The Revolving Door of Life

by Alexander McCall Smith

  They reached their floor on the common stair.

  “This is our place,” said Bertie proudly. “My Dad owns this whole flat.”

  “Does he now?” said Nicola. “Well, that’s very satisfactory.”

  “With the help of a mortgage,” Stuart muttered. “Quite an expensive one, actually.”

  He could not resist that reference. His mother, he knew, was quite well-off; not only did she have the money she had inherited from her late husband, Henderson, but her second husband, Abril, was rumoured to have a considerable fortune. He, too, could afford to pay off their mortgage, if only he would loosen the purse strings.

  “Mortgages are such a burden,” remarked Nicola.

  “They certainly are,” said Stuart.

  “But they are character-forming, aren’t they?” Nicola continued brightly. “If one receives everything in this life on a plate, Stuart, I think one misses out on certain experiences that we all need to go through.”

  Stuart groaned inwardly. Perhaps once she had had a few of those sherries she liked, he might be able to wheedle out of her some agreement to do something about the mortgage, but he did not hold out much hope for that. They would have to wait until she died, he thought guiltily. There would be plenty of money then. He stopped himself: one should not think that about one’s mother—one simply shouldn’t. A lot of people, though, he told himself, did exactly that. There were countless grown-up children watching the health of their aged parents with what could only be described as vulturine interest; watching for every telltale sign of weakness, for every symptom of a weakening heart or of a faltering step. He looked at his mother. She seemed so hale and hearty, but that, he remembered, was no guarantee of anything.

  25. He Never Thought of Love

  The Pollock flat in Scotland Street had three generously proportioned bedrooms and one cramped box-bedroom. Irene and Stuart occupied the largest of these rooms: Irene, in particular, appreciated the view it afforded out over the former marshalling yards of the old Newhaven railway. These yards were still largely an empty expanse of ground, one of those urban spaces that somehow seem to survive the avaricious eyes of developers. “Spaces are important,” she said to Bertie. “There are things, you see, and then there is the space that lies next to things. The space defines the thing every bit as much as the thing defines itself. You understand that, don’t you Bertie?” Bertie had nodded. The idea could be put more simply, he thought, but he understood.

  The second bedroom was Bertie’s. He was inordinately proud of this room, which was his sanctuary, his retreat—his boy-cave. The room had been much-painted: Irene had decorated it in pink to begin with, as a gesture against stereotyping, but shortly afterwards Stuart, egged on by Bertie, had painted it white, to the considerable annoyance of Irene. Unfortunately for Bertie, who had been thoroughly embarrassed about living in a pink room, the coat of white paint had been insufficiently thick to prevent pink from somehow seeping through, with the result that his room was now of a shade in between the two colours but still recognisably pink in the eyes of any of Bertie’s friends who came to the house.

  “How nice that you live in a pink room,” pronounced Olive when she was brought to play—without invitation from Bertie, but at the insistance of Irene. “I thoroughly approve of new boys, Bertie—I really do. You’d never get somebody like Tofu living in a pink bedroom. He doesn’t have the courage.”

  “It’s not really pink,” muttered Bertie. “It’s…it’s crushed strawberry.”

  “Oh no, Bertie,” said Olive. “It’s not crushed strawberry. I know what crushed strawberry looks like, and this isn’t it. This is dusty pink. I saw this exact colour in a magazine and it said it was pink. There was a picture of a girl in a dusty pink bedroom. They said it was the ideal feminine colour.”

  “It’s not,” muttered Bertie. “It’s nothing to do with that.”

  “Of course these days things like that don’t matter,” continued Olive. “Girls are very happy that boys want to be like them. We are going into the Age of the Girl, you know. I read that too. This is the Age of the Girl. Boys are finished—did you know that, Bertie? Boys are finished.”

  Contiguous with Bertie’s bedroom was the third bedroom, the smallest of the three, but larger, of course, than the windowless boxroom next door. This bedroom was now the nursery, and was occupied by Ulysses and the extraordinarily large quantity of impedimenta that constitute the support system for any baby: changing mats, stacked cartons of wet wipes, plastic devices for serving, catching, and disposing of food, piles of muslin cloth, bins for detritus of every category, and so on. Hanging from the ceiling were various mobiles, devices with strings that played repetitive tunes, and small silver stars intended somehow to induce a feeling of sleepiness at bedtime.

  This bedroom had been cleared by Stuart in preparation for his mother’s visit. The cot in which Ulysses slept had been shifted into the boxroom, and the various support systems had been dispersed about the house. With the infantile objects now elsewhere, the room had shrugged off its nursery feel. A small writing desk from the main bedroom had been moved in, along with an easy chair from the living room. With flowers on the desk and a fresh potpourri on the windowsill, the feel of the room was welcoming, even if a slight smell, inadequately masked by the potpourri, still lingered in the air.

  “My Dad says your room won’t smell too much of Ulysses after a couple of days,” said Bertie as he showed his grandmother into her room.

  “I’m sure it’ll be just fine,” said Nicola, moving across the room to open the window. “I hope poor little Ulysses won’t mind having been moved out of his room.”

  Bertie shook his head. “He doesn’t know what’s going on,” he said. “He’s got no idea of anything, really.”

  “Oh Bertie, I’m sure Ulysses is drinking it all in,” said Nicola brightly. “Babies know more than we give them credit for.”

  “You can use his chest of drawers over there,” said Bertie. “We chucked all his stuff out.”

  Nicola opened her suitcase and began to unpack. It was a strange feeling, she decided, this going back in time. How long was it since she had looked after a child? She did not like to count the years. Decades, rather. So long ago. And now these two little souls, this lovely little boy, Bertie, with his serious expression and his odd way of putting things; and that funny little scrap of humanity that was his brother…My flesh and blood, she thought. Mine.

  And in the kitchen, where he was making a cup of tea to welcome Nicola, Stuart thought: I still have a mother. A mother. There is still somebody who can say That is my son. Me. He watched the water in the glass-side kettle begin to move—tiny currents of heated water mixing with layers of colder water, a miniature watery turmoil. It all started there, he thought. It all started with the movement of water. It’s very easy to go back. It’s very easy to go back to being the child in the relationship, the dependent one; no matter how many years have intervened, it is easy to revert to how it was before, to the time when you knew instinctively that your mother loved you and that her love was always there like the sun, constant, always available, never for a moment critical or conditional.

  Love. He never thought of love. Did other people? Did other people go about their daily business thinking about love; about the people they loved and the people who loved them? Did people wake up in the morning and say to themselves Perhaps this will be the day I find love? Did they really do that?

  Did he love anybody at all? Did he love his mother, as he knew she loved him? He loved her, of course, but he was not sure exactly how he loved her. Did he love his boys? Yes, he did. He loved them—even Ulysses, sometimes. But did he love Irene, his wife? Did he love her? Why had he never cried, not once, since she went away? Was that the test—the real test—whether we could cry for somebody?

  26. Because It’s Small and It’s Ours…

  “It’s extraordinary what a difference moving in has made,” said Matthew. “When we were here last—before a
ll our stuff came—this place seemed…”

  “Unlived in?” prompted Elspeth.

  “Yes, unlived in. But it’s more than that. It somehow seemed cold.”

  Elspeth smiled. “I’ve turned on the heating. I know it’s summer, but I felt there was a bit of dampness.”

  “The Duke hadn’t used this place for ages,” said Matthew. “A house somehow loses its spirit if there’s nobody living in it.”

  “Lares and penates,” said Elspeth. “The Romans’ household spirits. And then they became gods. They put statues of them on the dining table.”

  “Whereas we put pepper and salt.”

  “Yes: we being devoid of any sense of things beyond us.”

  Matthew raised an eyebrow. “My, we are getting philosophical. But I do like the idea of household gods—shall we get some? A set of little statues and bring the boys up to believe in them?”

  “I hope they believe in something,” said Elspeth. “Imagine believing in nothing at all—not even in love, or justice, or any of the things that can make people passionate.”

  “Such as a country?”

  Elspeth thought about this. “I suppose there are lots of people who believe in Scotland. Or the European Union, for that matter. Their belief enables them to…well, to talk about the future with enthusiasm. They don’t like things as they are and they are convinced that things will be much improved once they are otherwise.”

  “Well, why not?” asked Matthew.

  “I didn’t say there was any reason why not. I’m just commenting on that sort of belief. The trouble is that it might make discussion difficult. If somebody believes so strongly in one particular solution to the world’s problems, then it may obscure the nuances. That’s all I was saying.” Elspeth paused. “They may not see that there are others who have a different view. You can love things in a whole lot of different ways, can’t you?”

  Matthew did not answer her question. “I believe in Scotland,” he said, “because I love it. I love it because this is where I come from and where I intend to stay. I love it because it’s…” He shrugged. “Because it’s small and it’s ours.”

  “Both are good reasons,” said Elspeth. “Just like our boys—they’re small, and they’re ours.”

  They had been seated during this conversation; now Matthew stood up. “You know, there’s something that’s still niggling away. I measured up the outside walls of the house yesterday. I noted down the measurements.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I wanted to calculate the floor area—at least of the ground floor.”

  “And?”

  “Well, it was quite simple measuring the outside walls, because they were fairly regular. There’s that bit that sticks out at the back, but I was able to factor that in. Anyway, I measured it all and then took into account the thickness of the walls. I deducted that from the total.”

  Elspeth was unsure where this was leading. “Why did you do all this? I thought that the solicitors’ particulars gave the floor area.”

  “They did,” said Matthew. “But I wanted to check up on something. So I then measured the rooms inside—everything. I worked out the size of each room, including the hallway and corridors. I added it all up.”

  Elspeth frowned. Matthew had a slight tendency to what she termed—quite fondly—geekiness, and she wondered whether he was going to turn into one of those men who became obsessed with facts and figures. They were terribly tedious—they knew much of the Guinness Book of Records off by heart and could recite batting averages for the Australian cricket team back to 1954. They were only one rung above the train-spotters, those lost characters who stand on platforms in anoraks and note down the numbers of passing trains. Presumably measuring floor areas was exactly the sort of thing that the off-duty train-spotter might do.

  “I added it all up,” repeated Matthew. “And then I compared the two figures. And you know what? There are just over sixteen square metres unaccounted for.”

  “Surely not.”

  “No, there are. Remember I said right at the beginning that I thought there might be a concealed room? Remember what I said?”

  “Vaguely,” said Elspeth. She remembered rejecting the possibility and thinking no more of it.

  “Well there must be one,” said Matthew. “Because I’ve done the maths and there’s only one conclusion.”

  “Just like Professor Higgs,” said Elspeth lightly. “He did the maths all those years ago and concluded that the Higgs Boson must exist.”

  “Elspeth, I’m not joking!”

  She put on a serious expression. “No, I can see that. Well, what are we going to do?”

  “I want to take that bookcase off the drawing room wall,” said Matthew. “The bookcase on the left. I’m pretty sure it’s in there.”

  Elspeth sighed. She knew that when Matthew got hold of an idea, it could be difficult to persuade him to drop it. “All right,” she said. “I’ll help you.”

  “Good,” said Matthew. “I’ll fetch something from the garage.”

  He returned a few minutes later with a crowbar and they went into the drawing room together. Matthew began by taking the books out of the bookcase and stacking them on a library table that stood against the opposite wall. Then, when the bookcase was bare, he tapped loudly on the inner layer of wood that separated it from the wall.

  “That doesn’t sound at all hollow,” said Elspeth. “That sounds as if it’s just wall.”

  Matthew, though, was still convinced, and he now moved round to the side of the bookcase and inserted the tip of the crowbar between it and the wall. He began to prise.

  It was slow work, but after a while he had prised the bookcase from its setting. It had been held in place with just a few screws, and these had eventually wrenched themselves free of plaster and lathe.

  Elspeth peered into the new space created. There was an opening—a door-sized opening—and it gave into a dark area beyond.

  “You see,” said Matthew. “I knew I was right.”

  Elspeth fetched a torch and played the beam into the darkness that lay beyond the newly exposed doorway.

  “It’s not empty,” she said, her voice faltering with the significance of the moment.

  “So I see,” said Matthew.

  “I have a strong sense of implausibility.”

  “But we all do,” said Matthew. “Anybody who thinks about the human condition must feel that.” He paused; he had more to say on that subject, but this, he thought, was not the time; not with a concealed room freshly unconcealed before him. “But shall we inspect what we see beyond?” he went on. “Please, after you…”

  Elspeth thought: I am so fortunate. I am married to a man who says “Please, after you.” How fortunate is that? And she thought of a friend who did not even have a husband, although she dearly would have loved one, and how her life would be transformed, would be made perfect, if she had one who said, “Please, after you” or indeed by one who did not even say that, who said nothing, in fact. Bless you, my darling, she thought. And thank you for this: for this house, for our marriage, for our three boys, for bothering to say “Please, after you.”

  27. Hand Sanitiser Issues

  They stood at the entrance of the concealed room, both slightly awed by what they were doing—how often in this life do we enter concealed rooms? Matthew, at least, remembered something he had read many years ago, as a boy at the Edinburgh Academy, when George Harris, his inspiring history teacher, had happened to mention the story of the archaeologists who had opened the sealed tombs of Egyptian pharaohs and who had all died within a few short years. That was just the sort of thing to engage the attention of a fourteen-year-old boy with a budding interest in science—of course it was asking for trouble to open something that had been sealed for so many years. What could one expect? It was not a question of curses or anything of that sort; it was more an issue of bacteria and viruses. Microorganisms could lie dormant indefinitely until somebody came along and kicked up the dus
t, metaphorical and real, under which they had been concealed.

  He half-turned to Elspeth. “Do you remember those stories of the Egyptian tombs? Lord Carnarvon and his team? How they all died after they’d opened the tombs? Probably pathogens inside. Rare moulds and so on.”

  “Oh nonsense!” said Elspeth. “They were probably much safer inside the tomb than outside, given sanitary conditions in Egypt at the time. And even these days you have to be careful. Everybody who goes for a cruise on the Nile gets the most awful tummy upsets. They just do. It’s the water. Morag McAndrew was really ill after she went on that boat on the Nile. She said the boat itself was very clean but she saw the galley staff washing the plates in the actual Nile. They had a big basket and they put all the plates in it apparently and then lowered it into the Nile and shoogled it around for a while.”

  Matthew bit his lip. “Have you got any hand sanitiser?”

  “Hand sanitiser!” exclaimed Elspeth. “Really, Matthew, you mustn’t get caught up in all that. Those people who carry those little bottles of gel and keep rubbing it on their hands…Really!”

  Matthew bit his lip again. He had developed the habit of taking hand sanitiser with him to work, and he used it several times a day; certainly after handling the door in the small staff washroom that led off his office at the gallery. Recently he had also resorted to opening and closing that door with a handkerchief—a precaution that he also used when he went for coffee at Big Lou’s café, where the handle of the main door must be, he thought, a major vector of transmission of every sore throat and chest infection in the New Town.

  And what was wrong with being careful? It was all very well for Elspeth to imply that hand sanitiser was a step too far, but why subject oneself to more germs than necessary? It was not as if he had taken to wearing those face masks that you see people in Japan wearing as a matter of course. Indeed, he had seen a group of young Japanese tourists in Edinburgh recently and several of them had been wearing white face masks. Not only was that absurd, it was, he thought, insulting. And where would it end: would people start walking about in those clumsy white suits with portable piped air supplies? Would we go to dinner at friends’ houses wearing protective clothing, and say, Nothing personal, of course? No, all that was a good mile away from the sensible precaution of using hand sanitiser when opening certain doors or when entering concealed rooms…