Bertie Plays the Blues

  Akela looked at Olive. “It might be private, Olive,” she said.

  “Yes,” said Tofu. “You can’t stick your nose into everything, Olive.”

  “Now, then, Tofu,” said Akela. “There’s no call to speak in quite that way. But Tofu does have a point, Olive.” She turned to Bertie. “You do know, Bertie, that it’s rude to whisper or pass notes when other people are around. You do know that, don’t you?”

  Bertie nodded. “It’s not an important note, Akela.”

  “Well, we’ll leave it at that,” said Akela. “Come now, boys and girls, time for Kim’s Game!”

  Bertie, relieved at this turn of events, glanced at the contents of the note. Ranald had written an address, followed by a telephone number.

  “I’ll come with you, Bertie,” whispered Ranald. “I’ve found out the combination to my dad’s safe, so I can get the money for the train tickets from there. That place is in Glasgow. We’ll go together.”

  Bertie nodded. “When?”

  “Tomorrow,” said Ranald. “We’ll miss school and go tomorrow.”

  “Great,” said Bertie. “But don’t tell anybody.”

  “Cross my heart,” said Ranald Braveheart Macpherson.

  Olive was watching. They were up to something, she thought. You could always tell with boys. They were always up to something, as all girls knew – deep in their hearts, they knew it.

  51. Domenica’s Visitor

  When he arrived at Antonia’s door, Magnus Campbell had the look of a guest who was unlikely to outstay his welcome. Guests who arrive at the head of a camel-train of luggage cause a momentary sinking of the heart: Are they planning to stay for weeks; or months perhaps; or even years? Are they planning to move in permanently? That has been known to happen; some guests have married their hosts, or their host’s sons or daughters, and never gone away again. That is rare, but it has happened. It is also very impolite. Any etiquette book will advise against making any form of romantic or sexual advance towards the people with whom you are staying, especially shortly after your arrival. It is not a question of bourgeois inhibition: it is definitely rude. It is also slightly bad form for the soldiers of occupying forces to marry local women during the course of the military occupation. This can be a problem in those countries where the men are so clearly undesirable that local women will marry anybody, even invading forces, rather than marry one of their compatriots.

  Of course, people also change their plans and stay rather longer than they intended. There is a curious phenomenon, more or less restricted to Scotland, of football supporters going to an away match in a foreign country and never returning. This has happened a great deal in Spain, where there are thought to be several thousand Scottish football supporters who have lived there for years after following Scotland’s football team to a match in Madrid or Barcelona, or some such place. These men marry Spanish women the day after the match, or sometimes on the day itself, and are immediately assumed into rambling Spanish families, to which they contribute the genes for red hair and a fondness for alcohol. Many of these men retain a vague memory of having come from somewhere else, and will occasionally refer, with a certain degree of nostalgic longing, to a dear, green place somewhere to the north, but that recollection will in due course fade.

  Magnus Campbell’s intention not to stay too long was made evident by the size of his case – a smallish weekend bag into which not much more than a single change of clothes might be packed. With this modest holdall in his hands, he peered at the notice that Domenica had pinned to Antonia’s door. Hesitating for barely a moment, he turned round and crossed the landing to press the neighbouring doorbell. Domenica, who had heard his footsteps on the stair, stood well back in her hall: one never knew when people might take it upon themselves to peer through the letterbox and it would never do to be found standing on the other side in anticipation.

  She counted to five before she moved forward to open the door. And then, with trembling hand it was done; the door was opened to the man she had loved so intensely – so giddily – all those years ago.

  There was no doubt but that Magnus Campbell realised who she was. There was a split second – not much more than that – as his mind went through the process of recognition; a split second during which his expression moved from surprise to pleasure.

  “Domenica!”

  She smiled at him coyly. She was nineteen again. “I hope this isn’t too much of a shock.”

  He shook his head. “A shock? Not at all …” He put down his bag and in a single movement, one that seemed utterly natural and appropriate, he leant forward to embrace and kiss her on both cheeks.

  She felt his hands upon her shoulders, and she shivered. I hope he didn’t feel that. She pulled herself together. “Come in. Don’t stand there. Antonia’s …”

  He looked at her anxiously. “Antonia’s all right, I take it?”

  Domenica reassured him. “She’s absolutely all right. Very all right, if that makes sense.”

  He looked relieved. “I wondered. She hadn’t replied to my card and it crossed my mind that …”

  “One always thinks the worst. But no, Antonia is perfectly fine.” She added, “Now.”

  Magnus frowned. “She’s been ill?”

  Domenica nodded.

  “Nothing serious, I hope.”

  Domenica hesitated. She was not sure if Antonia would want everybody to know about her condition, but Magnus must be a reasonably close friend of hers if he was coming to stay. “Stendhal Syndrome,” she said.

  His hand went to his mouth. “Oh no …”

  “But she’s made a good recovery,” Domenica went on. “And now she’s … well, she’s in a nunnery.”

  Magnus stared at her. “Permanently?”

  “I believe so.” Domenica gestured for him to follow her into the kitchen, where she had prepared a cafetière of coffee. “Leave your bag in the hall,” she said. “I’ll unlock Antonia’s place in a moment. Coffee?”

  He accepted, and they sat down at the scrubbed pine table. Domenica took the opportunity to glance at Magnus appraisingly. He had not changed a great deal, or not so much that she would have failed to recognise him. If anything, she thought, he is more handsome. The years had added dignity, she decided, and that curious, almost undefinable quality – gravitas. It became him.

  He was looking at her too, and smiling. “This is extraordinary,” he mused. “That you and Antonia should live next door to one another. Two of my oldest friends.”

  I’m more than that, thought Domenica. Or am I? The status of a former lover may be complicated; some former lovers might be enemies, others could be friends, but, if they were friends, they were surely a special class of friends. And how long, she wondered, did friends remain friends if they barely saw one another for years? Was friendship something that lasted forever, as family relationships do, or could it wither on the vine?

  She looked at his hands. The skin was brown, and smooth. They were not the hands of one who spent all his time indoors, she thought; and yet he worked in the City of London … London hands. It was a strange notion; hands that took on the characteristics of the place they lived.

  He noticed the direction of her glance. “I’ve caught the sun.”

  She looked away guiltily.

  “I’m not in London any more,” he said. “I go there, of course, from time to time. Last week, in fact. But I’m back in Scotland now.”

  “Good.” The word came out without her thinking about it.

  He smiled. “And it’s good that you’re here too.”

  She caught her breath. They understood one another perfectly.

  52. What About You?

  Domenica poured a cup of coffee for Magnus Campbell and passed it to him across the table.

  “So,” she said, trying to sound as matter-of-fact as she could. “So you’ve finished with London?”

  He reached out for the coffee. “Thank you. Yes, I did twenty years there. It all went … well, I suppose
I have to say it went rather well.”

  “You don’t need to apologise for that.”

  He blew across the steaming surface of his coffee. “Don’t I? I suppose not. It’s just that doing well in the financial world is regarded as somewhat suspect these days, isn’t it?”

  “Possibly,” said Domenica. “But not always.”

  “Some people think it’s little better than being a confidence trickster.” He saw her expression of amusement. “They do, you know. I had somebody spit on me in the street once.”

  “Actually spit?”

  “Yes. There was some sort of demonstration in London and I happened to be walking past. A young man came up to me and spat at me. It smelled of tobacco.”

  Domenica wrinkled her nose in disgust. “Why did he pick on you?”

  “The clothes I was wearing, I suppose. A suit. The City. He put two and two together.”

  “How unpleasant.”

  Magnus nodded. “It was. Though curiously enough, I didn’t feel any anger towards him. I found myself imagining what I might have felt had I been in his position.”

  “How tolerant of you.”

  “Not really. It’s a simple expedient, I think. Put yourself in the shoes of another and an awful lot makes sense. There he was with no money – I assume that he had no money. Living off others effectively – as a student, perhaps, or on benefits.”

  Domenica raised an eyebrow. To describe somebody else as living off others was extreme. Not everybody can work, she found herself thinking, and what did bankers or financiers do but live off the efforts of others?

  Magnus smiled. “Don’t draw the wrong conclusions,” he said. “I don’t use the expression living off others pejoratively. But it is a reality, isn’t it? Lots of people live on the charity of others and do you know what they feel about it? Not gratitude, I can assure you. They feel hostility.”

  She was not sure about that. Living in India, as Domenica had done, taught one something about charity and giving. “I don’t know,” she said. “In India there are millions of people who survive on the gifts of others. It’s quite normal, and they don’t resent it.”

  Magnus thought for a moment. “India? Of course you lived there, didn’t you? You were married – I’d forgotten that.”

  “I was. I was Mrs. Varghese, for a time. We lived in the south, in Kerala. That’s where his family came from.”

  He hesitated. “Do you mind if I ask what happened?”

  She assured him that she did not object to the question. “My husband’s family had a small electricity generating station near what was then Cochin. They called it their electricity factory. I know that sounds odd, but that’s how they made their living. They had one or two other things, of course: a spice plantation in the Western Ghats and a pepper trading firm – a small-scale business empire, I suppose.”

  He waited for her to continue.

  “My husband had an accident,” Domenica went on. “He was electrocuted in the factory.”

  “I’m terribly sorry to hear that.”

  Domenica nodded. “Thank you. It was a long time ago now and I hardly ever think about it any more. Although sometimes I must admit I dream that I’m back there and I’m standing in the garden of the electricity factory – it had a wonderful garden, you know. Courting couples used to use it for assignations. I didn’t mind, although my mother-in-law became livid when she saw that happening and would set dogs on them.” She paused. “How many romances that woman must have blighted.”

  “No love lost?”

  Domenica shook her head. “She never accepted me. I was not what she had had in mind.”

  “Wrong religion?” Magnus asked.

  “Not in broad terms. They were Thomist Christians. As you know, Kerala is a fairly Christian state. They have other faiths, of course – including Marxism: the state government is communist – and you find busts of Karl Marx along some of the roadsides, along with Hindu temples and Christian shrines.”

  “India is astonishing.”

  Domenica laughed. “That’s putting it mildly. It’s such a mixture. But alongside everything else – all those wonderful spiritual traditions – there are these people in the south who claim that Christianity started there before it took root in the west. They call themselves Syrians – nothing to do with modern Syria, of course. They used Syriac as their liturgical language, you see.”

  Magnus sipped at his coffee. “They were disappointed you weren’t a Syrian?”

  “Yes. Not that they said anything about it, but I knew that my mother-in-law would never accept me. Mind you, that’s not unusual, is it? An awful lot of mothers-in-law don’t take to the woman their son marries. D.H. Lawrence had something to say about that, I think.”

  “Did he?”

  Domenica laughed. “Possibly. He loved those dark corners of human relationships. I can’t be bothered to read him nowadays. I think his prose has dated a bit – rather like Hemingway’s. Hemingway sounds positively Old Testament at times.”

  He sighed, and she asked him if there was something wrong.

  “No,” he said. “Nothing’s wrong at all. It’s just that this conversation – with you talking about Lawrence and Hemingway and so on – reminds me so much of how we used to talk … back then. We discussed exactly these things, didn’t we?”

  They did, and Domenica acknowledged it. But even that acknowledgment, she felt, was taking her into territory from which she felt she must at all costs keep clear. She wanted to reach across the table and take Magnus’s hand, but she could not. One cannot touch a person one loved in that way; it was far too dangerous.

  For a few moments neither spoke. Then Domenica said, “I’ve been talking about myself. Forgive me. What about you?” She wanted to ask him whether he was married, but she held herself back. He knew, though, that this is what she wanted to find out; he knew, and he answered.

  53. On Teak, and Boyfriends, etc.

  “I never married,” Magnus Campbell said. “I’d fully intended to, but kept putting it off. I suppose I was too busy.” He looked at Domenica apologetically. “That sounds dreadful, doesn’t it? Being too busy to get married.”

  Domenica’s expression gave nothing away. “It’s not for everyone,” she said evenly. “And as for being too busy to get married – there are plenty of people who are too busy to live, let alone get married. They spend their lives working and then suddenly … But as for marriage, it’s not compulsory. Lots of people are content to live by themselves.”

  “Oh, I’m sure I would have enjoyed it,” said Magnus. “I’m not one of those crusty bachelors who would never make all the compromises that marriage involves – you know the sort.”

  Domenica tried not to think of Angus, but he came to mind immediately. “Was there anybody in particular?”

  “Oh yes. In London I was with somebody for six years. She was a lawyer with one of the big firms. She was very successful, as it happens, and was one of the youngest partners. But you know what those London legal firms are like … they take their pound of flesh, and then some. They wanted her to go to Hong Kong to take charge of their office there. It was a big job.”

  “And?”

  “She went. She had to choose between me and her career, and, well, she chose the career.”

  Domenica thought: How could she? “You were probably better off without her.” She stopped; Magnus was frowning.

  “I was very much in love with her,” he said. “But I suppose it was not entirely reciprocated. Had it been, then she wouldn’t have gone to Hong Kong, don’t you think?”

  “I do,” said Domenica quickly. “But you obviously survived.”

  He nodded. “Actually, I fell out of love with her remarkably quickly. It took about three weeks – an almost indecently short time. I suddenly realised that I no longer loved her. It happened just like that.” He paused. “And I’m not even sure whether I even liked her after that.”

  Domenica was thinking of the lawyer. Had she been in love w
ith Magnus? It was inconceivable to her that anybody could prefer a career to happiness with somebody they loved. But people did.

  “This happened not all that long ago,” Magnus continued. “In fact, it was last year – last March to be precise. It pushed me into making a decision.”

  “About?”

  “About my own career. I had made quite a bit of money in the City. It isn’t hard, you know. They try to tell us that they’re so skilled – it allows them to justify their inflated salaries. A certain amount of intelligence is required – and a head for figures – but not much more than that. A skilled craftsman needs more ability than a financier, if you ask me. But we don’t reward the craftsman or the engineer in quite the same way, do we?”

  Domenica’s interest was aroused. “Well, let’s say that I’m an ambitious young person and I want to make a lot of money. Can I just traipse off to the City of London and get a job? How do they hand them out?”

  “Connections,” said Magnus. “Not in every case, but in a very large number of cases.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. But that’s all behind me. I shook the dust of the City from my heels and came back here. I bought a house near Mallaig. And a boat.”

  Domenica stared at him. “Mallaig. We …”

  “Yes,” he said simply. “Yes, Mallaig. I remember.”

  She looked down at the floor. Her heart was doing something peculiar within her; racing, or straining at its moorings, or simply trying to cope.

  “Would you like to hear about the boat?”

  She nodded. “I don’t know much about boats. But I had a cousin who sailed …”

  Magnus interrupted her. “She’s a gorgeous piece of work. Forty feet. Lots of teak. In fact, the whole deck is covered in teak. And she’s fabulous down below. Wood everywhere. Modern yachts are full of plastic. This is very different.”

  “Wood gives character, doesn’t it?” Domenica felt embarrassed to say such a thing; it was rather like saying that books did furnish a room. But they did, just as wood really did lend character.