The World According to Bertie (17 page)

45. Minimalism Is Not Confined to the Canvas

But there were others in the room. Matthew and Pat had hardly noticed them, so engaged had they been by the flow of their host's conversation. So that was the reason why there was no mention of a Duke of Johannesburg in
Who's Who in Scotland
–there was no such duke, at least not in the sense that one would be recognised by the Lord Lyon. Yet what did such recognition amount to? Matthew asked himself. All that it did was give a stamp of purely conventional authenticity, conventional in the sense of agreed, or settled, and ultimately that was merely a question of arbitrary social arrangements. There was no real difference between this duke and any other better-known duke, just as there was no real difference between a real duke and any one of Jock Tamson's bairns. We were all just people who chose to call ourselves by curious things known as names, and the only significant difference between any of us lay in what we did with our lives.

Matthew found himself drawn to the Duke of Johannesburg, with his easy-going conviviality and his cheerful demeanour. This was a man, he thought, who dared and, like most men, Matthew admired men who dared. He himself did not exactly dare, but he would like to dare, if he dared.

“Yes,” said the Duke, looking around the room. “There are a couple of other guests. And I'm ignoring my social responsibilities by not introducing you. I shouldn't go on about these old and irrelevant matters. Nobody's interested in any of that.”

“Oh, but we are!” said a man standing near the fireplace. “That's where you're mistaken, Johannesburg. We all like to hear about these things.”

“That's my Greek chorus over there,” said the Duke, nodding in the direction of the man by the fireplace. “You must meet him.”

The Duke drew Matthew and Pat over to the other guest and made introductions.

“Humphrey Holmes,” said the Duke.

Matthew looked at Humphrey. He had seen him before–and heard of him–but he had never actually met him. He was a dapper man, wearing a black velvet jacket and bow tie.

“I hear you sold Johannesburg a painting,” said Humphrey. “He was telling me about it. Something very minimalist, I gather.”

Matthew laughed. “Very.” He glanced around the room, at the pictures on the walls. There were several family portraits–a picture of three boys in kilts, in almost sepia tones, from a long time ago; one looked a bit like the Duke, but it was hard to tell. Then there was a powerful James Howie landscape, one of those glowing pictures that the artist scraped away at for years in order to get the light just as he wanted it to be. Matthew knew his work and sold it occasionally, when Howie, a perfectionist, could be persuaded to part with a painting.

“I was surprised when he said he'd bought something minimalist,” remarked Humphrey. “As you can see, this isn't exactly a minimalist room.”

“Perhaps he'll hang it somewhere else,” said Pat.

Humphrey turned to her and smiled politely. “Perhaps. Perhaps there are minimalist things here already–it's just that we can't see them. But, tell me, do you like minimalism in music?”

Matthew looked down at his feet. “Well, I'm not sure…”

“You mean people like Glass and Adams?” Pat interjected.

“Yes,” said Humphrey. “Some people are very sniffy about them. I heard somebody say the other day that it's amazing how people like Adams make so much out of three notes. Which isn't exactly fair. There's quite a lot there, you know, if you start to look at Pärt and people like that.”

“I like Pärt,” said Pat.

“Oh, so do I,” said Humphrey.

“And then there's Max Richter,” said Pat. “Do you know that he lives in Edinburgh? His music's wonderful. Really haunting.”

“I shall look out for him,” said Humphrey. “Johannesburg wouldn't be interested, of course. He listens to the pipes mostly. And some nineteenth-century stuff. Italian operas and so on. One of his boys is shaping up to be quite a good piper. That's him coming in now.”

They looked in the direction of a boy who had entered the room, holding a plate of smoked salmon on small squares of bread. From behind a blond fringe, the boy looked back at them.

“Will you play for us, East Lothian?” asked Humphrey.

“Yes,” answered the boy. “Later.”

“Good boy,” said Humphrey. “Johannesburg has three boys, you know. That lad's East Lothian. Then there's West Lothian and Midlothian. Real boys. And he's taught them to do things that boys used to know how to do. How to make a sporran out of a badger you find run over on the road. How to repair a lobster creel. Things like that. I think…”

He was interrupted by the return of the Duke, who had gone out of the room once he had made the introductions.

“I have my cheque book,” said the Duke, holding up a rectangular green leather wallet. “If I don't pay for the painting now, I shall forget. So…” He unfolded the wallet, and leaning it on Humphrey's back, scribbled out a cheque, which he handed to Matthew with a flourish.

Matthew looked at the cheque. The Duke's handwriting was firm and clear–strong, masculine downstrokes. Three hundred and twenty pounds.

Matthew's expression gave it away.

“Something wrong?” asked the Duke. There was concern in his voice.

“I…” Matthew began.

Pat took the cheque from him and glanced at it. “Actually, the painting was thirty-two thousand pounds,” she said.

“Good heavens!” said the Duke. “I thought…Well I must have assumed that there was a decimal point before the last two zeros. Thirty-two thousand pounds! Sorry. The exchequer can't rise to that.”

“This'll do,” said Pat firmly. “Our mistake. This'll do fine, won't it, Matthew?”

Matthew glanced at Humphrey, who was smiling benignly. Elsewhere in the room, there was silence, as other guests had realised what was going on. It was easy to imagine a mistake of this nature being made. And three hundred and twenty pounds was quite enough for that particular painting, far too much, really.

“I shall be more careful in my labelling in future,” Matthew said magnanimously. “Of course that's all right.”

The tension which had suffused the room now dissipated. People began to talk again freely, and the Duke reached for a bottle of wine to refill glasses.

“That was good of you,” murmured Humphrey.

“It was nothing,” said Matthew. “It really was.”

“But it wasn't,” protested Humphrey.

“I meant the painting was nothing,” said Matthew, which was true.

46. He Wanted Her Only to Answer His Question

Later in the evening, Matthew, wanting, he said, to get some air, suggested that they go out into the garden. Pat nodded and followed him out through the hall. She had gone out into gardens with boys before this and knew what it meant. Boys were usually not very interested in gardens, except at night, when their interest sharpened. Outside, the evening was unusually warm for the time of the year, almost balmy; the air was still, the branches of the oak trees farther up the steeply sloping garden were motionless.

For a few moments, they stood on the driveway. Matthew reached for Pat's hand. “Look at that,” he said, gesturing up at the sky. “We don't often see that in town, do we? All that?”

The sky was a dark, black velvet, rich and deep, studded here and there with small points of starlight, one or two of which seemed to burn with great intensity.

“No,” she said. “All those yellow streetlights. Light pollution.”

Matthew squeezed her hand. This time, she returned the pressure, did not let go of his hand.

“Whenever I look up there,” he said, “I think the same thing. I think of how small we are and how all our concerns, our anxieties and all the rest of it, are so irrelevant, so tiny. Not that we think they are–but they are, aren't they?”

She looked at him. “I suppose they are.”

“And I also think of how we make one another miserable by worrying about these small things, when we should really just hug one another and say thank you to somebody, to something, for the great privilege of being alive–when everything up there”–he nodded in the direction of the sky–“when everything up there is cold and dead. Dead stars. Collapsing stars. Suns that are going out, dying.”

She was silent. She wanted to say to him: “I think so too.” But she did not.

He began to walk over towards the byre, leading her gently by the hand. “You know, a long time ago, when I had just left school, I had a friendship with another boy. It was the most intense friendship I ever had. I really loved my friend. And why not? It was pure–it really was. Nothing happened. It was completely innocent. Do you understand about that?”

“Of course I do,” she replied. “Women are much easier about loving their friends. It's only men who have difficulty with that.”

“Yes. Anyway, we were in Perthshire once, fishing, and we sat down on the rocks beside the river and I looked up at the sky, which was completely empty, and I suddenly had the feeling that I wasn't alone anymore. I can't explain it in any other way. I suppose it was one of those moments that people sometimes call mystical. A moment of insight. And I never forgot it. I still think of it.”

They were outside the byre now. It had been converted and appeared to be used as some sort of office. A French window, framed by creepers, was open, and they could see into the room on the other side of the window.

“Come,” said Matthew. “Come on, I don't think they'll mind.”

They pushed open one of the French windows and stepped inside the room. Through a large window in the roof there was enough light coming in from outside, from the glow that spilled out from the main house, from the light of the sky itself, to reveal a cluttered desk, a wall of bookshelves, and a sofa. In the far corner of the room, a squat, dark shape revealed the presence of a wood-burning stove. There was, about the room, an air of wood-smoke that had settled, a reassuring, comfortable smell that had also been present in the house, with its open fires.

“This looks like his study,” said Matthew. His voice was lowered, almost to a sepulchral whisper, although there was nobody about.

“It's so quiet after the din back there,” Pat said.

They sat down on the sofa. Matthew felt his heart beating within him and knew that even if he had not made up his mind in a conscious sense, at the level of the subconscious there was certainty.

“I wanted to talk to you,” he whispered. “Just us. Without anybody else around. I wanted to ask you…to ask you whether you thought that we could…well, whether we could get engaged.”

He had said it, but he had said it in such a clumsy fashion. Nobody said that anymore, he said to himself; nobody asks anybody else if they would like to be engaged. Like everything I do, he thought, it sounds awkward and old-fashioned.

For a few moments, Pat said nothing, and Matthew wondered if she had heard him. They were seated so close together that she must have been able to sense the agitated beating of his heart and must have known. At least she knew her presence excited him, made him catch his breath, made his heart go like that; one could not fake those symptoms of affection.

Then a square of light fell onto the driveway and lighted, too, the byre's interior. The front door had been opened and somebody came out, footfall upon gravel.

She said: “Somebody's coming.”

The steps came nearer and reached the French windows, a figure moving in the darkness, a shadow. Matthew wanted her only to answer his question–gauche though it may have been, it expressed everything that he now felt. Because I'm fed up, he thought, with being lonely and out of place and seeing everybody else in the company of somebody they love. That was why he wanted an answer to his question.

“Please tell me,” he said. “Please just think about it.”

She did not have the time to answer, or if she answered he could not hear. Young East Lothian, his pipes under his arm, was inflating the bag, his drones were beginning to wail; that protest of the pipes before they wrought their magic. He had gone out there to warm up, and now he began to play.

“‘Mist-covered Mountains,'” said Matthew. “Do you know it?”

“Yes,” said Pat. And then: “That question you just asked…”

“You don't have to answer,” said Matthew. “I'm sorry.”

“But I want to…” she said, and his heart gave a great leap, then descent: “I want to think about it. Give me…give me a few weeks.”

“Of course.”

Outside, the “Mist-covered Mountains” continued; such a tune, expressing all the longing, the love, that we feel for country and place, and for people.

47. The Statistical Lady Is Not for Smiling at

Stuart Pollock, statistician in the Scottish Executive (with special responsibility for the adjustment of forecasts), husband of Irene Pollock, father of Bertie (six) and Ulysses (four months); co-proprietor of the second flat (right) in 44 Scotland Street, Edinburgh; all of this is what Stuart was, and all of these descriptors he now mulled over as he walked home early, making his way down Waterloo Place after a long and tedious meeting in the neo-Stalinist St Andrew's House.

A life might be summed up within such short compass, thought Stuart. He saw actuaries do it in their assessments in which we were all so reduced to become, for instance, a single female, aged thirty-two, nonsmoker, resident of the Central Belt–so truncated a description of what that person probably was, about her life and its saliences, but useful for the purposes for which they made these abridgements. Such a person had an allotted span, which the actuaries might reel off in much the same way as a fairground fortune-teller might do from the lines of the hand or on the turn of the Tarot card. You have thirty years before the environmental risk of living in the Central Belt becomes significant. The fortune-teller was not so direct, and certainly less clinical, but it amounted to the same advice: beware.

It had been a long-drawn-out meeting, and a frustrating one, in which Stuart, together with four other colleagues and a couple of parliamentarians, had been looking at health statistics. The news from Scotland was bad, and the Executive was looking for ways of making it sound just a little bit better. Nobody liked to pick on Glasgow, a vigorous and entertaining city, but the inescapable fact was that everybody knew that it had the worst diet in Western Europe and the highest rate of heart disease. Was there any way in which this information might be presented to the world in a slightly more positive way? “Such as?” Stuart had asked.

This question had not gone down well. The politicians had looked at one another, and then at Stuart. Did one have to restrict the area in question to Western Europe? Could one not compare the Glaswegian diet with, say, diets in countries where there was a similar penchant for high-fat, high-sodium, high-risk food? Such as parts of the United States, particularly those parts with the highest obesity rates? Yes, but although the United States has a similar fondness for pizza, they don't actually fry it, as they do in Scotland. There's a difference there.

Very well, but what exactly was Western Europe anyway? If one took Turkey into account, and Turkey was almost in Western Europe–particularly if one overlooked the fact that most of it was in Asia and perhaps somewhat far to the east–did it change the picture? Might Glasgow not be compared with Istanbul, and, if one did that, how did the comparison look? Still bad, alas: the Turks did not eat so many fats and sweet things, and they were really rather good about consuming their greens. So were there not other places somewhere, anywhere, where everybody smoked like chimneys, drank to excess, and fried everything…? No, not really.

Stuart smiled as he negotiated the corner at the end of Waterloo Place and began to walk towards Picardy Place. As a statistician, he thought, I'm a messenger; that's what I do. And, like all messengers, some people would prefer to shoot me.

He looked down the street at the people walking towards him, young, old, in-between. After that day's meeting, it was taking some time for him to move back from the professional to the personal. Here, approaching him, was a sixty-year-old woman, with two point four children, twenty-three years to go, with a weekly income of…and so on. Now there were carbon footprints to consider, too, and that was fun. This woman was walking, but had probably taken a bus. She did not go on holiday to distant destinations, Spain at the most, and so she used little aviation fuel. Her carbon footprint was probably not too bad, particularly by comparison with…with those who went to international conferences on carbon footprints. The thought amused him, and he smiled again.

“You laughing at me, son?”

The woman had stopped in front of him.

Stuart was startled. “What? Laughing at you? No, not at all.”

“Because I dinnae like being laughed at,” said the woman, shaking a finger at him.

“Of course not.”

She gave him a scowl and then moved on. Chastened, Stuart continued his walk. The trouble with allowing one's thoughts to wander was that people might misunderstand. So he put statistics out of his mind and began to think of what lay ahead of him. Bertie had to be taken to his saxophone lesson, and he would do that, as Irene had her hands full with Ulysses. That suited Stuart rather well, as he found that the late afternoon was a difficult time for Ulysses, who tended to girn until he had his bath and his evening feed. Stuart had rather forgotten Bertie's infancy, what it was like, and the presence of a young baby in the flat was proving trying. At least going off to the lesson would give him the chance to get out with Bertie, which he wanted to do more often.

They had once gone through to Glasgow together on the train and that had been such a success, or at least the journey itself had been. The meeting in Glasgow with that dreadful Lard O'Connor had been a bit of a nightmare, Stuart recalled, but they had emerged unscathed, and Irene and Bertie's subsequent encounter with Lard, when he had shown up unannounced in Scotland Street, had been mercifully brief. It was important that Bertie should know that such people as Lard O'Connor and his henchmen existed, that he should not think that the whole world was like Edinburgh. There were people who did assume that, and who were rudely surprised when they travelled furth of the city; going to London, for example, could be a terrible shock for people from Edinburgh.

Stuart wanted to spend more time with Bertie and–the awkward thought came unbidden–less time with Irene. That was a terrible thought, and he suppressed it immediately. He loved and admired Irene, even if she was sometimes a bit outspoken in her convictions. Then another awkward thought intruded: if he wanted to spend less time with Irene, Bertie probably wanted exactly the same thing. But should I, a father, he asked himself, try to save my son from his mother? Was there a general answer to that, he wondered, an answer for all fathers and all sons, or did it depend on the mother?