirely without friends. He had kept in touch with some contemporari
es from James Gillespie’s, where he had spent his high school years, and they occasionally met at the Golf Tavern on the edge of the Meadows. But those reunion evenings had proved to be increasingly difficult for him. These friends, all of whom were, like him, married, seemed to be happy in their marriages, or, if they were not, were adept at concealing their unhappiness. They spoke of holiday plans with real enthusiasm: they were going with their families to Spain, or Portugal, or wherever it was, and seemed to be eagerly anticipating the trip. One of them, Tom, who had been perhaps Stuart’s closest friend at Gillespie’s, and who was now a successful insurance broker, had told him of a planned trip to Iceland later that summer, and had confessed that what really excited him about the trip was not the prospect of the dips in geothermally heated pools or marvelling at geysers, but the prospect of camping for two whole weeks with his wife.

  “Frankly,” Tom said, “I can’t wait.”

  “I’d love to go to Iceland,” said Stuart.

  “Yes, but what I’m really looking forward to, Stuart, is two weeks in the tent with Alice. Two weeks!”

  Stuart had looked at him with incomprehension, not sure whether he had understood correctly. Was it the case that Tom liked the idea of being under canvas for two weeks—there were, of course, some people who liked tents—or was he looking forward to being in a tent for two weeks with a particular person—his wife? If it were the former, then Stuart would simply marvel at the different things that people liked. There were some people who sought pleasures that no rational person—in Stuart’s view—would espouse. There were people to whom bungee-jumping appealed; there were people who liked four spoons of sugar in their tea; there were people who were never happier than when standing on a dance floor listening to music so loud that their eardrums—or what remained of their eardrums—hurt. And there were people who liked sleeping in uncomfortable, constricting sleeping bags—not infrequently made out of some sort of nylon—under a canvas roof that could not be trusted to keep the rain out entirely; who liked communal ablution blocks shared with total strangers, with showers that dribbled lukewarm water; who liked the feeling of being not-quite-clean, a target for midges and mosquitoes, and other unidentifiable agents of itchiness. There were people who liked all that, and Tom may have been one of them.

  Or—and this was slightly embarrassing—it was possible that Tom liked the idea of being in a tent with Alice for that length of time. Stuart could imagine that there would be people with whom being in a tent would be an adventure: a newly found lover, for example, with whom such intimacy was novel; he could understand the attraction of that; but Tom and Alice had been married for years, and presumably lived in close proximity anyway in their Newington flat. Was a Newington flat perhaps too unromantic to inspire excitement? That was possible, he supposed, but he had found his friend’s confession an awkward one, and had changed the subject by starting to talk about Iceland’s geological instability—a topic that, as it happened, was one on which Tom had views.

  “They’ve been very clever, those Icelanders,” his friend said. “Few of their houses are anywhere where they could really be damaged if anything blows up. Humanity in general has a habit of building its house in the wrong place, don’t you think?”

  Stuart had not given Tom’s observation the thought it deserved; his mind had gone back to tents, and he was asking himself how he would feel about spending two weeks under canvas with Irene, whether in Iceland or in a more geologically stable part of the world. And he had come to the conclusion that he would not enjoy it; that two weeks in such circumstances would be a sentence to be served with as much forbearance as he could muster. This realisation then prompted another, and even more disturbing question: if he could not face spending two weeks in a tent with Irene, then was there anybody with whom he would like to do just that?

  There was.

  Spitfires, Courage, Statistics

  Bertie looked up at his father from beneath the blankets. Perched on the side of his son’s bed, Stuart had a tattered edition of Kidnapped in his hands and was reading the book aloud, pausing here and there for dramatic emphasis. Bertie’s eyes widened with excitement at Stevenson’s tale; to think that such events took place just outside Edinburgh, and such a short time ago too. Whatever prodigiousness he might show in the scope of his reading, Bertie was much the same as other young children in having little awareness of time and chronology; for him, the past might be a long time ago, but was not so distant as to have been outwith the experience of most adults. It had never occurred to him that his father might not have been around to witness the Second World War, and he had expressed surprise on learning that Stuart had not participated in the Battle of Britain.

  “I suppose you were too old to fly a Spitfire, Daddy,” he remarked.

  For a moment, Stuart imagined himself, a youthful airman, engaged in aerial ballet with his opponents. Would he have had the courage to fly in the face of those bleak odds? He thought not. He looked at Bertie with regret; sooner or later the admiring son realises the father is not the omnipotent hero, and that day would inevitably come for Bertie. All he could hope was that Bertie’s judgment would be gentle. “Actually, Bertie, I wasn’t even born then—believe it or not.”

  When it came to his grandmother, Stuart’s mother, Nicola, Bertie had once asked her whether she remembered the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion. “Ranald Braveheart Macpherson says that his grandfather fought with Bonnie Prince Charlie,” said Bertie. “Do you remember all that, Granny?”

  “I may be old, Bertie,” replied Nicola evenly, struggling to suppress her laughter, “but not quite that ancient.”

  So it was that Bertie felt that the events described in Kidnapped were within recent memory, and that the dangers faced by David Balfour had not entirely disappeared. This meant that Stuart had been needed to comfort him after they had read of the disturbing visit that the hero had paid to his Uncle Ebenezer in the House of Shaws. That visit had almost ended the David Balfour story somewhat prematurely, as the uncle had sent his nephew in darkness up a staircase that ended in an abyss. And there had been nervousness, too, when David had accompanied the same uncle to a pier where he was hit on the head and bundled into a boat bound for the West Indies and certain servitude.

  “You must remember that the world was more dangerous in those days, Bertie,” Stuart reassured him. “Staircases are generally safer these days. And the risk of being sold into slavery is much reduced.” Stuart thought: was this true? Was the world really safer, or did we simply delude ourselves that human nature, with its lengthy and gory track record of cruelty, had in some way changed in its very essentials?

  He looked down at Bertie, and wondered what the world would be like when this little boy was forty. Would he even make it that far, or would some cataclysm, natural or man-made, intervene to cut short his life? In our human cleverness, we had dodged any number of bullets, courtesy of antibiotics and statistical good fortune, but Stuart felt that sooner or later microbes would defeat our pharmacopoeia, for all its cunning. Stuart was a statistician, and he understood risk. That meant he knew that our luck would run out, and we would lose this gentle earth that had nurtured us and which we had so thoughtlessly abused. That process had started, and was accelerating. His own generation would not be called to account, but Bertie’s would, and by then it would be too late.

  “He was a jolly wicked uncle, wasn’t he?” said Bertie.

  “He was indeed, Bertie,” Stuart replied. “And perhaps that’s where we shall leave it for tonight. But do remember, everything will be all right for David Balfour—so don’t worry too much.”

  “I want things to work out well for people,” said Bertie.

  Stuart caught his breath. Of course you do, dear Bertie, he said to himself. Because you—unlike us—are made of unalloyed goodness, and that is what goodness dictates. At some stage, of course, you’re going to discover that good does not always triumph and that evil can very easily win the battle; I hope, though, that when that
truth dawns you will be old enough and strong enough to make the deliberate effort not to believe it. Because only if we pretend that it is not true can we steel ourselves to fight against it—like those young men in the Spitfires who did not stop to consider the impossible, daunting odds and went up nonetheless.

  Stuart snapped Kidnapped shut and leant forward to plant a kiss on Bertie’s brow. He smelt the slightly soapy smell of a little boy who had recently bathed; he felt the tickle of Bertie’s hair upon his lips; he heard the breathing of his young son.

  “Goodnight, my darling boy,” whispered Stuart.

  From a place already halfway to sleep, Bertie muttered his goodnight. And then, as if remembering something that he had forgotten to ask Stuart earlier, he muttered, “Why were you in the museum today, Daddy?”

  Stuart froze, and then very slowly straightened up. Speaking very slowly, his voice lowered, he said, “Why do you ask that, Bertie? Did you see me?”

  “Yes,” said Bertie. “I saw you in the café. I would have liked to say hello but Miss Campbell was taking us to look at something.”

  “So you saw me,” repeated Stuart. “I was…I was speaking to somebody.”

  “I saw her,” said Bertie. “Does she work in your office?”

  It would have been easy for Stuart to say yes, but suddenly he stopped himself. He had never lied to Bertie, and he would not do so now, whatever the exigencies of the situation might be. “Not in my office,” he said evenly. “Another office—not mine.”

  Bertie’s gaze was still upon him. “Olive said…” His voice trailed off.

  “Yes,” said Stuart. “What did Olive say?” He had never liked Olive.

  “She said that maybe that lady was your girlfriend.”

  Stuart bit his lip. “I wouldn’t believe everything that Olive says.”

  “I don’t,” said Bertie, and then added, “I just believe some of it—not everything.”