Bertie's Guide to Life and Mothers Read online

  Pat laughed. “National heroes very rarely look like orangutans.”

  Dr. Macgregor smiled. “Exactly. Not at all fitting.” He paused. “He was probably also a psychopath—not that anybody mentions that openly.”

  “Really?”

  Dr. Macgregor slipped a large slice of quiche onto his daughter’s plate. “Yes. Psychopathic personality disorder as we used to call it. There are fancy new names for it these days—sociopathy, anti-social personality disorder and so on—but what we’re talking about is good, old-fashioned psychopathy.”

  Pat looked up at the figure of Rob Roy, surrounded by his Highlanders, his claymore raised above his head. The arms were quite long, she realised. A long-armed psychopath of orangutan-like appearance … It sounded so iconoclastic …

  “He showed all the signs,” Dr. Macgregor continued. “He lied. He cheated. He stole livestock as if cattle were going out of fashion. He pretended to be a Jacobite and all the time he was passing information on to the Duke of Atholl and the like.”

  “He was a traitor to his cause?”

  Dr. Macgregor shrugged. “It doesn’t make me particularly proud to be a Macgregor, but yes, he was. The only real cause that Rob Roy cared about was his own interests. He was an informer.” He paused. “Mind you, just about everybody at that time was every bit as bad. There were plenty of others who switched sides. Gordon of Glenbucket, for instance.”

  “Glenbucket?” Was there really somebody called Glenbucket?

  “Yes. It makes one think of Oor Wullie and his bucket, doesn’t it? But Glenbucket did exist, and he changed sides too.”

  “What an awful place Scotland must have been in those days,” said Pat.

  “My dear,” said Dr. Macgregor, “everywhere was awful, and, in a sense, everywhere still is awful. The world, I’m afraid, is a vale of tears and always has been. But Scotland suffered from particularly unpleasant nobles—a dreadful bunch in every respect. The nobles, after all, were simply the more successful thieves. That’s what made them noble.”

  Pat shook her head. “Isn’t it odd that we actually accepted all that?”

  “Not everybody did,” said Dr. Macgregor. “Remember what Burns said in ‘A Man’s A Man For A’ That.’ Remember that?”

  “Yes,” said Pat. “Of course I do.”

  “Well,” said Dr. Macgregor, “what Burns says is what we, as a nation, want at heart.”

  6. Socks Bought by Somebody Else

  Dr. Macgregor served them coffee in the drawing room, using the chipped cylindrical coffee cups—coffee cans as he called them—that had belonged to an aunt of his wife’s. These might have ended up in Perthshire, he thought, but his wife had taken little from the house, out of awkwardness or guilt, or perhaps because the cottage in Perthshire was not the place for such dreary china. He had been in that kitchen once, and had seen that everything was bright and modern: a red fridge, a framed Hockney print, retro mugs that said Keep Calm and Carry On; there was no place for fuddy-duddy Wedgwood there, he thought, and no place for him either. Sometimes, he reflected, a spouse or partner simply becomes aesthetically unsuitable and has to be scrapped. That happened to women, of course, when their husbands began to notice the effect of gravity and the years, the sagging, the desiccation, the wrinkling, and started to pay attention, as men did, to younger women. He, of course, would not have cared about such things, and would have adhered, as his lawyer had put it, but she had decided otherwise, and, well, he could understand why.

  But then there had been that article in the copy of Gentleman’s Quarterly that he had read in the dentist’s waiting room, and it had occurred to him that he might be able to do something about himself and have the makeover the magazine suggested. “Nobody is beyond the help of a looks-and-style-assessment,” the article advised. “Everybody can be helped to get the woman he deserves.” This wording had intrigued him. Did we deserve emotional or sexual satisfaction? Was that now something that we were somehow owed by some external dispenser of such things, some Cupid or Eros, the god of mortal doting envisaged by Auden in his Bucolics? Was that what people now expected?

  Over her full coffee can—and the coffee’s cold, she thought; poor Daddy—Pat looked at her father and noticed, now that he was sitting down and had crossed his legs, that he was wearing striped socks. He had never worn anything but black socks before, even on holiday in Spain when she, as a teenager, had experienced burning, mortifying embarrassment at her father’s holiday garb that had included those black socks. This settled the matter: something had happened. At what age did men have their mid-life crisis? And did it matter all that much? There were presumably many men who had their mid-life crisis quietly and with such consideration that nobody, not even their wives, noticed it—the Grange must be full of such people, she felt. Of course there were those who had vivid and disruptive mid-life crises, and behaved, as a result, like Italian prime ministers. Some men, perhaps, even had fatal mid-life crises: she imagined those obituaries that stated the cause of death—these would say, discreetly, Died, of a sudden and unexpected mid-life crisis …

  Dr. Macgregor looked at his watch, and she noticed.

  “Yes,” she said. “It’s late and I must get back to the flat. That essay …”

  He nodded. “I’ll walk you back.”

  “No need, Daddy. It’s not really dark yet.”

  He glanced out of the window. The Scottish summer made the sky still light, even at this hour. “No, I’d like the walk anyway.”

  In your new socks, she thought.

  “Those socks,” she said. “They’re very nice. Bright. Where did you buy them?”

  He opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came, and she realised, in a moment of insight, that when somebody can’t say where their socks come from then that can only mean one thing: somebody else had bought them.

  “I find it really difficult to get good socks,” she said quickly. “I found a mohair pair the other day.”

  He seemed relieved not to have to answer her question. “Mohair,” he said, rising from his chair. “Thank heavens for mohair. Where would we be without it, I wonder.”

  “Where indeed?”

  They left the house and made their way to the Marchmont street on which Pat lived. At the front door of her common stair, Pat said goodbye to her father, kissing him on the cheek. Aftershave? Cologne?

  “You’re wearing …” She stopped herself. She was going to say “You’re wearing something” but then she realised that she should not; she did not want to embarrass her father. And so she said, “You’re wearing nice socks.”

  He smiled, and nodded. “Maybe I should look for some mohair socks—like you.”

  He turned away with a wave and she went up to her flat. Once in, she made her way to the sitting room window that overlooked the street. From there she looked down and saw her father walk back along the way they had come, only to stop suddenly, look over his shoulder, and then turn in the opposite direction.

  Pat acted impulsively. On sober reflection she would never have entertained the thought of following her father, but at that moment it seemed to her to be the only thing to do.

  She went out into the street. Dr. Macgregor was now some distance away, walking fairly quickly, and had arrived at the end of Spottiswoode Road. When he turned that corner, Pat accelerated her pace, although she was careful to keep sufficiently far away from him so that if he turned and looked back he might not spot her.

  They reached the Meadows, and Pat watched from the cover of the trees as Dr. Macgregor began to walk down one of the transverse paths that led down towards Tollcross. Then, satisfied that he would not be able to see her, she continued to follow him.

  In Brougham Place, he lingered briefly outside the window of a still-open grocery store but did not enter it. Pat watched as he went further down the road. There were more people about now—a group of students heading to a party, a man walking a couple of elderly dogs, a few couples coming out of restaurants—and she felt more
confident about not being seen. And if the worst came to the worst and she was spotted, then here she could at least claim to be going off to meet a friend in one of the nearby bars, having decided that the essay would not progress that night.

  Then she stopped. Dr. Macgregor had paused outside a doorway in a tenement of flats. Then he pressed a button on an intercom, leaned forward to announce himself, and disappeared inside.

  7. The Declaration of Arbroath

  From her flat on the top floor of 44 Scotland Street, Domenica Macdonald looked out at the windows on the opposite side of the road. The view was one that would have been much appreciated by anybody with a close interest in the affairs of neighbours, but Domenica had always resolutely averted her gaze when anything unduly personal began to unfold before her eyes. This seemed to her to be the minimally decent thing to do, but she knew that this forbearance had not been shared by her former neighbour, Antonia, who had been unable to resist the temptation to look.

  “You’ll never guess what I’ve just seen,” she had remarked to Domenica one evening on the common landing. “You’d think that people would draw their curtains.”

  Domenica was silent.

  “That young woman opposite, the one from Stornoway …”

  Domenica smiled. “Ah yes, such a nice girl …”

  Antonia smirked; she knew better than that. “She was having a flaming row with that boyfriend of hers. You should have seen the saucepans flying …”

  Domenica pursed her lips. “I’m sure she thought she was having it in private—one does make that assumption, you know, that what one does in one’s own space is free from the gaze of outside eyes. And we all throw saucepans from time to time …” she stared at Antonia before continuing, “believing ourselves, perhaps naïvely, to be throwing them in privacy …”

  Antonia’s nosiness was only one of the reasons for strained relations between the two women; there had also been the vexed affair of the blue Spode cup Domenica had been convinced had been stolen from her flat by her neighbour. She repatriated the cup, only to discover later on that the original cup had been in her flat all along, meaning that she, not Antonia, stood accused—in a metaphorical sense—of the wrongful taking of blue Spode.

  Now, of course, everything had changed, including, Domenica imagined, Antonia herself, who was now some sort of lay associate of an order of nuns in Tuscany. These nuns had offered Antonia hospitality during her convalescence from the sudden attack of Stendhal Syndrome that had struck her in the Uffizi Gallery, and the spiritual peace of their rural convent had so impressed itself upon their guest that she had decided to remain there on a permanent basis.

  This decision to stay in the Italian convent had been accompanied by an offer to sell Domenica her flat at a very attractive price—an offer that Domenica had agonised over at some length before eventually reaching the conclusion that she should buy it. Antonia’s flat was contiguous with her own, and could be joined to it with minimal structural alteration: a door inserted into a shared wall would easily and appropriately add a further four rooms to Domenica’s five, and all without months of building works. That had been done shortly before Domenica’s wedding to Angus, with the result that they now each had a separate study and a bathroom, and Cyril, who had been accustomed to sleeping in a large dog basket in Angus’s kitchen, now had the luxury of sleeping in a room exclusively given over to his use.

  Cyril had originally been confused by these new arrangements. He understood that his place was with his master—wherever Angus might be—but he could not fathom the reason why, instead of walking back round the corner to Drummond Place at the end of a visit, as they always had done, they should stay for such long periods in Scotland Street. And then there was Domenica to contend with: Cyril had been aware of her disapproval, at least in the early days of their relationship, but had been pleased when she began to show first acceptance and then affection. If she was prepared to move emotionally, then so was he, and by the time of the merging of the households he regarded her as being every bit as much his responsibility as Angus was.

  Angus and Domenica themselves had adjustments to make—both had been accustomed to living alone, even if Domenica had been married before. For Angus, having somebody else in the house all the time was an entirely delightful feeling, so much more satisfactory than the isolation at the heart of his previous domestic arrangements. He had had no idea how lonely he was—singularity had seemed a natural state for him—and it was only now, with Domenica’s reassuring presence constantly at hand, that he realised the length and depth and breadth of his previous loneliness. How had he tolerated it? How had he endured those empty evenings when the flat was silent and the hours of darkness stretched out ahead? One answer had been the Cumberland Bar, where he went several nights a week, or the Scottish Arts Club, where he met his artist friends and, from time to time, that sociable dentist who, after a party, had inserted Cyril’s gold tooth. Another answer was that he had resorted to engaging himself in solitary conversation, a habit that he had now been obliged to break.

  “You do realise, I take it,” Domenica pointed out to him, “that you speak to yourself?”

  He had blushed. “I shall try not to. Living alone, you know, one gets into these habits.”

  She laughed. “No, I wasn’t referring to remarks you address to yourself during the day. We all do that—mutter away if we think nobody’s listening. No, it’s what you say in your sleep that interests me.”

  Angus froze. “In my sleep?”

  “Yes. You can be quite articulate—sometimes. At other times it’s difficult to work out what you’re saying.”

  Angus looked away. He had no idea he spoke in his sleep and the thought appalled him. “What sort of thing do I say?” he asked. His voice had a faltering tone.

  “Well, last night you said something about Creative Scotland. And then there was something about the Declaration of Arbroath. That was the night before.”

  Angus felt a degree of relief. That was nothing too embarrassing—there must be plenty of people muttering about the Declaration of Arbroath in their sleep.

  “And then the other night there was something that surprised me.”

  Angus looked at Domenica anxiously. He hardly dared ask.

  “You said, ‘They’re getting my vote all right.’ ”

  “Who? Who’s getting my vote?”

  Domenica shrugged. “You didn’t say. I must confess I was rather interested, and so I gave you the gentlest shake and asked you who was getting your vote, but you just mumbled something unintelligible and then became quite uncommunicative.”

  8. Narrow Ledger

  It was bad enough for Angus to hear that he was talking in his sleep about his political intentions, but what Domenica now went on to disclose was even more unsettling.

  “Do you know you got up the other night?”

  Angus frowned. “To go to the bathroom?”

  “No, not that. You sat up in bed, bolt upright, as if you’d suddenly had some sort of brilliant idea.”

  Angus’s frown deepened. He had no recollection of this; brilliant ideas were few and far between and one should surely remember them when they occur. “Are you sure?”

  “Am I sure? Of course I’m sure.”

  “And?”

  Domenica continued, speaking cautiously, as if particularly concerned to get the details right. “I woke up and saw you sitting there, and then you got out of bed and put on your dressing gown. You took it off the peg on the back of the door, wrapped it round you, and then padded off in the direction of the kitchen.”

  Angus looked down at the floor. I’m a somnambulist, he thought, feeling oddly ashamed. And then he thought: what was the title of that opera, and who wrote it? The Somnambulist. And what happened in it?

  Domenica sensed that Angus was embarrassed, and she reached out gently to place a hand on his forearm. “You shouldn’t worry,” she said, adding, “too much.”

  “I don’t remember any of this,�
�� Angus stuttered. “I … I …”

  “I decided to follow you,” Domenica continued. “You went into the kitchen, you see, and then you started to open and close the drawers. You didn’t take anything out of them. You just opened and closed them.”

  “Oh,” said Angus.

  “I asked you what you were doing and you said something about …” She began to smile. “I know it sounds ridiculous. I know that …”

  “Tell me,” muttered Angus.

  “It was something about the Declaration of Arbroath.”

  Angus looked at her in astonishment. “The Declaration …”

  “Yes,” said Domenica, continuing to smile. “It was as if you … well, it was as if you were looking for the Declaration of Arbroath in one of the kitchen drawers.”

  Angus shook his head in bewilderment. “I find this almost unbelievable. Why on earth would I go on about the Declaration of Arbroath while opening the kitchen drawers? It just doesn’t make sense.” He paused. “You didn’t dream all this, Domenica?”

  Domenica was quick to deny the possibility. “Of course not! I remember it all quite well and I assure you I was not dreaming.”

  “You see,” said Angus, “it’s possible that you don’t remember that it was a dream. Sometimes that happens, doesn’t it? People think that something happened and it didn’t—not really. The mind can play all sorts of tricks on you.”

  Domenica was not to be shifted. “I’m sorry, Angus,” she said firmly. “I’ve looked the subject up and I know what I’m talking about. What you did was classic somnambulistic activity. Somnambulists perform banal actions—opening and closing drawers, for instance—that’s exactly the sort of thing they do.”

  Angus was silent. If this revealing conversation was an instance of the necessary intimacy of marriage, then perhaps he could understand why people remained single.

  Domenica looked at him doubtfully. “I wasn’t certain that I should raise this with you. But I decided that I should.”