Bertie's Guide to Life and Mothers
Alexander McCall Smith
Praise for Alexander McCall Smith’s
44 SCOTLAND STREET SERIES
“McCall Smith’s assessments of fellow humans are piercing and profound.…[His] depictions of Edinburgh are vivid and seamless.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Charming.…[With] a crew that’s endlessly open to adventures while remaining immitigably themselves.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“McCall Smith’s charming, quirky and exasperating characters make you smile.”
—The Independent (London)
“Readers will relish McCall Smith’s depictions of this place … and enjoy his tolerant, good-humored company.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Written with abundant wit …[and] equally large dollops of wisdom too.”
—Scotland on Sunday
Alexander McCall Smith
BERTIE’S GUIDE TO LIFE AND MOTHERS
Alexander McCall Smith is the author of the international phenomenon The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, the Isabel Dalhousie series, the Portuguese Irregular Verbs series, the 44 Scotland Street series, and the Corduroy Mansions series. He is professor emeritus of medical law at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and has served with many national and international organizations concerned with bioethics.
www.alexandermccallsmith.com
BOOKS BY ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH
IN THE 44 SCOTLAND STREET SERIES
44 Scotland Street
Espresso Tales
Love Over Scotland
The World According to Bertie
The Unbearable Lightness of Scones
The Importance of Being Seven
Bertie Plays the Blues
Sunshine on Scotland Street
IN THE NO. 1 LADIES’ DETECTIVE AGENCY SERIES
The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency
Tears of the Giraffe
Morality for Beautiful Girls
The Kalahari Typing School for Men
The Full Cupboard of Life
In the Company of Cheerful Ladies
Blue Shoes and Happiness
The Good Husband of Zebra Drive
The Miracle at Speedy Motors
Tea Time for the Traditionally Built
The Double-Comfort Safari Club
The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party
The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection
The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon
The Handsome Man’s De Luxe Café
FOR YOUNG READERS
The Great Cake Mystery
The Mystery of Meerkat Hill
The Mystery of the Missing Lion
IN THE ISABEL DALHOUSIE SERIES
The Sunday Philosophy Club
Friends, Lovers, Chocolate
The Right Attitude to Rain
The Careful Use of Compliments
The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday
The Lost Art of Gratitude
The Charming Quirks of Others
The Forgotten Affairs of Youth
The Perils of Morning Coffee
The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds
IN THE CORDUROY MANSIONS SERIES
Corduroy Mansions
The Dog Who Came in from the Cold
A Conspiracy of Friends
IN THE PORTUGUESE IRREGULAR VERBS SERIES
Portuguese Irregular Verbs
The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs
At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances
Unusual Uses for Olive Oil
OTHER WORKS
La’s Orchestra Saves the World
The Girl Who Married a Lion and Other Tales from Africa
Trains and Lovers
The Forever Girl
AN ANCHOR BOOKS ORIGINAL, FEBRUARY 2015
Copyright © 2013 by Alexander McCall Smith
Illustrations copyright © 2013 by Iain McIntosh
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House LLC, New York, a Penguin Random House company. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd., Edinburgh, in 2013.
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
This book is excerpted from a series that originally appeared in The Scotsman newspaper.
The Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at The Library of Congress.
Anchor Books Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8041-7000-0
eBook ISBN: 978-0-8041-7001-7
Cover illustration © Iain McIntosh
Author illustration © Iain McIntosh
www.anchorbooks.com
v3.1
This book is for David Robinson, friend and editor
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
1. Knives and Chromosomes
2. Essex Girls et al
3. A Psychiatrist’s Daughter
4. A Memory of Lavender
5. Rob Roy as Flawed Hero
6. Socks Bought by Somebody Else
7. The Declaration of Arbroath
8. Narrow Ledger
9. In the Cumberland Bar
10. Definite Articles et cetera
11. Cyril Draws Attention to Himself
12. The Hinterland
13. Matthew and Big Lou Ponder Reincarnation
14. Matthew’s Lack of Tact
15. I Know What I Don’t Mean
16. Bertie’s Party: Social Issues
17. Tintin Issues
18. A Serious Case of Male Fright
19. Antonia Writes from Italy
20. Art, Resolution, and St. Ninian
21. Bruce Goes to the Waxing Studio, for Waxing
22. Arlene Talks About Her Ex and Pulls Hairs Out
23. In the Elephant House
24. The Working of Wood
25. Bruntsfield Noir
26. Angus Lordie Meets Dr. Macgregor
27. Interesting Somnambulism Cases
28. Birthday Presents
29. Today’s News
30. A Walk with Father
31. Spontaneous Combustion
32. Professor Purdie, Sleepers, Top Hats
33. By the Water of Leith
34. Big Lou Makes an Appointment
35. The Planning of Happiness
36. Culturally Specific Foods
37. Perjink Bungalows et cetera
38. Birgitte Becomes Irritating
39. “I love it. I want to live here.”
40. Jock Tamson’s Bairns
41. The Whole Point of Our World
42. “You all right, hen?”
43. Bertie’s Fantasy
44. Irene Makes a Fateful Decision
45. Irene Embarks for Dubai
46. The Dear Green Place
47. The Association of Scottish Nudists
48. Defeated
49. Big Day for Big Lou
50. “They were kind to me.”
51. “We are dust before the wind.”
52. A Case of Blue Spode Again
53. Unexpected Turbulence
54. Misunderstandings at Altitude
55. At the Grand International
56. Pat Thinks, and Is Almost Run Over
57. At the Canny Man’s
58. A Mercenary
Conversation
59. Thoughts at the Wallace Monument
60. “There’s a bit of Aberdeen in everybody.”
61. A Change of Clothing
62. Auras, Chakras, Halos
63. Materialism, Belief, et cetera
64. The Unexpected
65. La Vie Bédouine
66. A Paternalistic Issue
67. Ardnamurchan
68. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; Joy and Delight in Morningside
69. Pythagoras’s Trousers
70. On Loch Sunart
71. Lord of the Flies
72. Tea for Three
73. The Innocent Games of the Innocent
74. Architecture, Love, Dessert
75. Be Kind
1. Knives and Chromosomes
Bertie Pollock (6) was the son of Irene Pollock (37) and Stuart Pollock (40), and older brother of Ulysses Colquhoun Pollock (1). Ulysses was also the son of Irene but possibly not of Stuart, the small boy bearing a remarkable resemblance to Bertie’s psychotherapist, recently self-removed from Edinburgh to a university chair in Aberdeen. Stuart, too, had been promoted, having recently been moved up three rungs on the civil service ladder after incurring the gratitude of a government minister. This had happened after Stuart, in a moment of sheer frustration, had submitted the numbers from The Scotsman’s Sudoku puzzle to the minister, representing them as likely North Sea oil production volumes. He had immediately felt guilty about this adolescent gesture—homo ludens, playful man, might be appreciated in the arts but not in the civil service—and had he been able to retract the figures he would have done so. But it was too late; the minister was delighted with the encouraging projection, with the result that any confession by Stuart would have been a career-terminating event. So he remained silent, and was immensely relieved to discover later that the real figures, once unearthed, were so close to his Sudoku numbers as to make no difference. His conscience was saved by coincidence, but never again, he said to himself.
Irene had no interest in statistics and always adopted a glazed expression at any mention of the subject. “I can accept that what you do is very important, Stuart,” she said, in a pinched, rather pained tone, “but frankly it leaves me cold. No offence, of course.”
Her own interests were focused on psychology—she had a keen interest in the writings of Melanie Klein—and the raising of children. Bertie’s education, in particular, was a matter of great concern to her, and she had already written an article for the journal Progressive Motherhood, in which she had set out the objectives of what she described as “the Bertie Project.”
“The emphasis,” she wrote, “must always be on the flourishing of the child’s own personality. Yet this overriding goal is not incompatible with the provision of a programme of interest-enhancement in the child herself” (Irene was not one to use the male pronoun when a feminine form existed). “In the case of Bertie, I constructed a broad and fulfilling programme of intellectual stimulation introducing him at a very early stage (four months) to the possibilities of theatre, music and the plastic arts. The inability of the very small infant to articulate a response to the theatre, for example, is not an indication of lack of appreciation—far from it, in fact. Bertie was at the age of four months taken to a performance by the Contemporary Theatre of Krakow at the Edinburgh Festival and reacted very positively to the rapid changes of light on the stage. There are many other examples. His response to Klee, for instance, was noticeable when he was barely three, and by the age of four he was quite capable of distinguishing Peploe from Matisse.”
Some of these claims had some truth to them. Bertie was, in fact, extremely talented, and had read way beyond what one might expect to find in a six-year-old. Most six-year-olds, if they can read at all, are restricted to the doings of Spot the Dog and other relatively unsubtle characters; Bertie, by contrast, had already consumed not only the complete works of Roald Dahl for children, but also half of Norman Lebrecht’s book on Mahler and almost seventy pages of Miranda Carter’s biography of the late Anthony Blunt. His choice of this reading, which was prodigious on any view, was dependent on what he happened to find lying about on his parents’ bookshelves, and this was, of course, the reason why he had also dipped into several volumes of Melanie Klein and was acquainted too with a number of Freud’s accounts of his famous cases, especially those of Little Hans and the Wolf Man.
Little Hans struck Bertie as being an entirely reasonable boy, who had just as little need of analysis as he himself had.
“I think Dr. Freud shouldn’t have worried about that boy Hans,” Bertie remarked to his mother, as they made their way one afternoon to the consulting rooms of Bertie’s psychotherapist in Queen Street. “I don’t think there was anything wrong with him, Mummy, I really don’t.”
“That’s a matter of opinion, Bertie,” answered Irene. “And actually it’s Professor Freud, not Dr. Freud.”
“Well,” said Bertie. “Professor Freud then. Why does he keep going on about …” He lowered his voice, and then became silent.
“About what, Bertie?” asked Irene. “What do you think Professor Freud goes on about?”
Bertie slowed his pace. He was looking down at the ground with studious intensity. “About bo …” he half-whispered. Modesty prevented his completing the sentence.
“About what, Bertie?” prompted Irene. “We mustn’t mumble, carissimo. We must speak clearly so that others can understand what we have to say.”
Bertie looked anxiously about him. He decided to change the subject. “What about my birthday, Mummy?” he said.
Irene looked down at her son. “Yes, it’s coming up very soon, Bertie. Next week, in fact. Are you excited?”
Bertie nodded. He had waited so long for this birthday—his seventh—that he found it difficult to believe that it was now about to arrive. It seemed to him that it had been years since the last one, and he had almost given up on the thought of turning seven, let alone eighteen, which he knew was the age at which one could leave one’s mother. That was the real goal—a distant, impossibly exciting, shimmering objective. Freedom.
“Will I get any presents?” he asked.
Irene smiled. “Of course you will, Bertie.”
“I’d like a Swiss Army penknife,” he half-whispered. “Or a fishing rod.”
Irene said nothing.
“Other boys have these things,” Bertie pleaded.
Irene pursed her lips. “Other boys? Do you mean Tofu?”
Bertie nodded miserably.
“Well the less said about him the better,” said Irene. She sighed. Why did men—and little boys too—have to hanker after weapons when they already had their … She shook her head in exasperation. What was the point of all this effort if, after years of striving to protect Bertie from gender stereotypes, he came up with a request for a knife? It was a question of the number of chromosomes, she thought: therein lay the core of the problem.
2. Essex Girls et al
From Bertie’s point of view his approaching birthday was the cause of immense excitement. Not only was there the issue of presents—although he was virtually reconciled to not getting what he wanted, as his mother had on previous birthdays always been careful to choose gender-neutral gifts—there was also the question of the party Irene had promised him. This was something to which Bertie looked forward with keen anticipation, although he knew that here, too, there would be snares and pitfalls that would require very careful evasive action on his part.
The greatest problem, of course, was the list of those to be invited. If Bertie had his way, the guests would all be boys, as that would mean that they would be able to play the games they wanted without having to take into account the wishes of any girls. Bertie had once been to a party where the guests had played British Bulldog, and he had enjoyed that every bit as much as that other game of rough and tumble, Chase the Dentist. Girls, he had learned, liked neither of these games, on the grounds that the boys, being rougher and more inclined to pu
sh and shove, had a natural advantage over them.
But the list, he knew, could not be an all-boy one, as Irene had made it very clear that she expected an equal number of boy and girl guests.
“There are plenty of nice girls who’d love to come to your party, Bertie,” she assured him. “There’s Olive, obviously, and Olive’s friend Pansy. Then there’s that pleasant girl Chardonnay, although heaven knows why her parents should saddle her with such a name …”
“It sounds rather nice,” said Bertie. “I think she likes it. And she’s got a little sister called Shiraz. That’s a nice name too, I think.”
Irene rolled her eyes upwards. “Such names are … well, they’re rather closely linked with … well, Bertie, I’m sorry to say they are rather closely associated with Essex.”
“Essex?” said Bertie. “Isn’t Essex a place in England, Mummy?”
“Yes it is,” said Irene. “Unfortunately.”
“What do you mean, Mummy? Are there lots of girls called Chardonnay in Essex, but not in Edinburgh?”
Irene suppressed a smile. “You could say that, Bertie. Chardonnay is not really an Edinburgh name. But Essex, you see, is a bit … It’s a bit … well, let’s not worry about Essex, Bertie. Chardonnay can’t help her unfortunate name, and I’m sure that she’ll love to come to your party.”
“And there’ll be boys too,” said Bertie quickly.
Irene nodded. “I’m sure that Ranald will be very happy to come.”
“And Tofu.”
Irene made a non-committal noise. “I thought you found Tofu a bit difficult, Bertie.”
Bertie nodded. “Yes, he is, Mummy. But I have to invite him. He’d hear about the party and if I didn’t invite him, there’d be trouble.”
The conversation about guests continued for some time, but Bertie’s mind was not really on it. He was now remembering the party he had attended several weeks earlier, which had been to celebrate Olive’s seventh birthday. Bertie had been reluctant to go to this but had been obliged by his mother to accept the invitation. “You’ll enjoy yourself once you’re there, Bertie,” she had said. “I often find that myself when Mummy and Daddy have to go out. We may not be in the mood to begin with, but then we find that we enjoy ourselves quite a lot once we’re there. Daddy often finds that.”
