The Bertie Project

  Rhododendron Issues

  The garden of the house near Nine Mile Burn had proved more of a challenge to Matthew than he had anticipated. When he and Elspeth had moved in a month or two earlier with their three boys, Tobermory, Rognvald and Fergus—and, of course, with their Danish au pair, Anna, and the au pair’s au pair, the equally Danish Birgitte—they had imagined that the garden would require no more than the occasional mowing and perfunctory tidy-up. That was to underestimate grossly the enthusiasm of nature, and the effect of the copious rain that Scotland had received in the early months of that summer. Almost from the very day on which they moved in, Matthew had noticed the exuberant growth of shrubs he had barely seen when he first inspected the several acres attached to the house. He witnessed the advance of the rhododendrons so that they encroached on the drive; he saw the lawn become a denser green as the grass shot up; he saw patches of fireweed spread as if a paintbrush had carelessly daubed purple across the kitchen garden with all the subtlety of a graffiti artist. It was as if Nature herself were challenging him to assert his ownership of the plot of land for which he had paid so much. You may think you own the land, she said, but you reckon without me. On ne négocie pas avec Dame Nature, Matthew muttered.

  Surveying the grounds of the house with Elspeth shortly after their arrival, Matthew had wandered into an unexplored area behind the rhododendron bushes that lined the drive. No effort had been made to tame this part of the property, and he noticed that it was heavily colonised by smaller versions of the colourful bushes. These offshoots were smaller than their parent plants, but were clearly thriving and would soon be waist-height.

  “These are very pretty,” said Elspeth. “I’ve always loved rhododendrons, haven’t you?”

  Matthew thought for a moment. Had he a view on rhododendrons? It was possible, he imagined, to go through life without having a view on a large number of things—including rhododendrons—and not to feel that one was in any way evading some central and inescapable issue.

  “I haven’t really given the matter much thought,” he said. “I suppose I’ve noticed them—yes—but I’m not sure that I’ve responded to them.” As he spoke, he thought how much he sounded like a contemporary conceptual artist—such people were always going on about how we respond to things, usually to things that were utterly banal until the conceptual artist came along, marshalled them into a studio (or space, as such artists call their studios, and indeed all rooms and buildings, and flats too; a conceptual artist usually inhabits a space rather than a room or apartment).

  This was meant to be art, and we were meant to respond. If we did not respond, of course, that in itself would be considered a response. To do nothing, is to do something, wrote one contemporary exponent of this school of art. Not being is being. So even if we closed our eyes and said nothing about what we saw, that was every bit as much a response as if we were to make a specific and considered comment. There is no way, thought Matthew, of contesting the agenda of conceptual art: whatever one does, the artist has the last word—even to the extent of defining, in an entirely solipsistic way, the boundaries of art.

  “I really like them,” said Elspeth. “I like their colourfulness. We have some in Comrie that are a sort of purple—honestly, you’ve never seen a purple like it.”

  “They’re very colourful,” said Matthew. “I’ll give you that.”

  “And it looks as if this whole area here is going to be covered by them,” continued Elspeth. “Imagine what fun the boys will have playing in these bushes.”

  “They’re going to love it,” said Matthew. He spoke absently; he had remembered reading something in an old copy of Scottish Field about how rhododendrons were a problem in Scotland.

  “I think I read something about them,” he said. “I’d forgotten, but it’s coming back to me.” He paused. “Yes, it was all about non-native species. Rhododendrons come from…”

  “The Himalayas,” said Elspeth. “Yes, I know all about that. They were brought over by plant collectors in the nineteenth century.” She bent down and picked a leaf off one of the bushes. It was dark green, and had a waxy look to it. She held it in her hand and twirled it about on its stem. “And rhododendrons liked Scotland. The conditions are much the same as in the Himalayas.”

  “I wonder,” said Matthew, “what makes a species non-native.”

  “That’s quite complicated,” said Elspeth, dropping the leaf to the ground. “Obviously they have to come from somewhere else, but I don’t think it’s that simple.”

  “Because everything comes from somewhere else at some stage?”

  “Exactly. I think you have to look at things like distribution and how it fits in the ecological landscape.”

  “How it relates to other plants about it?” suggested Matthew.

  Elspeth reflected for a moment. “Yes. And to insects too. If a plant doesn’t have local bugs that like to sit on it or eat it or whatever, then it may be from somewhere else.”

  Matthew pointed to the house behind them. “We need to get back,” he said, glancing at his watch. “Remember, we’ve got the Duke coming for dinner.”

  They had bought the house from the Duke of Johannesburg, who had been letting it out for some years but who had eventually decided to put it on the market. He himself lived not far away, in Single-Malt House, and had been a kind and considerate neighbour since they had moved in, offering them the names of local tradesmen, sending them a consignment of green vegetables from his own kitchen garden, and generally taking a kindly interest in their settling into their new home.

  They, in turn, had come to appreciate his company. They had learned that he was not a genuine duke, not sensu stricto, even if he had a claim of sorts; yet this did not affect their attitude towards him. Indeed, if anything, it endeared him to them further; there was something vaguely raffish about the Duke, and the dubiety of his dynastic credentials simply added to this in a rather attractive way. He was a bit like one of those ubiquitous Russian princes who prop up the bars of Moscow—relics of an order that was as irrelevant as it was ancient, but, for the most part, now simply colourful. The Duke had recently experienced a bit of trouble with one of the Lord Lyon’s entourage, Marchmont Herald, but seemed to have emerged from this unscathed and had accepted their invitation with warmth and alacrity.

  “What a relief!” he said down the telephone. “I thought you were never going to ask me. What are we having, by the way?”

  Distressed Oatmeal

  There was every reason for the Duke of Johannesburg to look forward to a meal with Matthew and Elspeth—even a kitchen supper, which was what Elspeth had mentioned when she spoke to him on the phone. Since she had moved into the house near Nine Mile Burn, Elspeth’s reputation as a cook had spread widely, not only in Midlothian, but into East Lothian and Lanarkshire as well. Like many reputations, it had been inflated in the telling: a relatively simple meal cooked for a neighbour had quickly become a banquet; a plate of cheese scones, donated to the local church for its bring-and-buy sale, had been the object of lyrical praise in the church newsletter; even her marmalade, the result of an enthusiastic encounter with a sack of Seville oranges, was talked about in hushed tones by people who had never tasted it, nor seen it, but who knew somebody who had done both. Fairly quickly people had concluded that if there was one invitation to secure at all costs, it was to a dinner cooked by Elspeth and served by Matthew in their still-to-be-decorated dining room.

  “Frightfully shabby dining room,” it was remarked, “but so chic!”

  Shabbiness, in fact, was a highly sought-after quality in that part of the country. The problem was the influx of rather too many young couples from Edinburgh with money but no understanding of rural life. These people, mostly working in the city’s financial institutions, brought with them a demand for expensive fitted kitchens, hardwood conservatories, and gardens laid out by garden designers. Even if they did not initially understand that people who had lived in the country all their lives had none o
f these, they soon learned that a vaguely threadbare life, lived in rooms that were too large, too cold, and in need of paint, was much more fashionable than one lived in relative opulence. This resulted in complete reversals, all in pursuit of authenticity. Newly installed kitchens were replaced with old pine cupboards that did not close very well; compressed ash surfaces were replaced with rescued chopping blocks from ancient butcheries; and elegant Italian terra-cotta gave way to stone slabs worn down by generations of feet.

  Matthew, of course, twigged immediately, and successfully fought off Elspeth’s suggestions that they might redecorate the house, install modern central heating, and generally bring the house into the twentieth, if not the twenty-first century.

  “No,” he said. “It would be a big mistake. What’s the point of living in the country if you’re going to bring all your baggage from town? People will laugh at us. Far better to keep the place as it is.”

  Matthew himself fitted perfectly into his new surroundings. Elspeth had thrown out a lot of his clothes since their marriage, passing on tweed jackets, corduroy trousers and old jerseys to a charity shop in Morningside Road, but she had not managed to get rid of everything and Matthew was still in possession of several distressed-oatmeal sweaters as well as a couple of pairs of trousers in a colour that had been identified as mitigated-beige. Sharper-eyed neighbours had noticed this, and there had been positive comments on the shabbiness of his wardrobe and its suitability for the country.

  “He ticks all the right boxes,” said one hostess. “Nothing crushed strawberry about him.”

  Elspeth’s reputation as a cook was not entirely undeserved, even if it had been somewhat exaggerated. She had been taught to cook by her mother, Flora Harmony, who had in fact been a domestic science teacher, as they were called before the invention of home economics. Flora, who had been Flora McGillvray from Falkirk before she met and married Jim Harmony, had studied at what had been the Edinburgh College of Domestic Science at Atholl Crescent, known affectionately as the Dough School. It was not surprising then that Elspeth should have developed an interest in cooking, and had even succeeded in getting into the final rounds of a televised national young chef competition. Nor was it surprising that she should have started, at the age of eight, a recipe book of her own, Mummy’s Recipes, in which she wrote, in copperplate, recipes learned from her mother or painstakingly cut out from the pages of the Weekend Scotsman and pasted in under such titles as Really Good Cheese Straws or Mrs. Thompson’s (Old Bag) Lamb Ragout or Betty’s Aunty’s Thick Strawberry Jam.

  That book had accompanied Elspeth into her marriage and, although dog-eared and greasy from frequent consultation in the kitchen, was still being added to. Now it occupied pride of place on the kitchen shelf in the Nine Mile Burn House, where it stood alongside various publications left behind by the Duke: an ancient Mrs. Beeton’s Household Management, a much newer copy of Even Men Can Cook, and the Scottish Gas Board’s What To Do When You Smell Gas.

  “Do something from Mummy’s Recipes,” Matthew had suggested. “I should imagine that the Duke likes comfort food.”

  “I’ll do the first course from Mummy’s Recipes,” she said. “But the second course is going to be something suitable for sous-vide.”

  Matthew licked his lips. “You can’t go wrong with that.”

  “Well, actually you can,” said Elspeth. “Remember that risotto you tried to make in the sous-vide machine?”

  Matthew defended himself. “That was not my fault. It was Birgitte’s recipe. She gave it to me.”

  Elspeth sighed. “She thinks she knows everything,” she said. “She was lecturing me about how to get red wine stains off a carpet the other day. She spoke to me as if I were six.”

  Matthew made a face. “What are we going to do about her?” He hesitated. “Shall we ask her to leave?”

  Elspeth had been hoping he was going to say this. “We could buy her a ticket back to Copenhagen.”

  “But she said she didn’t want to go. Remember? She said that she liked Scotland so much she was going to stay indefinitely.” He paused, before continuing, “What if she met a Scotsman? What if he asked her to marry him?”

  Elspeth looked doubtful. “Would she be interested in a Scotsman?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you may have noticed that she and Anna get on very well. They tend to spend rather a lot of time in Anna’s room.”

  Matthew frowned. “But they’re talking Danish,” he said. “I’ve heard them.”

  Elspeth shrugged. “Maybe,” she said.

  She looked at Matthew. She loved him. She even loved his distressed-oatmeal sweaters and mitigated-beige trousers. She loved his innocence.

  The Rescue of Hollandaise Sauce

  Matthew saw the Duke’s car as it turned off the main road onto the track leading to their house. Standing out on the untended lawn, he watched as the car disappeared behind the bulk of the rhododendrons to emerge a minute or two later on the other side. Seeing the Duke, not at the wheel, but seated in the back, he remembered that his guest had once muttered something about having a driver.

  “I hope I’m not late,” said the Duke, as he stepped out of the car. “My watch has got a loose spring somewhere in the works and it’s a terrible business keeping it regular.”

  Matthew reassured him. “You’re absolutely punctual. On the nose.”

  The Duke seemed pleased. “Good. I can’t be doing with this business of arriving ten minutes late or whatever. What’s the point? Tell people the time you expect them to arrive and that’s it. If you want them to come ten minutes later, then adjust accordingly. Tell them.”

  “My thoughts exactly,” said Matthew.

  The Duke bent down to say something to his driver and then turned to Matthew. “I don’t believe you’ve met my driver. This is Padruig.”

  Matthew shook hands with the driver through the open window of the car.

  “Padruig’s actually a stockman,” the Duke explained. “He does some driving for me from time to time, but his real job is to look after my neighbour’s cows.”

  Matthew smiled at Padruig. “The cows I see when I drive in to Edinburgh? Those cows?”

  Padruig, a powerfully built man with sandy-coloured hair, nodded, almost regretfully, Matthew thought. When he spoke, it was with the unmistakeable lilt of the Western Isles.

  “The cows are in the field,” he said. “They are in the long grass. They are eating the grass.”

  Matthew was immediately captivated; it was as if poetry were being recited. The cows are in the field. They are in the long grass…

  “After all this rain,” said Matthew, “the grass will be long, won’t it?”

  Padruig nodded. “The rain has been falling,” he said.

  Again, it was poetry.

  “Like tears,” Matthew found himself saying. “The rain is like tears.”

  The Duke tapped the top of the car. “Padruig has to be on his way,” he said. “What time should he come back, Matthew?”

  It was Padruig who answered. “I shall come back whenever you are ready. I shall not be away. I shall be here.”

  “Ten o’clock, then,” said the Duke, glancing at Matthew for confirmation.

  They both watched as Padruig reversed the car and drove slowly back down the drive towards the rhododendrons.

  “A fine man,” said the Duke. “He likes to drive, and it suits me to get the occasional lift. In return I let him have use of the car whenever he needs it. He goes up to Pitlochry from time to time—I think he has a girlfriend there. Suits everybody.”

  “It’s a lovely car,” said Matthew. “What make is it?”

  The Duke shook his head. “No idea. There’s no name on it, which is strange, but I’ve looked. Padruig looked too—he said that he thought it might be a Jaguar, but then he decided it wasn’t. The mechanic at the garage couldn’t tell me either. He said he’d never seen a car like it, and perhaps it was homemade, but it must be very difficult to mak
e a car.” He paused. “I bought it from a chap I met at Haymarket Station. Paid quite a bit for it.”

  Matthew saw the Duke’s car turning onto the main road and heading back towards town. In the distance, the evening sun caught the side of the car, and it flashed back a signal to them, a glint of light.

  Matthew turned to the Duke. “He has a nice way of speaking,” he said.

  “Padruig?”

  “Yes. I like the West Highland accent.”

  The Duke nodded. “He’s a Gaelic speaker, of course. He goes off from time to time to speak Gaelic. My neighbour says that sometimes he’s away for a few days, and when he comes back he simply says he’s been speaking Gaelic.”

  “Odd…”

  The Duke nodded. “Yes, and did you notice the words? He seems to speak poetry.”

  “That’s just what I thought,” said Matthew. He gestured towards the front door. “Shall we?”

  The Duke smiled. “That’s what I came for,” he said. “Dinner.”

  They went into the kitchen, where Elspeth was preparing the meal. The Duke kissed her on both cheeks, sniffed at the air, and then said, “Oh my goodness, what a treat.”

  Elspeth had been using a whisk in a bowl. She laid down the whisk. “Disaster,” she said. “My hollandaise sauce…”

  The Duke peered into the bowl. “Curdled,” he said.

  Elspeth sighed. “I know. I’ll have to start again.”

  “No,” said the Duke. “That won’t be necessary.” He removed his jacket. “Get another bowl.”

  Matthew watched bemused as the Duke took control.

  “White wine?” asked the Duke.

  “If that’s what you want,” said Matthew. “But I can give you a whisky, if you prefer.”

  The Duke laughed. “No, not for me—for the sauce. A spot of white wine in the bowl.”

  Matthew found an opened bottle in the fridge, and passed it to the Duke, who poured a small amount into the clean bowl.

  “Now,” said the Duke. “This is what you do. First you pour some white wine into your fresh bowl—like that—then you spoon in the curdled sauce—gently, comme ça. Mix it into the wine and then add another spoonful. See?”