The World According to Bertie Read online

  ‘Oh, nineteen something-or-other,’ said Angus airily. ‘Put: Born, Twentieth Century. That will be sufficient. Or, perhaps, floruit MCMLXXX. I was in particularly good form round about then.’ For a few moments he looked wistful; MCMLXXX had been such a good year.

  Matthew typed as instructed. ‘And the price?’ he asked.

  Angus thought for a moment. It did not really matter, he thought, what he asked for the painting, as he did not think it would sell. But it occurred to him that if he was going to expose artistic pretentiousness – and artistic gullibility – he might as well do it convincingly. ‘Twenty-eight thousand pounds,’ he suggested.

  Matthew laughed. ‘Fifty per cent of which will come to me,’ he said.

  ‘In that case,’ said Angus, ‘make it thirty-two thousand.’

  The price agreed, Matthew stood up and prepared to hang the plain white canvas in a prominent place on the wall facing his desk. Then, after sticking the label and details below it, he stood back and admired the effect.

  ‘I’m tempted to keep it,’ he said. ‘It’s so resolved!’

  ‘One of my finest works,’ said Angus. ‘Without a shadow of doubt. One of the best. Flawless.’

  15. A Small Sherry and a Hint of Synaesthesia

  Since her return from the Malacca Straits, Domenica Macdonald had not seen a great deal of her friend, Antonia Collie, to whom she had lent her flat in Scotland Street during her absence. It had been a satisfactory arrangement from both points of view: Domenica had had somebody to water her plants and forward her mail, while Antonia had been afforded a base from which to pursue her researches into the lives of the early Scottish saints. These saints, both elusive and somewhat shadowy, were the characters in the novel on which she was working, and even if they had failed to leave many material traces of their presence, there were manuscripts and books in the National Library of Scotland which spoke of their trajectory through those dark years.

  Domenica’s return came too early for Antonia. She had become accustomed to her life in Scotland Street and to the comfortable routine she had established there. She had no desire to return to Fife, to the parental house in St Andrews, where she had set up home after the collapse of her marriage to a philandering farmer husband; not that he had been a philanderer on any great scale – unfaithfulness with one other woman was hardly philandering, even if that woman was exactly the sort an echt philanderer would choose.

  If she could not return to Fife, then Antonia would have to find somewhere else to live in Edinburgh. She would not have far to go – three yards, in fact – as the flat opposite Domenica’s, and on the same landing, came up for rent at exactly the right time. It was the flat previously occupied by Pat, and the one which had been sold by Bruce when he left for London. Its coming onto the market at just the right time amounted to particularly good fortune, Antonia thought; and indeed there was to be more.

  Within six weeks of her signing the lease, the owner asked Antonia if she was interested in buying it. Of course she was able to reply that the difficulty with this was that the flat already had a sitting tenant – herself – and this would require a reduction in the price. The owner had been annoyed by this claim, which seemed flawed in some indefinable way, but, wanting to make a quick sale, had agreed to take £10,000 off the price. Antonia agreed, and the flat became hers. Domenica, though, was hesitant. She was half-hearted in the welcome of her old friend: such friends are all very well – in their place, which is not necessarily on one’s doorstep.

  In the early stages of their being neighbours, Domenica had decided that she would not encourage Antonia too much. There had been an invitation to a welcoming drink, but this drink had consisted of a carefully measured glass in which the sherry had occupied only two-thirds of the glass, which was a small one at that. Anything more than this, she decided, might have sent the wrong signal. Antonia had noticed. She had looked at the sherry glass and held it up to the light briefly, as if searching for the liquid, and then had glanced at Domenica to see if the gesture had registered. It had, and both decided that they understood one another perfectly.

  ‘I know that you were about to offer me another sherry,’ Antonia said about fifteen minutes later. ‘But I really mustn’t stay. I have so much to do, you know. The days seem to fly past now, and I find that I have to struggle to fit everything in.’

  Domenica felt slightly embarrassed. After all, Antonia had shown no signs of living in her pocket, and perhaps it was rather unfriendly to make one’s concerns quite so obvious at this stage.

  ‘You don’t have to dash,’ she said. ‘I could rustle something up for dinner . . .’

  ‘Very kind,’ said Antonia. ‘But I’ve made my own arrangements. You must come and have a meal with me some time soon. Next month perhaps.’

  There was an awkward silence. Next week would have been courteous; next month made her meaning crystal clear. And perhaps had added the belt to the braces.

  ‘That would be very nice,’ said Domenica. ‘No doubt we shall see one another before then. On the stairs maybe.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Antonia. ‘On the stairs.’

  Over the next few days, they did not see one another at all. It had been an awkward way of establishing the rules of good neigh-bourliness, but it had worked, and after a while Antonia found herself able to knock on Domenica’s door and invite her in for coffee. The invitation had been accepted – after only a moment’s reflection on what the diary for that day might contain. That content was non-existent, of course, but one should only accept an invitation immediately if one is happy for the person issuing the invitation to conclude that one had nothing better, or indeed nothing at all, to do. And Domenica certainly did not want Antonia to reach that conclusion. She was sensitive to the fact that Antonia was writing a book, and therefore had a major project, while she did not. There was a very significant division, Domenica believed, between those who were writing a book at any time, and those who were not; a division just as significant as that between those actors who were currently on the stage and those, the majority, who were resting. For this reason, there were many people who claimed to be writing a book, even if this was not really the case. Indeed, somewhere at the back of her mind she remembered reading of a literary prize for such unwritten books, and of how the merits of those works on the shortlist for this prize were hotly debated by those who claimed to know what these unwritten books were all about.

  ‘What are you going to do with this flat?’ asked Domenica as she watched Antonia pour boiling water into the cafetière. It was the wrong question to ask somebody who had just moved into a new flat, but Domenica realised that only after she had asked it. It implied that the new place needed alteration, which, of course, may not have been the view of the new owner.

  But Antonia was not offended. ‘A great deal,’ she said, stirring the coffee grounds into the water. She sniffed at the aroma. ‘What a lovely smell. Coffee. Certain new clothes. Lavender tucked under the pillowcase. All those smells.’

  Domenica nodded. ‘Do you see smells as colours?’ she asked. ‘Or sounds as colours?’

  ‘Synaesthesia,’ said Antonia. ‘My father’s one, actually. A synaesthetic.’

  16. Unrequited Love

  Antonia poured coffee into a blue-and-white Spode cup and passed it to Domenica. Her guest thanked her and carefully put it down on the kitchen table. The cup seemed familiar – in fact, she remembered that she had one exactly like it in her own flat, one which unfortunately had acquired a chip to the rim, more or less above the handle, just as this cup . . . She stopped herself. The cup which Antonia had handed her had a chip to the rim at exactly the same place.

  She reached out and lifted the cup to her lips, taking the opportunity to examine the rim more closely as she did so. Yes, there it was, right above the handle, a small chip in the glazing, penetrating as far as the first layer of china, not enough to retire a well-loved cup, but clearly noticeable. She cradled the cup in her hands, feeling the warmth of t
he liquid within. Antonia had stolen her china! And if this cup had been removed, then what else had she pilfered during her occupancy of Domenica’s flat?

  She looked up at Antonia. It took a particularly blatant attitude, surely, to serve the dispossessed coffee in their own china. That was either the carelessness of the casual thief, or shamelessness of a high order. It was more likely, she decided, that Antonia had simply forgotten that she had stolen the cup, and had therefore inadvertently used it for Domenica’s coffee. Presumably there were many thieves who did just that; who were so used to ill-gotten goods that they became blasé about them. And even worse criminals – murderers indeed – had been known to talk about their crimes in a casual way, as if nobody would sit up and take notice and report them. In a shameless age, when people readily revealed their most intimate secrets for the world to see, perhaps it was easy to imagine how the need for concealment might be forgotten.

  Domenica remembered how, some years previously, she had been invited for a picnic by some people who had quite casually mentioned that the rug upon which they were sitting had been lifted from an airline. It had astonished her to think that these people imagined that she would not be shocked, or at least disapproving. She had wanted to say: ‘But that’s theft!’ but had lacked the courage to do that, and had simply said: ‘Please pass me another sandwich.’

  Later, when she had thought about it further, it occurred to her that the reason why they had been so open about their act of thievery was simply this: they did not consider it dishonest to steal from a large organisation. She remembered reading that people were only too willing to make false or exaggerated claims on insurance companies, on the grounds that they were big and would never notice it; nor were they slow to massage the figures of their expenses claims. All of this was simply theft, or its moral equivalent; and yet many of those who did it would probably never dream of stealing a wallet from somebody’s pocket, or slipping their hand into a shopkeeper’s till. What weighed with such people, it seemed to Domenica, was the extent to which the taking was personal.

  Well, if that was the case – and it appeared to be so, in spite of the indefensibility of making such a distinction – then one would have thought that stealing one’s friend’s blue Spode cup was a supremely personal taking, especially when one’s friend had let one stay in her flat for virtually nothing. That was the act of a true psychopath – one with no conscience whatsoever.

  ‘Yes, synaesthesia,’ said Antonia, pouring herself a cup of coffee into a plain white mug. ‘You know Edvard Munch’s famous picture The Scream? That’s a good example of the condition. Munch said that he was taking a walk one evening and saw a very intense blood-red sky. He then had an overpowering feeling that all of nature was screaming – one great, big, natural howl of pain.

  ‘Now, as to my father,’ Antonia went on. ‘His case is very simple. He thinks that numbers have colours. When you ask him what colour the number three is, without a moment’s hesitation he says: “Why it’s red, of course.” And ten, he says, is a shade of melancholy blue.’

  Domenica thought for a moment. ‘But blue is often melancholy, isn’t it? Or that’s what I’ve always thought. Does that make me a synaesthetic?’

  Antonia hesitated briefly before replying: ‘No, I don’t think so. I think that is more a question of conditioning. We’re told that blue is melancholy and so we associate that emotion with it. Just as Christmas is red, and white, being the colour of snow and ice, is cold. In my father’s case, I suspect that when he was learning to read as a boy he had a book which had the letters and numbers in different colours. The figure three was probably painted in red, and that association was made, and stuck. Our minds are like that, aren’t they? Things stick.

  ‘The association between blue and melancholy,’ Antonia continued, ‘is a cultural one. Somebody, a long time ago, a genuine synaesthetic perhaps, said: “I’m feeling blue,” and the expression caught on.’

  ‘The birth of the blues,’ said Domenica.

  ‘Precisely,’ agreed Antonia. She took a sip of her coffee. ‘Of course there are so many associations in our minds that it’s not surprising that some get mixed up – wires get crossed. Whenever I hear certain pieces of music, I think of places, people, times. That’s only natural.

  ‘People are always doing that with popular music. They remember where they were when they listened to something that made an impression on them.’

  ‘If you’re going to San Francisco,’ said Domenica suddenly, ‘be sure to wear some flowers in your hair . . .’

  Antonia stared at her.

  ‘A song,’ explained Domenica. ‘Round about the late sixties; 1967, maybe. It makes me think not of San Francisco, but Orkney, because that’s where I was when I listened to it. I loved it. And I can see Stromness, with its little streets, and the house I was staying in over the summer while I worked part-time in the hotel there. I was a student, and there was another student working there, a boy, and I suppose I was in love with him, although he never knew.’

  Antonia was silent. She looked at Domenica. She had never thought of Domenica having a love life, but she must have, because we all fall in love, and some of us are sentenced to unrequited love, talking about it over cups of coffee in flats like this, with friends just like this, oddly comforted by the process.

  17. Nihil Humanum

  Domenica looked about her. Antonia’s flat was a mirror image of hers in the arrangement of its rooms. But whereas the original features of her flat had been largely preserved, Antonia’s had suffered a bad 1970s experience. The original panelled doors, examples of which survived in Domenica’s flat, had either been taken down in Antonia’s and replaced with unpleasant frosted-glass doors – for what conceivable purpose? Domenica wondered – or their panels had been tacked over with plywood to produce an unrelieved surface. That, one assumed, was the same aesthetic sense which had produced the St James Centre, a crude cluster of grey blocks at the end of the sadly mutilated Princes Street, or, at a slightly earlier stage, had sought the turning of Princes Street into an urban motorway and the conversion of the Princes Street Gardens into a car park.

  One might not be surprised when some of these things were done by those with neither artistic sense nor training, but both the St James Centre and the plan to slice the city in two with a motorway had been the work of architects and planners. At a domestic level, these were the very same people who put in glass doors and took out old fireplaces.

  ‘Yes,’ said Antonia. ‘I will have to do something about all this.’

  Domenica pretended surprise for a moment; but Antonia had intercepted her glances and knew what she was thinking.

  ‘Don’t imagine for a moment that this is my taste,’ Antonia warned. ‘I’m every bit as Georgian as you are.’

  It was an amusing way of putting it, and they both laughed. Not everyone in the New Town lived a Georgian lifestyle, but some did. And of course Antonia, and Domenica, would find such people amusing, with their insistence on period authenticity in their houses, although they themselves were equally inclined to much the same aesthetic.

  Domenica waved a hand about her. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Just about everything,’ said Antonia. ‘Those doors over there. The plywood will come off. Panels back. I’ll free the shutters. Free the shutters – that’s a rallying call in these parts, you know.’

  Domenica looked at her friend. But her own shutters had indeed been freed, she had to admit.

  ‘And then I’m going to take all the light fittings out,’ Antonia went on. ‘All this . . . this stuff.’ She pointed up at the spiky, angular light that was hanging from the ceiling. ‘And the fireplaces, of course. I shall go to the architectural salvage yard and see what they have.’

  ‘You’ll need a builder,’ said Domenica, adding, with a smile: ‘We are mere women, you know.’

  ‘Oh, I’m ready for that. You know, people are so worried about builders. They seem to have such bad experiences with
them.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s that problem that builders have with their trousers,’ Domenica mused. ‘You know that issue of . . .’

  Antonia was dismissive of that. ‘Low trousers have never been a problem for me,’ she said. ‘Nihil humanum alienum mihi est.∗

  Although it is interesting – isn’t it? – how trousers are getting lower each year. Or is it our age?’

  Domenica thought for a moment. ‘You mean on young men? Young men’s trousers?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Antonia. ‘It’s now mandatory for them to show the top of their underpants above the trouser waist. And the trousers get lower and lower.’

  As an anthropologist, there was little for Domenica to puzzle about in this. Male adornment occurred in all societies, although it took different forms. It was perfectly natural, she thought, for young men to display; the only question of interest was what limits society would put on it. And could one talk about society any more when it came to clothing? T-shirts proclaimed the most intimate messages and nobody batted an eyelid. There were, she reflected, simply no arbiters.

  Domenica decided that the issue of trousers had been explored enough. ‘And these builders,’ she said. ‘Where will you get them?’

  ‘My friend Clifford Reed is a builder,’ Antonia said. ‘And a very good one, too. He’ll help me out. He said he will. He has a Pole he’s going to send over to take a look at what needs to be done, and then to do it. There are lots of Poles in Edinburgh now. All these builders and hotel porters and the like. All very hardworking. Staunch Catholics. Very reliable people.’

  Domenica thought for a moment. ‘You’ll have to get a large mug to serve your Pole his tea in,’ she said. ‘None of this Spode for him. He’ll want something more substantial.’

  She watched Antonia as she spoke. It was a somewhat obvious thing for her to say, she thought; a bit unsubtle, in fact. But she watched to see its effect on Antonia. Of course the true psychopath would be unmoved; such people were quite capable of telling the coldest of lies, of remaining cool in the face of the most damning accusations. That was why they were psychopaths – they simply did not care; they were untouched.