Bertie's Guide to Life and Mothers Read online

  Angus did not think there was any real likelihood of Cyril’s proving difficult. Intoxication, in his experience, disclosed a person’s true nature. Nice people were nice when they had taken too much to drink; nasty people were nasty. What had Domenica said about Auden? Hadn’t she said something about his views on the weather that could be applied here? He racked his brains and yes, that was it: nice weather is what nice people were nice about and nasty weather was what nasty people were nasty about. It was such a peculiar thing to say—at least at first blush—and yet it was, Angus decided, so true. People giving to moaning about things in general moaned about the weather; people not giving to moaning took an optimistic view of a darkening sky. Darkening skies could—and did—lighten. Rain fell, but then stopped falling; wind gusted, but also petered out.

  “Cyril will not be difficult,” Angus said confidently. “His true nature will reveal itself. In vino veritas. He’s a good dog, you see.”

  Matthew picked up his coat, which he had deposited on the back of his chair. Although it was a fine summer evening, there had been a chill in the air that morning when he had left the flat, and he had taken a lightweight coat to work. “I still feel rather bad about this,” he muttered to Angus.

  Angus assured him that an apology was not necessary. “Who amongst us has never made a dog drunk?” he asked.

  “Virtually everyone,” said Matthew, smiling.

  Angus reattached Cyril’s lead to the dog’s collar, and the three of them began to make their way out of the bar, Cyril walking somewhat unsteadily, his tail wagging preternaturally fast. As they approached the door, a man who had been watching Cyril’s antics with interest slipped off his stool and approached them.

  “Excuse me.”

  Angus stopped and looked at the stranger. “Yes?”

  “May I have a word with you? Outside?”

  Angus looked down at Cyril. “I can’t linger, I’m afraid. My dog’s a bit under the weather. But yes, if you wish …”

  They left the bar. Outside the cloudless evening sky was still filled with midsummer light. A jet trail intersected the blue—a line of white, wispy at the edges, stretched back towards Norway.

  The stranger introduced himself, showing Angus a small identity card that he extracted from his wallet. “I’m an animal welfare inspector,” he said. “And I’m sorry to say I take a very dim view of how your dog is being treated.”

  Angus stared at the man. “What do you mean?” he stuttered. “I love my dog. He’s very well looked after.”

  Matthew, frowning, chose to intervene. “Yes,” he said. “I can vouch for that. This dog is one of the most …” He searched for the right word. “… most appreciated dogs in Edinburgh. Everybody knows that.”

  The inspector appeared not to hear what Matthew said. He continued to address Angus. “Giving alcoholic drinks to a dog constitutes ill-treatment, I’m afraid.”

  “But it’s only beer,” protested Angus. “It’s not as if I’m giving him whisky, for heaven’s sake!”

  The inspector shook his head. “Anything with alcohol in it is bad for a dog.”

  “But all sorts of things are bad for us,” said Angus, looking briefly to Matthew for support. “Too much red meat. Too much chocolate. You name it; it’s bad for us.”

  “I’m sorry,” said the inspector. “I’m not prepared to argue with you. Your name and address, please—I’m going to have to file a report with a view to taking this dog into care.”

  12. The Hinterland

  Big Lou, proprietrix of the Morning After coffee bar in Dundas Street, allowed her thoughts to wander as she polished the stainless-steel surface of the counter. This was the place from which she dispensed cups of latte and cappuccino from eight in the morning until six at night, hours that were on the generous side: hardly anybody came into the coffee bar before half past nine, and it would have made no dent in Big Lou’s turnover if she were not to open until then. But an early start to the day was deeply ingrained in Big Lou’s nature: she had never stayed in bed beyond six in the morning, summer and winter, and saw no reason to change.

  Those robust attitudes had been instilled in Lou by her mother, Agnes Pittendreich, who came from rural Aberdeenshire, where the early start is enshrined in the culture. The beginning of the day in Scotland is staggered: breakfast in Edinburgh may be at eight, but in the East Neuk of Fife it is at seven-thirty, at seven in Arbroath, at six-thirty in Aberdeen, while in the rolling hinterland of the granite city it is at five-thirty, or even five.

  Agnes had known nothing but the agricultural life. She had been raised on the farm Cauld Hillock, just outside the well-set market town of Turriff, and had left Turriff only once she had married Big Lou’s father, who was, of course, also a farmer, but from Angus rather than Aberdeenshire. Agnes’s mother, Big Lou’s grandmother, or Grandmother Fraser, struggled with the stony soil of Cauld Hillock but in spite of this her farm remained in Big Lou’s mind a sort of Eden—a land of lost content, a place of warmth and security to which she was sent on the first day of every school holiday, only to return on the day before school was due to begin.

  While the sending away of children for such long periods might raise an eyebrow—not to say questions as to whether the parents were avoiding their child’s company—this was certainly not the case here. If the choice had been theirs, Big Lou’s parents would have had her remain with them during the school holidays, as there was a great deal of useful work a child could do in the busy growing season. But their daughter had made it clear to them that she wanted to spend time with her grandmother and they had acquiesced. So at the end of each school term Lou was duly placed in the train in Arbroath, entrusted to the care of the train’s guard, carrying her battered leather suitcase to which she had tied a home-made label reading Passenger from Arbroath to Aberdeen. She was proud of that label, and indeed it was still attached to that suitcase, although half of it had fallen off making it say, enigmatically, Passenger from.

  Grandmother Fraser doted on Lou, who reminded her of the daughter—Agnes’s sister—whom she had lost to a disease of childhood, now conquered. She had a predilection, as many in those parts did, for speech diminutives, adding ie if not to every noun, then at least to a good number of them. And while in some cases this might become annoying, it was not with her, its effect being only to impart a feeling of benignity and affection. And for the rest, her Doric was entirely natural: the patterns of rural speech in Aberdeenshire, unchanged for centuries, meant that the language fitted the land as a glove might fit the hand. She called Lou her quine, the word for a girl in that part of Scotland. Boys were loons, of course, which somehow seemed to suit them every bit as well as quine was right for a girl. Lou, to her grandmother, was her wee quine, or, in a moment of particular fondness, her wee quinikie.

  Grandmother Fraser’s husband, Neil, was a farmer of the old school. Except on Sundays, when he donned for the kirk a starched white shirt and a carefully pressed black suit—his gweed claes, as he called that outfit—Lou had never seen him wear anything but his working clothes. These consisted of a pair of stout trousers, his breeks, a shirt with no collar, but fastened at the top by a brass stud, a pair of heavy boots, and, if the day were colder than usual, an ancient green jacket. A particular feature of his dress was his Nicky Tams, a garter-like arrangement wound round the lower leg that prevented cold, or even mice, from making their way up the trousers to the warmer regions above.

  Grandmother Fraser baked girdle scones for Lou and served them with jam of her own making. She also made kailkenny, a dish of cabbage and potatoes, and skirlie, Big Lou’s favourite, which consisted of oatmeal cooked with onions and suet.

  “Naebody ever got thin eating skirlie,” announced Grandmother Fraser, a statement that might have been so obvious as not to require making in the first place, but was somehow invested with wisdom when spoken in the accents of rural Aberdeenshire. The Scots language can do that—can effortlessly transform the mundane into the poetic, giving th
e dignity of profound truth to the most banal of observations, making even a weather report sound dramatic. Grandmother Fraser may have said nothing of real importance, but that was not the impression she gave, and Lou found herself recording her grandmother’s observations in the diary she had kept since the age of seven.

  Even now, she took her old diaries out from time to time and read of those days at Cauld Hillock. On this morning in late June, as she polished the counter in her coffee bar, she thought of the entry she had seen the previous evening, for this very day, thirty-one years ago, when she had recorded the visit for lunch of the minister, the Reverend George Garioch. Her grandparents were so proud of him, and they had told Lou that as a young man he had graduated with a doctorate in divinity from Heidelberg. “Just think,” said Grandmother Fraser, “that this is just an ordinary parish and we have such learning at our disposal. Just think.”

  Big Lou had sat bolt upright, on her best behaviour, watching the minister as he raised his cup of tea to his lips and smiled at her, to all intents and purposes as human and as sympathetic as those who had no doctorate in divinity from Heidelberg, or anywhere else.

  13. Matthew and Big Lou Ponder Reincarnation

  Matthew, who was first in that morning, interrupted Big Lou’s thoughts, which were just on the point of returning to skirlie as the memory of the Reverend George Garioch and his Heidelberg D.D. faded. He had left the gallery in Pat’s charge—it was a Thursday morning, and since she had no lectures on that day she could work all day if required. This was not really necessary, as Thursday was a quiet day for the gallery too, but Matthew liked having somebody around, even if there was not much to do.

  Big Lou glanced up from her task of cleaning the stainless-steel counter.

  “So, Lou,” said Matthew cheerfully. “Thursday again.”

  Big Lou folded her cloth. “Happens once a week, Matthew. Regular as clockwork.”

  “In this universe at least, Lou. There’s always the possibility that there are parallel universes in which things may be quite different. No Thursdays, for instance.”

  “Or just a whole succession of Thursdays,” said Lou, reaching for a cup from below the counter. “Do you believe in reincarnation, Matthew?”

  Matthew frowned. “Why do you ask, Lou?”

  “You mentioned parallel universes—isn’t it possible that we go from one into the other after we die? Hence the conviction that people have always had that there’s another world—the other side, heaven, whatever you want to call it. People believe that, don’t they?”

  “Because they’ve got some memory of it? Somewhere in the collective unconscious?”

  Big Lou nodded. Of the many books she had acquired when she had bought the bookshop—and its stock—that had previously occupied her coffee bar’s premises, several had been by Jung, and by Jungians. The idea of a collective unconscious seemed entirely plausible to her, although its precise location was problematic.

  She pressed the button on the gleaming Italian coffee maker that would, with subterranean grindings and gurglings, make Matthew an almost perfect cappuccino. This machine, which had laboured without complaint or incident since its purchase some years previously, was called the Magnifica, an entirely suitable name, she thought. “Of course, the idea of reincarnation is that we come back right here, into this world,” said Lou. “We don’t find ourselves in a parallel universe, we find ourselves in the same place we were before.”

  Matthew thought this unlikely. The little he had read of reincarnation suggested that one might return in very different circumstances, and sometimes with a gap of centuries in between appearances. Who was that woman in Edinburgh who claimed to be James IV and had written a book about her earlier existence, including a moving account of her demise at the Battle of Flodden?

  “Exactly the same place?” he asked. “Surely not?”

  “No,” agreed Big Lou. “Not exactly the same. This world, of course, but not always the same bit. It depends on your karma, doesn’t it? If you believe in it all, of course. But if you do, then the state of your karma will determine where you come back.”

  Matthew sniffed at the coffee. It was his favourite smell—ranking above the smell of new shirts or the leather interior of a new car, or truffle oil, or the smell of gorse in blossom on an Argyll shore. If he came back, then he hoped it would be into a situation where coffee still existed.

  “Of course,” he said. “Karma. So if your karma’s bad you might be sent somewhere worse than where you are now?”

  Big Lou nodded. “So they say.”

  As Big Lou applied the milky foam to the top of his coffee, Matthew explored the implications. To be living in Edinburgh was undoubtedly a great privilege, and if one’s karma was bad—through the doing of bad deeds—then one might expect to be demoted in the next life to somewhere less desirable. For a moment he felt a twinge of anxiety. Glasgow?

  He voiced his doubts to Lou. “We might not get Edinburgh, then, Lou? If our karma’s bad?”

  Big Lou thought for a moment. “Yes, you might go somewhere else. Or you may just get sent to a worse part of Edinburgh than you’re in at the moment.” She fixed Matthew with a gaze that struck him as being almost evaluative. “You’re in India Street, aren’t you? That’s obviously because you’ve done good things in a previous life. India Street is for people with good karma, and if they improve this time round they can get Heriot Row. People who live in Heriot Row aren’t there by accident, Matthew. They’re there because they’ve done good things in a previous life.”

  Matthew smiled. “I’d never thought of that. Of course, it’s all wishful thinking, isn’t it? There’s nothing else, you know, Lou. It’s just this time, and that’s it.”

  Big Lou looked at him dismissively. “Hamlet?” she said. “You remember what Hamlet says? No, maybe you don’t. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

  “But you don’t really believe in all that stuff, Lou,” said Matthew, wiping away the milky moustache with which his cappuccino had endowed him.

  “What about that wee boy?” asked Lou. “The one they made the film about? Cameron Macauley. He was a wee boy who lived in Glasgow and he was convinced that he had had another family. He kept speaking about it.”

  “Children fantasise,” said Matthew.

  “You think so? Maybe they do, but this wee boy described a place on Barra in some detail. So they took him over and they found the house and it was just as he said it would be. And what’s more, he had given the name of the family who owned it. And after a lot of research, they discovered that the house had been owned by a family of that name.”

  “This happened?”

  “Yes, it did. And they brought this important American psychology professor over from Virginia or wherever it was and he looked into it and made sure there was no cheating.”

  Matthew shivered. “Creepy.”

  “Yes,” said Big Lou. “It is.”

  “Yet vaguely reassuring,” Matthew went on. “And … and if reincarnation, and perhaps more importantly this karma business, were to be true, then it would give the world a sense of justice. Evil people would get their just deserts in the next life.” He paused. “You know, Lou, I find that helps quite a lot.”

  Lou thought for a moment. She thought he was right: there might be no ultimate assertion of justice, but we had to behave as if there were. The problem of human evil was not so simple as we might blandly assume, she felt, and removing the eschatological dimension had only made it even harder.

  14. Matthew’s Lack of Tact

  The discussion about reincarnation, unexpected at that hour of the morning, when most of us are concerned with the immediate challenges of this life, rather than those that might be encountered in the next, or, a fortiori, in the life beyond that—this intimate discussion prompted Matthew to ask Big Lou how matters stood with her farmer friend, Alex. He would not normally have asked her this, as Big Lou’s love life seemed to him
to be an area of disappointment that was perhaps best not talked about too much. Somehow, though, the moment seemed right.

  “So, Lou, how’s Alex?” he asked. “Is that going well?” Big Lou had been bending down to pick up a cloth that had fallen from the counter. She stopped, mid-way, arrested by what had been said. For his part, noticing the effect of his question, Matthew became flustered.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t ask … sorry …”

  Big Lou retrieved the cloth. She did not face Matthew, but looked away when she replied.

  “He’s fine. He’s still coming to the Farmers’ Market. But … well, you know how it is.”

  Matthew hesitated. “Over, Lou? It’s over?”

  She nodded, and his heart went out to her. This strong, resourceful woman from Arbroath; this representative of a whole Scotland that people who lived in places like Edinburgh sometimes never saw; this woman whom they all rather took for granted, was suffering.

  “I’m sorry, Lou,” he mumbled. “It must be hard. Men can be so …”

  She turned to face him. “You think he broke it off?”

  Matthew blushed. “I assumed … I mean, I thought …”

  Big Lou sighed. “It was me, Matthew. I know you think I’m the one who’ll always be given the heave-ho, but it was me this time.”

  Matthew felt slightly better. He had, of course, assumed that Lou had been abandoned because that was the way it had always been. That seedy chef, that ridiculous Jacobite with that half-mad Belgian pretender of his, that Elvis impersonator who took her to Crieff Hydro for the Elvis conference and paid no attention to her once there, immersed as he was in Elvis matters … Every one of Big Lou’s men had ended the relationship rather than the other way round. But now that she had herself brought an affair to its end, his intrusive question seemed less tactless.