The World According to Bertie 4ss-4

by Alexander McCall Smith

  perfect.

  And now here was this advocate, in his strippit breeks, with his sharp, legal face that would not have been out of place in an eighteenth-century engraving, a John Kay miniature – though Kay preferred his subjects wirlie, and this man would take a good twenty years to become truly wirlie.

  “This is a very sad affair,” said the advocate, looking down 82

  The Advocate Takes a Look at the Case of Cyril at the file of papers before him. “Your agent here tells me that you’re very fond of your dog, Mr Lordie.”

  Angus looked at his lawyer, who smiled at him, a smile of sympathy, of regret.

  “Yes, I am,” he said. “I am. And I simply can’t believe that I find myself . . . that my dog finds himself in this position.”

  The advocate sighed. “I suppose that even the best-behaved of dogs have their . . . their – how should one put it? – atavistic moments.”

  Angus stared at the lawyer, noticing the slight touch of redness that was beginning to colour the side of the aquiline nose. That was the effect of claret, he thought, an occupational hazard for Edinburgh lawyers. The observation distracted him for a moment, but he soon remembered where he was and what the advocate had just said. Cyril was not atavistic; he had not bitten anybody. But the advocate had implied that he was guilty – on what grounds? The mere assumption that any dog was capable of biting?

  “That might apply to other dogs,” he said. “But it certainly does not apply to mine. My dog is innocent.”

  Silence descended on the room. In the background, a large wall clock could be heard ticking.

  “How can you be so sure?” asked the advocate.

  “Because I know him well,” said Angus. “One knows one’s dog. He is not a biter.”

  The advocate looked down at his papers. “I see here that your dog has a gold tooth,” he said. “May I ask: how did that come about? How did he lose the original tooth?”

  “He bit another . . .” Angus stopped. The two lawyers were looking at him.

  “Please go on,” said the advocate. “He bit another . . . person?”

  “He bit another dog,” said Angus hotly. “And the fight in question was certainly not his fault.”

  “Yet he did bite, didn’t he?” pressed the advocate. “You see, Mr Lordie, the situation looks a bit bleak. Your dog has bitten . . .”

  The Advocate Takes a Look at the Case of Cyril 83

  Angus did not allow him to continue. “Excuse me,” he said.

  “Perhaps I misunderstand the situation. I assumed that we had engaged you to help us establish Cyril’s innocence. Aren’t you meant to believe in that? Aren’t you meant to argue that?”

  The advocate sighed. “There is a difference between what I believe, Mr Lordie,” he said, “and what I know to be the case.

  I can believe a large number of things which have yet to be established, either to my satisfaction or to the satisfaction of others.”

  Angus felt his neck getting warm. There was some truth in the expression getting hot under the collar; he was. “What if you know that somebody you’re defending is guilty?” he began.

  “Can you defend him?”

  The advocate looked unperturbed by the question. “It all depends on how I know that,” he answered. “If I know that he’s guilty because he’s suddenly told me so in a consultation and because he wants me to put him in the box so that he can lie to the court – as sometimes happens – then I must ask him to get somebody else to defend him. I cannot stand up in court and let him lie. But if I just think he’s guilty, then it’s a different matter. He’s entitled to have his story put before the court, whatever my personal suspicions may be.”

  Angus frowned. “But Cyril can’t talk,” he said. “He’s a dog.”

  Again there was silence. Then the advocate spoke. “That is something that we can all agree we know to be the case.”

  “And since he can’t give any story at all – because of his . . .”

  “His canine condition,” supplied the advocate.

  Angus nodded. “Yes, because of his canine condition, then surely we must give him the benefit of the doubt.”

  “Of course we must,” the advocate conceded. He gestured at the papers in front of him. “Except for the fact that there is rather a lot of evidence against him. This is why I believe we might be better to accept that he did it – that he bit these unfortunate people – and concentrate on how we can ensure that the outcome for him is the best one. In other words, we should think about making recommendations as to his supervision that

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  Bertie Plucks Up Courage and Asks the Big Question the sheriff will see as reasonable. And it will be a sheriff court matter.”

  “Evidence?” Angus asked nervously.

  “Yes,” said the advocate. “Your solicitor has obtained various statements, Mr Lordie, and it seems that there are three people who say that they recognised your dog as the biter. They each say that they knew it was your dog because they had seen him with you in . . .” He looked down at a piece of paper. “In the Cumberland Bar. Drinking, I might add.” He paused, and looked searchingly at Angus. “Do you think your dog might have been drunk when he bit these people, Mr Lordie?”

  Angus did not reply. He was looking up at the ceiling. Cyril is going to be put down, he thought. This is the end.

  26. Bertie Plucks Up Courage and Asks the Big Question

  On several occasions, Bertie had asked his mother whether he might stop psychotherapy, but the answer had always been the same – he could not.

  “I don’t need to see Dr Fairbairn,” he said to Irene. “You could still see him, though, Mummy. You could go up there and I could sit in the waiting room and read Scottish Field. You know Bertie Plucks Up Courage and Asks the Big Question 85

  that magazine. I could even look after Ulysses while you went in to see Dr Fairbairn. Ulysses could look at Scottish Field with me.”

  Irene laughed. “Dear Bertie,” she said. “Why should I want to see Dr Fairbairn? It’s you who are his patient, not Mummy.”

  “But you like him, don’t you?” said Bertie. “You like him a lot, Mummy. I know you do.”

  Irene laughed again – slightly more nervously this time. “Well, it’s true that I don’t mind Dr Fairbairn. I certainly don’t dislike him. Mummy doesn’t dislike many people, Bertie. Mummy is what we call tolerant.”

  Bertie thought about this for a moment. It seemed to him that much of what his mother said was simply not true. And yet she was always telling him that it was wrong to tell fibs – which of course he never did. She was the one who was fibbing now, he thought. “But there are lots of people you don’t like, Mummy,”

  he protested. “There’s that lady at the advanced kindergarten, Mrs Macfadzean. You didn’t like her.”

  “Miss Macfadzean,” Irene corrected. “She was Miss Macfadzean because no man in his right mind would ever have married her, poor woman.”

  “But you didn’t like her, did you, Mummy?” Bertie asked again.

  “It was not a question of disliking her, Bertie,” said Irene. “It was more a question of feeling sorry for her. Those are two different things, you know. Mummy felt pity for Miss Macfadzean because of her limited vision. That’s all. And her conservative outlook. But that’s quite different from disliking her. Quite different.”

  Bertie thought about this. It had seemed very much like dislike to him, but then adults, he noticed, had a way of making subtle distinctions in the meaning of words. But even if his mother claimed not to have disliked Miss Macfadzean, then there were still other people whom he was sure she did not like at all. One of these was Tofu, Bertie’s friend – of sorts – from school.

  “What about Tofu?” he asked. “You don’t like him, Mummy.

  You hate him, don’t you?”

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  Bertie Plucks Up Courage and Asks the Big Question Irene gasped. “But Bertie, you mustn’t ever say things like that! Mummy certainly does not hate Tofu. Mum
my just thinks . . .” She trailed off.

  “Thinks what, Mummy?” Bertie asked.

  “I think that Tofu is just a little bit aggressive,” Irene said. “I don’t want you to grow up being aggressive, Bertie. I want you to grow up to be the sort of person who is aware of the feelings of others. The sort of boy who knows about the pain of other people. I want you to be simpatico, Bertie. That’s what I want.”

  Bertie looked thoughtful. “And you don’t like Hiawatha,” he said. “That other boy in my class. You said you didn’t like him.

  You told me so yourself, Mummy.”

  Irene glanced away. “Bertie,” she said, “you really mustn’t put words into my mouth. I did not say that I disliked Hiawatha.

  All I said was that I didn’t like the way Hiawatha . . . well, not to beat about the bush, I didn’t like the way that Hiawatha smelled. He really is a rather unsavoury little boy.”

  “But if you don’t like somebody’s smell,” said Bertie, “doesn’t that mean that you don’t like them?”

  “Not at all,” countered Irene. “You can dislike the way a person smells without disliking them, in their essence.” She paused. “And anyway, Bertie, I really don’t think that this conversation is getting us anywhere. We were really meant to be talking about Dr Fairbairn. I was giving you an answer to the question that you asked about stopping your psychotherapy. And the answer, Bertie, is that you must keep up with it until Dr Fairbairn tells us that there’s no longer any need for you to see him. He has not done that yet.”

  Bertie looked down at his shoes, thinking of how the answer was always no. Well, if his mother wanted to talk about Dr Fairbairn, then there was something that had been preying on his mind.

  “Mummy,” he began. “Don’t you think that Ulysses looks a lot like Dr Fairbairn? Haven’t you noticed?”

  Irene was quite still. “Oh?” she said. “What do you mean by that, Bertie?”

  Bertie Plucks Up Courage and Asks the Big Question 87

  “I mean that Ulysses has the same sort of face as Dr Fairbairn.

  You know how they both look. This bit here . . .” He gestured to his forehead.

  Irene laughed. “But everybody has a forehead, Bertie! And I suspect if you compared Ulysses’s forehead with lots of other people’s, then you would reach the same conclusion.”

  “And his ears,” went on Bertie. “Dr Fairbairn’s ears go like that – and so do Ulysses’s.”

  “Nonsense,” said Irene abruptly.

  “Do you think that Dr Fairbairn could be Ulysses’s daddy?”

  asked Bertie.

  He waited for his mother to respond. It had just occurred to Bertie that if Ulysses were to be Dr Fairbairn’s son, then that could mean that he would go and live with him, and Bertie would no longer have the inconvenience of having a smaller brother in the house. He was not sure how Ulysses could be the psychotherapist’s son, but it was, he assumed, possible. Bertie had only the haziest idea of how babies came about, but he did know that it was something to do with adults having a conversation with one another. His mother and Dr Fairbairn had certainly talked to one another enough – enough to result in a baby, Bertie thought.

  Irene was looking at her fingernails. “Bertie,” she said. “There are some questions we never ask, and that is one of them. You never ask if somebody is a baby’s real daddy! That’s very rude indeed! It’s the person whom the baby calls Daddy who is the daddy. We just have to accept that, even if sometimes we wonder whether it’s not true. And of course it’s not true in this case –

  I mean, it’s not true that there’s another daddy. Daddy is Ulysses’s daddy. And that’s that.”

  Bertie listened attentively. He wondered if there was a chance that Irene was not his real mother, and he would have loved to have asked about that, but this was not the right time, Bertie sensed.

  27. It’s Never Rude to Say Things to a Doctor Now, sitting in Dr Fairbairn’s waiting room, Bertie paged though an old issue of Scottish Field. His mother was closeted in the consulting room with the psychotherapist, and Bertie knew that they were discussing him, as they always did at the beginning of one of his sessions. He did not like this, but he knew that there was nothing he could do about it. It was hard enough to tackle his mother by herself; when she teamed up with Dr Fairbairn, it seemed to Bertie that he was up against impossible odds.

  Bertie liked reading Scottish Field, and his regular encounters with the magazine helped to make the visits to Dr Fairbairn at least bearable. He wondered if it would be possible to take the magazine in with him to read during the psychotherapy session itself, as it seemed to him that Dr Fairbairn was quite content to do all the talking and it would make no difference if he was reading at the time. But he decided that this request would have little hope of being met; adults were so difficult over things like that.

  He turned to the back of the magazine. After looking at the advertisements for fishing jackets and Aga cookers, which he liked, he turned to the social pages, which were his particular favourite. There were photographs there of people all over Scotland going to parties and events, and in every photograph everybody seemed to be smiling. Bertie had not been to many children’s parties, but at those to which he had been there had always been one or two people who burst into tears over something or other. It seemed that this did not happen at grown-ups’ parties, where there was just all this smiling. Bertie thought that this might have something to do with the fact that many of the people in the photographs were holding glasses of wine and were therefore probably drunk. If you were drunk, he had heard, you smiled and laughed.

  He examined the photographs of a party which had been held at a very couthie place called Ramsay Garden. Somebody who It’s Never Rude to Say Things to a Doctor 89

  lived there, it said, was giving drinks to his friends, who were all standing around laughing. That’s nice, thought Bertie. One or two of the friends looked a bit drunk, in Bertie’s view, but at least they were still standing, which was also nice. And there was a photograph of a man playing the kind-looking host’s piano.

  His hands were raised over the keyboard and he was smiling at the camera, which Bertie thought was very clever, as it was hard to get your fingers on the right notes if you were not looking.

  Underneath the photograph there was a line which said: Eric von Ibler accompanies the singing, while David Todd turns the pages.

  Bertie wondered what the guests had been singing. He had once walked with his father past a pub where everybody was singing

  “Cod Liver Oil and the Orange Juice,” which was a very strange song, thought Bertie. Was that what they were singing at the Ramsay Garden party? he wondered. Perhaps.

  Bertie sighed and turned the page. There was a lot of fun being had in Scotland, mostly by grown-ups, and he wondered if he would ever be able to join in. He looked at the new spread of photographs and his eye was caught by some familiar faces.

  Yes, there was Mr Roddy Martine whom Bertie had seen in a previous copy of the magazine months ago. Mr Martine was very lucky, thought Bertie. All these invitations! And this was a party to launch his book about Rosslyn Chapel, and there was a photograph of Mr Charlie Maclean, balancing a glass of whisky on his nose. Mr Charlie Maclean entertains the guests, the caption read, while Mr Bryan Johnston and Mr Humphrey Holmes look on.

  That was very clever, thought Bertie. They must have had such fun at that party.

  “Bertie?”

  He looked up from Scottish Field and all the colour, all the warmth of the world of those pages seemed to drain away. Now he was back in monochrome. Dr Fairbairn.

  Irene came from behind Dr Fairbairn and took a seat in the waiting room. Ulysses was strapped to her front in his tartan sling. She glanced with disapproval at Scottish Field and picked up, instead, a copy of The Economist.

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  It’s Never Rude to Say Things to a Doctor

  “Dr Fairbairn’s ready to see you now, Bertie,” she said. “Just half an hour today.”


  Bertie went into the consulting room and sat in his usual seat.

  Outside, he could see the tops of the trees in Queen Street Gardens. They were moving in the breeze. It would be a good place to fly a kite, he thought, if he had one, which he did not.

  “Now, Bertie,” said Dr Fairbairn. “You’ve had a very big change in your life, haven’t you? Your younger brother. Wee Ulysses. That’s a big change.”

  “Yes,” said Bertie. Ulysses had brought many changes, especially a lot of mess and noise.

  “Having a new brother or sister is a major event in our lives, Bertie,” said Dr Fairbairn. “And we must express our feelings about it.”

  Bertie said nothing. He was staring at Dr Fairbairn’s forehead. Just above his eyebrows, on either side, there was a sort of bump, or ridge. And it was just like the bump he had seen on Ulysses’s brow, whatever his mother said. Other people did not have that, Bertie was sure of that – just Dr Fairbairn and Ulysses.

  “Yes,” Dr Fairbairn went on. “Perhaps you would like to tell me what you’re thinking about Ulysses. Then we can look at these feelings. We can talk about them. We can get them out in the open.”