The Bertie Project

  She nodded quickly—too quickly, thought Matthew. “Aye, I’m no bad. Same as usual. Getting by.”

  Matthew looked at her sideways. She was definitely not all right, but he knew that he would have to handle things carefully. Big Lou was independent; she was strong. She had opened up on things in the past, but only in a self-controlled way, and self-pity, so enthusiastically indulged in by others, was anathema to her. It was something to do with being brought up on that farm…Matthew tried to remember its name. Snell Mains. Cold Farm in Scots. He gave an involuntary shiver. He could picture it, with the wind from the North Sea sweeping up over the coast and penetrating inland, seeking out farmhouses to whistle about, to chill…Snell Mains—what a thought!

  It was that man, he decided. There had been another man, as there always was. Poor Lou—she had terribly bad luck when it came to men. Every one of them was unsuitable in some way. There had been that ridiculous half-deluded plasterer, that Elvis impersonator, that farmer who turned out to be a complete miser…and now there was that doctor she had said something about—the one who had invited her to a medical fancy dress party and had suggested that she went dressed as Matron. Had something gone wrong with that too? A doctor sounded as if he might bring some stability, but perhaps not.

  He decided to raise the subject. “That fellow,” he began. “How’s…”

  Lou turned round. She shook her head. “No good, Matthew. No good.”

  “Oh Lou…”

  She looked at him, and he saw her disappointment. She looked away.

  “You don’t have to talk about it, Lou,” he said. “Not if you don’t want to.”

  She busied herself with making his cappuccino. “No, it’s all right, Matthew. I feel I can talk to you. I can’t talk to Angus about it, but I can to you.”

  “That’s fine, Lou. You can tell me. So things didn’t work out?”

  She pushed the cup of coffee towards him over the counter. “No, they didn’t,” she said. “Well, not quite as I hoped.”

  He took a sip of his coffee. “You said something about a party? A fancy dress party?”

  “Aye, it was in Fairmilehead. Somebody’s hoose there. Another doctor at the Infirmary.”

  Matthew tried to imagine it. He had not been to a fancy dress party for years—not since his first year at university, in fact, when he had gone to one in Tollcross dressed as Harlequin. It had been rather a flat occasion, as he remembered it, with too many people dressed as policemen or ballerinas.

  “I haven’t been to one of those for years,” he said. “It’s always struck me as being a bit…well, it’s not really my scene, Lou. Chacun à son goût, as they say.”

  “Oh, it was all right,” said Lou. “There was a lot to eat and drink and there were some nice folk there. There was a whole group that went dressed as characters from that film, you know, Casablanca. The one with Rick and that French policeman. There was a very good French policeman. He had the képi and everything.”

  “You went dressed as Matron, didn’t you?” said Matthew.

  “Yes. I found a place where you could hire outfits.”

  Matthew smiled. “So you ended up with one of those blue outfits with a watch pinned on upside down? And a sort of white cap?”

  Big Lou nodded. “People liked it,” she said. “They laughed. And he introduced me as the new matron of the Infirmary. He said, ‘Things are going to change round here, now that Matron’s back.’ ”

  “Your man? He said that?”

  “Yes.”

  Matthew took another sip of his coffee. “But…” he began.

  “No, there was nothing wrong with that party,” said Lou. “We had a good time. And he said he’d give me a call. He said he was on duty for the next few days—night duty—but he’d call when he was off.”

  Matthew sighed. So many people were waiting for telephone calls that never came. It was a common feature of the human tragedy. “And he didn’t?”

  “No, he did.” Lou paused. “And he asked me out to dinner.”

  Matthew held his breath. He was not sure that he wanted to hear what happened, but Lou appeared to want to continue the conversation.

  “It’s the way he asked,” she said quietly. “I couldnae, Matthew, I couldnae…” She broke off.

  “Lou, look, you don’t have to speak to me about this. You really don’t.”

  She shook her head. “No, I want to, Matthew. You see, he asked me whether I’d come to dinner with him, at his place, dressed as Matron…”

  Matthew gasped. “Oh, Lou, I’m so sorry…”

  “Aye, I said no. He’d gone on and on about bringing Matron back, but I wasn’t going to be involved in anything like that.”

  Matthew reached across the counter and took Lou’s hand. He held it briefly, patting it gently, in consolation.

  “Thanks, Matthew,” muttered Lou. “But look, I dinnae want to talk about my troubles. What about you? How are things with the triplets now you’ve got that Australian lassie helping Elspeth?”

  It was typical of Lou, thought Matthew. She was more concerned with how other people were getting along. She was strong.

  He let go of her hand. “Brilliantly, Lou,” he said. “Things are going brilliantly. That girl Clare is a real find.”

  “Tell me about her,” said Lou. “What’s she doing?”

  “All sorts of things, Lou,” said Matthew. “She’s amazing—really amazing.”

  Clare Takes Over

  Matthew had every reason to be pleased with Clare. When she arrived at Nine Mile Burn, Clare had found Elspeth in a state of near exhaustion, barely able to cope with the demands of the triplets, who were now at the early toddler stage and who were exploring their surroundings with all the enthusiasm and long-range ambition of tiny Marco Polos. Try as she might to confine them to her immediate purview, Fergus, Rognvald and Tobermory had other ideas; they were keen to try every avenue of escape. What they discovered within any particular room was merely a taster of what they imagined lay beyond; a door was an invitation and a challenge, a portal to unsampled delights that it was their manifest destiny to conquer. And when one of them went off in one direction, that was a signal to the others to make a beeline in the opposite direction—a technique that escapees have always used: you run that way and I’ll run this way—at least one of us will get away.

  Clare had been willing to move in straight away. She was tired of the Newington flat, with its dingy decoration and its half-hearted hot water system. She had been prepared to put up with discomfort on coming to Scotland, having been warned by her father that physical hardship was to be expected virtually anywhere outside Australia, but particularly in Scotland. “It’s cold over there, my girl,” he said. “But it’s worth it for a few months. It’s your heritage, you see. Put up with it for a few months. Remember: no pain, no gain!”

  The house at Nine Mile Burn appealed to her. It was far better appointed, there was plenty of hot water, and the kitchen was four or five times the size of what she had to make do with in Newington.

  “I’ll start right away,” she said to Elspeth on the day that she and Bruce came for afternoon tea. “Bruce will get my stuff—our stuff, rather. I’ll just stay. You OK with that, Brucey?”

  Had she been feeling less defeated, Elspeth might have taken exception to Clare’s assumption that the job was hers without further discussion. She would also have thought very carefully about the prospect of taking on both Clare and Bruce, since Clare had made it very obvious that Bruce would be sharing her room for at least some of the time. But Elspeth had no desire to deliberate; all that mattered to her was that the hole left by the departure of the two Danish girls should be plugged as soon as possible, and it seemed to her that Clare would do just that.

  So Elspeth said, “I’m OK with that too. In fact, I’m really grateful, Clare.”

  “Cool,” said Clare. “So that’s it.”

  The triplets had been having their afternoon rest when Clare and Bruce arrived; half a
n hour later there were the first signs of wakefulness from the nursery.

  “Company!” said Clare. “Sounds like we’ve got company!”

  “They’re sometimes a bit groggy when they first wake up,” said Elspeth. “And they’ll usually need changing.”

  “No probs,” said Clare, rising to her feet. “You stay here. I’ll handle this.” Turning to Matthew, she said, “You show me where all the gear is, Matthew. Nappies. Changing mats. Powder, etc., etc. Elspeth, you put your feet up.” Then to Bruce, “You go back to the flat and get my stuff, toot sweet. Pack all my clothes—the lot. And don’t forget my hairdryer—the Qantas one.”

  Elspeth closed her eyes. She was tired to the depths of her being. Her feet ached. Her scalp itched as it always did when she was sleep-deprived. She sat back in her chair and felt waves of sleep come over her. The scone she had been eating, half-finished on the plate she had been balancing on her knee, fell to the floor in crumbs. She did not notice.

  She slept for three hours, waking with a start and feeling the immediate grip of panic. Where were the boys? Had she left them somewhere? Where was Matthew?

  She remembered, and then she heard voices drifting in from the driveway outside. She went to the window: Clare was balancing on a bicycle, her feet down on either side, adjusting the strap of a cycle helmet. She was dressed in electric blue Lycra. Behind the bicycle, attached by a long yoke, was a small buggy, rather like a motorcycle side-car. Seated in the buggy, their faces just visible through its Perspex panels, were the boys.

  Elspeth opened the window.

  “Woken up?” shouted Clare. “You needed that sleep, I think.”

  Elspeth rubbed at her eyes. “Are they all right?” she asked.

  Clare smiled. “Look at them—they’re loving it. I’m just going to take them up that track there. See? It goes all the way up that hill.”

  “Will they be…?”

  “They’ll be fine. Don’t you worry. I’ll only be an hour or two.”

  She opened her mouth to protest. The boys would need their bath. They would be dehydrated if they did not get their water-beakers. You could not simply take toddlers up a hill track in a buggy, just like that…

  But it was too late to raise these objections. Clare had moved off and the buggy was bouncing along behind her. And now Matthew had appeared from the side of the house and was pointing at the buggy. “Did you see them?” he called out. “They’re in seventh heaven.”

  He came inside.

  “I’m not sure, Matthew,” said Elspeth. “She’s a bit…a bit extreme, isn’t she?”

  Matthew was cheerful. “Just go with the flow,” he said. “Australians are like that. They’re can-do people.”

  “But that track’s quite steep…”

  “She’s got brakes,” he said.

  “And Bruce?” she said. “Where’s Bruce?”

  “He went back into Edinburgh,” said Matthew. “He said he had things to do.”

  Elspeth looked at Matthew with concern. “I hope we haven’t made a mistake,” she said.

  Matthew was quick to reassure her. “Honestly, she’s great. She fixed up that buggy in two minutes. I’d left it in the garage because I couldn’t attach it. She did it with her eyes closed. Then she took them for a walk. She tied them together with a bit of string and took them down to the rhododendron bushes.”

  “Tied them together with string?”

  “So that they couldn’t wander off on their little legs. It really worked.” He paused. “And then she said something about making a flying fox for them tomorrow. She spotted some old fencing wire in the garage and she said she could rig that between that pine tree over there and the side of the garage. She said she’d make a sort of harness for them so they could slide down. I remember having one of those when I was a kid. I loved it.”

  Elspeth frowned. “What if they fall?”

  “You can’t wrap them up in cotton wool,” said Matthew.

  “Are we doing the right thing, Matthew? Is her judgement going to be all right? After all, if she thinks Bruce is…”

  He put a protective arm around her shoulder. “Of course we are. They’ll be fine. We’ll be fine. Everything will be fine.”

  In Moray Place

  The committee meeting of the Association of Scottish Nudists had been called by the Chairman and Secretary in order to address what the Secretary described as “one of the greatest crises in the Association’s history.” The Chairman thought this was something of an exaggeration, particularly in the light of the recent challenge to the committee’s authority coordinated—fermented, the Chairman said—by the Glasgow membership, but he agreed with the Secretary that the issue would need to be addressed just as soon as the committee members could meet.

  So it was that on a Wednesday evening all six members of the committee gathered in the Association’s headquarters in Moray Place, that fine example of classical Georgian architecture perched on the cliffs above the Water of Leith. The Association was fortunate in owning such handsome premises, particularly since the elegant double flat it occupied was on the side of Moray Place that looked over Lord Moray’s Pleasure Gardens and, in the distance, across the cold blue waters of the Firth of Forth, to the hills of Fife. It was a prospect to quicken the aesthetic pulse, especially in summer, when the canopies of the trees below were dark green and the sky above them was of that particular blue associated with clear, northern light.

  For the committee, though, there was little time to admire the view or engage in small talk; everybody present knew of the reason for the calling of the meeting and understood what was at stake. So rather than engage in chat over the tea and biscuits served by the Social Secretary, the committee members turned immediately to the sole item on the agenda: the World Naturist Federation’s conference.

  The Chairman set the scene. “As you know,” he said, “we put in a bid over eighteen months ago to hold the World Federation’s annual conference here in Edinburgh. The competition for that event is always considerable. We heard on good authority that there were bids from three other places—from Cairo, from Reykjavik, and from Stuttgart.”

  “And these were serious bids,” interjected the Secretary.

  “Yes,” said the Chairman. “The three bidders all put a lot of effort into their pitches. However, two of them were at a significant disadvantage: Cairo was too hot, Reykjavik was too cold, and Stuttgart…”

  “Would have been just right,” said one of the members. “Rather like the porridge in the story of Goldilocks and the three bares.”

  The Chairman frowned; what was this about bears? “No, Stuttgart would have been too expensive, as it happened. And so Edinburgh was preferred.”

  “I must admit I was a bit surprised,” said the Secretary. “The Association has a history of going for sunny places, although Cairo would have been far too sunny, I’m afraid. A large number of our members were really worried about sunburn—and quite rightly so, in my view.”

  “And arrests,” said one of the members. “They stipulated that delegates would have to be completely covered—or face arrest. Frankly, I can’t see the point of a naturist convention if you’re going to arrest people who aren’t entirely clothed.”

  “I must admit I had my doubts,” said the Chairman. “But it all remained hypothetical, anyway. Their application was not favoured by the Federation—whereas we were.”

  “In spite of our weather?”

  The Chairman nodded. “They asked for Scottish sunshine statistics and I was fortunately able to send them the figures from the island of Coll, which, as you know, gets more sun than anywhere else in Scotland. I felt quite justified in this in that they didn’t ask me for Edinburgh figures, they just said Scottish figures. So I gave them Coll’s.”

  “Well, it paid off,” said the Secretary. “But then…” He gave the Chairman a sad look.

  “And then,” said the Chairman, “things started to get difficult. As you know, we had approached the Dynamic Earth p
eople to hold the plenary sessions there, and they were perfectly agreeable to that. They said that they thought that it was highly appropriate to hold a naturist conference in a centre devoted to the natural sciences. I should have put two and two together, but, I’m sorry, I didn’t.”

  One of the members groaned. “They misread,” she said. “They thought we were talking about naturalists?”

  “I’m afraid so,” said the Chairman. “It’s a common mistake. And when they discovered it, they said they would have to withdraw their agreement. They said that they couldn’t take us as they had too many windows and members of the public who use their steps to sit and eat their lunch would be unprepared for what they might see.”

  “But what about curtains?” asked one of the members.

  “They have none,” said the Chairman. “They’re all glass.”

  Another member had a suggestion to make. “What about the International Conference Centre?”

  “We approached them,” said the Chairman. “They were very helpful—they always are. But then they said that during the summer their air-conditioning was set to a particular level and could not be changed. It would have been too cold for us—or so they said.”

  “Nobody wants us,” complained one of the members. “These days you can’t discriminate against people on all sorts of grounds, but then, when it comes to us, oh yes, you can discriminate like mad.”

  “I can understand how you feel,” said the Chairman. “It’s a matter of human rights and we need to be more assertive. But that’s a broader question—for the moment we are more concerned with our immediate problems—one of which is that even if we get a new venue for the plenary sessions, our major social event has run into trouble.”

  “You mean our Scottish country dancing event?” asked one of the members.

  “Yes,” said the Chairman. “That was going to be our principal entertainment—our showpiece, so to speak. We had booked the Ross Pavilion for an evening of Scottish country dancing. We were going to invite all the foreign delegates to join in. It was all set up.”