The Importance of Being Seven

by Alexander McCall Smith

  That pattern, of course, had been repeated thousands and thousands of times during the twentieth century, when Scotland was bled of its people, as it had been bled before, when the Highlands had been cleared. The doctor had been fortunate; he came from a background that was economically secure; for most, the experience was a far chancier one: discarded by an industrial system that had prospered on their labour, they went with very little, scarred in body and soul by the hardships of the factories and foundries of Motherwell, of Glasgow, of the Clyde. He met these men on the boat, as they made the long journey south; men who felt privileged because they were heading for a place that people described as the lucky country after their own had treated them so badly.

  Again, pure chance intervened. The ship’s doctor, who sat at the same table in the dining room, said to him: ‘You don’t have to take the job they’ve offered you, you know. I can fix you up with something far better up in Queensland. That’s the place to go.’

  He should have said that he would think about it, but he did not. It was hot, and the journey seemed interminable. He accepted the offer, largely because he wanted to do something – anything – to break the tedium of the voyage. By this decision, taken so lightly, he dictated the course of his life, the life of his son, and that of his grandson. It was this decision that meant eventually that it was a Dr St Clair, rather than anybody else, who became Bertie’s psychotherapist, and therefore came into fateful contact with Bertie’s mother, Irene.

  43. A Scotsman, His Life and Marriage

  Dr St Clair’s practice in Brisbane flourished. People felt reassured by the quietly spoken Scottish doctor, with his habit of nodding sympathetically as people described their symptoms. He prospered and although he never forgot that he was a Scot, he never returned to Scotland. There were plans to do so, of course, particularly after his marriage; his new wife, who had never been out of Australia, liked to hear him talk about Dumfries and about Edinburgh, too, which he told her was more beautiful than Venice and Paris put together. ‘I’ll show you,’ he said. ‘We’ll walk through Princes Street Gardens together and have coffee in the Brown Derby. And we’ll go shopping in Forsyth’s, and Jenners too, and motor out to Gleneagles. And, oh, you’ll love it, my dear, and you’ll bless the day that you agreed to marry a Scotsman, for all his faults …’

  ‘Which are none to speak of,’ she said. ‘Or none that I notice, darling.’

  He got as far as arranging long leave from his practice, and enquiring with a shipping agent for a passage home, but the war intervened. Doctors were needed, and the two partners with whom he ran the practice had seven children between them. ‘It’s me,’ he said to his wife. ‘I’ll have to go.’

  Her father had been at Gallipoli, and had told her about it on one of the rare occasions when he spoke of the subject. At the end of his narrative, which was interrupted at several points by sobbing, he took her hand. ‘Never again,’ he said. ‘Never. Never. Whatever happens elsewhere, Australia must never get caught up in all that.’

  So when her husband said that he felt that he should volunteer, she begged him not to. ‘There are other doctors,’ she said. ‘Plenty of them.’

  ‘There aren’t,’ he said.

  ‘Well, just wait a while. See what happens.’

  ‘I can’t. I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror if I didn’t go.’

  She was silent. I’m going to lose him, she thought.

  He was posted to Malaya as the Medical Officer of an Australian infantry unit. He was used to the heat of Brisbane, but his overwhelming impression was of unrelenting humidity and unrelieved boredom. The men were healthy, and apart from treating malaria and the occasional surgical emergency in which he assisted the other medical officer in his unit, a surgeon, he did not have much to do. The surgeon was an Irishman who had settled in Darwin. He was good company and had a fund of improbable stories, but he drank. On many occasions he was barely sober enough to stand in the operating theatre and Dr St Clair was obliged to take over, receiving more or less intelligible instructions from the surgeon swaying behind him. ‘There’s a thing in the middle there,’ the surgeon said. ‘The name escapes me at the moment, so it does, but I wouldn’t cut that bit if I were you. Frightful amount of blood swirling around down there. So just take out that wee thingy over there and Bob’s your uncle. My God, I wish I could remember my anatomy a bit better. We had a wonderful chap in Dublin who taught us everything we knew about the subject. Great fellow, so he was. Professor Mac something or other. Bit of a Scotsman, like yourself. Had a moustache and a glass eye. Or a glass moustache, was it? Anyway, we put a leg in his car one day just to give him a wee fright and he took not a blind bit of notice. Pretended not to care, or so we thought, until one of the fellows pointed out that the leg was on the passenger seat and since that was the side that he had his glass eye he probably didn’t see it! We had to bring it back to the dissecting room. Terrifically amusing business. Those were the days, so they were. Whole world’s different nowadays. Lots of old women running the show. Careful! Not there – a bit further down, near the what’s it called? That’s better. Cut that bit off. I wish I had my glasses.’

  At least the boredom ended when the Japanese invaded. Pushed south into Singapore, he was kept busy dealing with the flood of casualties from the fighting on the peninsula. And then suddenly it was over. He had been billeted in a bungalow belonging to a harbour official and had been catching up on sleep after a twenty-hour stint of duty when his host told him it was all over. ‘There are a few boats getting out,’ he said. ‘I can get you on one of them if you hurry.’

  ‘I have to get back to the casualty station.’

  ‘It’s in enemy hands. You can’t. You’ve got five minutes.’

  He had gone, and found himself on a sampan with an Australian general and a handful of staff officers. The general, who had handed over his command before leaving his men to their captors, sat on the deck of the boat and looked moodily towards the shore. He watched him. What should a general do in such circumstances, he wondered. Should he stay and join his men as a prisoner of war, or should he escape, if he can, and live to fight another day? He wanted to speak to the general, but he seemed sunk in his thoughts, and he left him to himself.

  Later, when the party split up, Dr St Clair fell into Japanese hands and was taken to Changi. He resumed his role as a medical officer, coping with what primitive supplies they had, surviving forced marches and the horrors of the labour camps. He became more of a nurse than a doctor, tending to men dying of dysentery and starvation, making representations when he could to the guards. He learned about cruelty; about the ease with which one person may kill another, by a nod of the head, by a tiny movement of the lips; he learned about all the workings of inhumanity. And then, as suddenly as he had been captured, he found himself free. He wondered how the Japanese would respond to defeat: would they fall upon those very swords they had used to decapitate their prisoners? He looked into the face of his erstwhile captors, and saw nothing. They were like puppets, he thought; puppets whose strings had been cut from above.

  He returned to Brisbane. None of his clothes would fit him now. You sent a man off to war, he thought, and you got a skeleton back.

  She said, ‘Let’s not talk about it. Let’s forget that all this happened.’

  He looked at her. He could not speak, even had he wanted to. He wept. She held him, remembering how her father had wept over Gallipoli.

  She became pregnant and they had a son. This was Dr St Clair’s father.

  44. A Move to Moray Place

  ‘We can’t stay here,’ Matthew announced. ‘I like India Street – it’s one of the nicest streets in the New Town – but how can we stay here? How?’

  Elspeth cast an eye down on her stomach, now rather larger, she imagined, than it would otherwise have been. The thought of three babies within her – three! – made her feel slightly light-headed. I’m going to be vast, she thought; really vast. I’ll require scaffolding. ‘I d
on’t see what you mean. What’s wrong with India Street?’

  Matthew shook his head. ‘It’s not India Street itself,’ he said. ‘In fact it’s nothing to do with India Street. It’s to do with us – all six, no, five of us. You can’t have three children in this flat – you just can’t.’

  Elspeth looked around. ‘But it’s a really large flat,’ she said. ‘Lots of people – virtually everyone – make do with much less space. We’re lucky.’

  ‘Of course we’re lucky. I know that. But how are you going to get three babies up the stair? Impossible.’

  Elspeth thought about this. ‘No …’

  ‘Well, there you are,’ said Matthew. ‘We’re going to have to move.’

  She saw that he was right. But where could they move? Was Matthew planning a move into suburbia – to the braes of Corstorphine, to the glades of Colinton, to the Braids? This was all territory with which she was unfamiliar, her idea of it being long avenues of well-set bungalows with neat little gardens behind carefully manicured hedges. Such places were undoubtedly comfortable, but she wondered whether anything happened there. Matthew, she thought, might be unhappy in such circumstances; he was more urban than suburban, and it was difficult to imagine him wheeling the triple pushchair off to Blackford Pond to visit the ducks. And yet, that’s what people did; they went off into the suburbs and were never seen again.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I suppose we’re going to have to get somewhere more suitable. But where? Corstorphine?’

  Matthew shook his head. ‘No, I don’t think so. Corstorphine is fine for …’ He paused, uncertain how to complete the sentence. What was Corstorphine fine for? He was not sure. It was not far from the zoo, of course, and he had heard that at night one might hear the lions roaring. He was not sure how he would react to that. It might make one think one was in the Serengeti, or it might make one reflect on the whole question of keeping such great, proud beasts in northern captivity.

  ‘So, where then?’

  Matthew looked up at the ceiling. ‘Well, what do we need? Somewhere on the ground floor. Somewhere with a garden where we can play with the baby … babies. Somewhere within reach of the gallery so I don’t have to sit in a bus all morning. Somewhere … comfortable.’

  Elspeth thought for a moment. She had seen a large For Sale notice recently and remembered thinking that the place that it was advertising might be rather attractive. But where was it? It took a few moments to recall, but then it came to her and she smiled with pleasure at the recollection.

  ‘Just round the corner,’ she said.

  ‘Ann Street?’ Matthew asked.

  ‘No, not Ann Street. They have a committee, you know, to decide whether you can live there.’

  Matthew shook his head. ‘I don’t think that’s true. I know people who live in Ann Street, and they’re not like that. They’re very welcoming – within reason, of course.’ He paused. ‘They do have a list, though, of people who should not be allowed to live there. It’s quite a long list, actually. Apparently there are seventeen names on it.’

  ‘I’d love to know who’s on it,’ said Elspeth, smiling.

  ‘Wouldn’t we all,’ agreed Matthew. ‘I’ve heard about one or two people who are said to be on it. I thought it was a bit unfair. I knew one of them, by the way.’

  ‘Oh? Who?’

  Matthew told her, and then gave her the details. Elspeth listened with an increasingly incredulous expression. ‘Really?’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, you can see their point of view,’ she said.

  ‘But anyway, Ann Street is not on my list. So we need to look elsewhere.’

  Suddenly she remembered. ‘Moray Place!’ she exclaimed. ‘That was where it was.’

  ‘Where what was?’

  ‘The For Sale sign that I saw. I was trying to remember where it was. It was Moray Place – on the northern side – you know, the bit that looks down over the Water of Leith and those gardens. That side.’

  Matthew looked doubtful. ‘That’s not going far. In fact, it’s just round the corner. I thought that we might make a slightly bigger move than that.’

  ‘But why move far away just for the sake of it? We’re not trying to get away from anything, are we?’

  Matthew shook his head. ‘Of course not. I just imagined that a move would take us a little further afield than that.’

  ‘You could still walk to work,’ Elspeth pointed out. ‘And there are those wonderful gardens.’

  ‘True … true. But then there are …’

  Elspeth looked at him quizzically. ‘You mean the nudists?’

  ‘Yes. You do know, don’t you, that half the committee of the Scottish Federation of Nudists lives there? Or so I’m told.’

  Elspeth nodded. It was an open secret, although one would not have thought that of one of the very grandest addresses in Edinburgh. And yet one could see the attraction of Moray Place, with its gardens that were well protected from snell winds from the north.

  ‘I don’t think it really matters,’ she said. ‘Nudists are generally fine. I had an aunt who was a nudist. Nobody talked about it, of course – they just said that Aunt Dot was off on one of her little holidays again. As children we had no idea – and couldn’t understand why we were never shown her holiday photos. “Not quite suitable for those of tender years,” she said.’

  Of course, that answer merely served to whet the appetite, and she and her brother had, while staying with their aunt, crept into the room where she kept her photograph albums and taken the relevant volume off the shelf.

  ‘No!’ exclaimed her brother, as they opened the album. ‘Look at that!’

  Elspeth glanced at the photographs. ‘That’s the airline’s fault,’ she said knowingly. ‘They must have lost their suitcases for them, with all their clothes. It happens all the time, especially with …’ And here, with all the innocence – and perspicacity – of youth, she named an airline.

  45. In Moray Place

  The decision to move, like many such decisions of great personal importance, was made quickly. Within ten minutes of Matthew’s mentioning the unsuitability of India Street for triplets – or of top flats in India Street for that purpose – he and Elspeth found themselves firmly committed to what in Scotland is called a flit. Scots words are usually very descriptive and apt for their purpose – dreich describes moist, foggy days perfectly; to be trauchled is to be exactly as the verb suggests; and fantoosh is virtually onomatopoeic in its capture of flashiness – but flit is surely misleading. Few people flit in the carefree way that the word implies; most flits are traumatic, trauchling experiences that test the psychological and material resources of the flitters. So even if the decision to flit was quickly and painlessly taken by Matthew and Elspeth, the actual flit would surely be much more demanding.

  The proximity of Moray Place, though, made the first stages of the process simplicity itself. On the very day on which Matthew raised the subject, he and Elspeth made an appointment with McKay Norwell, the selling solicitors, to view the flat in question. ‘It’s a very attractive flat,’ the solicitor said over the telephone. ‘We have several notes of interest.’

  Matthew’s heart sank at this news. The system of blind-bidding for property in Scotland was attractive to a seller, who might hope that what was effectively a process of auction would drive the price up, but was a nightmare for the purchaser, who would never know how much to bid. It all depended on how badly somebody wanted the property: a flat in a popular part of town might have ten people chasing after it – possibly even more – and those with the deepest pockets would have the best chance of getting it. Matthew had heard of a flat that had been on the market for offers over four hundred thousand pounds going for five hundred thousand. And then there were the heart-breaking stories of people who had missed a house they yearned to possess by ten pounds. Of course there was always somebody who was happy with the outcome, and the couple who bid ten pounds more might have loved it ten pounds mo
re, but there were usually those who were bitterly disappointed.

  ‘We mustn’t raise our hopes,’ Matthew warned, as he and Elspeth made their way to the appointment to view. ‘There’ll be other people looking at it. We may not get it, you know.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Elspeth.

  ‘And we may not want it anyway,’ said Matthew. ‘It may be awful.’

  Again Elspeth said, ‘Of course.’ But she was already mentally moving into the flat, wondering whether the curtains from India Street would fit the windows at Moray Place.

  They arrived outside the building. The front door, painted black and with a brass numeral attached above the letterbox, gave directly on to the pavement.

  ‘You’d only have to get the pushchairs up over these two steps,’ said Matthew. ‘That won’t be hard.’

  Elspeth nodded. She was looking at the high, elegant windows on either side of the front door. They would definitely need new curtains.

  Matthew rang the bell and the door was answered by the solicitor’s assistant, a young woman, who led them into the hall. There was a brochure, setting out the floor plan and the details of each room. ‘Here are the particulars,’ said the young woman, handing them folders. ‘Please wander around – and let me know if there’s anything that needs explaining.’

  The young woman went off to read a magazine in the kitchen, while Matthew and Elspeth made their way along the corridor that led to the garden end of the flat.

  ‘Particulars,’ whispered Matthew. ‘It’s a great word, isn’t it? Such a lovely old-fashioned ring to it. Just right for solicitors. Like the word corporation. Please send me particulars of your corpor ation.’

  ‘Corporation?’

  ‘Tummy,’ explained Matthew. ‘If somebody has a large stomach, it’s called a corporation in polite conversation. In Edinburgh. As in “He has a substantial corporation.” ’