The Importance of Being Seven

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Nobody had ever said that to Bertie before. How about some chocolate? It was not a complex phrase, but its power, its sheer, overwhelming sense of gift and possibility filled Bertie with awe. Well might more of us say these words to others, and more frequently – how healing would that prove to be. ‘Look, we’ve had our differences, but how about some chocolate?’ Or: ‘I’m so sorry: how about some chocolate?’ Or simply: ‘Great to see you! How about some chocolate?’

  ‘Chocolate?’ said Bertie. ‘Chocolate, as well as crisps?’

  Stuart smiled. ‘Why not?’

  Bertie looked at the trays of chocolate bars laid out so temptingly; thus might the siren voices tempt the sailor; thus might Faust falter and conclude the bargain. He hesitated, and then made his choice – a bar of gold-wrapped Crunchie with peppermint-flavoured air holes.

  ‘And?’ said Stuart, looking down at his son’s choice, reading the label of the tempting confection. ‘Peppermint-flavoured air holes? An interesting concept.’

  Bertie looked up at his father. ‘And what, Daddy?’

  ‘You can’t just buy one,’ said Stuart. ‘Pick another two, Bertie. We’ve got a long day’s fishing ahead of us.’

  Bertie stared at the array of chocolate bars. Some of them he had heard of – discussed by the children at school. Olive, in particular, was an authority on the subject. ‘I’ve tasted them all,’ she announced, with an air that implicitly challenged anybody who might doubt her. ‘It’s a pity you’ve never tried them, Bertie.’

  ‘It’s not Bertie’s fault he’s not allowed chocolate,’ said Tofu. ‘It’s his mother. She’s a cow, isn’t she, Bertie?’

  Bertie said nothing; Olive glared at Tofu. ‘I doubt if you know what I’m talking about, Tofu,’ she said. ‘You get soya chocolate at home, I suppose. Soya chocolate! Hah!’

  Pansy, who had joined the discussion, laughed. ‘Poor Tofu,’ she said.

  Tofu fixed his gaze on Olive. ‘You stink,’ he said.

  It had not been an edifying discussion, and Bertie put it out of his mind as he reached out and picked two further chocolate bars, more or less at random. Then, following his father, he made his way to the cash desk.

  Once back in the car, he laid the chocolate and crisps out on his lap and stared at them. They were real. This was really happening. He was going fishing with his father, and the sun had burst out from behind a bank of cloud, now dispelled, filling the sky, touching all Scotland, and all its hills, it seemed, with gold.

  68. The Need for Evidence

  Matthew spent little more than an hour in the gallery that morning. It had not been easy: he had been completely taken aback by Pat’s disinclination to enter the door once she had glimpsed Kirsty through the window.

  ‘But you hardly know her,’ he protested. ‘You said so yourself.’

  Pat peered through the glass: she could just make out the figure of Kirsty in the back room. ‘She’s bad news, Matthew. She really is.’

  Matthew sighed. ‘You can’t just say things like that. What do you mean, “She’s bad news”?’

  ‘Just that,’ said Pat. ‘Some people are … bad news. One can’t necessarily say much more than that.’ As she spoke, she thought of Bruce. He was bad news; very bad news, really. But if you had to describe exactly why he was bad news, it would be difficult: somehow one would not get just the right flavour of the numerous ways in which Bruce failed the good news test. It was the same with Kirsty – and yet she was not sure how to explain all this to Matthew.

  ‘She has a reputation,’ she said.

  Matthew looked at her in astonishment. ‘But everybody has a reputation. A reputation can be quite neutral, or even good. You have to have evidence, anyway.’

  Pat looked away. Matthew was not making it any easier for her. What could she tell him? That Kirsty had been responsible for not just one young man abandoning his degree course, but two? That she was said to have been responsible for the most disastrous skiing trip in the history of the university ski society? That she had stolen the boyfriend of a girl in Pat’s year, and had dumped him after a mere three weeks? These were only some of the charges outstanding against Kirsty, but she wondered how she could provide the evidence that Matthew appeared to need.

  Pat had surrendered, and they had gone into the gallery, where Matthew had witnessed their meeting. Nothing had happened; they had been polite to one another, and indeed Kirsty had seemed quite pleased to see Pat. Then they had discussed a rota and how they would split the hours between them. That, too, had been quite amicable.

  ‘You see?’ whispered Matthew to Pat, when Kirsty went to fetch something from the back room. ‘What’s the problem? She’s fine – she really is.’

  ‘Just you wait,’ Pat whispered back. ‘I’m not making it up, Matthew. I’m not, you know.’

  Shortly before twelve, Matthew had left the gallery in the charge of the two girls. He was meeting Elspeth for lunch, he explained, and then he was going to Moray Place to see the surveyor whom they had commissioned to survey the new flat. ‘I probably won’t be back,’ he said. ‘So could one of you lock up at five?’

  Kirsty agreed to do this. ‘Pat and I will be fine,’ she said. ‘Won’t we, Pat?’

  Pat had nodded, but Matthew had noticed the look of reservation, a glance in his direction. He chose to ignore it. Women were odd about these things, he told himself. Half the time it’s unspoken jealousy – Kirsty was a rival; that must have been it. It was all reducible to competition between members of the same sex; competition for the scarce resource – men. That was what Matthew thought.

  He left the gallery and made his way to Glass and Thompson’s café at the intersection with Heriot Row. As he went down the couple of steps to the front door, he saw that Elspeth was already there, sitting at one of the tables opposite the service counter, reading a magazine. Matthew appeared at her table and put his hand over a page of the magazine. ‘Boo,’ he said.

  Elspeth smiled. ‘I was reading my horoscope.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ he said, sitting down. ‘Pure fiction.’

  She shrugged. ‘Plenty of people believe in them.’

  Matthew pointed out that people believed in all sorts of ridiculous things. ‘There are few limits to human gullibility,’ he said. ‘Flying saucers and so on. Angels. Horoscopes. It’s all wishful thinking.’

  ‘Angels?’ asked Elspeth. ‘You don’t believe in angels?’

  He was unsure as to whether she was joking. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I only believe in things I can see.’ He paused. ‘Has there ever been a confirmed sighting of an angel? Has anybody ever photographed one?’

  Elspeth thought about this. ‘So you only believe in things that you can photograph?’

  He hesitated. But it was true, he thought: we should only believe in that which we can either see for ourselves – with senses that we can trust because we experience them directly – or in things that can be proved to be perceptible to others. That was where photography came in. If something could be seen, then it could be photographed. And if there were no photographs, then that meant that either nobody had ever had a camera ready at the right time, or the thing in question did not exist. There were no photographs of angels. None.

  ‘Yes,’ said Matthew. ‘That’s what I believe. If something exists, then it should be possible to photograph it.’

  ‘Such as love,’ said Elspeth.

  Matthew frowned. ‘What’s love got to do with it?’

  ‘Does love exist?’

  Matthew laughed. ‘Of course it does. I love you, don’t I?’

  ‘But you can’t photograph it,’ said Elspeth simply. ‘You can’t, can you?’

  Matthew smiled. ‘That’s different. Love is an emotional state.’

  ‘Is it?’ asked Elspeth. ‘Is that all it is?’

  Matthew looked at the menu. ‘I wonder what their mozzarella is like?’ he asked. Then he pointed to the magazine. ‘What does your horoscope say, anyway?’

  Elspeth looked down at the pa
ge. She thought that she had won that little debate, but Matthew obviously did not want to pursue it. So she read from her horoscope. ‘The stars say …’ she began. ‘The stars say this: “You will receive advice from a well-intentioned person. Do not disregard it. You will also meet an old friend who needs your help and understanding. Do not turn him or her away.”’

  Matthew nodded in mock-seriousness. ‘Very wise,’ he said. ‘And what about me? Will I meet an angel, perhaps?’

  Elspeth ignored the jibe. ‘Your stars,’ she said, looking down the page. ‘Here you are. “You will be given a warning. The person who gives you this warning will have your interests at heart. Do not ignore what he has to say to you. Lucky colour: yellow. Lucky number: 3.141.”’

  ‘Pie?’ said Matthew, looking back at the menu.

  69. On Subsidence

  Matthew looked at his watch. ‘We have to hurry,’ he said. ‘The surveyor will be there in fifteen minutes.’

  Elspeth sighed. ‘Do I have to come too?’ she asked. She suddenly felt heavy, as happened quite frequently now. And she was hungry too, although she had just finished a plate of mozzarella and tomato salad, with no fewer than five small pieces of bread. Again this was something that seemed to happen rather regularly now – a meal would no sooner be finished than she would feel incipient pangs of hunger. It was the triplets, of course, and if they were demanding at this stage of the pregnancy, then she could imagine what they would be like when nine months was almost over. And after that? She had already experienced a disturbing dream in which she found herself in the kitchen surrounded by piles of cans of baby food – hundreds of them, some open and disgorging porridge-like substances. She had awoken hungrier than ever.

  Matthew reached forward and laid his hand on her forearm. ‘Of course not, my darling. You don’t have to bother about surveyors. I’ll go.’

  She smiled at him fondly. Dear, considerate Matthew. ‘But you will ask him about the kitchen, won’t you? Ask him about changing the position of the sink.’

  Matthew shook his head. ‘That’s not what surveyors do, my darling. That’s what architects are for. That chap I played squash with – Alex Philip – I’ll ask him. He’s an architect – and a pretty good one.’ He paused. ‘Surveyors look at terribly dull things. Rot. Subsidence. That sort of thing.’

  Elspeth looked concerned. ‘Subsidence?’

  It was a word to strike terror into any Edinburgh heart. The subsidence of parts of the New Town meant that building societies might be reluctant to advance money on certain streets, with the result that prices could be depressed.

  ‘There’s no subsidence in Moray Place,’ said Matthew calmly. ‘Moray Place is rock solid. It’s the east end of the New Town that has the problem.’

  ‘One of the lecturers at Moray House lived in Gayfield Square,’ said Elspeth. ‘He invited all his students round for a drinks party once. He showed us how if you put an orange on the floor at one end of his living room it would roll to the other end under its own steam.’

  Matthew nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I knew people who ended up living on one side of their flat because everything rolled in that direction. It was very strange – half of each room was very cluttered and half was very empty.’

  She looked at him; there were times when she was uncertain whether to take him seriously; times when he made absurd suggestions – flights of fancy – and would then wait for her to tumble to the conceit. He had once told her that in Japan precedence at road intersections was based on age, with older drivers giving way to younger ones, and she had for a few moments believed him. But now?

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No.’

  He looked disappointed. ‘It could happen,’ he said. ‘And such people would have heels of different heights on their shoes – so that they could walk about their flats without listing to one side. And then …’

  She interrupted him. ‘The surveyor.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ He rose from the table and leaned forward to kiss her on the cheek. ‘I’ll be back in an hour or so, maybe less. This is going to be a formality. He’ll whizz in and out – shine his torch round a bit, maybe – and that’ll be it.’

  He made his way along Heriot Row towards Moray Place. Arriving outside the flat – now with its Sold notice very satisfactorily displayed – he tried the front door, to discover that it was still locked; the surveyor was not there. The flat was not yet his, in the sense that he had not yet been granted what his solicitor had described as entry and actual occupation, and so he did not have the key – that would have been entrusted to the surveyor for the survey, to be returned afterwards to the selling agents.

  He looked up at the sky. When you owned property, you owned it from the ground all the way up to the sky – or so he assumed – which meant that he owned, or would soon own, that bit of sky directly above his new garden. This also meant that the clouds that crossed that little patch of land were, for a moment, his; as was the rain that fell on that same bit of ground. And if a bird should land on one of his shrubs, it was, for a few moments, his bird. He smiled. That, surely, was not true. We did not own these wild creatures – not really; nor did we own the land, whatever the law might say about that. Some lines of a poem came back to him, and he struggled to remember who had written them – Norman MacCaig? Yes, it was him, he thought. He had asked who owned a glen – the tycoon who possessed it, or he, who was possessed by it. Matthew knew the answer.

  He was lost in these thoughts when the surveyor arrived. He heard a vehicle drawing to a halt and the engine being turned off. He looked round.

  Bruce emerged from the car.

  ‘Oh …’ It took Matthew a moment to remember. Bruce was a surveyor – of course he was. And he specialised in domestic property – he had told him that once in the Cumberland Bar. But … Bruce, of all people, was hardly a figure to inspire confidence.

  ‘Hah!’ said Bruce. ‘Surprised you, didn’t I? When I got the call from the lawyers I recognised the name. I wondered if there could be two people of the same name in this town, but then I thought: only one with the readies to buy this sort of place! How are you doing?’

  ‘Not badly,’ said Matthew. ‘We’re moving from India Street and …’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Bruce, extracting a set of keys from his jacket pocket. ‘Let’s go and take a look. Bit gloomy, isn’t it? I can’t stand these big New Town places. Give me the creeps. Still, somebody likes living in them.’

  ‘It’s rather nice, actually,’ said Matthew. ‘And the garden …’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Bruce. ‘Cool.’

  The back of Matthew’s neck felt warm. It was none of Bruce’s business; he was here to look at structural issues, at rot and damp and matters of that sort. He was not here to make aesthetic judgements.

  ‘Let’s go in,’ said Bruce. ‘Let’s go in and see what’s wrong.’

  70. Supporting Walls

  They stood in the hall.

  ‘Dark,’ said Bruce. ‘I can’t stand these dark entrance halls. It’s like entering a cave, isn’t it?’

  Matthew said nothing. The hall was on the dark side, but no darker than many. And the flat was on the ground floor, which was always darker than the drawing-room floor and the floors above. What did Bruce expect? Mediterranean light?

  ‘Gloomeee!’ said Bruce, extracting his torch from his pocket. ‘I suppose it’ll be all right, though, if you carry a torch with you most of the time.’

  Before Matthew could utter any refutation, Bruce had moved across the hall and was poking about in the corridor. ‘You know, it’s not usual to have the client with you as you do your survey,’ he remarked. ‘It could influence you. You don’t want to see the place through the client’s eyes – you want to see it through your own.’

  ‘I could wait in the garden,’ said Matthew.

  Bruce reassured him. ‘No, don’t go. I quite like having somebody with me. You never know when the floor’s going to collap
se. Especially in buildings like this …’ He stamped lightly on the floorboards. ‘Only joking, of course. Ha ha et cetera. Did you hear about that surveyor who looked up the chimney of some house in Perthshire and got stuck? Terrible story. Nobody knew he was doing the survey and he could have died. But somebody came in and heard him and they got him out. Poor chap. Too fat, I suppose. I go to the gym. You go the gym, Matthew?’

  Matthew thought of his New Year resolution. ‘I try to. But you know how …’

  ‘Didn’t think that you were the gym-going type,’ continued Bruce. ‘No disrespect. It’s just that some people look like Mr Universe – others don’t. You know how it is?’

  Not having seen Bruce for some time, Matthew had forgotten what it was in the other man’s manner that was so objectionable; now he remembered. It was his utter self-confidence, his breezy insouciance, his tactlessness, his lack of attention to anything that anybody said to him. And there were probably other failings, too, that would reveal themselves as one got to know Bruce better.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Bruce. ‘Let’s take a look at this place. What did you pay for it, Matthew?’

  Matthew was about to tell him, but Bruce was not listening.

  ‘I notice that you didn’t ask for a valuation,’ Bruce went on. ‘So I won’t give you anything in writing. But I can give you a verbal valuation if you like. It won’t cost you anything extra. You want it?’

  Matthew was uncertain. Bruce, however, continued. ‘In its current condition – which is not brilliant, I’d say – about seven hundred thousand tops. Maybe a tiny bit more in a good market. What did you pay, Matthew? Six fifty?’

  Matthew said nothing. Bruce looked at him, waiting for an answer that did not come.

  ‘You didn’t pay eight, did you?’

  Matthew turned away. ‘It’s private,’ he said.