Bertie Plays the Blues

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Angus, for his part, had reflected on this and had come to the conclusion that issues of habit arose in the human world too. There were those who led the examined life – who questioned themselves, who weighed up what to do, who developed and nurtured the self – or the soul, if they were inclined to such terminology. But then there were plenty of people who simply did what they did because that was what they had always done and would continue to do. They ate certain things because they liked them and had always eaten them; they voted for a particular political party because that was what their grandparents and parents had done before them; and so on into virtually all the corners of their lives – an unevaluated, unchanging pattern of behaviour that was rarely challenged or reviewed. Such people did not feel themselves to be in control of their lives: decisions were taken elsewhere; they were told what to do.

  The thought depressed him. It was not the fault of those who thought this way: they lived in a system that had actively encouraged such passivity. Vote for us and we’ll look after you; join us and we’ll make sure you have a job; let us house you, feed you, look after your health, take care of your children. And yet all of these things were goals that seemed so enticing. The world was a cold, hard place, and if there was somebody offering to protect you from it, then independence of thought and action was not much to give up in return. And surely it was better that there should be somebody to clothe and nurture those who would otherwise be naked and vulnerable?

  It was noon by the time Angus arrived home, and Cyril was feeling hungry. Angus opened a can of dog food and put half of the contents into the metal bowl labelled CYRIL. Then, leaving Cyril to enjoy his lunch, he went into his studio and put on his painting smock.

  He was proud of this smock, which had been given to him by Nigel McIsaac, a fellow artist who had lived round the corner in Dundonald Street. Nigel had been the kindest of men, and had taken Angus under his wing when he had first come to Edinburgh. Not only had he given him an easel – Angus’s own easel being a distinctly shaky third-hand affair, retired from the Art College on health and safety grounds – but he had also passed on this smock which, tradition had it, had been worn by John Duncan Fergusson himself before it had been auctioned at the Glasgow Arts Club in aid of the Scottish Artists’ Benevolent Association. It gave Angus such pleasure to know that it was this very smock that Fergusson would have worn in his Paris studio in the late Twenties; that it might have been seen by Matisse and Picasso – perhaps even borrowed by them if their own smock was at the dry-cleaner (if dry-cleaning existed in those days). And if Matisse had worn it, then some of the small smudges of paint hardened on the fabric, tiny, ancient specks of colour, might equally well have been from his palette as from Fergusson’s … To be so close to greatness, and yet not be great oneself; a bitter thought for some, but not for Angus. I still have time to produce a great painting, he told himself. And to get married. And to visit Sweden for my honeymoon.

  He stopped. Why had he thought that their honeymoon would be in Sweden? Who went on honeymoon to Sweden? And why?

  21. An Evening with the Triplets

  That evening, Matthew and Elspeth experienced for the first time the full implications of having triplets. It was not their first night at home with their newly arrived brood, but it was the first night during which there was a complete failure of synchronised sleep on the part of Tobermory, Rognvald and Fergus. This meant that from the early evening onwards, when the infants all appeared to be wide awake – and hungry – there was no moment in the night when at least one of them was not awake and making his feelings apparent. If Matthew and Elspeth had been on a small yacht, undertaking a night-crossing of some dangerous body of water – and all bodies of water are dangerous, as Matthew had discovered on his honeymoon in Western Australia – then they would have shared the watches of the night, with one sleeping below while one took the helm and kept an eye out for shipping.

  This, though, was different. To begin with, there was no metaphorical below; the flat was not acoustically discreet – and a niggle or cry in one room seemed to penetrate quite easily into the reaches of other rooms, or at least a baby’s cry, designed by nature to alert the hearer, seemed to do this. And then there was the psychological factor: Matthew found that he could not sleep if Elspeth was up attending to a girning child. He would lie there wondering what the problem was, and eventually, after a few minutes, would be up at her side, offering to assist. And when he was attending to one of the babies, Elspeth found that she could not sleep either, being far too unsure as to Matthew’s ability to deal with the situation.

  Matthew tried to put on a brave face. He was not a complainer by nature – a worrier, yes, but not one to moan. “Isn’t this fun?” he cheerfully remarked. “Having the babies all to ourselves while the rest of Scotland is asleep!”

  “Yes,” muttered Elspeth, struggling with a nappy. She would get better at putting them on, she felt; they were awkward things when a pair of little legs was moving with such determination. And it was remarkable what pressure such tiny bladders must muster to project quite so far – and with such accuracy.

  “Do be careful,” said Matthew. “You don’t want to get those sticky tapes on his skin. Some babies are allergic to those things, I read.”

  She glanced at him. “You should try to get some sleep, darling. There’s no point in both of us being up, is there?”

  “I want to help, my darling,” Matthew replied. “I don’t want you to be the only one up dealing with all these tiny babies!”

  “It’s perfectly all right, dearest sugar. I can cope.”

  “We don’t need all that sleep,” he said. “There are plenty of people who can get by with just an hour or two a night. Winston Churchill, for instance. I think he only had a couple of hours’ sleep a night. Apparently he lay in bed, smoking cigars, and dictating letters at two or three in the morning. He also used to dictate in the bath. The secretaries would sit outside and take shorthand.”

  Elspeth grunted. Tobermory was now dropping off to sleep, but Rognvald seemed particularly wide awake. And Fergus was rather quiet, she thought: was he all right? Matthew checked, but in so doing woke him, and had to pick him up in an attempt to calm him down.

  “There’s something annoying him,” said Matthew. “I wonder what it is.”

  Elspeth paid little attention to this. She was now feeding Rognvald and was concentrating on that task. So she did not hear Matthew say, “It’s the bracelets. I think we should take them off.”

  The babies had been discharged from hospital wearing small plastic bracelets on which their names were written in ink. These had been kept on by Elspeth as she realised that it was the only means, at this stage, of identifying which baby was which. Matthew may have claimed to detect different personalities, but she had made no such unrealistic claim, and for the time being was relying on the bracelet for identification.

  Matthew now laid Fergus down while he went to find a pair of scissors. A quick snipping relieved Fergus of his bracelet, which was tossed into the bin, alongside assorted baby-wipes. A similar operation was then performed on Tobermory, gently and discreetly, but not sufficiently so to prevent his waking up and joining Fergus in full-lunged crying.

  Elspeth looked up. “What’s going on?” she asked.

  “Tobermory’s just woken up,” said Matthew. “Here, give me Rognvald while you try to calm him down.”

  “No, give me Fergus first,” said Elspeth wearily. “You take Rognvald and put him in Fergus’s crib. Then pick up Tobermory and shougle him about for a while. He usually stops crying if you do that.”

  Matthew took Rognvald from Elspeth. Reaching for the scissors he snipped off his bracelet and threw it in the bin. Laying Rognvald down in the crib next to Tobermory, he went into the bathroom to replace the scissors on the shelf where they were kept; Matthew did not like to leave things lying about, and household objects were always where they were meant to be. But not necessarily babies …

  Coming back,
he saw that Elspeth had lifted a baby up from the crib where Rognvald and Tobermory had been lying. But which one?

  “Is that …” He broke off.

  “Is that what?” asked Elspeth, now sounding rather testy.

  “Is that … Tobermory?”

  “No, it’s Fergus,” she said. “He was the one who was crying, wasn’t he?”

  Matthew stood quite still. “No, it was Tobermory. I put Rognvald down next to Tobermory … Which side was he on? Left or right?”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Matthew, I don’t know! The place is full of crying babies – I can’t remember who was where. Just look at the bracelets …”

  She became silent. Then, in a voice that seemed un -naturally quiet, she asked, “What’s happened to the bracelets, Matthew?”

  “I can easily fix them,” said Matthew hurriedly, scrabbling in the bin. “Here we are. Tobermory. And here’s Rognvald …”

  Elspeth was looking at him wide-eyed. “Matthew,” she hissed. “You’ve mixed them up. You’ve mixed the boys up! Now we don’t know which is which!”

  Matthew sat down, his head sunk in his hands. He was very tired. Did it matter whether Rognvald was really Tobermory, or even Fergus – or the other way round? He thought it might – it just might; but he was far too tired, far too tired …

  22. Sheer Exhaustion

  Matthew walked out into the garden. Summer, although not yet high, nor blazing – Scottish summers having ceased to blaze years before – was nonetheless making itself felt in a hint of warmth in the breeze coming up from Stockbridge. This breeze lapped at the Georgian cliffs of Moray Place, rolled half-heartedly across Charlotte Square, and then moved lazily up Lothian Road, disturbing as it did the carelessly abandoned litter of the previous night’s revellers: discarded tickets, exhortatory fliers from dubious bars, scraps of this and that from the pockets and purses of the lank boys and scantily clad girls who flooded in and out of the city’s night spots with all the regularity of a tide.

  Matthew looked at his watch, and sighed. It was six o’clock, but he would have preferred it to be three, or even four – hours at which it was always possible to go back to bed and have at least some sleep before the day began. He was afraid that now he would never get to sleep; he had never been able to linger in bed in the morning, the legacy of a regime that his father had imposed on him as a small boy – a regime that began with a shower first thing in the morning followed by a series of vigorous exercises. “Mens sana in corpore sano,” his father intoned. “Never forget that, Matthew!”

  The things that our parents tell us never to forget are often instinctively mocked and refuted, scorned as old-fashioned advice. But the uncomfortable truth is that we do not forget them – they lodge in the mind – until years later they emerge in our consciousness, and we find ourselves repeating those very aphorisms our parents expounded. And the same is true of habits. The things we are taught as children, if taught well, remain taught. “Give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the man” was not intended to sound sinister when first uttered, but rings perfectly chilling in modern ears: chilling, but probably true, as long as it is realised that the early influence may have exactly the opposite effect of what is intended. Matthew’s father had sought to raise a boy who, if everything worked out well, would follow a conventional cursus honorum and become a keen rugby player, perhaps even – oh, wildest dream – appearing at Murrayfield in some heroic match against mud-bespattered squads of New Zealanders or Welshmen. He raised instead an art dealer, with a penchant for distressed oatmeal sweaters and crushed strawberry cords. But in so far as he wanted to produce a son who would not, like most teenagers, spend half the morning in bed if given a chance, he had succeeded: Matthew could not lie in long without feeling guilty. And not only that; the shower he took in the morning, if not exactly cold, was nonetheless deliberately never more than tepid.

  So now, after that sleepless night of attending to the triplets, Matthew found that he had no alternative but to begin the day. He sighed again, knowing what would happen: by noon he would be exhausted, befuddled and aching from sleep deprivation, good for nothing but an unreceptive grunt or a weary shrug. He might be able to sleep then, but what if Elspeth were tired as well? What if both of them dropped from exhaustion – at precisely the time that the triplets needed attention? Would they lie there in their cribs, crying, hungry, in need of a change, while their parents slept? Not only would that be traumatic for them – it could be downright dangerous. What if a bee came in the window and stung one of the boys on his nose, and it swelled up and made it difficult for him to breathe, and …

  As a new father, such dangers seemed very real to Matthew. The boys were so tiny, such perfect little miracles of nature, and yet they were at the same time completely helpless: infinitely more so, Matthew reminded himself, than their equivalents in the young of other species. Lambs may gambol and skip within hours, it seemed, of arrival; lion cubs walk, unsteadily, perhaps, but on all four feet, on their first day; a new-born whale calf is born with the ability to swim alongside its mother immediately; we, by contrast, can barely move for months, cannot fend for ourselves for years. That was why parents had to be awake, Matthew told himself.

  He walked towards the end of the garden. The previous owners of the flat had been keen gardeners; weeds, though, had now begun to appear – another thing to worry about, he thought. He made a mental resolution to tidy some of the beds up that weekend; the boys could be brought out if it was sunny – they needed their vitamin D, and a little bit of sun would do them good. And what about vitamin C? Would they be getting enough of that? When could you start to give them orange juice? Or Coca-Cola? He smiled. There would be no Coca-Cola for his boys; not until they were … No, never. They would not get hooked on sugar, or carbon dioxide bubbles, unlike those unfortunate American children, who became so puffed up with all that sugar and palm oil, and yet who had … such regular teeth. Would his boys go to an orthodonist, he wondered. How old should they be for that?

  And what about Watson’s? What age did they have to be before they could start at Watson’s? Four? But did you have to telephone when they were two, perhaps, and ask for their name to be put on a list? Or did the school itself scour the birth notices in The Scotsman and put them down automatically when they read that Watsonian babies had been born? Matthew thought that this might happen in Edinburgh, but was not sure.

  He reached the end of his garden. Beyond a hedge composed of California lilac and mahonia, Lord Moray’s Pleasure Gardens began, descending precipitously down the hill to the Water of Leith. Matthew found himself peering through this hedge.

  He saw something.

  23. Help Needed

  When Matthew went back into the flat, he found Elspeth sitting on the drawing room sofa, cradling one of the boys in her arms, her eyes closed. Taking her to be asleep, he became immediately concerned for the safety of the baby; it would be so easy to drop one of the triplets if one nodded off, and if he rolled off the edge of the sofa he would fall almost his entire height to the floor below – the equivalent, Matthew calculated, of an adult’s falling five or six feet. Babies, of course, landed more lightly, but even so …

  Elspeth opened her eyes. “I wasn’t asleep,” she said.

  Matthew nodded. “Good. You wouldn’t want him to fall …”

  “I told you: I wasn’t asleep. He was in no danger of falling.”

  Matthew sat down. “I didn’t sleep at all last night,” he said. “Not one wink.”

  “Nor did I.”

  Matthew closed his eyes. He felt slightly dizzy, and he wondered whether sleep would now overtake him, there and then, on the sofa. But the thought of sleep merely served to wake him up and he opened his eyes again to see the baby – whichever one it was, staring at him from his mother’s arms, as if trying to focus. It would be so easy, he thought, just to have one; you would hardly notice a single child, really, especially with the two of them available to share the work.r />
  “Elspeth,” he said, “is this how it’s going to be?”

  “How what’s going to be?”

  “Parenthood. Having triplets.”

  She looked away. “They warned us. Remember that talk we went to where that woman who had had triplets came and spoke. Remember how you said she looked fifty when she was only twenty-seven?”

  Matthew did remember. “Poor woman. She looked completely shattered.”

  They were both silent for a moment as they remembered the talk. Had they taken her warning seriously enough? Matthew thought they had not; at that point it had all seemed so theoretical, so removed from the state of pleasant anticipation in which Elspeth’s pregnancy had passed. Now everything seemed so different.

  He reached out to touch Elspeth’s arm. “I don’t want you to start looking fifty,” he said quietly. “Or not until you really are fifty.”

  Elspeth smiled at him. “Fifty. Can you imagine what it’s like to be fifty?”

  “I suspect that you feel exactly the same as you felt when you were … well, whatever age.”

  She thought about this. “My father told me that he always felt eighteen. Even when he was forty and beyond.”

  “I’ve heard that,” said Matthew. “I’ve heard that there are lots and lots of eighteen-year-olds around – some of them really quite old now.” He paused. “But I don’t think we should be talking about that; I think we should be talking about how we’re going to survive.”

  She nodded. “Yes. If every night is going to be like last night …”

  Matthew shook his head. It could not be, he said; nobody could cope with prolonged sleep-deprivation. “You die if you get really sleep-deprived. You just die.”