Bertie's Guide to Life and Mothers Read online

  Bertie thought about this. “Is that because he gets drunk, Mummy?”

  Irene looked shocked. “Bertie, you mustn’t say things like that. Daddy doesn’t get drunk at cocktail parties. Anyway, the point is this: you’ll enjoy Olive’s party once you’re there—you mark my words.”

  Bertie did not enjoy himself. When he arrived at Olive’s house in the Braids, his heart sank as he saw the cluster of pink balloons tied to the gatepost at the end of the short drive. And it sank even further when he realised that of the twelve guests invited by Olive, he was the only boy.

  “Isn’t Ranald coming?” he asked Olive as he handed over her present.

  “Certainly not,” said Olive. “Ranald Braveheart Macpherson has not been invited to my house and never will be, with those stupid thin legs of his! No, Bertie, you are the only boy who is privileged to join us today, and you should be jolly grateful for that.”

  “Yes,” said Pansy, shaking her finger at him. “You should know just how lucky you are, Bertie.”

  Bertie did not argue. He was outnumbered in every way, and he had long ago learned that arguing with Olive got one nowhere. So he busied himself with a sausage roll and a slice of pizza and waited for events to take their natural course.

  After tea, Olive had clapped her hands and announced that it was time for games. “We’re going to play a game now,” she said. “A really good one.”

  “Houses?” asked Pansy. “Could we play houses, Olive?”

  Olive appeared to give this request full consideration before she shook her head. “No, we shall not play houses, Pansy. Houses is a very yesterday game. We’re going to play Jane Austen!”

  There were squeals of pleasure and excitement from several of the girls. “Yes!” enthused Pansy. “Jane Austen!” And then she asked, “How do you play that?”

  “I’m going to be Lizzie,” said Olive. “She’s a girl with lots of sisters. Pansy, you can be her Mummy, who is very stupid, and Lakshmi, you can be her sister Jane. And Bertie …”

  Bertie looked away. It was only three o’clock and the party was due to go on until five. Two hours of Jane Austen stretched ahead of him.

  “And you, Bertie,” said Olive decisively, “you can be Mr. Darcy.”

  “How do I do that?” whispered Bertie. “I don’t know how to play Jane Austen, Olive.”

  “You just stand there and be handsome,” said Olive. “That’s all you have to do. And when one of the sisters asks you to dance, then you have to bow and say, ‘Madam, I would be most honoured, truly I would.’ That’s all. You don’t have to say anything else.”

  “How long do I have to do that for?” asked Bertie.

  “An hour or so,” said Olive. “Then we’re going to play another game. Royal Weddings!”

  There were further squeals of excitement, but from Bertie there came only a sigh. Royal Weddings, he felt, was a game that adults played—not children.

  3. A Psychiatrist’s Daughter

  For Pat Macgregor, the mother issue had been of a very different complexion. If Bertie might have been expected to wish to see rather less of his mother, then Pat would have liked to see rather more. Unfortunately, this did not happen, as Pat’s mother was vague about most things, including the dates on which she and her daughter would meet. After a long history of absenteeism, Maureen Macgregor had eventually drifted out of her marriage by the simple expedient of moving to a village in Perthshire from which she made increasingly infrequent forays into Edinburgh. Her departure from the matrimonial home had not been in any way acrimonious: Dr. Macgregor was a tolerant man, who understood that as life progresses we lose interest in some things and develop an interest in others.

  In Maureen Macgregor’s case, her interest in plants, which had not been present when she lived in the Macgregors’ inconspicuous villa in the Grange, had become an abiding passion. Originally self-taught in the subject, she had eventually enrolled in a botanical course in Dundee, which she had completed with distinction. That had been followed by the purchase of a late-eighteenth-century walled garden in Perthshire—a garden that, though once sufficiently distinguished to be the subject of a book, had become derelict and overrun with giant hogweed. Maureen had seen its possibilities, and had acquired the garden and its adjoining cottage for a very small sum in return for a promise to restore it to its previous splendour. The giant hogweed had been slain, the rich earth below tilled, sifted, and raked into submission, and an ambitious physic garden had been planted.

  In this task, Maureen had been assisted by a friend whom she had met on the botanical course in Dundee, a woman who, although a good few years younger, seemed to enjoy her company. They had become close friends and had ended up sharing the cottage—an arrangement that suited both of them and, most importantly, made them happy. Dr. Macgregor had understood perfectly well and bore no resentment against the friend who had replaced him in his wife’s life. He knew that people could drift apart, and he felt that there was no real point in trying to prevent it. In his professional practice, which was devoted to helping people in their unhappiness and distress, he had seen many cases of people trying to be something that they were not. One should not fight these things, he felt.

  Pat had accepted the situation with similar equanimity. If her mother was happy, then the somewhat distant, slightly distracted air she had about her was something she could live with. When her father announced that on a busy morning in Perth Sheriff Court the marriage’s legal existence had quietly and without fuss been brought to an end, she had experienced none of the disappointment and hurt that such a development can bring. Her mother and father loved her in their very different ways—she knew that, and felt the security that such knowledge brings—and both parents still seemed fond of each other. It could have been far worse, she decided, and for many, of course, it was.

  “We stumble,” said Dr. Macgregor. “We try our best in this life, but we stumble. Then we pick ourselves up again, and the dance continues.”

  That rather pithy remark resonated in Pat’s mind that evening as she made her way from her flat in Marchmont to her father’s house in the Grange, where they were due to have dinner together. Pat went for these meals every other Saturday, although occasionally the routine would vary and they would go out to a restaurant instead. The conversation was always good; Pat’s father took a close interest in the doings of Pat’s friends, and she took a similar interest in the reported activities of her father’s colleagues and the members of the book group to which he belonged. This book group was a serious-minded one that set itself books that could sometimes take months to discuss. Antony Beevor’s history of the Second World War had recently taken them four months to deal with, with the discussion becoming bogged down in the North African campaign just as had Rommel’s tanks in the sands of the desert. There had also been a heated debate on the qualities of the leaders of the time, with adverse comparisons being made between those politicians and current examples of the breed.

  “The real difference,” Dr. Macgregor said, “is that politicians today won’t tell people what they need to know. They spend all their time telling them what they think they want to hear.”

  “Oh yes?” said Pat.

  “Yes. Look at Churchill. What did he say to people? ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering.’ Imagine a politician today saying that! What do ours say? They say: everything’s going to be fine, just fine. And it’s not, you know.”

  “Then why do they say it?” asked Pat.

  “Because they know that if you offer people sweat and tears—let alone blood, and struggle and suffering, for that matter—they won’t vote for you. They’ll vote for anybody who offers them free sandwiches instead.”

  Pat digested that. “So you tell them …”

  “You tell them that they can have what they want—which is more of everything. You don’t tell them that
we must all work harder. You don’t tell them that we must all try to behave a bit better towards each other. You don’t tell them that they must drink less and eat less fatty food. You act as if they must never, ever in any circumstances be offended, and if you inadvertently offend them—by telling the truth, perhaps—you must immediately apologise.”

  Pat smiled. She did not think that her father should eat so many chips, for which he had a weakness; perhaps she should tell him, and then, of course, apologise.

  “It’s infantilisation,” continued Dr. Macgregor. “We have become thoroughly infantilised.”

  Pat raised an eyebrow. “Us? You and I?”

  Dr. Macgregor laughed. “No, not us. Theories never apply to us, my dear. I meant the electorate.”

  4. A Memory of Lavender

  Now, from ancient habit, she reached into the waving forest of lavender and plucked a head. She sniffed it: the smell brought so much back, almost as powerfully as had Proust’s madeleine cakes: she saw herself sitting at her desk; she saw her mother rearranging sheets of music on top of the family piano; and there was her friend Anna crouched behind the tree at the other end of the garden while she counted to one hundred, peeking illegally through the spaces between her fingers to see where her playmate was hiding. She felt a sudden pang of regret: life had been so comfortable and assured back then, whereas now …

  Final examinations were looming and her essay on Ridolfo Ghirlandaio had stalled. She was considering the influence of Raphael on his work, and was having difficulty with the topic. Did it matter? All that she was doing was jumping through a hoop to prove to the world that she merited a degree in the history of art. But was the world remotely interested in that fact? Would it make any difference to a prospective employer—if one could be found—that she knew that Raphael influenced Ridolfo Ghirlandaio? There were so many graduates working in coffee bars—one of these establishments in Morningside Road was staffed entirely by classicists, she had read, and there would surely be places where art historians would be welcome. Perhaps she could engage the customers in conversation, mentioning the Florentine renaissance as she handed them their low-fat lattes or their double americanos, or whatever it was they wanted.

  She tucked the lavender into a pocket. One never really grows up, she thought; not really. She looked up; her father must have spotted her coming, as he had opened the front door and was standing on the doorstep, silhouetted against the light of the hall. “I saw you, darling,” he said. “I saw you picking some lavender.”

  She kissed him lightly on the cheek. He smelt of father.

  “I love lavender. I always have.”

  “Yes,” he said. “It’s your protection, isn’t it?”

  She looked at him in surprise. “My protection?”

  “I saw you do the same thing every day. You always stopped and picked a few heads of lavender. It was obviously one of those childhood rituals.”

  She nodded. “Yes. I thought I had to do it to stop something terrible happening.”

  Dr. Macgregor smiled. “We all do that, in one way or another. I suppose we haven’t stopped believing in the gods. We need to placate the gods, although we’d never put it that way these days.”

  They made their way into the drawing room, where Dr. Macgregor poured his daughter a sherry. “I know it’s desperately uncool to pour people a sherry,” he said. “But I feel that if I don’t do it, something will go wrong.”

  “You’re not serious …”

  “No, not really.”

  They sat down and talked about what each had been doing. Pat told her father about her essay and he suggested that she cut it short. “Tell them that it’s on the short side because you don’t have anything more to say. There’s no point in verbiage for verbiage’s sake.”

  “But they told us it has to be five thousand words. At the moment, it’s only two and a half.”

  Dr. Macgregor made a dismissive gesture. “What about those PhD theses in mathematics? Some are only, what, twenty pages?”

  “That’s mathematics,” said Pat. “Mathematicians don’t have much to say—or they can say what they need to say in a few lines.”

  “Maybe,” said Dr. Macgregor. “There are some charming and articulate mathematicians, but they can be—how shall I put it—terse. And some mathematicians are certainly on the spectrum.”

  “What spectrum?”

  “Social inadequacy. When I was at university there was a mathematician who had never been heard to speak—at all. He was regarded as very brilliant, of course, but he never uttered a word. And then, at the opposite end of the spectrum, there was a mathematician who was regarded as being very outgoing because at least he looked at your shoes when he spoke to you.”

  “That’s cruel,” said Pat.

  “But rather funny, I’m afraid,” retorted Dr. Macgregor. “Funny things are very often cruel.”

  They sat in silence for a moment. Pat looked at her sherry glass. Then she looked at her father. There was something different about him. Had he had a haircut?

  “Your hair,” she said.

  He answered quickly. “I have a new barber.”

  “Oh, has Jimmy retired? What’s the new one called?”

  “No, Jimmy hasn’t retired, and the new one is called Angie.”

  Pat raised an eyebrow. “A woman?”

  Dr. Macgregor nodded. “Yes, a woman.”

  Pat laughed. “I never thought I’d see the day. You always used to go on about how Jimmy was good enough for you with his gardening shears or whatever he used. You said that male barbers understood men.”

  “I still believe that to be true. However, one must move with the times, and now I go to a unisex salon in Bruntsfield.”

  “A unisex salon!” exclaimed Pat. “Daddy, are you all right?”

  The question was posed in a tone of amusement. But the concern that underlay it was serious. Pat had long been worried that her father would do something peculiar, and had been ready for signs of this. Abandoning Jimmy was aberrant: men did not change their barbers—at least not men like Dr. Macgregor. And as for moving with the times, any middle-aged man who said that he must move with the times was signalling something just as clearly as if he were using an Aldis lamp.

  5. Rob Roy as Flawed Hero

  They went through to the dining room. In most places people move into rooms rather than through to rooms, but not in Edinburgh where they move through, just as they go through to Glasgow while Glasgow people go across to Edinburgh. People in Scotland go down to London, and Londoners go up to Scotland, which is not surprising, bearing in mind the way the map looks (when held the right way up). The English, of course, think of Edinburgh as being in the north, which it most certainly is not. It’s in their north, but not our north; in Scotland, Edinburgh is in the south-east, more or less, or possibly in the central belt, although there are some in Edinburgh who think that particular belt starts slightly further west, but not in the west, which starts a bit further north.

  The Macgregor house was not of a sufficient size to justify the use of compass points to describe rooms. It had two storeys, the ground floor consisting of a hall, kitchen, drawing room, dining room, scullery, and what the property departments of solicitors’ firms used coyly to describe as the usual offices. These usual offices contained something called, in the same descriptive tradition, a vanitory unit. The word vanitory appears only on sufferance in dictionaries and possibly came into existence through the tendency of plumbers installing such things to add the occasional syllable, as a courtesy. The term stuck, and summed up, rather neatly some felt, the aspirational quality of such an item. This was no mere vanity unit, no everyday basin for the washing of hands; this was a large, avocado-coloured ceramic construction with ornate taps and a substantial mirror into which the vain might peer—hence vanitory. The first floor consisted of three bedrooms and a large, draughty bathroom in which there was no vanitory unit at all, but only an uncomfortable bath and a meagre basin.

  T
he dining room that Pat and her father now entered was furnished comfortably, with a large red Turkish carpet on the floor, a sideboard on which a seldom-used decanter stood along with a silver coffee pot and an empty Mason’s Ironstone fruit bowl, a three-leaved mahogany table, and a set of six ladder-backed chairs the seats of which were covered with now somewhat threadbare tapestry work. On the walls were the usual views of Perth in mezzotint, and a large Victorian painting of a hillside in the Trossachs. While such pictures might normally be expected to have a small herd of Highland cattle in the foreground, or perhaps a stag or two, this painting was distinguished by a group of kilted figures engaging in vigorous disagreement with a detachment of soldiers. The soldiers were on the losing side: the Highlanders having floored several of them were now clearly on the point of putting the rest to flight. At the bottom of the gilded frame, a small tablet gave the name and dates of the artist and the title of the picture, Rob Roy Macgregor Defeats the Duke of Montrose’s Men.

  Pat had lived with the painting and with her father’s claim that he—and therefore she—stood in a direct line of descent from the famous outlaw. She had never liked the painting, though, which she felt was too partisan, rather like one of those works of discredited Soviet Realism that left little doubt as to the artist’s sympathies, simulated or genuine. Now, coming into the room for dinner, she glanced up at it as she sat down and her father began to serve the cold quiche that he had prepared.

  “I always thought that if Rob Roy were the hero he’s made out to be he would have been kinder to those poor soldiers,” said Pat.

  Dr. Macgregor looked up at the painting. “Artistic licence,” he said. “The artist romanticised him, as just about everybody did. He’s made to look like a tall, handsome Highlander. In fact he had terribly long arms. They went down almost to his knees—he looked a bit like an orangutan, I suppose.”