The World According to Bertie 4ss-4

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “The best sort of friend,” said Bruce. “As long as they don’t change. Sometimes you find these people you knew a while ago have become all gross and domestic.”

  Julia caught her breath. Did he think that grossness and domesticity went together? “Well, she is married,” she ventured.

  “But it hasn’t really changed her. She’s even happier than she used to be, in fact.”

  “Chacun à son goût,” remarked Bruce. Then he added: “Glad to hear it.”

  Julia looked at her fingernails. “She told me she’s pregnant.”

  “That happens,” said Bruce. He was not interested in this sort of thing, women’s gossip, he thought.

  Julia persevered. “You couldn’t tell yet, of course. But, anyway, she’s really pleased about that. She and her husband have been hoping for this to happen.”

  “They may as well get some sleep now – while they can,”

  said Bruce, reaching for his glass of sparkling water. “They won’t get any for the next ten years.”

  “But sleep isn’t everything, Brucie!” Julia teased. “And lots of babies sleep quite well, you know. They can be fun.”

  There was a silence. On the television set, in some unspecified distant place, a man kicked a ball into a goal. There was cheering and despair. Bruce raised a finger and shook it at the 250 Julia Decides to Test the Temperature set. “There you are,” he said. “That’s what comes from having a cripple for a goalkeeper.”

  “Some babies you hardly even notice,” Julia went on.

  “These people are seriously useless,” said Bruce. “Did you see that? They’ve just let the other side score a goal and now they’re risking having somebody sent off. Incredible. Just incredible.”

  He rose to his feet and walked across to switch off the television set. “I can’t bear anymore,” he said. “I’m going to go and have a bath. Should we go out for dinner tonight? You choose.”

  Julia nodded vaguely, but her mind was elsewhere. This was not going to be easy, she thought. She watched Bruce as he left the kitchen, and she realised that, quite apart from anything else, quite apart from the baby – their baby! – she had to secure this man, this gorgeous, gorgeous man, as she thought of him.

  This Adonis – what exactly did that word mean? – this rock star – this husband!

  Bruce went into the bathroom and slipped out of the moccasins he was wearing. He loved the bathroom floor, which was made of limestone, and had a cool, rough feel on the soles of the feet.

  And he liked the decor too, the stone-lined shower cubicle – even if the shower itself required special handling – the double basins with their designer bases, the entire glass shelf which Julia had cleared for the hair gels and shampoo she had seen him unpacking in his room. It was a bathroom for living in, Bruce had decided.

  One could move one’s stuff in here and just live in it.

  He bent over and started the bath running. There was a cube of bath salts on the edge of the bath, left there by Julia, and he picked this up and smelled it. Lily of the Valley. Well, not what he would exactly have chosen – he preferred sandalwood – but he liked the feel of these things and the way they made the water milky white. So he unwrapped it and broke it into the rapidly filling bath. Then he turned round and his eye caught the small leaflet which was lying on the floor at the end of the bath. He reached forward and picked it up. He became quite still.

  A Prayer from a Painter in Utter Despair 251

  For a few moments after he had finished reading the leaflet that came with Julia’s pregnancy testing kit, Bruce did nothing.

  Then, quite slowly, he pivoted round and turned off the running water. Now there was silence in the bathroom.

  Bruce looked at the leaflet again. She told me, he thought.

  I asked her and she told me. I very specifically, very considerately, asked her, and she reassured me. And now . . . What if the result had been positive? What if he was already responsible for

  . . . He suddenly remembered the conversation they had had in the kitchen. He had dismissed it, thought nothing of it. Women always talked about babies, but now he realised that there was a very good reason for Julia having raised the subject.

  He looked at the bathwater. He would get in and do some serious thinking in the bath, thinking about his future, thinking about escape routes.

  75. A Prayer from a Painter in Utter Despair Angus Lordie had painted very little since the fateful day of Cyril’s arrest. He had been finishing a portrait which had been commissioned by the board of a whisky company; the sittings were done, and he was now working from photographs, but his heart was not in it. It seemed to him that although Cyril was no longer lying at his feet, as he normally did, he was somehow insinuating himself into the very painting, somewhere in the background, a canine presence, a shadow. No, it was hopeless: a painter could not work when his muse lay somewhere in a cold pound, awaiting trial for something that he did not do.

  On that morning, although Angus knew that he would have to force himself into his studio, he sat unhappily at his breakfast table, toying with his food; even a Pittenweem kipper seemed unap-petising while he was in this frame of mind. Food was a problem.

  The previous evening, to tempt himself to eat, he had treated himself to several thick slices of the smoked salmon sent down to 252 A Prayer from a Painter in Utter Despair him from Argyll by his friend Archie Graham. Archie’s salmon, which he steeped in rum and then smoked himself, was, in Angus Lordie’s opinion, the finest smoked salmon in Scotland, but he had found that in his current mood he had little appetite even for that. Indeed, since Cyril’s arrest, Angus had lost a considerable amount of weight. He now had to wear a belt with the trousers that had previously fitted him perfectly ungebelt, and his collars, normally slightly tight because of the age of his shirts, could now have two fingers inserted between them and his neck and waggled about without discomfort. If a dog could pine for a man, thought Angus, then a man could just as readily pine for a dog.

  He lingered over his coffee, watching a shaft of sunlight creep slowly across the table to illuminate the cracks in the wooden surface, the ancient crumbs these contained. We are not worthy, he thought, so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy table . . . The familiar words of the Book of Common Prayer came back to him unbidden, from the liturgy of the Scottish Episcopal Church, in which he had been raised and to which, when he felt the need, he always went home; these phrases lodged in the mind, to surface at unexpected moments, such as this, and brought with them their particular form of consola-tion. Such language, such resonant, echoing phrases – man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live . . . Dearly Beloved we are gathered together here in the sight of God –

  this was the linguistic heritage bequeathed to the English-speaking peoples in the liturgy and in the Authorised Version by Cranmer and by Jamie Sext, James VI, a monarch with whom Angus had always felt a great affinity. And what had we done with it, with this language and all its dignity? Exchanged it for the banalities of the disc jockey, for the cheap coin of a debased English, for all the vulgarities and obscenities that had polluted broadcasting. And nobody taught children how to speak clearly anymore; nobody taught them to articulate, with the result that there were so many now who spoke from unopened mouths, their words all joined together in some indecipherable slur. You have taken away our language; you have betrayed us. Yes. Yes.

  A Prayer from a Painter in Utter Despair 253

  Our situation, he thought, is serious. Our nightmares are waking ones: global warming; the loss of control over our lives; a degenerate, irretrievably superficial popular culture; the arrival, with bands playing, of Orwell’s Big Brother. He stared at his table in despair. Did he want to live through all this? Did he want to see the world he knew turned so utterly upside down?

  He closed his eyes. Even then, he could feel the presence of the sun as it cast its light upon his table. It was there, a yellow glow, a patch of warmth. He lowered his head and brought
his hands together on his lap; hands on which the smell of paint and turps seemed always to linger, the hands of one who made something, an artist. Suddenly, and with complete humility, he began to pray. At first, he felt self-conscious as he performed the forgotten act, last done how many years ago? But, after a moment, that went away, and he felt the onset of a proper humility, a glow. Because I am nothing, he thought, just an ordinary man, a tiny speck of consciousness on a half-burned-out star, precisely because of that I lower my head and pray.

  And it seemed to him at that moment that it did not matter if there was nobody listening; the very act of prayer was an acknowledgement of his humanity, a reminder of true scale.

  “Oh Lord,” he whispered, “who judges all men and to whom alone the secrets of the heart are known; forgive me my human failings, my manifold acts of wickedness. Open my heart to love.

  Turn thy healing gaze to me. Forgive me for that which I have not done which I ought to have done.”

  254 All Hail Cyril as He Returns in Triumph It was a hotch-potch of half-remembered phrases, taken out of context and patched together, but as he spoke them, uttered each one, he felt their transformative power. He saw a man beside a shore. He saw children at the feet of the man. What he saw was love and compassion; he was sure of that, utterly sure.

  Angus opened his eyes and saw the sunlight upon the table.

  He moved his hands so that they lay in the square of warmth.

  He looked. The hairs on his hands were picked out by the light; there was a small fleck of white paint on one knuckle. He closed his eyes and concluded his prayer. “And I ask one final thing,”

  he muttered. “I ask that you restore to me my dog.”

  He rose to his feet and looked about him. How foolish, he thought, to imagine that words uttered by him could change the world in the slightest way, what a massive, sentimental delusion!

  But then the telephone rang. Angus gave a start, and then crossed the room to answer. For a second or two, he imagined that his prayer had brought results and that the call would bring news of Cyril. But that, he knew, was not how the world worked.

  The world was one of chance, a biological lottery, not one ruled by eternal verities and design. Prayer was a wishful-thinking conversation with self; that’s what he told himself. Of course he knew that.

  He picked up the telephone. It was his lawyer, George More, on the other end. “Come round to the office,” said the lawyer.

  “There’s somebody here who’s looking forward to seeing you again.”

  Angus frowned. Who could George have in the office? Then he heard, coming down the line, a bark.

  76. All Hail Cyril as He Returns in Triumph They had not expected it in the Cumberland Bar. There they were, the regulars – Jock, Sid, Harry, Maggie, Gerry, all sitting there, as they always did at six o’clock, waiting for somebody to All Hail Cyril as He Returns in Triumph 255

  say something memorable – which nobody ever did – and in walked Angus Lordie, with – mirabile dictu, as Harry, a classical scholar, was so fond of saying – Cyril behind him, gold tooth flashing, tongue hanging out of the side of his mouth as it always did. For a moment, nobody said anything, but all eyes were turned to them; and, a few moments later, before Angus had taken more than a few steps into the bar, the assembled company erupted.

  Cyril barked once or twice, but for the most part accepted the fuss calmly and with dignity. Unfamiliar hands ruffled the fur on his head, stroked him, patted him vigorously on the back, all of which he took in his stride, for this is what humans do to dogs, and Cyril understood his place.

  Angus, glowing with pleasure, ordered his drink from the bar and the dish of beer for Cyril. Then he went over to his table, where friends were ready to ply him with questions.

  “He’s been acquitted?”

  “What happened at the trial?”

  “Is he on probation?”

  None of these questions were relevant, and Angus simply shook his head. Then he began to explain.

  “I received a telephone call this morning,” he said. “I must admit I was feeling somewhat low, and I almost didn’t answer the phone. Thank heavens I did! There was George More on the line and he said . . .” He looked down at Cyril, who had finished his beer and was looking up at his master, his eyes damp with contentment.

  “He said,” Angus continued, “that he had acted on the information which we passed on – information about the real culprit, which that funny wee boy in Scotland Street . . .”

  “Bertie,” prompted Maggie. “The one with the . . .”

  “With the mother,” said Harry.

  Angus nodded. “Anyway, George said to me that he had been in touch with the powers that be and told them that we intended to lodge a special defence of incrimination. Apparently, that’s what you do when you say that it wasn’t you, it was somebody else.

  256 All Hail Cyril as He Returns in Triumph

  “Apparently, this caused disarray at the other end, because nobody has ever lodged that defence in a case involving a dog.

  And there was the additional issue of whether or not any of the defences normally available in a criminal trial would be able to be applied to a dog. Nobody at the Crown Office seemed to know!”

  “So?” asked Maggie, reaching down to pat Cyril again.

  “So the fiscal asked the police to go and see if they could find the dog in question. Which they did . . . with very convenient results. Convenient for us, that is.”

  Angus looked about him at the expressions of his friends.

  “They found that dog all right,” he went on. “They found him and the dog very obligingly bit one of the policemen on the shins. Not a bad bite – just a nip really, but enough to suggest that the finger was pointing in the right direction.”

  There were expressions of satisfaction all round. Most people in the Cumberland Bar had been convinced of Cyril’s innocence, and this result merely confirmed what they had always believed.

  Now they crowded round Angus, sharing his manifest joy and relief.

  “I can get back to work now,” Angus said, smiling. “I haven’t been able to paint a thing – not a thing.”

  His friends nodded in sympathy. And when, an hour or so later, Angus rose to go home, they raised their glasses to Cyril as he walked past, a triumph of sorts, a victory march. Cyril wagged his tail and his gold tooth flashed in the light. “He’s a very great dog,” said the barman. “Would you just look at him?

  One of the finest dogs of his generation.”

  As they made their way out onto Dundonald Street, Cyril raised his head and sniffed at the air. There were the familiar smells of Drummond Place, the smell of the gardens in the centre, the sharp smell of oil on the stone setts, a cooking smell from somewhere close by, the smell of damp. All of that was there, but there was something else, a smell so exciting that Cyril quivered in anticipation.

  “What is it, boy?” Angus asked.

  Cyril looked up at his master. Then he twisted his neck round All Hail Cyril as He Returns in Triumph 257

  and smelled the air again. He had to go where his nose took him; he simply had to.

  “What’s troubling you, old chap?” asked Angus. “Are you hungry?”

  Cyril tugged at his lead. It was an insistent tug, an urgent one, and Angus decided to let him go where he wanted to go.

  So, with Cyril pulling at the leash, Angus followed him across the road, to the gardens in the centre of Drummond Place.

  “So you want a run round?” asked Angus, when they reached the half-open gate of the gardens. “All right. But make it brief.

  I’m hungry.”

  He bent down to take the leash off Cyril’s collar. The moment he did this, Cyril tore towards the centre of the gardens. Angus, bemused at Cyril’s sudden, but totally understandable desire for a bit of freedom, followed behind his dog.

  It was one of those generous summer evenings when the light persists, and it was quite bright enough for him to see exactly wha
t was happening. A woman had been walking her dog, a large terrier of some sort, in the gardens, and now, to Angus Lordie’s horror, Cyril rushed over to this dog and began what could only be interpreted as amatory advances. The woman shouted loudly and threw something at Cyril, missing him by some margin. Angus dashed forward, shouting his apologies as he did so. Cyril and the female dog were now in full embrace.

  “Stop him!” shouted the woman. “Stop him!”

  Angus struck at Cyril with his leash, using it as a whip, but he missed. He raised his arm again and struck once more. This time, the lead connected with Cyril, but the amorous dog seemed to be impervious to his master’s displeasure. There was a growling sound, a warning.

  Angus turned to the woman. “I’m terribly sorry,” he said. “It appears that . . .”

  The woman glared at him.

  “Listen,” said Angus testily. “You shouldn’t take a dog out in that condition.”

  “How dare you!” snapped the woman.

  258 Olive Has News of Bertie’s Blood Test Angus looked at Cyril reproachfully. New dogs, perhaps, behaved with greater sensitivity; Cyril, it seemed, was not a new dog.

  77. Olive Has News of Bertie’s Blood Test Ever since Olive had come to play “house” in Scotland Street, Bertie had tried to avoid her at school. One reason for this was that he feared that if he talked to her she would try to arrange a further visit; another was that he was concerned that she might wish to give him the result of the blood test she had carried out.

  Bertie remembered with a shudder the moment when Olive had cornered him in his room and insisted on plunging the needle of her syringe into his upper arm. It had hurt, even if not quite as much as he had feared, but what had terrified him was the sight of his blood rising so very easily in the barrel of the syringe. Olive herself had seemed to be slightly surprised at this and remarked, with some satisfaction: “I seem to have found a vein first time, Bertie! And look at all that blood. Look at it!”