The World According to Bertie Read online

  THE WORLD ACCORDING TO BERTIE

  A 44 Scotland Street Novel

  Alexander McCall Smith

  Hachette Digital

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  Alexander McCall Smith is the author of over sixty books on a wide array of subjects. For many years he was Professor of Medical Law at the University of Edinburgh and served on national and international bioethics bodies. Then in 1999 he achieved global recognition for his award-winning No.1 Ladies’Detective Agency series, and thereafter devoted his time to the writing of fiction, including the 44 Scotland Street, Sunday Philosophy Club and Portuguese Irregular Verbs series. His books have been translated into forty-two languages. He lives in Edinburgh with his wife Elizabeth, a doctor.

  Praise for Alexander McCall Smith’s writing:

  ‘Perfect escapist fiction’

  The Times

  ‘There is a timelessness to the tales, yet they are also of the moment . . . His talent is to see the god in small things’

  Sunday Times Scotland

  ‘Simple, elegantly written and gently insightful’

  Good Book Guide

  ‘Highly amusing, intelligent and heart-warming’

  Scotsman

  ‘A treasure of a writer whose books deserve immediate devouring’ Marcel Berlins,

  Guardian

  ‘It is hard to think of a contemporary writer more genuinely engaging . . . his novels are also extremely funny: I find it impossible to think of them without smiling’ Craig Brown,

  Mail on Sunday

  ‘Alexander McCall Smith’s stories are subtle, gentle works of art’

  Daily Telegraph

  ‘Delicious, light-hearted stuff and I love it – my only criticism is that these books are just not long enough’

  The Lady

  Also by Alexander McCall Smith

  The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency Series

  The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency

  Tears of the Giraffe

  Morality for Beautiful Girls

  The Kalahari Typing School for Men

  The Full Cupboard of Life

  In the Company of Cheerful Ladies

  Blue Shoes and Happiness

  The Good Husband of Zebra Drive

  The Sunday Philosophy Club Series

  The Sunday Philosophy Club

  Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

  The Right Attitude to Rain

  The Careful Use of Compliments

  The 44 Scotland Street Series

  44 Scotland Street

  Espresso Tales

  Love Over Scotland

  The World According to Bertie

  The von Igelfeld novels

  The 2½ Pillars of Wisdom

  Audio editions are available

  from Hachette Digital

  THE WORLD ACCORDING TO BERTIE

  A 44 Scotland Street Novel

  Alexander McCall Smith

  Hachette Digital

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  Published by Hachette Digital 2008

  Copyright © Alexander McCall Smith 2007

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Lines by W.H. Auden reproduced by kind permission of the Estate of W.H. Auden.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Librar.

  ISBN 978 0 7481 1073 5

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Grangemouth, Stirlingshire

  Hachette Digital

  An imprint of

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DY

  An Hachette Livre UK Company

  This book is for Derek and Dilly Emslie

  1. Your Distressed-oatmeal Sweater

  Pat saw Bruce at ten o’clock on a Saturday morning, or at least that is when she thought she saw him. An element of doubt there certainly was. This centred not on the time of the sighting, but on the identity of the person sighted; for this was one of those occasions when one wonders whether the eye, or even the memory, has played a trick. And such tricks can be extraordinary, as when one is convinced that one has seen the late General de Gaulle coming out of a cinema, or when, against all reasonable probability, one thinks one has spotted a famous Italian tenor on a train between Glasgow and Paisley; risible events, of course, but ones which underline the proposition that one’s eyes are not always to be believed.

  She saw Bruce while she was travelling on a bus from one side of Edinburgh – the South Side, where she now lived – to the New Town, on the north side of the city, where she worked three days a week in the gallery owned by her boyfriend, Matthew. The bus had descended with lumbering stateliness down the Mound, past the National Gallery of Scotland, and had turned into Hanover Street, narrowly missing an insouciant pedestrian at the corner. Pat had seen the near-miss – it was by the merest whisker, she thought – and had winced, but it was just at that moment, as the bus laboured up Hanover Street towards the statue of George IV, that she saw a young man walking in the opposite direction, a tall figure with Bruce’s characteristic en brosse hairstyle and wearing precisely the sort of clothes that Bruce liked to wear on a Saturday: a rugby jersey celebrating Scotland’s increasingly ancient Triple Crown victory and a pair of stone-coloured trousers.

  Her eye being caught by the rugby jersey and the stone-coloured trousers, she turned her head sharply. Bruce! But now she could see only the back of his head, and after a moment she could not see even that; Bruce, or his double, had merged into a knot of people standing on the corner of Princes Street and Pat lost sight of him. She looked ahead. The bus would stop in a few yards; she could disembark and make her way down to Princes Street to see if it really was him. But then she reminded herself that if she did that she would arrive late at the gallery, and Matthew needed her to be there on time; he had stressed that. He had an appointment, he said, with a client who was proposing to place several important Colourist pictures on the market. She did not want to hold him up, and quite apart from that there was the question of whether she would want to see Bruce, even if it proved to be him. She thought on balance that she did not.

  Bruce had been her flatmate when she had first moved into 44 Scotland Street. At first, she had been rather in awe of him – after all, he was so confident in his manner, so self-assured – and she at the time had been so much more diffident. Then things had changed. Bruce was undoubtedly good-looking – a fact of which he was fully aware and of which he was very willing to take advantage; he knew very well that women found him attractive, and he assumed that Pat would prove no exception. Unfortunately, it transpired that he was right, and Pat found herself drawn to Bruce in a way which she did not altogether like. All this could have become very messy, but at the last moment, before her longing had been translated into anything beyond mere looking, she had come to her senses and decided that Bruce was an impossible narcissist. She fought to free herself of his spell, and she did. And then, having lost his job at a firm of surveyors (after being seen enjoying an intimate lunch in the Café St H
onoré with the wife of the firm’s senior partner), Bruce decided that Edinburgh was too small for him and had moved to London. People who do that often then discover that London is too big for them, much to the amusement of those who stayed behind in Edinburgh in the belief that it was just the right size. This sometimes leads to the comment that the only sensible reason for leaving Scotland for London was to take up the job of prime minister, a remark that might have been made by Samuel Johnson, had he not been so prejudiced on this particular matter and thought quite the opposite.

  Pat had been relieved that Bruce had gone to London and it had not occurred to her that he might return. It did not matter much to her, of course, as she moved in different circles from those frequented by Bruce, and she would not have to mix with him even if he did return. But at the same time she felt slightly unsettled by the possible sighting, especially as the experience made her feel an indefinable excitement, an increase in heart rate, that was not altogether welcome. Was it just the feeling one gets on meeting with an old lover, years afterwards? Try as one might to treat such occasions as ordinary events, there is a thrill which marks them out from the quotidian. And that is what Pat felt now.

  She completed the rest of the bus journey down to Dundas Street in a thoughtful state. She imagined what she might say if she were to meet him, and what he in turn might say to her. Would he have been improved by living in London, or would he have become even worse? It was difficult to tell. There must be those for whom living in London is an enriching experience, and there must be those who are quite unchanged by it. Pat had a feeling that Bruce would not have learned anything, as he had never shown any signs of learning anything when he was in Edinburgh. He would just be Bruce.

  She got off her bus a few steps from Matthew’s gallery. Through the window, she saw Matthew at his desk, immersed in paperwork. She looked at him fondly from a distance: dear Matthew, she thought; dear Matthew, in your distressed-oatmeal sweater, so ordinary, so safe; fond thoughts, certainly, but unaccompanied by any quickening of the pulse.

  2. Troubling Trousers

  Matthew glanced at his wristwatch. Pat was a few minutes late, but only a few minutes; not enough for him to express irritation. Besides, he himself was rarely on time, and he knew that he could hardly complain about the punctuality of others.

  ‘I have to go,’ he said, scooping up some papers from his desk. ‘Somebody wants my advice.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Pat. ‘You told me.’ It had been surprising to her that anybody should seek Matthew’s advice on the Scottish Colourists, or on any painters for that matter, as it seemed only a very short time ago that she had found it necessary to impart to Matthew some of her own very recently acquired knowledge of basic art history. Only a year ago, there had been a rather embarrassing moment when a customer had mentioned Hornel, to be greeted by a blank look from Matthew. Yet in spite of the fact that he was hazy on the details, Matthew had a good aesthetic sense, and this, Pat thought, would get him quite far in the auction rooms. A good painting was a good painting, even if one did not know the hand that had painted it, and Matthew had considerable ability in distinguishing the good from the mediocre, and even the frankly bad. It was a pity though, she thought, that this ability did not run to clothes; the distressed-oatmeal sweater which he was wearing was not actually in bad taste, but was certainly a bad choice if one wanted, as Matthew did, to cut a dash. And as for his trousers, which were in that increasingly popular shade, crushed strawberry, Pat found herself compelled to avert her eyes. Now, if Matthew would only wear stone-coloured chinos, as Bruce did, then . . .

  ‘Chinos,’ she said suddenly.

  Matthew looked up, clearly puzzled. ‘Chinos?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Pat. ‘Those trousers they call chinos. They’re made of some sort of thick, twill material. You know the sort?’

  Matthew thought for a moment. He glanced down at his crushed-strawberry corduroy trousers; he knew his trousers were controversial – he had always had controversial trousers, but he rather liked this pair and he had seen a lot of people recently wearing trousers like them in Dundas Street. Should he have been wearing chinos? Was this Pat’s way of telling him that she would prefer it if he had different trousers?

  ‘I know what chinos are,’ he said. ‘I saw a pair of chinos in a shop once. They were . . .’ He tailed off. He had rather liked the chinos, he remembered, but he was not sure whether he should say so to Pat: there might be something deeply unfashionable about chinos which he did not yet know.

  ‘Why are they called chinos?’ Pat asked.

  Matthew shrugged. ‘I have no idea,’ he said. ‘I just haven’t really thought about it . . . until now.’ He paused. ‘But why were you thinking of chinos?’

  Pat hesitated. ‘I just saw a pair,’ she said. ‘And . . . and of course Bruce used to wear them. Remember?’

  Matthew had not liked Bruce, although he had tolerated his company on occasion in the Cumberland Bar. Matthew was a modest person, and Bruce’s constant bragging had annoyed him. But he had also felt jealous of the way in which Bruce could capture Pat’s attention, even if it had become clear that she had eventually seen through him.

  ‘Yes. He did wear them, didn’t he? Along with that stupid rugby jersey. He was such a . . .’ He did not complete the sentence. There was really no word which was capable of capturing just the right mixture of egoism, hair gel and preening self-satisfaction that made up Bruce’s personality.

  Pat moved away from Matthew’s desk and gazed out of the window. ‘I think that I just saw Bruce,’ she said. ‘I think he might be back.’

  Matthew rose from his desk and joined her at the window. ‘Now?’ he said. ‘Out there?’

  Pat shook her head. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Further up. I was on the bus and I saw him – I’m pretty sure I did.’

  Matthew sniffed. ‘What was he doing?’

  ‘Walking,’ said Pat. ‘Wearing chinos and a rugby jersey. Just walking.’

  ‘Well, I don’t care,’ said Matthew. ‘He can come back if he likes. Makes no difference to me. He’s such a . . .’ Again Matthew failed to find a word. He looked at Pat. There was something odd about her manner; it was as if she was thinking about something, and this raised a sudden presentiment in Matthew. What if Pat were to fall for Bruce again? Such things happened; people encountered one another after a long absence and fell right back in love. It was precisely the sort of thing that novelists liked to write about; there was something heroic, something of the epic, in doing a thing like that. And if she fell back in love with Bruce, then she would fall out of love with me, thought Matthew; if she ever loved me, that is.

  He stuffed his papers into his briefcase and moved across to Pat’s side. She half-turned her cheek to him, and he planted a kiss on it, leaving a small speck of spittle, which Pat wiped off. ‘I’m sorry,’ he muttered.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ said Pat, adding, ‘Just spit.’

  Matthew looked at her. He felt flushed, awkward. ‘I’ll be back later,’ he said. ‘But if you need to go, then just shut up the shop. We probably won’t be very busy.’

  Pat nodded.

  Matthew tried to smile. ‘And then maybe . . . maybe we can go and see a film tonight. There’s something at the Cameo, something Czech, I think. Something about a woman who . . .’

  ‘Do you mind if we don’t?’ said Pat. ‘I’ve got an essay to write and if I don’t do it soon, then Dr Fantouse will go on and on at me, and . . .’

  ‘Of course,’ said Matthew. ‘Dr Fantouse. All right. I’ll see you on . . .’

  ‘Wednesday.’

  ‘Yes. All right.’ Matthew walked towards the door. Nobody wrote essays on Saturday night – he was convinced of that, and this meant that she was planning to do something else; she would go to the Cumberland Bar in the hope of meeting Bruce – that was it.

  Leaving the gallery, Matthew began to walk up Dundas Street. Glancing to his side, he looked through the gallery window. Pat was still standing there, and he
gave her a little wave with his left hand, but she did not respond. She didn’t see me, he thought. She’s preoccupied.

  3. Famous Sons and Gothic Seasoning

  Matthew was wrong about Pat. He had imagined that her claim to be writing an essay that Saturday night was probably false and that in reality she would be doing something quite different – something in which she did not want him to be involved. But although it is true that students very rarely do any work on Saturday evenings– except in extremis – in this case, Pat was telling the truth, as she always did. There really was an essay to be completed and it really did have to be handed in to Dr Fantouse the following Monday. And this indeed was the reason why she declined Matthew’s invitation to the Czech film at the Cameo cinema.

  Pat closed the gallery shortly after three that afternoon. Matthew had not returned and business was slack – non-existent, in fact, with not a single person coming in to look at the paintings. This is what, in the retail trade, is called light footfall, there being no commercial term – other than death – to describe the situation where absolutely nobody came in and nothing was sold. So Pat, having locked the cash-box in the safe and set the alarm, left the gallery and waited on the other side of the road for the 23 bus that would take her back to within a short walk of the parental home – once more her home too – in the Grange, that well-set suburb on the south side of the Meadows.

  Pat’s parents lived in Dick Place, a street which had prompted even the sombre prose of the great architectural historian John Gifford and his collaborators into striking adjectival saliences. Dick Place, they write in their guide to the buildings of Edinburgh, is a street of ‘polite villas’ – a description which may fairly be applied to vast swathes of Edinburgh suburbia. But then they warn us of ‘Gothic seasoning’, mild in some cases and wild in others, and go on to observe how, in the case of one singled-out house, ‘tottering crowstepped porches and skeleton chimneys contrast with massive bald outshoots’. But Dick Place is not distinguished only by architectural exuberance; like so many streets in Edinburgh, it has its famous sons. At its junction with Findhorn Place is the house in which the inventor of the digestive biscuit once lived; not the only house in Edinburgh to be associated with baking distinction – in West Castle Road, in neighbouring Merchiston, there once lived the father of the modern Jaffa Cake, a confection which owed its name to the viscous orange jelly lurking under the upper coating of chocolate. No plaque reminds the passer-by of these glories, although there should be one; for those who invent biscuits bring great pleasure to many.