Big Lou’s eyes widened. “Is that it? Approved?”
“You’ll need to go to our training sessions,” said Marjory. “There’s a place just come up, as it happens, this weekend. Could you manage that?”
Big Lou said she could. “I’ll close the business on Friday afternoon. I’ll be there.”
“Good,” said Marjory. “It’s out at Eskbank. I’ll send you the details.”
“And then?” asked Big Lou.
“Then … well, then we can make a placement. You’ll be monitored quite closely to begin with—I’m sure you understand why we have to do that.”
“Of course.”
“But in your case,” went on Marjory, “your experience working in that nursing home up in Aberdeen is in your favour. We felt we could shorten the training and perhaps have a shorter monitoring period too.”
“I won’t let you down,” said Big Lou. “I would never let you down.”
Marjory looked at Big Lou in silence. It seemed that the younger woman was evaluating her—and she was. “I can tell that,” she said. She glanced down at the open file. “Arbroath. The farm … The nursing home. Frankly, it’s the ideal background. I suppose the only thing that perhaps is not ideal, and we have to be open about this, is that you’re …” She hesitated. “You’re by yourself.”
Big Lou did not flinch. “I see.”
“Because it’s sometimes easier for two foster parents,” said Marjory. “Particularly if there’s a boy involved. Boys can be demanding.”
Big Lou said nothing.
“But it’s not something we make a fuss about,” Marjory went on. “The important thing in looking after children is routine, love, and a proper measure of firmness and consistency. I’m sure that you will be fine with all of those.”
“I’ll try,” said Big Lou.
Marjory smiled. “Good. I have complete confidence in you.” She closed the file and reached for a piece of paper from her tray. “We have a child in mind,” she said. “In fact, two—a brother and sister. They’re eight and ten. You obviously would need school age children if you’re working. And of course you’ll have to make arrangements for the period between school and your coming home in the evening.”
“I’ll change my opening hours,” said Big Lou. “I can shut the café at three in the afternoon. Nae bother.”
“Good.”
“Can you tell me something about them?”
The social worker sighed. “It’s not an atypical story, you know. A bad one. Bad adult behaviour and who suffers? The children. The innocent children.”
“I’ve seen that,” said Big Lou.
“Of course you have. These two youngsters are, I’m afraid, quite badly damaged. They’ve never had a chance, really. Mother was utterly irresponsible, and how she managed to bring them up as long as she did is anybody’s guess. She wanted a good time. Clubbing every night, excessive drinking, and that didn’t fit with having two children. Father was nowhere to be seen, of course, which is par for the course. The children were in and out of care, and then Grandmother came into the picture. She was the maternal grandmother and she lived out at Craigmillar—a really good woman. She looked after them pretty well, in the circumstances, but she became ill. One of those quick cancers and there wasn’t much they could do for her. She was really worried about the kids and tried to make arrangements—with friends and so on—but it wasn’t very satisfactory. Shortly before her death she handed over all her life savings—four thousand pounds—to a friend who promised to use it to help the children after she was gone. And you know what happened?”
Big Lou looked away. She imagined what was coming.
But she was wrong. “No, the friend didn’t make off with the money,” Marjory went on. “Not at all. She decided to put it into bank shares. This was before the crash.”
“Oh no,” said Big Lou.
“And yet what do we read in the paper?” said Marjory. “We read about major bonuses for bankers. That’s what we read.”
35. The Planning of Happiness
While Marjory made Big Lou a cup of coffee they continued their conversation.
“I’ve never understood this bonus system,” said Big Lou. “Don’t they pay these people salaries?”
“Of course they do,” said Marjory. “They pay them handsome salaries.”
“So what are these bonuses?”
“That’s a good question,” said Marjory. “It amounts, in my view, to a skimming off of a substantial part of the profits by the staff.”
“Aye,” said Big Lou. “That’s what it sounds like to me.”
“And the problem is that they’re all at it. The shareholders can’t control it because the boards are all packed with institutional shareholders. Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas, as they say. They’re not going to stop a system which they tend to have a stake in themselves.”
“No, they wouldn’t,” said Big Lou.
Marjory handed Big Lou her cup of coffee. “Instant, I’m afraid.”
Big Lou said nothing.
“Of course,” continued Marjory, “they argue that they have to give these big bonuses in order to attract the talent. They say that they wouldn’t get the best people if they couldn’t offer bribes of millions. But that’s rubbish. People would be lining up for those jobs—lining up; and there are people already working in banks who could do the job every bit as well as the bonus-merchants. There are bags of people who are hungry who would go for that work like a shot. And be able to do it, too. They’d do it for a salary that was a fraction of what these greedy individuals are paying themselves.”
“I can imagine that,” said Big Lou. “I get some of the more junior staff of one of the banks coming into my café. They’re hard-working people, and good at their job. They don’t get these bonuses at all.”
“They could do those jobs just fine,” said Marjory. “They would do them for one fifth, one sixth of the pay—and still be happy with it.”
“The world is in a gae fankle,” mused Big Lou.
“The world isn’t,” said Marjory. “Just bits of it.”
They sipped at their coffee.
“These bairns,” said Big Lou. “The brother and sister: what happened?”
“The mother couldn’t look after them properly,” said Marjory. “She tried again after the grandmother—her mother—died, but it was no use. We had to take them into care when the school discovered that they hadn’t had a proper meal for two days. Mother handed them over quite happily—she couldn’t be bothered. So they’ve been with us. They had a spell of fostering with a very good couple we have off the Easter Road, but that was always going to be short term. The children aren’t easy, I’m afraid.”
Big Lou frowned. “Who can blame the pair wee things?”
“No, one can’t blame them at all. You can’t ever blame the children, as far as I’m concerned. If a child behaves badly, then it’s because of what’s been done to him. And if he behaves badly in spite of being treated well, then it’s the genes, I’m afraid, and you can’t blame a child for his genes either, can you?”
Big Lou supposed not.
“There’s no violence, or anything like that, so …”
“Would a bairn be violent?” interrupted Big Lou.
“Oh yes,” said Marjory. “We had a six-year-old the other day who threatened to kill somebody. Threatened to throw him downstairs. What can you expect? The child had been dumped in front of the television set for six hours a day and seen images of non-stop violence and aggression. Watch six hours of television, and that’s what you’ll see.”
“But these bairns …”
“Their problem is silence,” said Marjory. “They’re very withdrawn. They’ll hardly speak, I’m afraid. Mind you, they haven’t really been spoken to very much. Their mother certainly didn’t speak to them.”
“That’s bad,” said Big Lou.
“So they’re very withdrawn,” said Marjory. “They’re not autistic, as far as we can mak
e out, because there have been spells of perfectly normal social interaction in the past. We hope that with time they’ll come out of their shell.” She paused. “I hope I haven’t put you off.”
Big Lou shook her head. “It would take more than that to put me off. No, you send me these bairns and we’ll see what I can do.”
“Thank you.”
“There was a boy like that at school when I was a wee girl,” said Big Lou. “He had been bullied a lot. He was a muckle great lad, but he wouldn’t stand up for himself. His father had been killed in a road accident. He never said anything. He just looked at you and then looked away.”
“What happened?”
“He joined the Boys’ Brigade. There was a good man there and he took him under his wing. He saw him through. He works in Dundee now, that boy. He has a landscape gardening business and has done well enough. He married and has a family—I saw him at the Highland Show last year.”
“It doesn’t always work out like that,” said Marjory.
“No, it doesn’t.”
“But when it does, it makes everything we do seem so worthwhile.”
Big Lou put down her cup. “These bairns—what are their names?”
“Luke and Jenny. Luke is ten; Jenny is eight.”
“I like those names,” said Lou.
Marjory handed Lou a photograph from her drawer. “That’s them,” she said. “That was taken about six months ago.”
Big Lou looked at the picture. The boy was standing; the girl was sitting. They were in what looked like a living room. There was a small fireplace in the background and a shelf of china ornaments. Neither of the children was looking at the photographer. Jenny was looking down at the floor, and Luke was staring at the wall. Neither was smiling.
“They look very unhappy,” said Big Lou. “What a pity.”
“You’re right: they are unhappy,” said Marjory.
“Then we’ll change that,” said Lou.
Marjory grinned. “That’s what I like to hear,” she said.
36. Culturally Specific Foods
Elspeth’s irritation with Matthew did not last long. She was too fond of him to feel angry for much more than a very short time, and the casus belli in this case was hardly a casus belli anyway—a tactless remark, and an absurd one at that, was not something that she would allow to rankle. She forgave him, as marriage, or friendship for that matter, ultimately requires of those who wish to remain married or friends.
Their life together, though, was not without its tensions. The birth of a first child is a stressful time for any man, and many men choose that difficult point in their lives to entertain what amounts to a premature mid-life crisis—a short-lived period of rebellion, confusion, or, in some cases, downright bad behaviour. The causes of this are complex: for some men, becoming a father is a psychological Rubicon, the crossing of which brings it home to them that their wings have been clipped—and their metaphors mixed perhaps. Being responsible for a wife or partner is one thing—a man who sees himself as a free spirit can still reconcile that with the continued enjoyment of personal autonomy—but responsibility for a child is quite another, involving connotations of permanence and seriousness for which he might not be prepared. If a puppy is for life and not just for Christmas, then how much more so is a baby and, a fortiori, triplets.
Even if it looked as if Matthew had managed to weather the birth of the three boys, he was still slightly unsettled, and the situation was not made any easier by the arrival of the au pair’s au pair—the one engaged to act as assistant to Anna, the original au pair. This young woman, Birgitte, had been recruited in recognition of the sheer volume of work that three young infants created for Elspeth and Anna. She was just nineteen, having left school in Copenhagen a year previously and spent the last eight months working in a hotel in Lemvig. She was attracted by the thought of a job in Scotland, as it would enable her to improve her English, which, thanks to the excellent Danish educational system, was already quite fluent.
Birgitte appeared to be both biddable and cheerful, but her arrival in the household had somehow disturbed the balance of the domestic relationships previously existing in India Street. There is a folk belief that two women cannot share a kitchen. This is probably not true; there may well be cases where women find the sharing of a kitchen difficult, but many modern women, being less thirled to the domestic life than they used to be, no doubt share their kitchen quite amicably with another woman. But when it comes to three women sharing a kitchen with one man—as was now the case in Matthew and Elspeth’s flat—then tensions may be expected to develop. With six in the flat—if one included Fergus, Rognvald and Tobermory—there were, it seemed, simply too many people living under one roof.
Some of the kitchen tensions were minor—risible, really. Shortly after her arrival, Birgitte, who, like Anna, was energetic and keen to work, had taken it upon herself to tidy one of the food cupboards. Much of what she did in this exercise was useful: there had been, for example, three packets of hazelnuts in current use—these she reduced to one, by emptying the contents of the second and third bags into the first. Then she wiped the marmalade and jam jars so that they would not be sticky to the touch—again, a very sensible thing to do, even if not a task that the average Scot would think to perform. But then it came to the jar of Marmite, which Matthew used each morning at breakfast.
It is well known that Marmite is not for everyone. While it is much appreciated in Britain—as is its Australian equivalent, Vegemite, in Australia—there are those who find it quite beyond their understanding that anybody should eat dark brown, salty yeast paste and appear to enjoy it. Americans, in particular, have difficulty in understanding the appeal of Marmite, and if they are ever encouraged to sample it tend to wrinkle up their noses, utter expressions of disgust, and immediately try to remove the taste from their mouth by eating something sweeter or blander. Marmite, it seems, is something that one needs to be brought up with in order to appreciate to the full extent; not a surprising thing, as western Europeans and Americans have never quite got the hang of eating sheep’s eyeballs, or mopani worms, or any of the other culturally specific delicacies they are on occasion offered when travelling abroad. The idea of the relativity of taste applies in matters of the table as much as it applies in other areas of life; the simple truth is that those who enjoy Marmite enjoy it. As Muriel Spark had Jean Brodie observe: for those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like.
On opening the jar of Marmite, Birgitte sniffed at it, unwisely dipped a teaspoon into the jar, and then put the teaspoon straight into her mouth. The recommendation is, spread thinly, and putting a spoonful into one’s mouth hardly comes within the scope of that advice. Birgitte gave a cry, and concluded that the contents of the jar—whatever they might be—had definitely gone off or were possibly even poisonous and needed to be thrown away. Which is what she did.
Similar weeding out occurred when she turned her attention to the fridge. A half-eaten haggis, saved for Matthew’s dinner that night, also judged to be off, was wrapped in newspaper and put in the bin, the same fate as befell Matthew’s supply of Patum Peperium. This was followed by the washing of all the saucepans and kitchen utensils, and their replacing in the wrong place.
“She’s just trying to be helpful,” whispered Matthew.
“I know,” said Elspeth. “But I can’t stand this, Matthew. It’s my space, you see. My space!”
He looked at her apologetically. It was his fault. He had given her three boys. He had encouraged this new au pair. It was his unsuitable flat they were living in. It was all his fault.
37. Perjink Bungalows et cetera
The awkward state of domestic affairs in Matthew’s flat might have continued for some time had it not been for the fact that he and Elspeth one morning happened to find themselves reading the property supplement of The Scotsman. Property pages are not just read by those actively searching for a new home—interest in the houses being sold and bough
t by other people is widespread, and there are many who, although they may never read the business or motoring supplements of newspapers, will nonetheless turn with enthusiasm to advertisements for houses and flats.
There are various forms of motivation behind this. For some, the reason to scan the property advertisements is to get an idea of what one’s own home is worth. This is understandable: for many of us, our principal asset is our house, and to find that it has grown in value provides the reassurance that we are not going to die paupers. Within this group, there are those who, having bought their house for very little, discover that it is now worth so much that they are comfortably millionaires. This may turn their heads, and they may well be reminded that the value of a house is mainly theoretical if one has to live in it. Even if one sold the house for one million pounds, one would have to choose between being a homeless millionaire, or buying a new house, and becoming cash poor again.
Another reason for looking at the property advertisements even if one is not thinking of moving is the sheer voyeuristic pleasure of seeing how other people—both below one and above one on that terrible escalator known as the property ladder—live their lives. In this way, photographs of perjink bungalows in Greenbank will reveal exactly what happens in that particular slice of Edinburgh suburbia—how many bedrooms and bathrooms there are in the lives of those who live there, how large their garages are, and the nature of their outlook—in the sense of both their view and their views. Similarly, the occasional advertisement of large country houses will reveal to those who live in towns just how much room those who live in the country may have. This can be the cause of some distress, as urbanites looking at the leisurely and indulged lifestyle of country gentry may feel a sense that life is not quite as fair as it might be: what gives them the right, after all, to have a gazebo system and a small loch? And if that is not enough to give rise to feelings of frustrated longing, then resort to the property pages of Country Life may cause even greater annoyance to those of an envious cast of mind. These pages have full-page pictures of an estate near Inverness (six thousand acres and a salmon river—at least four fish last season); a villa in the Charente Maritime (with hobby vineyard and the most charming chateau); and a bijou mews house in London (Notting Hill tube station just yards away) for a mere four million pounds (rather more in roubles).