Bertie Plays the Blues Read online

  The social worker nodded. “I suppose so.”

  “Then the problem’s solved,” said Matthew. “I’m going to reverse home.”

  He looked challengingly at the social worker, daring her to contradict him. She did not, and he took the seats through to the ward where Elspeth was waiting for him. Then, with some help from obliging ward assistants, they carried their newly minted family out of the hospital to the car park where the mud-coloured car was parked.

  When Matthew set off, Elspeth turned to him and asked why he was reversing. “It’s to do with the car seats,” he said. “They face the wrong way. I was told that I had to …”

  “Oh, don’t be ridiculous, Matthew!” snapped Elspeth. “We can’t reverse all the way back to the flat. It won’t matter, just this time. Get the right sort of seat tomorrow.”

  The journey back was safely accomplished and the Holy Grail parked directly outside their front door in Moray Place. Then the babies were carried in and transferred to the cots that awaited them. Matthew handled each child as a museum curator might handle a priceless Chinese vase – tenderly and with reverence. But no curator ever felt such love and pride as he felt for each tiny scrap of humanity, each of his sons; nor would any curator have stood so still, so clearly transported, gazing with such awe at the cherished possession as Matthew did, silent, his expression of utter satisfaction, of unalloyed joy.

  Elspeth came to stand beside him. Slipping her hand into his, she nestled her head against his shoulder. “Our little boys,” she said. “Ours.”

  “I’m so proud of you,” whispered Matthew.

  She squeezed his hand. “And I’m so proud of you,” she said. “Not every man can make triplets.”

  He laughed. “My darling, you’re the one who did it. It was you who did all that pushing and shoving. And now, here they are – our lovely boys.”

  They gazed at the three babies, who were all sleeping soundly, their breathing sounding like the snuffles of some small animal, their tiny red faces in repose; so vulnerable, so utterly precious.

  9. Remember to Expand

  His new paternal duties uppermost in his mind – and what father of triplets would have anything else in his thoughts? – Matthew nonetheless remembered that he had a business to run. His work at the gallery could hardly be described as onerous, but it did require his presence at set hours, which were nine in the morning until six in the evening. During this period he had to be there, except for half an hour in the morning, when he had coffee at Big Lou’s, or on the odd occasion went he went off to an auction or to see a painting in somebody’s house. During these absences, he simply put a sign on the door saying, Back Soon, and hoped that any client, or potential client, who called while he was out would return in due course. But no businessman would want to do this too often.

  From time to time Matthew engaged an assistant. These were usually temporary, or part-time, although he had taken the decision that he would at some point get somebody permanent. After all, there was no financial reason not to do this: the gallery was now making a reasonable profit and Matthew was emboldened to expand. “Remember to expand,” was one piece of advice his father had given him, and Matthew had never forgotten this. He had been counselled about other things – about the importance of making provision for tax, about the importance of maintaining cash flow and so on – but he found it difficult to recall the precise terms of these admonitions. Yet he had remembered this curious comment of his father’s: remember to expand.

  The advice itself had a vaguely comical ring to it, as if it could be taken to urge people who were somehow small, or thin, perhaps, to expand their girth. And would one expand in all directions, or confine oneself to a single area of expansion? Matthew felt, too, that the advice sounded vaguely megalomaniac – like the mantra of a dictators’ training course: Remember to invade, gentlemen.

  Appointing an assistant would count as expansion, he thought, but he suspected that he would have to do something else as well. Expansion must mean more sales, and more sales meant that more pictures would have to be bought, and sold on to more clients. But what if one had the same number of clients – as Matthew did – and no ideas as to how to increase that number?

  Of course it really did not matter all that much – at least to Matthew. The funds passed on by his generous father had been well managed by the Adam Bank and Matthew had no reason to worry financially, but he was still conscious of the fact that the reason for creating businesses was, after all, to make money, rather than to sit around. So in so far as an assistant represented at least one plank in a strategy of expansion, then such a person should be appointed. And now, with the birth of the triplets and the need for paternity leave, an assistant’s presence was even more necessary.

  His first response had been to contact an employment agency past whose door he walked each morning if he took the Howe Street route. A few weeks before the birth of the triplets, Matthew had gone to this agency one morning and made an enquiry. The man he spoke to had noted down the particulars of the job. “We won’t send you anybody challenging,” he said. “We don’t do challenging, you know.”

  Matthew tried not to smile. “I don’t really want to be challenged,” he reassured him.

  They were not for him, he decided, and he took his leave, promising to think about it. Later that week he placed an advertisement on a local employment website, which brought not much more than a trickle of unsuitable responses. Matthew began to despair. He had been under the impression that there was any number of graduates in the history of art who would jump at the chance of employment in a gallery. Where were these people?

  History of art … He began to think. Pat Macgregor was still at university, he believed, and she had been a perfectly competent assistant. Why had he not thought of her in the first place? The reason was clear enough, and he intuitively understood exactly what it was, once he confronted it. Pat had been his girlfriend and he had gone through that process of quarantining that one goes through when one marries somebody else. The old girlfriend, the old boyfriend, had to be kept at arm’s length in those circumstances. But if one had triplets, surely things were different: a man in that unusual position would hardly be stoking the flame of old passion if he were to ask an old girlfriend to help him out.

  He found Pat’s telephone number in his old diary, where he had written it when they had first got to know one another. Telephone numbers jotted down in bars or clubs have a certain poignancy to them: pencilled figures written in hope that maybe this will be the grand passion, the new and exciting friend, the person whose lively offers will somehow change one’s life. And then, as often as not, the telephone number in question becomes a reminder of what was not to be, and reverts to being just another jumble of figures along with all the other figures that clutter our lives: codes, PINs, postcodes, registration numbers, and so on. And somewhere, Matthew suddenly thought, there was that number we all dread so much and do not really want to know: the number of days we have left to live – a number as yet unquantified, but which, like all such numbers, must be there precisely because it is going to be there. That number is n.

  Pat sounded pleased to hear from Matthew.

  “I was going to phone you,” she said. “This is amazing.”

  “Were you?”

  “Yes,” she replied. “I was going to …” She paused, and Matthew detected a note of awkwardness in her tone. Suddenly a disturbing, ridiculous possibility crossed his mind. Pat had become pregnant, by him, all that time ago and not told him. She had gone off and had the baby and had now decided to break the news. He had four children rather than three.

  10. A Distressed Oatmeal Sweater

  Matthew’s voice took on a strained note. “You were going to what?”

  “I was going to phone you about … well, about a job. The uni is on vacation now and I wondered whether you needed anybody for the next month or so.”

  He laughed, with some relief. It was ridiculous to think that he was respo
nsible for another, non-existent child; such a fear struck him as rather like worrying about being hit by a meteorite. “As it happens, that’s what I was phoning about. When can you start?”

  “Any time,” she said. “But how are things with you? Anything new?”

  Matthew paused before he answered. Anything new? “I have three sons,” he announced.

  He explained to an astonished Pat about the triplets, and heard her gasps of surprise. “It’s still sinking in,” he said. “Three, Pat. Three boys. Imagine.”

  There was silence as Pat imagined. “Well …” she said.

  “Exactly,” said Matthew. “But I’m really thrilled, you know. I always wanted a son. Or not always, I suppose, but for the last couple of years I’ve thought about it. Now I’ve got three.”

  He brought the conversation back to its original purpose, telling Pat what he had in mind. He would come into the gallery every day, he said, but would not stay long. She could phone him if anything came up that needed his attention, and he would always be able to drop back in if there was a crisis. Not that he thought this was likely, he assured her; nothing had ever really happened in the gallery that could be remotely described as a crisis.

  Pat offered to start the following day – an offer that Matthew accepted with relief.

  “You’ve saved the day, Pat,” he said. “You’re always doing that.”

  Am I? she asked herself. She was unaware of ever having saved Matthew from anything, but it pleased her that he should think this of her. She liked Matthew – even if he had one or two habits that irritated her. There was his tendency to be too kind to people – which meant that he was walked over by anybody unscrupulous who came into contact with him; there was his habit of leaving tea bags in cups and then putting the cups back on the shelf; there was that distressed oatmeal sweater of his and his crushed strawberry cords … Somebody had said that Elspeth had sorted his wardrobe out, but that remained to be seen. And, oh, there was another thing: his Macgregor tartan underpants. That was a ridiculous thing to be annoyed by, but it had made Pat feel quite cross when she had seen Matthew’s underpants and had noticed that they were in her family tartan. Somehow this seemed disrespectful: there was no reason why people should not wear tartan underpants, but to take somebody else’s tartan was definitely objectionable. It was rather like blowing one’s nose on a handkerchief printed with the national flag; there were countries where that would not only be considered bad taste, but be deemed a calculated insult.

  But these quirks were very small things when viewed beside Matthew’s undoubted good points. He was generous to a fault; he had an even temper and never raised his voice; he was polite in an old-fashioned way that people really appreciated. These qualities far outweighed those other traits, all of which might be corrected if Matthew had them pointed out to him. The problem, as Pat knew, was that nobody would do the pointing out. She could have complained about his underpants, for instance, but had not – we do not like to criticise the underwear of others; at least not in Edinburgh.

  Such thoughts were far from her mind when she met Matthew at the gallery the next morning. There was an odd embrace – a brotherly and sisterly affair, as meetings between former lovers can be – followed by a prolonged and gossipy exchange of personal news. They had not seen one another for some time, and there was much catching up to be done. How was Pat’s course going? What was her new flat like? And her flatmates?

  From Pat’s point of view, there were questions about the triplets. Were they sleeping? Did they wake up at different times, or would one wake up the other two? How did you tell them apart? Did you need to have one of those little identity bracelets?

  Matthew answered as best he could. He thought that he was beginning to be able to distinguish them from one another – more on the basis of personality than appearance.

  “I think, though, that I can detect some differences in their character,” he said. “Rognvald, for example – he’s the oldest – has a really serious expression. I think he’s more intellectual than his brothers. Tobermory is sensitive, if you ask me. He’s probably going to turn out to be artistic.”

  Pat concealed her amusement. “It’s amazing that you can tell all that this early,” she said.

  “Yes,” said Matthew. “It’s extraordinary. But you very quickly get used to having babies, you know.”

  He spoke with such authority that she almost believed him. It was touching, she felt, to see Matthew assume the mantle of fatherhood. And he would be a good father, in her view. One wanted a father to be decent, and that was exactly what Matthew was: he was profoundly decent. And that, she reflected with some alarm, was why it would never have worked between Matthew and her. Pat, for all her own normality, wanted danger. Or if not danger, she wanted spice.

  As a psychiatrist, her father had sensed this and had sought to warn her. “It’s a good thing,” Dr Macgregor said, “to be aware of who you are. You don’t want to dwell too long on it – therein lies a direct route to neurosis – but it’s useful to know your weak points. And one of yours, my dear, might be to search for … how shall we put it? Excitement? Perhaps that’s it.”

  She had shrugged. “Maybe it’s something to do with coming from the Grange.”

  The Grange, which was the area of Edinburgh in which Pat had been raised, and in which her father still lived, was synonymous with settled, haut-bourgeois existence; the Grange was no Left Bank.

  He had smiled at the reference. “We’re very sedate,” he said. “But what’s wrong with that?” He paused. “Sedate people of the world …”

  “Sit down!” said Pat. “You have nothing to gain …”

  “But your chairs.”

  They both laughed, father and daughter, together. There were very few real Marxists in the Grange.

  11. Flowers and Submarines

  Matthew needed to explain very little to Pat when he met her in the gallery that morning.

  “Everything’s the same as when I worked here last time,” she said. “Same paintings, almost … no, not really.”

  Matthew struggled to smile at the joke. “It’s not that bad,” he said. “I really have sold quite a lot. Maybe it’s because we have a lot of the same artists.”

  “Of course,” said Pat. She regretted the attempt at humour; Matthew was so easily hurt, and she did not want that. “Mind you …”

  “Mind you what?”

  “Remember how we talked about themed exhibitions?” she asked. “It was a long time ago, but we discussed having shows with titles like The Scottish Landscape or Through Kirkcudbright Eyes – that sort of thing.”

  Matthew frowned. “Vaguely. Of course, Kirkcudbright might be quite a good idea. There was Hornel, and lots of others. There was quite a colony of artists down there. Still is, I think.”

  “Exactly. Although I can only take Hornel in very small doses. All those flowers. And all those Japanese girls picking them.”

  Matthew agreed. “Yet people buy them, don’t they? People like flowers.” He stared out of the window for a moment before turning to Pat again. “Perhaps somewhere other than Kirkcudbright. What about Pittenweem? There are bags of good artists there. Tim Cockburn, for instance. And that man who does those rather haunting paintings of Arctic scenes. What’s his name again?”

  Pat knew. “Reinhard Behrens. Yes. I did an essay on his work in my second year. It’s beautiful. He paints these amazing pictures and puts a tiny toy submarine in them. He found the toy on a beach in Turkey years ago and he’s constructed a landscape for it ever since then.”

  This gave Matthew an idea. “Flowers and Submarines,” he said. “How about that for an exhibition?”

  Pat smiled. “Should I work on it? Just a bit of Hornel and rather more submarines.” She looked at Matthew. She was serious. In her view Matthew needed something unusual like that to raise the profile of the gallery. And it would make her time there so much more interesting, rather than simply sitting there, waiting for the occasional customer to
wander in and buy a painting at random.

  Matthew looked thoughtful. “Why not? We’ll have to buy the paintings, of course, but you could go online and see what’s available. The dealers all put their stuff on Artprice these days. You’ll find things there. And there are sales coming up soon at Lyon & Turnbull, and Bonhams too. We could see what turns up.”

  She nodded enthusiastically. “I’ll be careful.”

  “Don’t buy without asking me first,” said Matthew. “I want to see everything.”

  “Even the flowers?”

  “Yes, even the flowers. And the submarines.”

  They both laughed. Then Matthew asked, “There are very few paintings of submarines, you know. Why is that, do you think?”

  “Because we can’t see them,” said Pat.

  “So they might be there in a seascape? It’s just that the artists can’t show them when they’re submerged?”

  Pat was grinning. “I’ve had the most fantastic idea. Let’s call the show Flowers and Submarines, as you suggested, but it’ll be mostly seascapes. Well, flowers too, but the seascapes will be normal – but with the possibility of a submarine under the waves.”

  “Are you joking?”

  Pat was not. “I’m serious. It’s the angle, Matthew. You need an angle to get attention. People will love it.”

  Matthew shrugged. “I suppose it can’t do any harm. Seascapes sell. I had two of those old Dutch paintings of sailing boats being tossed about on the waves. I sold them both in three days.”

  “Well, there you are,” said Pat. “Agreed?”

  “Sort of,” said Matthew. He looked at his watch. “Let’s go over for coffee. Big Lou will be pleased to have you around again.” He reached for the Back Soon sign and hung it on the door.

  “I feel so nostalgic,” said Pat. “Going for coffee at Big Lou’s – just like the old days.”