The Bertie Project

  Matthew did his best. He had so arranged his work commitments that he could spend as much time as possible at home, but there were limits to what he could do. The Danes had left about a week earlier, and he had managed to take over for two complete afternoons during that period, allowing Elspeth the chance to lie down and catch up on sleep, but for the rest she had been in sole charge.

  Now at least there was the prospect of help. She had received with undisguised elation the news that Bruce’s new girlfriend was looking for a job and might be interested in helping with the boys. She knew nothing of Clare other than that she was friendly with Bruce, but she was prepared to overlook that fact. Elspeth had little time for Bruce, whom she had once described to Matthew as an “eighty-four horse-power, six-cylinder narcissist”—a description that Matthew had thought a bit extreme. “He’s doing his best,” he said, trying to convince himself that this was indeed the case. He saw what she meant, but Matthew was one of these people who was prepared to give others the benefit of the doubt even when their flaws were writ large for all to see. He remembered the chaplain at school all those years ago saying, “We are all flawed, boys—in our various and inventive ways.” One of the boys had muttered Speak for yourself, Chaplain but that phrase had stuck with him—in our various and inventive ways—as had the sentiment behind it.

  Of course the fact that Clare was associated with Bruce raised at least some issues as to her taste, and possibly also as to her judgement, but Elspeth was very much aware that women found Bruce attractive and that a perfectly sensible, level-headed woman could easily fall for him. She herself would never do that, but she understood the physical realities of these matters and would certainly not hold it against Clare that she appeared to have fallen for Bruce. “You don’t judge people by their friends,” she remarked to Matthew, and he had nodded his agreement. But then he had looked at her, and they both realized that what she had just said—although the sort of thing we like to say, and feel good and virtuous about saying—was actually quite false. Of course you can judge people by the company they keep, at least to an extent, she thought, and Matthew thought the same. But neither said it.

  And now Bruce and Clare were due to arrive in twenty minutes or so and she was trying to have scones ready for their arrival. Things were not going well; Matthew was looking after the boys, giving her the chance to be alone in the kitchen, but everything was not working out as smoothly as she wished. The scones were quite straightforward and would be baked in time, but she had also been trying to make a pork pie for lunch the following day, and that was not going well. She had made the jelly—using trotters specially obtained from her butcher, Mr. Christie—but she had found it difficult to get this into the pie once the hot-water pastry crust had baked. And then the crust had split at a crucial point, allowing liquid to drain from the filling and compromising the structural integrity of the pie.

  She looked at her watch, and decided to leave the pie for the time being. If she could not get the jelly into it, then it would be a pork pie without jelly; nobody would notice the difference, and she could use the jelly to make lentil soup. But did she have lentils? She tried to remember whether she had bought them on her last visit to the supermarket. She thought she had, but could not be sure. And if she had not bought lentils, then what else had she forgotten? She sat down. I have to get a grip, she told herself. Help is on the horizon.

  And over that metaphorical horizon—the driveway between the rhododendrons in reality—drove Bruce and Clare in Bruce’s open Triumph TR3. As they approached the house, Bruce sounded the horn and waved cheerfully to Matthew, who was waiting to greet him at the front door.

  “Jeez, Matthew,” said Bruce as he emerged from the car, “this is quite some place you’ve got here. How much did you pay for this?”

  Matthew smiled. “Not too much,” he said.

  “I’d say eight hundred grand,” said Bruce, looking about him. “It depends on how much land you’ve got.”

  “Six acres,” said Matthew.

  “Six acres is six acres,” said Bruce.

  He introduced Clare. “This is my old pal Matthew,” he said. “He’s not as dim as he looks.”

  Matthew smiled, and shook hands with Clare. “My wife—Elspeth, that is, is inside. Come and meet her.”

  “Matthew eventually got somebody to marry him,” said Bruce. “Only joking, Matt, old chap.”

  Elspeth appeared from the kitchen, drying her hands on a dish towel.

  “Where are the sprogs?” said Bruce.

  “They’re having their afternoon sleep,” said Matthew. “A rare moment of peace…” He stopped himself. They wanted Clare to work for them, and this might give the wrong impression of the boys. “Actually, they’re very good,” he said.

  “Pull the other one, Matt,” said Bruce.

  “Come along and have some tea,” said Elspeth. “And scones. I’ve made some scones.”

  Clare smiled. “I love scones,” she said. “I had an aunt in Murrumba Downs who made terrific scones.”

  “Murrumba Downs!” exclaimed Bruce.

  Clare looked at him. “So?” she said.

  “Scones,” said Elspeth. “Let’s go and have a scone.”

  The Symbolism of Scones

  “Nice scones,” said Clare. “Different, though.”

  “Different from what?” asked Bruce.

  Matthew gazed up at the ceiling. “We all have fixed ideas on how things should taste,” he said. “Childhood determines that. The way things are cooked at home is, of course, the definitive way.”

  Elspeth looked thoughtful. She did not want to find out how scones were cooked in Murrumba Downs. “It’s the same with religion, don’t you think? That comes through childhood exposure.”

  “Membership, rather,” corrected Matthew. “Don’t you think religion has become more about group membership these days—rather than theology?”

  Elspeth did not entirely agree. “People can come to a position through choice. I know somebody over in Glasgow who was on a spiritual quest…”

  Matthew smiled. “I know who you’re talking about. A very nice man.”

  Bruce bit into a scone; a light dusting of flour stuck to his lips, outlining them in white. “Went on a quest?”

  Clare reached over and brushed away the flour. As she did so, she looked reproachfully at Elspeth—a look that was not seen by anybody else. “Did he go somewhere?” she asked.

  Elspeth shook her head. “No, it wasn’t that sort of quest. It wasn’t a pilgrimage or anything of that sort. He was just looking for something to satisfy himself spiritually. You know the feeling?”

  Clare did not. She looked blank. Bruce whispered in her ear: “God—your actual God.”

  “He tried various options. He went to Catholic Mass. He went to a Church of Scotland service. He even went to a Quaker meeting—but none of them seemed to be quite right for him. Then he went to a synagogue, and liked it.”

  “But it’s hard to become Jewish, isn’t it?” said Clare. “I know somebody back in Perth who wanted to be Jewish and got nowhere. You’re not exactly recruited.”

  “It’s not a proselytising religion,” said Matthew. “They want to make sure you mean it. They don’t seek out new members.”

  “But they do allow them,” said Elspeth. “He had to go through a lot of instruction and then he was accepted. It answered his needs. He was very happy. Judaism’s a very satisfying religion. I find his story rather inspiring. We all need some sort of spiritual life—otherwise…” She thought: otherwise what? Otherwise a pointless, arid life, trapped in an empty materialism. Religion was all about deep meaning—and we all needed that.

  “The thing that interests me,” said Matthew, “is this: isn’t it harder to accept the tenets of a faith when you approach it as a possible convert?”

  “Much harder,” said Clare.

  They all looked at her.

  “Why do you think it is?” asked Matthew.

  She shrugged. ?
??Just is,” she said. “That’s the way it is. What you’re told as a kid you keep in the back of your mind with all the other stuff you get. You don’t go there. You just accept it all.”

  “Possibly,” said Matthew. “Possibly.”

  Elspeth thought that Clare had a point. “I think Clare’s right. We all have a set of attitudes that are part of our deep cultural background. We don’t question these. They’re just there—like the way you tie your laces; like the way you talk; like the nursery rhymes you’re taught.”

  Matthew smiled. “And some of that stuff is pretty odd,” he said. “Did you believe, for example, that if you cut yourself in the web of skin between your thumb and your forefinger you got lockjaw? Remember that?”

  Clare did. “And if you put blotting paper in your shoes you fainted. We did that to our gym teacher. We put blotting paper in her gym shoes and waited for her to faint. She didn’t.” She looked disappointed.

  “This chap,” said Bruce. “This chap who became Jewish signed up for everything? Special food and all that?”

  “Yes,” said Elspeth. “The food bit can be very important in a religion.”

  “I don’t see what difference it makes,” said Bruce. “Who cares what you eat? Didn’t Catholics used to eat fish on Friday?”

  “I think they can eat meat on Fridays now,” said Matthew. “Things have changed.”

  “The Pope said you can,” said Clare.

  “The food part is a ritual,” said Elspeth. “It underlines membership. And it’s about adherence too. If you don’t eat whatever you’re not meant to eat, it reminds you that you’ve accepted the other, more important things.”

  She saw that her guests had finished their scones, and she passed the plate. “As far as I know,” she said, “there’s no religious faith that says you shouldn’t eat scones.”

  “Don’t say that too loudly,” said Matthew. “It’s exactly the sort of thing somebody might pick up on. No scones from now on, folks!”

  Elspeth laughed. “I suppose that scones do carry a bit of symbolism. They’re a rather…how should I put it? They’re rather a polite food. Bourgeois? Lace doilies? Edinburgh?”

  “They’re definitely Edinburgh,” agreed Matthew. “And yet…if you go to a small town in Scotland, they’ll offer you a scone.”

  “They like scones in Crieff,” said Bruce suddenly. “Boy, do they like scones in Crieff.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of Crieff,” said Matthew. “I was thinking of smaller places—where they eat a lot of scones. Places like…”

  “Auchtermuchty?” suggested Elspeth.

  “Perhaps,” said Matthew. “Perhaps everywhere in Scotland is…is prone to scones. Maybe it’s just part of our inheritance.”

  “Isn’t Scotland sometimes called the Land of Cakes?” asked Clare. “I remember my father used to call it that. He was Scottish, you know—or, rather, his father was, which made him Scottish, he said, although he was born in Oz.”

  “And by the same token it makes you Scottish,” said Matthew.

  “So you won’t need to convert,” said Elspeth, laughing. “You won’t need to do anything else to become Scottish.”

  “Except accept our prejudices,” muttered Matthew. “Do you want me to list those?”

  Elspeth gave him a discouraging glance. She did not want Matthew to be misunderstood; he was proud of Scotland, but ashamed of it too. And that, she thought, was how it should be: one should be proud of one’s country but ashamed of it as well. “And anyway…Clare, Bruce told Matthew that you were looking for a part-time job.”

  Clare nodded. “Yup. Anything. Baking scones even.”

  “Hah!” said Bruce. “Très drôle.”

  Elspeth hesitated. “I’ve got these triplets, you see, and I used to have a couple of Danish girls…”

  “Good riddance,” interjected Bruce. “You should have seen them, babe…”

  Elspeth winced. Babe. What century was Bruce in? Babe!

  “Elspeth and I were wondering,” said Matthew, “whether you might…”

  Clare reached for another scone. “Do the job? Yes, no probs. I like kids—always have—even snotty little…”

  “She’s only joking,” said Bruce.

  Metaphorical Falls

  Stuart made his way up Howe Street, crossing the road at the corner of which Madame Doubtfire had once run her cat-infested shop, selling winter coats from deceased estates, reminding passers-by, should they need reminding, that she had “danced before the Czar.” Here the city’s palimpsest had faded, as it had in so many other places where lettering had lingered for so long that the claims of ancient outfitters, upholsterers, pen-makers, and whisky distillers seeped out of the stone. But neither Stuart’s eyes, nor mind, were on such matters as he began the short ascent leading to the blue door, with its polished brass Roman numerals, through which he had gone for the first time just a few weeks ago.

  A few weeks ago…so short a time, and yet for him those weeks constituted one of the great divides of his life, as significant as the first few days away from home when he had started at university. Days when, almost reeling at the possibilities, he had found himself master of his destiny, able to decide what to do with his time, what to eat for breakfast, what clothes to wear; freedom, in short, to live out his life as he wished to live it. Freedom, that state that is as easily obscured by a thousand tiny quotidian constraints as it is by the slamming of a prison door, or, in his case, perhaps, by the contours of an unfortunate domestic arrangement—to put it simply, and brutally, by his wife; by Irene, author and begetter of the Bertie Project, relentless advocate of the correct approach to everything, enforcer of an orthodoxy of Stalinist proportions…And yet she was still his wife, still the woman who made a home for him and his children, who loved those children fiercely even if Ulysses was profusely sick whenever she picked him up, who would defend him ferociously if he were ever to be assailed, who was the other party in the pronoun us he used when talking about so many things, who laundered his socks and shirts and merino-wool underwear, who did the shopping for sun-dried tomatoes and tagliatelle and Chianti at Valvona & Crolla, who sometimes, even if hardly ever, laughed at his jokes…

  In spite of all that, he had created a watershed in his life, an occasion that he would forever view as the point at which a new and important phase had started. And that had happened when he had slipped into Henderson’s for what he had thought would be a quick bite of lunch. Stuart only very occasionally ate out—Irene disagreed in principle with the idea of being served food by others, which she had labelled as irretrievably bourgeois—an attempt, in short, to recreate the conditions in which people were attended at table by servants. This meant that any sampling of restaurants had to be undertaken by Stuart as a solitary diner, in the eyes of some a slightly melancholic sight, although solitary diners may be quite happy, particularly if they are left to read the book or magazine they are trying to read and are not too often disturbed by over-attentive waiting staff asking them whether everything is all right.

  Henderson’s, a vegetarian restaurant even in the days when restaurants in Edinburgh were few and far between, and when those that were vegetarian were even rarer, had become an Edinburgh institution, ranking along with such well-known howffs as the Oxford Bar or the Café Royal. Stuart chose it for his lunch that day not just because he liked the atmosphere and food, or because it was widely appreciated for not being too expensive, but also because it was just round the corner from a one-day conference he was attending at the Royal College of Physicians on Queen Street. This was a conference on health statistics, and Stuart had been sent by his department to listen to a variety of papers on the incidence of several conditions, on cost/benefit figures, and mortality rates.

  He had enjoyed the morning sessions, but was less interested in the afternoon’s offerings, the highlight of which was to be a paper by a Belgian health statistician on the collection of data relating to accidental falls in the home. Stuart was not unsympathetic to
Belgians who suffered injury of this type, or indeed of any type, but he felt that it had little bearing on the work that he did for the Scottish Government. People were always falling over and hurting themselves—everybody knew that, and he was not sure whether information as to how often they fell off ladders or stools was going to change all that. Ladders, of course, could be made safer, but that was an issue for their manufacturers, who were all in China, and even if they made these as safe as they possibly could, there were always people who would use ladders inappropriately. Perhaps ladders should carry a warning, as so many other things now did: climbing a ladder can lead to a fall would perhaps be the wording, or use this ladder responsibly. That would give pause for thought, perhaps, to the reckless and troublesome minority determined to use ladders irresponsibly, and indeed to others, who might interpret such warnings more metaphorically. Falls awaited us, in such a view, even if we never used an actual ladder.

  And as for the Belgians, thought Stuart as he made his way towards Henderson’s, accidents in the home were surely the least of their problems. They had experienced great difficulty, had they not, in even establishing a government—any government, let alone one that would have the time or inclination to warn its citizens about the inappropriate use of ladders. And they were always bickering amongst themselves about where they belonged, whether they were French or vaguely Dutch; there were times when it must be so hard to be Belgian, thought Stuart; perhaps he should give their domestic accident issues a more attentive hearing than he was currently proposing to do.

  He reached Henderson’s. The restaurant was busy, and the staff were asking people to share tables; Stuart agreed, and was directed to a table at which a young woman was already sitting. As he placed his soup bowl on the table, he spilled a small amount on the front of his shirt, fumbled, and spilled a further small amount on the sleeve of his jacket.

  “Oh,” he said.

  “Poor you,” said the young woman opposite him. “Here, let me wipe it off for you.”