The World According to Bertie

by Alexander McCall Smith

  With the order placed, Bertie and his father sat down at one of the nearby tables.

  ‘This is a very nice place, Daddy,’ said Bertie politely, swinging his legs backwards and forwards under the table. ‘Is it a nightclub?’

  ‘No,’ said Stuart. ‘Nightclubs are a bit different, Bertie.’ He thought for a moment. He wondered if he had ever been in a night-club before, and concluded that he had not. And if there were nightclubs in Edinburgh, where were they? He looked at Bertie. ‘Where did you hear about nightclubs?’

  ‘From Tofu,’ said Bertie. ‘He says that he goes to nightclubs sometimes.’

  Stuart suppressed a smile. ‘Quite the lad, Tofu,’ he said.

  Bertie nodded. ‘Most of the time he tells fibs,’ he said. ‘So I don’t really believe him.’

  ‘Rather wise,’ said Stuart.

  They sat in companionable silence for a few minutes while Big Lou prepared the order, which she then brought across. Bertie stared appreciatively at the large glass of orange-coloured fizzy drink that was placed before him and the sizeable chunk of rich Dundee cake under its mantle of whipped cream. He looked up at Big Lou and smiled. ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  ‘Aye, well, that’s the stuff that a boy needs,’ she said. ‘Especially after a music lesson.’ She nodded in the direction of the saxophone case. ‘Is that your trumpet, Bertie?’

  ‘It’s a saxophone,’ said Bertie. ‘The saxophone was invented by Adolf Sax, who was a Belgian . . .’ He did not finish his explanation. The man who had been talking to Big Lou, and who was still standing at the bar, now turned round.

  ‘A sax?’ he said. ‘And you play it?’

  Bertie looked at his interlocutor. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I can play jazz, and some other things. I used to play “As Time Goes By” a lot, but now I’ve got a new piece from Mr Morrison.’

  Big Lou, who was standing nearby, thought it time to effect introductions. ‘This is my old friend, Alan Steadman,’ she said. ‘His cousin married my cousin, up in Kirriemuir. He runs a jazz show on Radio Tay. And a club too. Near Arbroath.’

  ‘Arbroath?’ said Stuart. ‘Is there jazz up there?’

  Big Lou rounded on him. ‘What do you mean, is there jazz up there? Of course there’s jazz in Arbroath.’

  ‘Hospitalfield, actually,’ said Alan. ‘Do you know it? It’s an art college these days, but, as it happens, we do have a monthly jazz club there. There are lots of people round about who like to listen to jazz. We get great players going up there, you know. Brian Kellock’s coming up in a few weeks’ time. He’s based here in Edinburgh, but comes up to Arbroath now and then. Great pianist.’

  ‘Aye, he’s that,’ joined in Big Lou. ‘He did a great Fats Waller tribute some time ago. I heard it.’

  ‘You should come up and listen,’ said Alan. ‘You and your dad. You’d be very welcome, you know.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Big Lou. ‘I’ll come along with you. It’s about time somebody went up to Arbroath.’

  Stuart smiled. Why should he and Bertie not go up to Arbroath with Big Lou and listen to jazz together? He would have to find the car first, of course, but after that . . . Well, why not?

  ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘We’ll come.’ He looked at Bertie, who was busy drinking his Irn-Bru through a straw.

  ‘Great stuff, that,’ said Alan Steadman. ‘Made from girders.’

  And sugar, thought Stuart.

  50. Bertie asks about Ulysses

  They walked back to Scotland Street, hand in hand, Stuart and Bertie, father and son. The visit to Big Lou’s had been an unqualified success– in every respect. Two generous pieces of Dundee cake had been followed by three large squares of vanilla tablet, and the whole thing had been washed down with a couple of brimming glasses of Barr’s Irn-Bru. That had been Bertie’s portion. For his part, Stuart had restricted himself to a large cup of café latte and a dovetail-shaped piece of Big Lou’s home-baked shortbread; more modest fare than that of his son, but for both of them it had been perfect.

  The invitation extended by Big Lou’s friend, Alan Steadman, had been an agreeable bonus. They would all three of them – Stuart, Big Lou and Bertie – travel up to Arbroath for the next jazz evening at Hospitalfield. Alan wrote out the details on a piece of paper, along with the directions, and scribbled down his telephone number in case they should need to contact him. Everything was satisfactorily arranged. And if they left early enough on the Saturday afternoon, Big Lou promised, they would be able to call in at her cousin’s farm, and Bertie could look at the two retired Clydesdale horses who lived there. That was also agreed, and duly planned for.

  ‘What will Mummy do while we’re up in Arbroath?’ asked Bertie, as they made their way back round Drummond Place.

  Stuart thought for a moment. ‘She’ll stay and look after Ulysses,’ he answered. ‘Ulysses, you see, is too young to appreciate jazz. Pity about that, but there we are.’

  Bertie nodded. It would be best to leave his mother behind, he thought, as he could not imagine her in a jazz club in Arbroath. He hoped that she would agree.

  As they walked down Scotland Street, Stuart fell silent.

  ‘Are you all right, Daddy?’ asked Bertie. ‘You didn’t eat too much, did you?’

  Stuart looked down at Bertie and laughed. But there was a nervous edge to his laugh. ‘No, I didn’t,’ he said. ‘I’m just thinking. That’s all.’

  ‘About statistics?’ asked Bertie.

  It would have been easy for Stuart to answer yes to that, as he had been thinking about his chances, which appeared to be diminishing the nearer they approached the front door of 44 Scotland Street. To begin with, before any other charges were considered, he and Bertie were late. They had spent rather longer than he had intended at Big Lou’s, and the meal which Irene would have prepared for them would have been ready a good twenty minutes earlier. That would undoubtedly be an issue. But then there was the question of the trip to Arbroath. He was reluctant to ask Bertie not to mention it, as that would suggest that something was being kept from Irene; but if Bertie mentioned it before he, Stuart, had the chance to do so, then the whole outing might not be presented in quite the right light. Irene could hardly be expected to agree to Bertie’s going to a club of any sort; there had been that unseemly row over his attending Tofu’s birthday party at the bowling alley in Fountainbridge, and a jazz club was surely even one step beyond that. It would be far better, Stuart thought, if they could present the occasion as a concert. To say that one was going to Arbroath for a concert sounded much better than saying that one was going to a jazz club in Arbroath – that was clear.

  He broached the subject with Bertie as they climbed the stairs to their front door. ‘Bertie,’ he began, ‘let me tell Mummy about that concert we’re going to. I think that might be best.’

  ‘What concert?’ asked Bertie. ‘Do you mean the jazz club?’

  ‘Well, yes, I suppose I do. It’s just that there are ways of explaining things to other people. Mummy is not a great aficionado of jazz, is she? She doesn’t know about jazz clubs, but she does know about concerts. I think it might be better for us to say that we’re going to a concert – which is true, of course. It will be a sort of a concert, won’t it?’

  Bertie nodded. He was relieved that his father seemed willing to take on the task of persuading Irene. ‘Of course, Daddy,’ he said. ‘And Mummy is your wife, isn’t she? You know her better than I do, even if Ulysses might not be your baby.’

  Stuart stopped. He stood quite still. They were halfway up the stairs, and he stopped there, one foot on one stair and one on another, as if caught mid-motion by some calamity, as at Pompeii. Bertie stood beside him, holding his hand, looking rather surprised that his father had come to this abrupt halt.

  ‘Now, Bertie,’ said Stuart, his voice barely above a whisper. ‘That’s a very odd thing to say. Why do you think Ulysses might not be my baby? Whatever gave you that idea?’

  ‘He doesn’t look like you, Daddy,’ said Bertie. ‘
At least, I don’t think he does.’

  Stuart’s relief was palpable. ‘Oh, I see. Is that all it is?’ He laughed, and patted Bertie on the shoulder. ‘Babies often don’t look like anybody in particular, Bertie. Except Winston Churchill, of course. All babies look like Winston Churchill. But you can’t draw any conclusions from that!’

  ‘But Ulysses does look like somebody, Daddy,’ said Bertie. ‘He looks like Dr Fairbairn. You should look at Dr Fairbairn’s ears, and his forehead too. Ulysses has this little bump, you see . . .’

  Bertie became aware that something was amiss. Stuart was leaning back against the banister, staring at him.

  ‘Are you feeling all right, Daddy?’ asked Bertie, the concern rising in his voice. ‘Are you sure that you didn’t have too much shortbread?’

  ‘No, I’m all right, Bertie,’ Stuart stuttered. He leaned forward so that his face was close to Bertie’s. On the little boy’s breath he could smell the Irn-Bru, an odour of sugar, and violent orange, an odour of a whole Scotland that would disappear one day, along with the Broons and Oor Wullie, a whole culture, things so loved, so taken for granted.

  He recovered, but only to the extent of being able to say to Bertie: ‘I don’t think that you should talk about that, Bertie. That sort of thing is a bit sensitive. People are funny about it.’

  ‘I know,’ said Bertie. ‘You should have seen how Dr Fairbairn looked when I asked him.’

  51. So Many Books Unread and Bikes Uncycled

  The following morning, Domenica Macdonald took slightly longer over her breakfast than usual. This was not because there was more to eat – her breakfasts were always the same: a bowl of porridge, made from the cut-oats she obtained from the real-food shop in Broughton Street; and two slices of toast, one spread thinly with Marmite and one with marmalade. This breakfast never varied, at least when she was at home, and it was accompanied by whatever reading was current at the time – Mankind Quarterly, with its earnest anthropological papers, rubbed shoulders with the toast as easily as did the daily newspaper or an interesting letter set aside for leisurely perusal. Not that there were many of those: Domenica still wrote letters, by hand, but received few back, so depleted had the ranks of letter-writers become.

  She had read somewhere that the vast majority of boxes of notelets that were sold in stationery shops were never used. They were bought with good intentions, or given as presents in the same spirit, but they remained in their boxes. But that, she reflected that morning, was a common fate for so many objects which we make and give to one another. Exercise bicycles, for example, were not designed to go anywhere, but the wheels, at least, were meant to go round, which they rarely did. Exercise bicycles in gyms might be used, but this did not apply to those– the majority – bought for use in the home. They stood there, in mute affront to their owners, quite idle, before being moved to a spare room and ultimately to an attic. Then they were recycled, which did not mean, in this case, that they had been cycled in the first place.

  She poured herself a cup of coffee and stared out of the window. And then, she thought, there were those books bought and not read. Somewhere there might be those who read each and every book they acquired – read them with attention and gravity and then put them carefully on a shelf, alongside other books that had received the same treatment. But for many books, being placed on the shelf was the full extent of their encounter with their owner. She smiled at this thought, remembering the anecdote about the late King George VI – she thought, or V perhaps, or even Edward VII – who was presented with a book by its author and said: ‘Thank you, Mr So-and-So, I shall put it on the shelf with all the other books.’ This was not meant to be a put-down to the author – it was, by contrast, a polite and entirely honest account of what would be done. And one could not expect one who was, after all, an emperor, to read every book given to him, or indeed any. Although – and this thought came to Domenica as she took a first sip of her coffee – even those whose office makes them too busy to read are never too busy to write their book when they leave office – a book which, by its very nature, will be most likely to appeal to those in similar office, who will be too busy to read it.

  Some books, of course, were destined not to be read, largely because of their unintelligibility to all except a very small number of people. Domenica could think of several examples of this, including the remarkable books of her friend, Andrew Ranicki, a professor of mathematics at the university. She had once asked him how many people in the world would understand his highly regarded but very obscure books from cover to cover, and he had replied, with very little hesitation: ‘Forty-five.’ He had said this not with an air of resigned acceptance, as might be shown by an author reporting on the public’s failure of taste, but with the air of one who knows from the beginning that he is writing for forty-five people. And surely it is better that forty-five should buy the book and actually read it, than should many thousands, indeed millions, buy it and put it on their shelves, like George VI (or V, or Edward VII, or possibly somebody else altogether). That, she remembered, had been the fate of Professor Hawking’s Brief History of Time. That was a book that had been bought by many millions, but had been demonstrated to have been read by only a minute proportion of those who had acquired it. For do we not all have a copy of that on our shelves, and who amongst us can claim to have read beyond the first page, in spite of the pellucid prose of its author and his evident desire to share with us his knowledge of . . . of whatever it is that the book is about?

  And then, she thought, there were those novels that went on forever. Readers in a more leisurely age may have stayed the course, but not now. Domenica herself had tried to read Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy four times, but on each occasion had got only as far as page eighty. This was not because of any lack of merit in the novel – it was very fine – but because of its sheer scale. Such a fat book, she thought, in her defence; so many pages, and marriages, and family relationships. Almost like Proust, whom she had never finished, and whom she accepted she now never would. À la Recherche du Temps Perdu was on her shelves – and in a prominent position – and every so often she would dip into it and wander away into a world of dreamy reminiscence, but she would never finish it; she knew that. The sentences were too long. Modern sentences are short. In Proust, we encounter sentences which appear interminable, meandering on and on in a way which suggests that the author had no desire to bring a satisfying or intriguing line of thought to any form of conclusion, wishing rather to prolong the pleasure, as one might wish if one were an author like Proust, who spent most of his time languishing in bed – he was a chronic hypochondriac – rather than experiencing life – an approach which encouraged him to produce sentences of remarkable length, the longest one being that sentence which, if printed out in standard-size type, would wind round a wine bottle seventeen and a half times, or so we are told by Alain de Botton in his How Proust Can Change Your Life, a book which has surely been read by most of those who have bought it, so light and amusing it is.

  Domenica stopped. She had been gazing out of the window, allowing her thoughts to wander. But there were things to be done that day, and Proustian reverie would not help. One of these things was to remind Antonia that it would be her turn to sweep the common stair next week; not an onerous duty perhaps, but one of those small things upon which the larger civilisation in which we lived was undoubtedly based.

  52. The Anthropology of Neighbours

  When Domenica went out of her flat onto the landing, she noticed immediately that the pot plant which grew beside the banister had been damaged. It was a large split-leaf philodendron, which she had bought some years before and which she had nurtured to its current considerable size. In this task she had received, she observed, very little support. When Bruce had occupied the other flat on the landing, he had professed an interest in the plant’s welfare, but had rarely, if ever, raised a finger in support. Such a narcissistic young man, Domenica thought; had the leaves developed reflective surfaces,
of course, it might have been different. Pat, who had at that point shared the flat with Bruce, had been more conscientious, and helpfully had washed the leaves from time to time, something which the plant appeared to appreciate and which it rewarded with fresh sprouts of growth. But Antonia, in spite of having been very specifically asked to ensure that the plant was well watered while Domenica was in the Far East, had proved to be an indifferent guardian at best, and Domenica was convinced that it was only as a result of Angus having come in to water it discreetly that the plant had survived her absence.

  Now something had ripped the plant’s largest leaf and something else had broken one of the stems, leaving a leaf hanging by no more than a few sinews. Domenica stared in dismay at the damage that had been done: two years’ growth, she thought, had been casually destroyed in a few moments of carelessness.

  She looked up and saw that Antonia’s front door was ajar. It was as if a detective had arrived on the scene of the crime and seen the culprit’s footprint etched clearly into the ground. It was now obvious to her what had happened – Antonia had been carrying something into the flat, swinging her bag perhaps, and had brushed against the plant, thus causing this damage. And rather than attend to it – to break off the damaged leaf – and rather than knock on Domenica’s door and offer some sort of apology, she had merely disregarded what had happened. Well! That showed gratitude. That showed how much she appreciated everything that Domenica had done for her – offering her flat for the full period of her absence for nothing; and indeed getting nothing in return other than this cavalier conduct towards the local flora.

  And then there had been the incident of the blue Spode teacup, which Domenica had found Antonia using in her flat, having obviously removed it from her own kitchen. Remove was a charitable term in this context; steal might be more accurate. That was business that had yet to be resolved, and it was difficult to see how this could be done. It is a major step to accuse one’s neighbour of theft; it implies a complete breakdown in relations and leads one into a position from which there is no easy retreat. It is quite possible, though, to make a remark that falls short of an outright accusation, yet makes a clear implication of negligence at the very least.