The Bertie Project

  “Yes, yes, Angus. If you must make me something, then tea will do, thank you.”

  “No sooner said than done. The pot has recently been filled and is ready for pouring. Such serendipity…”

  They went into the kitchen. “Sit ye doon,” said Angus.

  Irene overcame her irritation. Sit ye doon indeed! “We’re not in Brigadoon, Angus.”

  “On the contrary,” said Angus, “Brigadoon is in us.”

  “I don’t have time for any of that, Angus. I wanted you to look at a poem.” She handed him the piece of paper.

  “You wrote this?” asked Angus.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she snapped. “You know I don’t write poetry.”

  “But people change,” said Angus. “Those who once didn’t now do, and that applies to so many things, not just to poetry.” He paused. “We have stages in our lives, Irene. When I was a young man I did hardly any figurative painting, you know. I loved landscapes. I loved those Gillies landscapes—you know, those pictures he did of the hills down near Temple and places like that. Those gorgeous hills—so lovely before they ruined them by putting great wind turbines all over them.” He paused again. “They’re ruining our country, you know. They’re defacing Scotland with those great ugly structures. They’d never let people build tall buildings all over the hills and yet they let them erect those things. Our heartbreakingly beautiful country, our Scotland, defaced, ruined, brutalised by giant pieces of white metal. Have you ever encountered such vandalism, Irene?”

  She glared at him, and he returned to the poem.

  “Rime,” he said. “That’s a word I love. Rime, not rhyme with an h and a y, of course. Trees with rime. It outlines them so well.”

  She brushed this aside. “Did you write that poem, Angus?”

  He shook his head. “No, I didn’t.”

  “Do you recognise it, then? Do you know where it comes from?”

  “From the heart, I’d say.”

  Clare’s Proposal

  Out at Nine Mile Burn, Elspeth’s anxiety over the suitability of Clare as a replacement for the Danish au pairs had been largely, if not completely, assuaged. Her new helper was prepared to do anything, willingly tackling tasks that the young Danes had dismissed as “not the work of an au pair.” So Clare cheerfully drove off to do the household shopping at Straiton, returning with a carful of bulk items—twenty-four cans of tinned tomatoes, thirty-eight rolls of kitchen roll, six packs of Pringle socks for Matthew, and so on. Nor was she above the cleaning out of blocked drains—a task she tackled with a vigour and efficiency that astonished Elspeth.

  “I love shoving rods up drains,” she said. “It reminds me of when I worked as a cabin attendant.”

  Elspeth could not imagine the link, but did not enquire.

  And when it came to dealing with the boys, the fact that they were triplets seemed to be a bonus rather than a burden. She had worked out a technique of bathing all three at once—single-handed—and could even change two of them into their pyjamas at the same time, adjusting and buttoning with one hand while pulling and pushing with the other.

  Clare’s programme of outdoor activity for the boys had initially caused Elspeth some concern, but after a week or two she became quite used to it. The flying fox that Clare had constructed, running from a corner of the garage to a distant pine tree, had alarmed both Elspeth and Matthew at first, but they had been assured by Clare that the harness she had constructed out of an old car seat belt was more than strong enough and that fence wire of that sort rarely, if ever, broke. “Mind you,” Clare said, “we had an incident in Fremantle not that long ago when a flying fox broke while somebody was using it. Maybe I shouldn’t tell you about it.”

  “Maybe not,” said Elspeth.

  “It was very old wire,” said Clare. “That came out at the inquest.”

  There were other physical challenges for the boys. Clare had managed to get hold of a trampoline, and the triplets, although only just able to walk, were already being taught to do somersaults.

  “It’s perfectly safe as long as they don’t bounce right off the trampoline,” said Clare. “That gets messy, I can tell you.”

  Apart from momentary alarm at these asides, Elspeth quickly became used to Clare’s presence and even stopped resenting Bruce’s tendency, when visiting her, to sit on the kitchen table and expostulate on issues of the day. And when Clare asked at the end of two weeks whether she could take two days off to go up to Skye with Bruce, Elspeth readily agreed. She had now recovered her strength, and the prospect of looking after the triplets single-handed, or with Matthew’s help in the evenings, no longer filled her with dread.

  The purpose of Clare’s trip to Skye was to introduce Bruce to para-mountain-biking, the new extreme sport that Clare had recently take up, although she was yet to do it on mountains or hills of any size. She had her own equipment and had managed to hire a wing, bicycle, and harness for Bruce from Extremities, an extreme sports shop in Leith. This rental wing had a small label that read To be returned by the renter or his/her executor to Extremities, Salamander Street, Leith.

  Clare seated Bruce down in front of her computer and showed him several videos of para-mountain-bikers practising their sport in Switzerland and Colorado. They made it seem effortless: on their mountain bikes they cycled with complete ease, their gossamer-thin wings above them, and then, suddenly but gracefully, the land fell away beneath them: they had cycled over the edge of a precipice. Up they soared, caught in the invisible hands of a supporting updraught, suspended from the wing together with their mountain bike, to the saddle of which they were strapped, with the wheels still spinning beneath them.

  “You see,” said Clare. “You see, Bruce, how easy is that?”

  “Quite difficult,” said Bruce.

  Clare leaned over and very gently licked the tip of his nose.

  “You’ll have no difficulty,” she encouraged. “It’s dead simple.”

  “How do I land?” asked Bruce.

  “On your wheels,” she said. “Bring yourself down as if you’re landing a plane. Start pedalling the moment you hit the ground, and you’re off. I think the next video shows you how to do that.”

  They travelled up in a white van that Clare had rented for the trip. This had room in the back for the mountain bikes, the folded wings, and the various other bits of equipment needed for the sport. On the drive up, Clare played Joan Baez discs and sang along with them.

  “My dad liked her voice,” she said. “I know she’s ancient, but she had this special voice, you see, and all the songs get me here.” She put the palm of her hand against her chest. “Right here.”

  They stopped at Tyndrum, and then again, briefly, at Fort William. Thereafter a winding Highland road took them to Mallaig and eventually to the ferry that crossed to the Sleat peninsula. It was a long drive from there to Trotternish Ridge, in the north of the island, and there was no time that evening to do their first para-mountain-biking flight.

  “We’ll start tomorrow,” said Clare. “Oh, Brucey, we’re here! I can hardly believe it—we’re on Skye and we’re about to para-mountain-bike!”

  Bruce was silent. He looked up at the beginning of Trotternish Ridge. He had never understood why mountains seemed to bring out in people an urge to ascend them or, in some cases, to cast oneself off them. Was life so devoid of challenges at sea level, so to speak?

  In his arms that night, Clare whispered to Bruce, “I’ve decided.”

  He was sleepy. “What have you decided?”

  “To marry you.”

  Bruce’s eyes, until then half-closed in somnolence, opened wide. “Marry? Me?” The two question marks hung in the air, splitting the question into two quite separate issues.

  “Yes, darling, darling boy, marry—as in get married. And you, as in Bruce.”

  Para-mountain-biking on Skye

  Breakfast in the excellent Ceòl na Mara Guesthouse on Skye was exactly what the Scottish Tourist Board, now rebranded as Visi
tScotland (where visit may be a noun or a verb, and Scotland may be a proper noun or, mirabile dictu, an adjective) would have wanted, in its heart of hearts, the proprietors of all bed and breakfast establishments to offer: a generous, unstinting meal, sufficiently nourishing to set up the visitor for a day of tramping the hills, fishing the rivers, or simply walking about in swirling mists wondering how to get home. That morning Bruce and Clare sat down to generous bowls of real oatmeal porridge topped with cream, followed by plates of eggs, bacon, mushroom, and tomato; no continental breakfast this, but a hearty meal that might well have sprung from the pages of Marian McNeill’s Book of Breakfasts.

  Bruce had woken earlier than Clare, and had got out of bed, opened the curtains, and gazed out on the distant shape of the ridge from which they were planning to para-mountain-bike under the eye of a local instructor. It was a clear day, and at that latitude the sun had already been up for some time, covering the island landscape with a soft, diluted gold. He raised his eyes to the sky, a pale, singing blue, across which, as he looked, a tiny line of white traced its way westwards—the vapour trail of a jet heading over the islands for America or Canada. He thought of the passengers inside their fragile metal tube, looking down, perhaps, on the curved field of blue that was the sea and the ragged little chunks of earth and rock that were the Hebrides, and on the great wind turbines, visible even from that height, that covered the once-beautiful land. And he thought of freedom, and of loneliness, and of how he found himself poised between the two.

  And then he thought: why should women not propose? Why should they wait to be asked, even now, when women had dealt with so much of the inequality of the past—when they no longer expected men to open doors for them or offer them seats or do any of the things that men used to do; when men could no longer condescend to women and expect to get away with it; why should so many women still imagine that they had to be asked to marry somebody, and why should men be surprised when the question was put to them rather than by them?

  Nothing about that was said at breakfast until Bruce had buttered his last slice of toast and spread it with thick-cut Dundee marmalade. Then, staring at the toast, he began, “Last night, you said…”

  She reached for the teapot. “I used to drink gallons of tea at breakfast back in Perth. In the hot weather, you know, tea seems to make you feel cooler. Why do you think that is, Bruce? You’d think that swallowing hot liquid would heat you up rather than cool you down.”

  Bruce shrugged. “No idea,” he said. “But going back to last night, you said something about…” He hesitated. It was the word over which so many single men hesitated. “About marriage.”

  Clare poured herself a cup of tea. “Yes, I did. I said that…Could you pass the milk, Bruce? You know, I used to take tea without milk, but only for about six months or so. Then I went back to taking milk again.”

  “You said…”

  She cut him short. “Yes, I said that I’d decided to marry you. And I had—or have, should I say. I assume you’re cool with that.” She looked at him now, and he lowered his eyes. “I mean, everything you’ve said or done made me think that we were an item. Right?”

  He was quick to reply. “Of course we’re an item. We’ve been living together, sort of, haven’t we?”

  “Well that settles that,” said Clare. “I don’t want to get married tomorrow, but maybe in a couple of months. We could go somewhere, or just do it at a register office. I don’t mind. I suppose my folks will want to come over from Australia, or…” She broke off as if to consider a new possibility. “Actually, we could do it out there. Or in Thailand maybe—lots of Aussies get married in Thailand. You can have one of those Thai beach weddings where this guy in military uniform comes with the papers and you sign everything and that’s you. I went to one once in Phuket, and it was really cool. We had the best man and his boyfriend at our table and he was this chef from Sydney, see, who was on the television a lot and…”

  That was breakfast; now they were at the beginning of the ridge, having met the local extreme sports instructor who had transported them and their equipment to the starting point.

  “You done this much before?” the instructor asked Bruce as he helped strap him onto the bike.

  Bruce shook his head.

  “Dead simple,” said the instructor. “No worries. Keep the front wheel straight—if it goes over to the side your balance can be disturbed. Enjoy.”

  Clare was ready. “OK, Bruce, let’s set off together. See that track? We go down there and then it gets to the edge. That’s lift-off point—make sure you get your canopy full before you reach it. OK?”

  She did not wait for an answer. The wind had come up, and it was in the ideal direction, floating their canopies gracefully above their heads.

  “Now!” shouted Clare.

  And Bruce followed her. The instructor shouted something, but Bruce didn’t hear what it was. It was something about the wind, but it was the wind that swallowed the words.

  He picked up speed, feeling the tugging of the canopy above him. This made the mountain bike seem light; it was almost as if it wanted to detach itself from the ground beneath him. The path was rocky, but the bike seemed to bounce over the rocks rather than jar against them. And then, far too quickly, he reached the edge and the ground suddenly disappeared. Beneath him now was no immediate earth but heather and green and expanses of distant rock.

  Bruce glanced about him. There was no sign of Clare. He looked up, but became dizzy because all he saw was blue.

  Why did I agree to do this? he asked himself. Why did I let it all end like this?

  The wind seemed to catch the canopy. They were only meant to travel a few hundred yards, mere feet above the ground, Clare had said—that was the point about para-mountain-biking—it was like kite-surfing: you were meant to hop briefly and then come down to land again. But the wind now embraced Bruce, took him in its arms, and was carrying him skywards.

  He closed his eyes. He thought of his mother. He thought of Crieff.

  Freedom Come All Ye

  Stuart finished early at work that day, having told Irene that he would again be late. He knew that she was going to her Melanie Klein Book Group at four in the afternoon; he knew, too, that Ulysses was going to Stuart’s mother in Northumberland Street; and that Bertie was to be spending the afternoon and early evening at Ranald Braveheart Macpherson’s house in Church Hill. That meant that he would be able to drop into Scotland Street, shower and change, and then go off to meet Katie in the St. Vincent Bar. He had thought of meeting her in the Cumberland Bar, but had ruled that out on the grounds that he was known there, and his being in the company of Katie could give rise to gossip.

  He unlocked the door of the flat and entered jauntily, humming Hamish Henderson’s Freedom Come All Ye. It was a song that he had always loved, right from that electric moment when as a young man he had heard the poet himself singing it in Sandy Bell’s bar in Forrest Road, and the bar had fallen silent, knowing it was witnessing something quite out of the ordinary, some fragile line of experience and feeling going back to the Spanish Civil War and to Cyrenaica.

  But he got no further than a few bars into the tune, for it was then that he realised that he was not alone and that for some reason Irene was there.

  He stood quite still, his rapid heartbeat sounding in his ears, the back of his neck suddenly intensely warm.

  “Stuart?”

  She came out of the kitchen, and he knew immediately from her expression that his world was about to end. There was no room for optimism; there was no room for evasion, for explanations. Like a truant caught lurking in his hiding place, the light of authority shone upon him quite mercilessly.

  “You said you were working late,” challenged Irene. “You said you’d be back after nine.”

  “Ah…” said Stuart. And then his mouth stayed resolutely closed. His jaw, it seemed to him, had frozen—locked in a muscular spasm caused by intense fear. But then, after a few moments, it loosened, an
d he said, “But you were going to your Melanie Klein…”

  She cut him off. “Let’s leave me out of this,” she said icily. “What happened at the office?”

  He shrugged. “The minister…”

  Again he could not finish. “Don’t bother to lie, Stuart.”

  He caught his breath. “I wasn’t…”

  “Perhaps you came back to read poetry,” said Irene.

  For a moment he struggled to understand; he had forgotten about the poem, but now Irene, like a prosecutor producing a piece of damning evidence at a trial, reached into the pocket of her blouse and took out the piece of paper she had found in his jacket. She waved this at him, and he saw, and recognised, the handwriting. He felt giddy. He was going to collapse. He was going to die.

  “I was given that by somebody,” he said. “It’s just a poem. Nothing important.”

  He looked down as he spoke. He felt that he was denying poetry itself, that he was saying that it did not matter; it was a small treason, a small and grubby betrayal of all that really mattered, just because he was frightened of this woman to whom he was married; yes, he was frightened of her; he lived in fear, and would lie and deny and do anything rather than face the gross inequality in their relationship.

  He took a deep breath. “I’ve had it,” he muttered. “I’ve had it up to here.”

  She was staring at him, her eyes fixed on his. Her voice was low and steely. “I shall pretend that I didn’t hear that, Stuart. And I shall pretend that I never found these pathetic lines of so-called poetry. And you, in turn, will forget that you ever met the pathetic girl who wrote it. You will forget her, Stuart. You will not think of her, speak to her, see her, let alone sleep with her. She’s over, Stuart—she’s completely over. She is erased.”

  From somewhere deep within him, he summoned such resistance as he could muster. It was not much, but it enabled him to issue the challenge: “And if I don’t? Can you make me? I don’t think you can, Irene.”