The Revolving Door of Life Read online

  Matthew was keen to keep as much of the Duke’s furniture as possible, but Elspeth had other ideas. “It’s terrible old rubbish,” she said. “Look at this.” She referred to the inventory that the Duke’s agent had prepared. “A charming William IV library table with only two legs, but otherwise sound.”

  “Oh, I saw that one,” said Matthew. “It had a lovely green leather top.”

  “That’s as may be,” Elspeth retorted, “but what’s the use of a table with two legs? Or…” And here she pointed to another inventory item. “A glass-fronted bookcase, circa 1860; no glass.”

  She looked up at Matthew. “What is the point, may I ask, of having a glass-fronted bookcase with no glass in the front? In fact, one might even go so far as to say that it’s an impossibility. A glass-fronted bookcase with no glass is simply not a glass-fronted bookcase.”

  “Perhaps,” said Matthew. “If you’re intent on being pedantic.”

  They normally did not argue with one another, but even the most equable of couples may be expected to fall out over a move. And so Matthew decided at a very early stage that he would leave everything up to Elspeth and not dispute any of her decisions. Armed with this authority, Elspeth made all the arrangements, chose the date of departure, and did most of the packing herself. He helped, of course, mostly by taking the triplets around the Botanic Gardens in their three-seated pushchair. This inevitably brought a response from passersby—looks that ranged from amusement to sympathy and sometimes on to disapproval.

  “Three!” remarked one elderly woman as Matthew and the triplets passed her on the way to the greenhouse. “My, you must have been insatiable!”

  Matthew was ready to let this remark pass with a polite nod of his head, but then its implications dawned on him. Did she really think that? he asked himself.

  “Excuse me,” he said, “but I wonder what you mean by what you’ve just said.”

  The woman blushed. “Oh…oh, I don’t really know. It’s just that it must take a lot of energy to create triplets. Not every man…Oh dear, I’m not sure that I know what I meant.”

  And then there was the visiting American woman who asked the triplets’ names when they were waiting together for a pedestrian light in Stockbridge. “Dear little things,” she said. “They’re all boys, aren’t they? What are they called?”

  “Tobermory, Rognvald and Fergus,” answered the proud father.

  “What wonderful Scottish names!” enthused the visitor. “Which is Tobermory?”

  Matthew hesitated. The truth was that he did not know, as although Elspeth claimed to be able to differentiate between the three boys, he had no idea. But a father could hardly confess to being uncertain as to the identity of his own sons, and so he pointed at random to one of the boys. “Him,” he said.

  The woman bent forward to look more closely. “We went to Tobermory last week,” she said. “We were visiting Iona and afterwards we called in at Tobermory—a lovely place…” Her voice trailed away. “He’s wearing his brother’s jumper, I see. It has Fergus knitted across the front.”

  Matthew waved airily. “They share their clothes,” he said airily. “And of course they’re far too young to dress themselves, or to care what they’re wearing, for that matter.”

  In the last few days before the move, the boys were left in the care of Anna, their Danish au pair, while Matthew and Elspeth made final preparations. A couple of weeks before they were due to move in, the Duke agreed to meet them at the house to hand over the keys—they had already paid the purchase price—and to answer any final queries they might have.

  “I shall miss the old place,” he said, as he stood with them in the doorway of the large ground-floor drawing room. “We used to have such marvellous parties here back in the old days. White-tie affairs, you know. The men in Highland dress, of course, and the women in long dresses with tartan sashes. Interminable affairs, some thought, but I always enjoyed them. We used to give breakfast to anybody who was still there at six in the morning, and standing. Sometimes we even had to give them lunch. Frightful, but there we are—it’s very hard to ask guests to leave, you know. Some stayed for weeks.” He paused. “I never really knew how to do it until I read about what Willie Maugham said to Paddy Leigh Fermor after Paddy had for some reason been terribly rude to the old boy when he was staying as a guest at the Villa Mauresque. For some reason Paddy imitated Maugham’s stutter at the dinner table—causing dreadful offence. One doesn’t imitate the host’s stutter in any circumstances. Anyway, Paddy did and so Maugham said to him over coffee that night, ‘I shall have to say goodbye to you at this stage as when I get up tomorrow morning you will already have left.’ ”

  The Duke laughed.

  “How very tactful,” said Matthew.

  “I never met Maugham, of course,” continued the Duke. “He was more my father’s generation. In fact, Pa met him once or twice in Antibes. He said he was an ill-tempered old cove, but there we are. Leigh Fermor shouldn’t have done what he did.”

  The Duke gazed fondly over the drawing room. “Yes, those white-tie parties were grand evenings, and people paid attention to what they wore. You can’t just add a white tie to Highland Dress, you know. It all depends where you are. If you’re in Perthshire, for example, you can only wear a white tie with Highland Dress if you were born in the county. In Argyll, if the invitation says white tie—and it does for occasions like the Oban gathering—you wear a jabot, as I’m sure you know.”

  Matthew was silent. He knew nothing about any of this and he wondered why nobody had ever taught him about these things that were so important even while being utterly unimportant.

  3. Boys Are So Physical

  After the Duke of Johannesburg left—he had an engagement with his lawyer in Edinburgh—Matthew and Elspeth made their way into their new drawing room. Elspeth flopped down on one of the Duke’s faded chintz-covered sofas, now theirs, patting the cushion beside her in an invitation for Matthew to join her. As they sat there, surveying their new home about them, there was at first a silence of the sort that comes when one has done something important but not yet determined the full implications of one’s actions. After a few minutes, almost in unison, they said, “So…” and then stopped.

  “You go ahead,” said Matthew.

  “No you.”

  Matthew smiled. “I know that we haven’t actually moved in yet, even if we’ve got the keys. But I was just going to say: so here we are. That’s all. And you?”

  “I was going to say exactly the same thing,” said Elspeth.

  Matthew looked thoughtful. “Do you think we’ve done the right thing?”

  “I was just about to ask you that,” said Elspeth. “My answer, though, is: yes. I can’t wait to live in the country. It’ll be such fun for the boys; they’ll have so much room…Boys are so physical. They love to run around, to climb trees…”

  “…And bruise their knees,” said Matthew.

  “Exactly.” She looked up at the ceiling. “What’s that song about bruising both your hearts and your knees? Isn’t there a song about that?”

  “There is,” said Matthew. “But I can’t remember what it’s called. It’s about friendship, I seem to recall.”

  “Just like…” Elspeth tried to remember another song about friendship, but none came to mind; there were so many songs about being in love, but people did not sing quite so much about being in friendship. And yet, she thought, there was no reason that one might not “be in friendship” just as one might be in love. Could friendship intoxicate in the way in which love did? Could you feel as elated about friendship as you could about love?

  “Like John Anderson my Jo,” suggested Matthew. “Robert Burns.”

  “Isn’t that about being married?”

  “Yes, it is. But I think it’s about friendship too. You could apply those words to an old friend—to one with whom you’ve shared a great deal.”

  She looked at him. She had read an article somewhere that many men were lonely b
ecause they did not know how to handle friendship, because they did not attend to their friendships in the way in which women did. You could not simply leave friendship to look after itself. Friendship was a plant that required careful tending—and that was something that women did rather better than men.

  The same article had discussed the contemporary idea of bromances, which were strong friendships between men. There was nothing physical about these, but they were romantic in a way in which male friendships usually were not. David and Jonathan had a famous bromance, the article said, and there were other examples, but male reticence and taboos meant that it was not a common thing. Those in a bromance could not only play golf or squash with one another, but could go out for dinner afterwards, or could simply sit and talk; in short, they could do all the things that women did so easily and so naturally with their female friends but that men were frightened to do.

  Matthew was an only child, as was Elspeth. She remembered feeling lonely in her childhood and the envy she had felt for those who had brothers and sisters. Matthew, she imagined, had felt the same, although they had never talked about it, just as they had never discussed the question of friendship. What friends did he have? There was Angus Lordie, for whom Matthew had acted as best man when Angus had married Domenica, and there was Bruce Anderson, whom he occasionally met in the Cumberland Bar. Angus was older than him, though, and that must limit the friendship to some extent, and Bruce was vain and unreliable, and hardly a friend to be encouraged. Who else was there? There were various friends from his days at the Academy, and he met them at regular reunions, but none seemed to be particularly close. Big Lou? She did not count because men and women tended to be friends with one another in a totally different way—and anyway, no wife would encourage a husband to develop friendships with other women.

  She wondered whether perhaps Matthew did not need male friends; perhaps he was one of these men who lived entirely through their family. Her own father had been a bit like that, she remembered. His life had revolved around his wife, his daughter, his dog, and his motorbike. That was his universe, and he seemed uninterested in engaging with anything very much outside that.

  While Elspeth was thinking about this, Matthew had risen to his feet and was inspecting a bookcase at the end of the room.

  “Elspeth,” he said. “There’s something odd about this bookcase. Come and take a look.”

  She got up to join him. She bent forwards to examine one of the books—part of the library that the Duke had thrown in with the sale. “I’ve far too many books,” he had said. “And that can be so confusing.”

  One of the titles stood out. Eastern Approaches by Fitzroy Maclean. She reached for the book and opened it. Inside, on the title page, the author had written: J: something I wrote some time ago, but I hope you enjoy it. Fitzroy. She closed it. Her father had said something about Fitzroy Maclean, but she could not remember exactly what it was. And who was J? Johannesburg?

  “Not the books,” said Matthew. “It’s just that I get the impression there’s something behind this bookcase.”

  Elspeth laughed. “No,” she said. “Don’t tell me. A concealed room.”

  Elspeth laughed again. “There are no concealed rooms,” she said. “Concealed rooms are a cliché too far: nobody has concealed rooms any more. Nobody.” She imagined the estate agent’s advertisement for a house so endowed: four bedrooms (one concealed)…

  “Au contraire,” said Matthew. “I think that’s exactly what we might have.”

  4. Glasgow—A Promised Land

  In Scotland Street, Bertie Pollock, now just seven, gazed out of his bedroom at the view of Edinburgh sky that his window afforded him. Bertie was reflecting on the fact that he was no longer six; he had been that age for so many years, it seemed, and he had begun to despair of ever getting any older. Other people had regular birthdays—at least one a year—and yet whatever clock determined the passage of time for him seemed to be very badly calibrated.

  He had to put up with some flaunting of birthdays by those who had them. “No birthday yet, Bertie?” crowed Olive. “I’ve had a birthday, as you may have noticed, and Pansy has had one too. Even Tofu’s had a birthday, although he didn’t deserve one. What about you? Still six?”

  At this rate, he thought, it would be an interminably long time before he turned eighteen—the age at which, according to the law of Scotland, he believed you could leave your mother and go to live wherever you liked. In his case, he imagined it would be Glasgow, a promised land that lay only forty miles away to the west, where there would be no psychotherapy, no yoga classes, no Italian conversazione, and no prohibition on owning a Swiss Army penknife. Glasgow represented freedom—a life in which you could do what you liked and do it when you liked. As a small boy who had been told what to do since as long as he could remember, he could not imagine anything headier, anything more exhilarating than that.

  Yet these thoughts of freedom were tinged with guilt, for although Bertie might be forgiven for dreaming of freedom from his mother, he could not rid himself of a nagging disquiet. He had encouraged his mother to go off to the Persian Gulf, and this meant that what happened there was his fault. That, of course, is how children think: they blame themselves for the misfortunes of their parents. If something goes wrong with the world, it’s my fault: I did it. That was a heavy burden of guilt for so young a set of shoulders, and the strain was telling.

  The trip to the Gulf had come about after Irene had entered a competition to compose a new slogan for a desert sheikhdom, and rather to her surprise she had won. Her suggestion—So much sand—and so close at hand!—came to her almost without thinking, and it was this spontaneity, perhaps, along with its undoubted veracity, that made her entry stand out above others. Some of those other entries, of course, were made by those who seemed to be quite unfamiliar with the region. From lush forests to Alpine pastures—we’ve got it all! was an enthusiastic entry, but not one that disclosed much knowledge of physical geography. More truthful was the entry, It’s air-conditioned! That had the merit, too, of being brief, but could perhaps be applied to rather too many places and did not quite capture—or so the judges thought—the particular essence of the sheikdom. And as for the entrant who suggested Not much here!—that was downright rude and was tossed aside without further consideration.

  Irene had duly been awarded the prize, which consisted of five days on the Gulf coast with all expenses paid. Unfortunately the five days proved to be an underestimate: after having been mistaken for the new wife of a Bedouin sheikh and being consigned to a harem, Irene had now spent almost two months in a desert fastness. British diplomats had done their best to arrange for her return, but these matters can be difficult, and there had been many misunderstandings. At least a message had been allowed out, in which Irene said: Am working on attitudes here. Don’t worry about me. In fact, quite content to stay pro tem. It was a brief and rather enigmatic message, and the British consular authorities had been doubtful as to its genuineness. Irene’s husband, though, had been convinced that this was indeed Irene: working on attitudes had a certain ring to it that he thought could only come from his wife.

  “It’s the sort of thing she says,” said Stuart. “It really does sound like her.”

  “But what can she mean?” asked a puzzled official at the other end of the telephone line.

  Stuart paused. He did not wish to be disloyal. “She is very enthusiastic about changing attitudes,” he volunteered.

  There was a brief silence at the other end of the line. “Whose attitudes?”

  Stuart thought for a moment. “I suppose everybody’s,” he said. “That’s not to say that she doesn’t recognise the validity of other points of view…I’m not saying that.”

  The official, trained in diplomacy, sensed that this was a sensitive area. “Of course,” he said quickly. “And if you feel that she really wrote that, then that, at least, is a good sign. It means that relations with her…her host are probably quite good. And that
helps, of course.”

  The conversation had concluded shortly after that with the advice that there was very little that anybody could do but to wait for the wheels of desert bureaucracy to grind at whatever pace they were accustomed to grinding. There was every chance, the official suggested, that Irene might return before a forthcoming round of trade talks between the United Kingdom and local states. “Nobody wants this sort of thing to be brought up at ministerial level,” said the official. “It sours relations unnecessarily. She’ll suddenly reappear—I’m pretty confident of that.”

  Stuart had passed this reassurance on to Bertie. “The people in London say that Mummy will come back,” he said. “Her holiday is just taking a little bit longer than we thought.”

  Bertie had frowned. He was not quite sure whether he wanted his mother to come back; life without her had clear benefits, and if she was happy enough in the desert, then surely it was unkind to persuade her to come back.

  “I think she might be happier over there,” he said to his father. “It’s much warmer than Scotland, Daddy, and you know that Mummy likes warm weather. And some of those places are really nice, you know. Look at Dubai—people love going there. Perhaps we should let her stay for…” He did a rapid calculation. “Eleven years?”

  If Irene stayed in the desert for a further eleven years, then when she came back to Scotland he would be eighteen, and…He hardly dared hope.

  5. E Portugallia Semper Aliquid Boni

  As might be expected, Irene’s absence had complicated Stuart’s life. Like most men of his generation—at least in that part of Edinburgh, where new and reconstructed men abounded—he believed that he shared fully in the task of bringing up a young family. But like many men who think that of themselves, his self-evaluation was perhaps somewhat optimistic. Day-to-day responsibility for Bertie and his young brother, Ulysses, had been borne almost entirely by Irene who, in spite of her views of the tyranny of domestic drudgery, nonetheless performed almost all the mundane tasks of running the lives of two small boys—getting Bertie to school in the morning and then afterwards to yoga and psychotherapy, delivering Ulysses (in a miasma of vomit) to the East New Town pre-toddler social awareness play sessions, laundering the endless stream of flannelette garments in which Ulysses passed the day, and making meals for the entire household every evening. All of this had to be done before clearing up and preparing for the next day in which she would do exactly the same thing.