The World According to Bertie Read online

  ‘Brucie! You haven’t changed!’

  ‘Why should I? No point changing when you’ve got things just right, is there?’ He paused. ‘But you’ve changed, Julia.’

  A shadow passed over her face. ‘Oh? Have I?’

  Bruce smiled. ‘You’ve become more beautiful. More ravishing.’

  ‘Brucie!’

  ‘No, I mean it. I really do. Look at you!’

  Julia led him into the living room. ‘I go to the gym, every day. Every single day.’

  ‘And it shows.’

  ‘Thank you. What about you? Do you still play rugby?’

  Bruce did not. ‘Now and then. Not much really. Too busy.’

  Julia nodded. ‘I know what it’s like. I almost got a job the other day, but I found I couldn’t. I was just far too busy.’

  ‘I know what it’s like.’ He looked about the living room. A large sofa, piled with cushions, dominated one wall. Opposite it was an ornate, gold-framed mirror above a large marble chimney piece. Bruce noticed, too, the expensive glass table piled with fashion magazines.

  ‘You’re quite a reader,’ he said, gesturing to the copies of Vogue and Harpers.

  Julia seemed pleased with the compliment. ‘I like to keep my mind active. I’ve always liked to read.’

  Bruce, who had seated himself on the sofa, reached forward and flicked through one of the magazines. ‘No!’ he said. ‘Would you believe it? I knew these people in London. That girl there, in the black dress, I met her at a party in Chelsea. And that’s her brother there. The tall one. Terribly dim, but a good chap once he’s had a drink or two.’

  Julia joined him on the sofa. ‘I can’t wait to get to London,’ she said. ‘That’s why I’m selling this place. One of Daddy’s friends has arranged for me to work with a woman who cooks directors’ lunches in the City. You know, they make lunches for the boardroom. And they cater for dinner parties. Party planners, sort of.’

  Bruce turned a page of the magazine. There was an advertisement for perfume, with a flap down the side of the page. He ripped open the flap and sniffed at the page. ‘Great,’ he said. ‘That’s the stuff. It really is. Sexy, or what?’

  Julia took the magazine from him and sniffed. ‘Mmm. Spicy. It reminds me of Mauritius.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Bruce. ‘Mauritius.’

  He laid the magazine back on the pile and turned to Julia. ‘So. London.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘London.’

  ‘When?’ asked Bruce.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. After I sell this place. Or before. I don’t know.’

  Bruce looked thoughtful. ‘Great place, London,’ he said. ‘But I’m pretty glad to be back in Edinburgh, you know. It’s great here too. And not so crowded.’

  ‘No,’ said Julia. ‘I’ve enjoyed myself here.’

  ‘The important thing,’ said Bruce, ‘is not to burn your boats. Never make a decision in a rush.’

  He rose to his feet, rubbing his hands together. ‘You going to show me around?’

  Julia laughed. ‘Of course. I forgot. Where shall we start?’

  ‘The kitchen,’ said Bruce. ‘You’ve got a kitchen?’

  Julia reached out and punched him playfully on the arm. ‘Cheeky! It’s a great kitchen, actually. All the stuff. Marble tops. Built-in wine racks. Everything.’

  They moved through to the kitchen. Bruce ran his fingers over the marble surfaces. ‘Smooth,’ he said. He looked at Julia. ‘Are you hungry? Seeing the kitchen makes me realise that I haven’t had lunch. You had lunch?’

  Julia had not, and Bruce offered to cook it for her, in her kitchen. ‘You’ve got pasta?’ he asked. ‘And some butter? Parmesan, yes? Well, we’re in business.’

  ‘This is fun,’ said Julia.

  Bruce winked at her. ‘Better than selling a flat?’

  Julia giggled. ‘Much better.’

  Bruce found a bottle of white wine in the fridge and opened it. He poured Julia a glass and they toasted one another as Bruce cut a piece of cheese off the block of Parmesan.

  ‘I went to the place where they make this stuff,’ he said, breaking off a fragment of the cheese and passing it to Julia. ‘Reggio Emilia. Near Parma. That’s where they make it. I knew an Italian girl. They lived in Bologna, but her father had some sort of farm there. Big place, with white oxen. And this great villa.’

  Had Bruce been paying attention to Julia’s expression, he would have noticed the trace of a frown. But she recovered quickly. ‘An Italian girlfriend? Very exotic.’

  Bruce looked at her from the corner of his eye. He appeared to be concentrating on slipping the pasta into the water, but he was watching her.

  ‘No more Italian girlfriends for me,’ he said. ‘I’ve had enough of all that. It’s settle-down time now. Comes to us all.’

  He watched her response. She had picked up her glass and was gazing at the rim. But he could tell.

  ‘You? Settle down?’ She forced a smile, but there was a real point to her question.

  ‘I’m serious,’ he said. ‘I want a bit of quiet. I want a bit of domesticity. You know . . . going out for dinner, coming back and putting one’s feet up on the sofa with a . . . with a friend. Lazy weekends.’ He paused. ‘Long lie-ins on a Sunday. Then brunch somewhere. Some jazz. The Sunday papers.’

  Julia had closed her eyes, just momentarily, but she had closed them. It’s working, thought Bruce: she’s imagining what it would be like. And there’s no reason for me to feel bad, because it really would be like that. That’s exactly what we could do in this place. It’s ideal. And the other great attraction of it all was that the need to find a job would be less urgent. Julia, as everybody in Edinburgh knew, was not impecunious. An indulgent father, the owner of three large hotels and a slice of a peninsula in Argyll, made sure that his daughter wanted for nothing. It was surprising, thought Bruce, that she had not been snapped up by some fortune-hunter. If she went to London, there would be a real danger of that happening. And that was why he was doing her a good turn. That’s what it was: an act of pure selflessness – considerate and sympathetic; pure altruism.

  13. Mr Fifty Per-cent

  After he had finished his cup of coffee at Big Lou’s, Matthew made his way back across Dundas Street to the gallery. It was always a bit of a wrench leaving Big Lou: he felt she was the most relaxing, easy company, rather like a mother, he thought – if one had the right sort of mother. Or an aunt perhaps, the sort of person with whom one could just pass time without the need to say anything. Not that Matthew had ever had an aunt like that, although he did have vague, childhood memories of an aunt of his father’s who lived with them for a time and who worked all day, and every day, at tapestry. Matthew’s father had told him an amusing story about this aunt’s older brother, a man who suffered from a mild mental handicap and who had been taken in by Matthew’s grandfather. Uncle Jimmy had been a kind man, Matthew’s father said, and although there was little other contribution he could make to the household, he had been adept at fixing clocks.

  ‘During the war, Jimmy had been largely uninterested in what was going on,’ Matthew’s father had said. ‘But he was in great demand as a fixer of clocks, and his war service consisted of repairing the clocks of naval vessels that came into the Clyde. They brought the clocks round to the house because he couldn’t really be left wandering around the ships unattended.

  ‘After the war, he was disappointed that his supply of ships’ clocks dropped off. He liked the shape of these clocks, and it was not much fun going back to the fixing of mantelpiece clocks for the neighbours. Eventually he asked why there were so few ships coming in and was told that the war had finished three years ago.

  ‘“Oh,” said Uncle Jimmy. “Who won, then?”’

  Matthew’s father had for some reason found this story vastly amusing, but Matthew thought: Poor Uncle Jimmy, and remembered those Japanese soldiers who had come out of the jungle twenty, thirty years after the end of the war. Presumably they knew who won, or did they?
r />   He unlocked the door of the gallery, removing the notice which said Back in half an hour. Surveying his desk, from which he had earlier cleared the day’s mail, he realised that there was not much to do that morning. In fact, once he thought about it, there was nothing at all. He was up to date with his correspondence, such as it was; he had paged through all the catalogues for the forthcoming auctions and knew exactly which pictures he would bid for. There were no invoices to send out, no bills to be paid. There was simply nothing to do.

  For a few moments, he thought of what lay ahead of him. Would he be doing this for the rest of his life – sitting here, waiting for something to happen? And if that was all there was to it, then what exactly was the point? The artists whose work he sold were at least making things, leaving something behind them, a corpus of work. He, by contrast, would make nothing, leave nothing behind.

  But was that not the fate of so many of us? Most people who made their way to work each day, who sat in offices or factories, doing something which probably did not vary a lot – pushing pieces of paper about or moving things from one place to another – these people might equally well look at their lives and ask what the point was.

  Or should one really not ask that question, simply because the question in itself was a pointless one? Perhaps there was no real point to our existence – or none that we could discern – and that meant that the real question that had to be asked was this: how can I make my life bearable? We are here whether we like it or not, and by and large we seem to have a need to continue. In that case, the real question to be addressed is: how are we going to make the experience of being here as fulfilling, as good as possible? That is what Matthew thought.

  He was dwelling on this when he saw Angus Lordie walk past, carrying a parcel. On impulse, Matthew waved and gestured to him to come in.

  ‘I was on my way to Big Lou’s,’ Angus said. ‘And you?’

  ‘Going nowhere,’ said Matthew. ‘Sitting. Thinking.’

  ‘About?’

  Matthew waved a hand in the air. ‘About this and that. The big questions.’ He paused. ‘Any news of Cyril?’

  Angus shook his head. ‘In the pound,’ he said. ‘It makes my blood boil just to think of it. Cyril will be sitting there wondering what on earth he did to deserve this. Have people no mercy?’

  ‘They used to try animals for crimes,’ said Matthew thoughtfully. ‘Back in medieval times. I read something about it once. They had trials of pigs and goats and the like. And then they punished them. Burned them alive.’

  Angus said nothing, but Matthew realised that he had touched a raw nerve, and changed the subject. He gestured to the parcel that Angus was carrying.

  ‘That’s a painting?’

  ‘It will be,’ said Angus. ‘At the moment it’s just a primed canvas. There’s a man down in Canonmills who does this for me. I can’t be bothered to make stretchers and all the rest.’

  ‘Well, don’t leave it lying about,’ said Matthew. ‘It might be picked up and entered for the Turner Prize. You know the sort of rubbish they like. Piles of bricks and unmade beds and all the rest.’

  ‘But they wouldn’t even consider this,’ said Angus. ‘Although it’s only a primed canvas, it comes too close to painting for them.’

  Matthew smiled. An idea was coming to him.

  ‘Antonin Artaud,’ he muttered. He looked up at Angus. ‘You know something, Angus. I would like to try to sell something of yours. I really would.’

  ‘You know that I don’t sell through dealers,’ said Angus. ‘Even a semi-decent one like you. Why should I? No thank you, Mr Forty Per Cent.’

  ‘Fifty,’ corrected Matthew. ‘No, I’m not asking for any of your figurative studies. Or even those iffy nudes of yours. I’m thinking of something that wouldn’t involve you in much effort, but which would be lucrative. And could make you famous.’

  ‘You’re assuming that I want to be famous,’ said Angus. ‘But actually I can’t think of anything worse. People taking an interest in your private life. People looking at you. What’s the attraction in that?’

  ‘It’s attractive to those who want to be loved,’ said Matthew. ‘Which is a universal desire, is it not?’

  ‘Well, I have no need to be loved,’ snorted Angus. ‘I just want my dog back.’

  It was as if Matthew had not heard. ‘Antonin Artaud,’ he said.

  ‘Who?’ asked Angus.

  14. Artaud’s Way

  This was something that Matthew knew about. ‘Antonin Artaud,’ he pronounced, ‘was a French dramaturge.’

  Angus Lordie wrinkled his nose. ‘You mean dramatist?’

  Matthew hesitated. He had only recently learned the word dramaturge and had been looking for opportunities to use it. He had eventually summoned up the courage to try it on Big Lou, but her espresso machine had hissed at a crucial moment and she had not heard him. And here was Angus making it difficult for him by questioning it. Matthew thought that a dramaturge did something in addition to writing plays, but now he was uncertain exactly what that was. Was a dramaturge a producer as well, or a director, or one of those people who helped other people develop their scripts? Or all of these things at one and the same time?

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Matthew. ‘Anyway . . .’

  ‘I don’t call myself an arturge,’ Angus interrupted. ‘I am an artist. So why call a dramatist a dramaturge?’

  Matthew said nothing.

  ‘Simple words are usually better,’ Angus continued. ‘I, for one, like to say now rather than at this time, which is what one hears on aeroplanes. They say: “At this time we are commencing our landing.” What a pompous waste of breath. Why not say: “We are now starting to land”?’

  Matthew nodded, joined in the condemnation of aero-speak. At least this took the heat off his use of dramaturge.

  ‘And here’s another thing,’ said Angus Lordie. ‘Have you noticed how when so many people speak these days they run all their words together – they don’t enunciate properly? Have you noticed that? Try to understand what is said over the public address system at Stansted Airport and see how far you get. Just try.’

  ‘Estuary English,’ said Matthew.

  ‘Ghastly English,’ said Angus. He mused for a moment, and then: ‘But who is this Artaud?’

  ‘A dram . . .’ Matthew stopped himself, just in time. ‘A dramatist. He was very popular in the thirties and forties. Anyway, he painted monochrome canvases and gave them remarkable titles. It was a witty comment on artistic fashion.’

  This interested Angus. ‘Such as?’

  Matthew smiled. ‘He came up with a totally white painting – just white – and he called it Anaemic Virgins on their Way to their First Communion in a Snowstorm.’

  Angus burst out laughing. There were white canvases in the public collections in Scotland. A suitable title, he thought.

  ‘And then,’ Matthew went on, ‘he painted a completely red canvas which he called Apoplectic Cardinals Picking Tomatoes by the Red Sea.’

  Angus clapped his hands together. ‘Wonderful!’ he said. ‘Now let me think. What would we call a canvas that was simply blue?’

  Matthew thought for a moment. ‘Depression at Sea?’

  ‘Not bad,’ said Angus. ‘A bit short, perhaps? What about A Depressed Conservative at a Risqué Film Convention?’

  ‘Except that people don’t use the term “blue film” any more.’

  ‘But we do talk about turning the air blue,’ said Angus. ‘One turns the air blue with bad language. So how about A Sailor at Sea, Swearing?’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Matthew. ‘And green? A completely green canvas?’

  It did not take Angus long. ‘An Envious Conservationist Sitting on the Grass,’ he said. And then he added: ‘Reading Our Man in Havana.’

  Matthew looked blank for a moment, but then he laughed. ‘Very clever,’ he said. He was about to add something, but then he remembered how the conversation had started. ‘That canvas of yours,’ he said. ‘I could sell it f
or you. Just sign it, and I’ll sell it.’

  Angus looked puzzled. ‘But I haven’t begun . . .’ he said.

  ‘It’s plain white,’ said Matthew. ‘Just sign it. I’ll put a title on it, and we could see if I could sell it. We could follow our late friend, Monsieur Artaud.’

  Angus was scornful. ‘A waste of a perfectly good primed canvas,’ he said. ‘We don’t have a sufficient body of pretentious people . . .’

  Matthew interrupted him. ‘But we do!’ he said forcefully. ‘Edinburgh is full of pretentious people. There are bags and bags of them. They walk down Dundas Street. All the time.’

  At this, they both looked out onto Dundas Street. There were few people about, but just at that moment they saw a man whom they both recognised. Matthew and Angus exchanged glances, and smiled.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Angus.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Matthew, producing a small tube of black acrylic paint from a drawer. ‘Now, where do you want to sign it?’

  Once Angus had inscribed his signature, Matthew raised the issue of the painting’s title. He held the white canvas up and invited Angus to suggest something.

  ‘It looks very restful,’ Angus mused. ‘Something like Resolution might be a good title for it. Or perhaps The Colour of Silence?’

  ‘Is silence white?’ asked Matthew. ‘What about White Noise?’

  Angus thought that was a possibility, but was just not quite right. Then it occurred to him. ‘Piece Be With You,’ he said.

  ‘Perfect,’ said Matthew.

  Angus nodded in acknowledgement of the compliment. ‘The subliminal message of such a title is this,’ he said. ‘Buy this piece. That’s what it says. This piece wants to be with you.’ He paused. ‘Of course, we could increase its appeal simply by putting an NFS tag on it – not for sale. That message would fight subconsciously with the encouraging message of the title. And the result would be a very quick sale.’

  Matthew reached for one of the sheets of heavy white paper on which he typed labels for his paintings. Inserting this into his manual typewriter, he began to tap on the keys. ‘Angus Lordie, RSA,’ he typed. ‘Born . . .’ He looked at Angus expectantly.