The Bertie Project Read online

“Now,” said the Duke. “This is what you do. First you pour some white wine into your fresh bowl—like that—then you spoon in the curdled sauce—gently, comme ça. Mix it into the wine and then add another spoonful. See?”

  Elspeth peered into the bowl. “You’ve uncurdled it,” she said.

  “Amazing, isn’t it?” said the Duke, beaming with satisfaction. “It’s rather like unmixing whisky after you’ve put the water in. Or uncooking porridge and ending up with oats and water. The miracle at Cana of Galilee, and all that…”

  “Who taught you?” asked Elspeth, relieving him of the whisk.

  “Mother,” said the Duke. “My mother was a remarkable woman, rest her soul. I learned more from her than from anybody else.”

  “We need our mothers,” observed Matthew.

  Both the Duke and Elspeth stared at Matthew, surprised at the statement, and waiting for more to emerge. But Matthew had nothing to add, as he thought that what he had just said was in itself quite sufficient and needed no further adumbration.

  Birgitte Offends

  They sat at table, the empty plates of the first course before them. The dining room faced west and was benefiting from the last of the evening sun—a glow, half red, half yellow, in the cloudless sky. Beyond a line of Scots pine affording a foreground, the hills of Lanarkshire were a line of blue, merged into blue, as if a wash of watercolour had been daubed across the sky.

  The Duke looked down at his plate, now scraped quite clean; the hollandaise he rescued had accompanied a salmon roulade. “Perfect,” he said.

  “Claire Macdonald,” said Elspeth. “One of her books.”

  “The woman who runs that place up on Skye?” asked the Duke. “Kin-something or other?”

  “Kinloch Lodge,” supplied Matthew. “It’s up near Sleat. We went there, didn’t we, Elspeth?”

  Elspeth nodded. “I wrote down one of her recipes in my book…”

  “Mummy’s Recipes,” said Matthew.

  The Duke thought this a good title for a recipe book. “Mind you,” he said, “my own late father, the first Duke—soi-disant, of course—always said Never eat at a restaurant called Momma’s.”

  Matthew laughed. “Sage advice.”

  “Nor play cards with a man called Doc,” added the Duke. “But that doesn’t prevent you having a recipe book called Mummy’s Recipes.”

  Birgitte had been asked to help serve the meal, and she now came in to clear the plates. She looked at the Duke with undisguised curiosity, ignoring Elspeth’s discouraging gaze. Once the au pair had retreated to the kitchen, Elspeth whispered to the Duke, “I must apologise—that girl is extremely rude. She’s pushy, too, although I’ve never thought of the Danes as pushy, have you?”

  The Duke looked thoughtful. “The Danes are most usually described as melancholy,” he said. “Hamlet was the original melancholy Dane—and that appears to have stuck. And yet…”

  “Yes?” asked Matthew.

  “…And yet if you think of their history—which I happen to know a bit about, as I had a Danish teacher once—they’ve been as pushy as everybody else. It’s just that they don’t see themselves in that light. But just look at their history.”

  Matthew tried to marshal such facts as he knew of Danish history. He decided that he knew nothing.

  “They have been as expansionist as anybody else,” said the Duke. “They like to think they have a more humane history, but remember where the Vikings came from.”

  “Ah!” said Matthew. “That’s a point.”

  “Yes, indeed,” said the Duke. “And Scandinavian countries have not yet paid us a penny of restitution—not a penny.”

  The Duke took a sip of his wine. “Denmark had colonies too, you know,” he continued. “They had possessions in the West Indies. They had outposts in West Africa and they had a place called Tranquebar in Tamil Nadu, amongst others. And Greenland. They had colonies, all right.”

  Birgitte came back into the room.

  “Tell me,” said Elspeth. “Did you know that Denmark had colonies, Birgitte?”

  Birgitte stared at her. “Of course not. We are not like you English people. Or the French, for that matter. We have nothing to be ashamed of.” She paused. “That’s the difference between us and you.”

  Matthew gasped. “We’re not English, Birgitte. We’re Scottish.”

  “Same thing,” said Birgitte airily.

  Elspeth drew in her breath sharply. “I’m afraid you’re wrong, Birgitte,” she said. “On that, and other things too. Denmark had plenty of colonies. You were as bad as everybody else.”

  “And don’t forget the Vikings,” added Matthew.

  Birgitte spun round to face Matthew. “The Vikings were misunderstood,” she said. “They were very peaceful.”

  The three seated at the table looked at one another in mute astonishment.

  “I’m afraid you’re misinformed, my dear,” said the Duke. “A Scandinavian co-prosperity sphere—is that what you’re saying?”

  “Do not call me my dear,” snapped Birgitte. “It’s sexist condescension.”

  The Duke reeled visibly at the reproof. “I was only trying to…”

  Birgitte stared at him, and he became silent. To Elspeth she said, “Are you ready for the main course?”

  Elspeth nodded. And then, when Birgitte had left the room, she said to the Duke, “I’m so sorry, Duke. That’s what we have to put up with.”

  “Goodness gracious,” said the Duke. “I was only being friendly. What a difficult young woman.”

  “We’re going to have to do something,” said Elspeth. “It’s just a bit complicated. She’s very good with the boys, I have to admit. It’s just that she’s a bit intimidating, if the truth be told.”

  The conversation turned to the paintings that Matthew and Elspeth had found in the house after they had bought it from the Duke. The question of ownership, which Matthew thought would be a difficult one, had been very quickly resolved by the Duke’s generosity. Pleased that everything had been so amicably and easily settled, the Duke recalled another art discovery—the Dublin Caravaggio that had been found in the parlour of the Jesuit house in Leeson Street, hanging in the dining room unattributed, neglected, and badly in need of restoration.

  “It was only very recently,” said the Duke, “that the senior conservator of the National Gallery of Ireland had a look at it. Until then, everybody thought that it was a copy by Honthorst—interesting enough, of course, but not the real McCoy. Then this chap from the gallery started to take the grime off and he saw that the painting technique was pretty impressive and he started to take an even closer look. It was a Caravaggio all right.”

  “A stroke of good fortune,” said Elspeth.

  “Yes, that’s what a group of nuns down in the Borders thought,” said the Duke. “They thought that they’d check up on the paintings they had in their parlour—a whole lot of pictures in elaborate frames. One of them looked as if it could be a di Cosimo; another had a ring of Lippi about it—according to one of the sisters who had borrowed a book on art history from the local library.”

  “Exciting,” said Elspeth.

  “And?” said Matthew.

  “Well…” began the Duke.

  Fra Filippo Lippi

  “Just imagine,” said the Duke of Johannesburg, “this small nunnery in the Borders, not far from Kelso. I happen to know the place a bit myself, as my father had a half-share in a racehorse that was stabled nearby, along with a number of other second- or even, dare I say it, third-rate horses. Ours was called Luminosity, and he never won a race, although he took third place on two occasions in Kelso when other horses fell or were ill. None of the amateur jockeys they used down there wanted to ride him, and so occasionally we had to enter him in a race without a jockey at all, which never did much for his chances.

  “This nunnery had been a school years ago—you still bump into people down there who remember it—but the nuns appear to have lost interest in education and closed that side of
things down. They had a couple of farms thereafter, including a chicken farm at one stage, and they also bred Highland cattle at one point—ill-tempered beasts, those, particularly when their calves are around. Then they lost interest in farming, too, and I think they did nothing in particular after that, although some of the nuns kept bees. They had a small hostel where they took in wayward girls from Motherwell and tried to sort them out—a thankless task with zero chance of success, but there we are, at least they tried.

  “Their buildings were rather beautiful, in fact. They had a lovely little chapel that had been decorated by Phoebe Anna Traquair, not that anybody in particular noticed—it’s in none of the books, but it really is very fine. There’s a fresco of St. Catherine of Siena and her miraculous water barrel, all done in Traquair style—a real jewel.

  “Everything was going rather well at the time that this happened. Their numbers were down a bit—fewer vocations, of course, and lots of other things for young women to do other than become nuns. But they were managing all right with several novices coming from Sri Lanka and a trickle of locals who liked the place and who joined up—if that’s what nuns do—in their fifties or even sixties. I suppose being a nun is quite a good thing to be in your retirement: fairly decent accommodation, good enough food, peace and quiet, if that’s what you want.

  “I’ve never really thought of going into a monastery myself, but I did know somebody who went into one after a career in the oil industry and found it highly congenial. I gather they don’t have to get up quite as early as they used to—none of this up at four for prayer or eating in silence. He said they got up at about eight thirty most days and had a three-course breakfast, reading the papers, before they got down to the real work of the day. His monastery was an unusual one—it didn’t do farming or brewing cider or any of the things that monasteries traditionally do—they actually played the stock market. I suppose it’s a case of moving with the times—work patterns change.

  “This nunnery had a rather large parlour—much bigger than the usual nuns’ parlour, and it was on the walls of this parlour that their pictures were hung. Now of course these were all more or less what one would expect to find in a nunnery—at least in subject matter. There were lots of pictures of the Virgin Mary with the usual supporting cast—Joseph and so on—and I particularly remember a very large St. Jerome and the Lion, with the lion looking utterly depressed. I think there must have been about fifteen of them.

  “Now it came to pass—as they say—that the nun I mentioned who had borrowed the book on art history started to identify one or two of the paintings. The Mother Superior of the time was not particularly interested in art, but perked up when the sister in question said that in her view they were possibly sitting on some important art treasures. The finances of the nunnery were not too bad—they had a fairly comfortable endowment—but there was a big roof bill coming up and there was a lot of pointing to be done on the walls. Money was definitely needed.

  “The Mother Superior telephoned a friend of mine, as it happens, who was an agent for one of the big London auction houses. She explained that they had a number of old paintings that they might consider selling, and she mentioned the fact that one looked as if it might be by Fra Filippo Lippi.

  “At the mention of Lippi, my friend became pretty excited. All sorts of people, I gather, phone up and say they have a Lippi in the attic, and he would normally be fairly sceptical, but in this case people were still talking about the Caravaggio in Dublin, and so he was taking it all very seriously. He went down there, had a look, and broke the news to the Mother Superior. They were all nineteenth-century copies—every one of them. The total value for the whole shooting match, in his view, was about two thousand pounds, if that.

  “The Mother Superior was obviously disappointed, but cheered up considerably when, the following week, quite by chance, an antique dealer from Glasgow turned up with a couple of his shady friends. This man knew nothing about paintings, but scoured the country looking for furniture he could buy from people who had no idea what they had. In other words, he took advantage of them.

  “The Mother Superior said to him that they had some old paintings in their parlour that they might consider selling if the price were right. She took him along and showed him, saying that she thought some of them might be quite good, particularly one by somebody called Lippi, whose name one of the sisters had seen in a book. She went on to say that this painting could be worth as much as forty thousand pounds if it were given a good scrub.

  “The dealer’s ears pricked up. He knew enough to realise that the real value of a painting of that importance would be in the millions, but he went along with her suggestion that it could be as much as forty thousand. He offered thirty-eight thousand—maximum—and said that he would take the others for a few thousand pounds each. All in all, he paid seventy thousand for the lot and agreed to go down to the Bank of Scotland in Kelso to get his cheque cleared there and then and paid into the nuns’ account. Then he loaded them into his van, barely concealing, I imagine, his delight at the deal, waved goodbye, and drove straight up to Edinburgh to an appointment with my friend the auction agent—the same man who had valued them for the Mother Superior a week or so earlier.”

  Matthew burst out laughing. “Not a satisfactory meeting for him!”

  “No,” said the Duke. “But there you are.” He paused. “Not only is their roof now in good order, but I gather they also have rather a good cellar.”

  “The rewards of virtue,” said Matthew.

  “Well, sort of,” mused the Duke.

  Stuarts and Campbells

  That Saturday, Bertie followed the new routine into which he had settled since the return of Irene from her sojourn in the Gulf. This was to be taken round the corner from Scotland Street to his grandmother’s flat in Northumberland Street. This happened at half past eight in the morning, as Irene, who was not at her best in the early mornings, or indeed at any other time, liked to have a long lie-in on Saturday. Ulysses would accompany them in his pushchair, but would not be left at Nicola’s; he would be taken home for breakfast and entertained by Stuart until Irene emerged.

  Irene only grudgingly permitted Bertie to continue to see his grandmother. “Your mother,” she said to Stuart, “is hardly what I would call a good influence, but I suppose she is Bertie’s grandmother, after all, and we have to give some weight to that.”

  Stuart stared at her in frank disbelief. “But your own mother…” he began, and stopped. He had intended to point out at least some of the more egregious faults of his mother-in-law, but Irene’s glance silenced him.

  “My mother,” she said, “doesn’t enter into the equation. She very rarely, if ever, has the opportunity to see her grandchildren.”

  Just as well, thought Stuart, but did not say it. Irene’s mother, Stephanie, who like Nicola had been widowed, had remarried, to an Adlerian psychotherapist, and gone off to live on Osney Island, a small island in the Thames in its meandering passage through Oxford. She had never taken to Stuart and he, in turn, had given up on ever establishing much of a relationship with her. She was close to Irene, though, even if the four hundred miles between Edinburgh and Oxford meant that they spent little time together. What they lacked in physical contact they made up for in long telephone conversations, in which Stephanie, now herself firmly in the Adlerian camp, would talk at length about compensation and overcompensation, about fictive goals, and other subjects of common interest.

  Nicola had only met Stephanie once, and the two women had taken an instant dislike to one another. “I can imagine no possible world,” said Stephanie, “in which I would find myself drawn to the company of that woman.”

  And for her part, Nicola simply smiled and looked out of the window whenever Stephanie’s name was mentioned.

  Bertie, of course, being the boy he was, tried to be positive about his maternal grandmother, but did not receive a great deal of encouragement. Nicola, of course, was different. She doted on Bertie
and Ulysses, and made sure that the time they spent in her company was filled with as much fun and excitement as could reasonably be mustered. During Irene’s absence, this programme had included trips to pizza restaurants and ice cream parlours—now both out-of-bounds, unmentioned and only dreamed about under the Irene regime.

  That morning Nicola had planned a trip to the Scottish National Portrait Gallery café on Queen Street, where she would have a cup of coffee and Bertie would have a large milkshake. That would be followed by a visit to the gallery itself before they walked down the hill to Valvona & Crolla’s delicatessen on Elm Row. There they would meet Stuart at noon, and Bertie would be handed back to his father’s care.

  Bertie enjoyed the Portrait Gallery. He had acquired a small red Moleskine notebook, in which he had written a list of portraits, and had then filled in notes with such details as he could muster on the lives of the people portrayed. He also liked the frieze in the gallery’s Central Hall, where around the room paraded figures from Scotland’s past, portrayed against a gilded background. Craning his neck, Bertie would point to those he could identify, and on each visit would concentrate on a particular section, inscribing the names in his red notebook. That morning he focused on the figures between James VI and Mary, Queen of Scots, an unedifying group, but one that fascinated Bertie.

  “That’s King James, isn’t it, Granny?” he said, pointing at the instantly recognisable melancholy figure of the Stuart monarch. “He always looks unhappy, doesn’t he?”

  Nicola nodded. “He was,” she said. “And I suppose you’d be unhappy too if your mother got her head chopped off.” She pointed to Mary, Queen of Scots, a few figures away.

  Bertie did not answer immediately, and for a moment Nicola entertained a mental picture of Irene, in the dress of the time, being led off to Fotheringay Castle. No, she thought; one should not even think such things.

  Bertie was looking at Mary. “She looks nice,” he said. “And that’s her husband there, isn’t it, Granny? That’s Mr. Darnley.”