Praise for Alexander McCall Smith’s

  44 SCOTLAND STREET SERIES

  “McCall Smith…is a pro, and he delivers sharp observation, gentle satire…as well as the expected romantic complications…. [Readers will] relish McCall Smith’s depiction of this place…and enjoy his tolerant, good-humored company.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Contain[s] a healthy helping of McCall Smith’s patented charm…just about perfect.”

  —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  “Packed with charming characters, piercing perceptions and shrewd yet gentle humor.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  “The most genial of writers and most gentle of satirists…. [The] characters are great fun…. McCall Smith treats them with affection.”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  “Powerfully addicting fiction…. Delightful…. [A] graceful and always amusing depiction of the pleasures and problems of everyday life.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  Alexander McCall Smith

  LOVE IN THE TIME OF BERTIE

  Alexander McCall Smith is the author of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency novels and a number of other series and stand-alone books. His works have been translated into more than forty languages and have been bestsellers throughout the world. He lives in Scotland.

  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

  Bertie’s Guide to Life and Mothers

  The Revolving Door of Life

  The Bertie Project

  A Time of Love and Tartan

  The Peppermint Tea Chronicles

  A Promise of Ankles

  Love in the Time of Bertie

  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

  The Woman Who Walked in Sunshine

  Precious and Grace

  The House of Unexpected Sisters

  The Colors of All the Cattle

  To the Land of Long Lost Friends

  How to Raise an Elephant

  The Joy and Light Bus Company

  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 (eBook only)

  The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds

  The Novel Habits of Happiness

  At the Reunion Buffet (eBook only)

  Sweet, Thoughtful Valentine (eBook only)

  A Distant View of Everything

  The Quiet Side of Passion

  The Geometry of Holding Hands

  in the detective varg series

  The Department of Sensitive Crimes

  The Talented Mr. Varg

  The Man with the Silver Saab

  in the paul stuart series

  My Italian Bulldozer

  The Second-Worst Restaurant in France

  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

  Your Inner Hedgehog

  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

  Fatty O’Leary’s Dinner Party (eBook only)

  Emma: A Modern Retelling

  Chance Developments

  The Good Pilot Peter Woodhouse

  Pianos and Flowers

  Tiny Tales

  The Pavilion in the Clouds (eBook only)

  VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 2022

  Copyright © 2021 Alexander McCall Smith

  Author illustration © Iain McIntosh

  Cover illustration © Iain McIntosh

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Published by Vintage Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2022 and simultaneously in the United States of America by Anchor Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Polygon Books, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd., Edinburgh, in 2021. Distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Vintage Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House Canada Limited.

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  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.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: Love in the time of Bertie / Alexander McCall Smith.

  Names: McCall Smith, Alexander, 1948- author.

  Series: McCall Smith, Alexander, 1948- 44 Scotland Street series ; 15.

  Description: Series statement: A 44 Scotland Street novel ; 15

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210320826 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210320834 | ISBN 9781039004016 (softcover) | ISBN 9781039004023 (EPUB)

  Subjects: LCGFT: Humorous fiction. | LCGFT: Domestic fiction.

  Classification: LCC PR6063.C326 L68 2022 | DDC 823/.914—dc23

  Image credits: © Iain McIntosh

  ep_prh_6.0_139332125_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Books by Alexander Mccall Smith

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Belgian Shoes

  Galileo, Orthodoxy, Dinner

  The Terraces of Purgatory

  Debtors and Creditors

  Being Aeneas

  Blue Remembered Hills

  The Holy Family Boxing Club

  Students Eat Anything

  An Orcadian Spell

  Scotsmen Can Skip

  Fat Bob

  The Story of Mags

  Great Lass, Big Quads

  The Wolf Man Again

  Dear Little Argonaut

  Aberdeen Beckons (or Threatens)

  The Coolest Boy by Far

  An Incident in Crieff

  The Money Rolls In

  Torquil at the Door

  Aunts and Spies

  Oedipus, the Minotaur, Guilt

  Torquil and Domenica Converse

  Agrippina and Nero

  Bertie’s Fate

  Stuart Goes Out

  Sister Maria-Fiore dei Fiori’s Secret

  Bruce Prepares

  The Merits of the Double-Upper

  What Tam Didn’t Do

  Garlic Naan

  Harry and Josephine

  Sleeping Rough

  Bertie’s Outing

  Bertie’s Farewell to Ranald

  Retro’s In

  Bruce Snubbed

  In the Elephant House

  The Omnipresence
of Hierarchy

  Poppadoms and Theology

  Given Lodging

  Bruce Reflects, and Conducts

  Against All Medical Odds

  “You are troubled in your soul”

  The Road to Aberdeen

  My Ordeal, by Bertie

  Edinburgh Past; Glasgow Future

  Sister Maria-Fiore Confides

  A Martini Is Planned

  Post Martinis Omnia Animalia…

  Room Issues

  Elspeth Reflects

  We’re All of Us Lost

  At Doddie’s Hoose

  Ranald Leaves a Note

  Thank You for Having Me

  Bless You

  A Thursday Meeting

  Pluscarden Abbey

  Ca’ the Yowes

  How the Cyclops Felt

  Let the Games Begin

  A Hammer Hurled

  Love, Simpliciter

  This book is for my good friend, Alistair Kerr

  1

  Belgian Shoes

  Angus Lordie, portrait painter, citizen of Edinburgh, husband of Domenica Macdonald and owner (custodian, perhaps, according to modern sensibilities) of Cyril, the only dog in Scotland to have a gold tooth; that Angus Lordie stood in a room of his flat at 44 Scotland Street, wondering what to wear.

  All the clothing he possessed was either hanging from a number of wooden hangers or was neatly folded and stacked away in a series of drawers within a large wardrobe, called in the second-hand trade, brown furniture. Nobody, apparently, wanted brown furniture any longer, as it was considered too cumbersome, not to say too dull, for contemporary tastes. If the Scottish diet had become Mediterranean, then Scottish furniture had become Scandinavian – light and minimalist, consigned to its owners in flat boxes and requiring to be assembled before use – and then reassembled, once the instruction booklet had been read. This was the very opposite of Angus Lordie’s wardrobe, as gloriously over-engineered, in its way, as the Forth Railway Bridge, and of similar vintage.

  This wardrobe consisted of a series of drawers in which Angus kept what he called his accoutrements: his shirts and socks, handkerchiefs, ties, vests and so on, while jackets and trousers were hung from a railing on the opposite side. His kilt, along with his sporran, hose, kilt pin and sgian dubh, were also in one of the drawers, protected, ineffectively, by moth-repelling balls of cedar.

  He had two suits – a dark one that had been made for him twenty-two years ago and that was described by Domenica as his kirk suit, and a three-piece, tweedy outfit that Domenica had disparagingly labelled his bookie’s suit. Neither of these descriptions was entirely helpful: the kirk suit was well-made and discreet, rather than Calvinist; the bookie’s suit was not in the least bit flashy, being made of Harris tweed and designed to withstand Hebridean weather – the horizontal rain and Atlantic gusts that beset the West of Scotland, and the North, South, and East for that matter. There was nothing wrong with these suits, although Angus seldom wore them. Suits, he thought, might be going the way of men’s hats and ties – both of which were now seen only infrequently on any man under forty. This was a matter of regret, Angus felt, even if he himself was doing nothing to stem that particular tide of fashion.

  Alongside the suits were hung four jackets, all of them in frequent use. Two of these were linen, and formed the core of his summer garb, while the others were of an unidentified fabric that Angus referred to as one hundred per cent un-natural. They were comfortable enough, though, and went with virtually anything, but particularly with the crushed strawberry corduroy trousers by which Angus signalled his status as a resident of the Georgian New Town, as a member of the Scottish Arts Club, and as a man of artistic bent. If these trousers raised eyebrows amongst the ranks of the staid, then Angus did not care in the slightest. There was no fixed ordinance stipulating that men should wear sober trousers: fund managers, lawyers and accountants could dress in grey and black if they wished – he, as an artist, preferred something livelier.

  On the floor of the wardrobe was the shoe rack on which Angus kept shoes other than those in regular use. His regular shoes – described by Domenica as his daily boots – were a pair of brown brogues made by the Northampton shoe-maker, Joseph Cheaney. English shoes, Angus maintained, were second to none. They may not be as elegant as Italian footwear, but Italian shoes would never stand the rigours of Scottish conditions. English shoes were made to last; they were modest, often understated, and they were, above all else, honest shoes. That quality of honesty was difficult to define – in shoes at least – but one knew it when one encountered it. That was why English shoes were still sought after when everything else, as far as Angus could see, was being made in distant, unspecified workshops. Designed in X and made in Y…Angus had never fallen for that particular attempt to sugar the pill of local deindustrialisation and the deskilling that went with it.

  The English shoes of which he was proudest were a pair of black brogues, made of soft and supple leather, and bought by his father from the London firm of John Lobb. Lobb made shoes to measure, and while Angus could not afford the expense of bespoke shoes – the price tag ran effortlessly into thousands – his father, a Perthshire sheep farmer, had been able to do so after a particularly good season at the Lanark stock sales. His prize Scottish Blackface tup, Walter of Glenartney, renowned for his noble bearing, his fine Roman nose, and his contempt for lesser sheep, had broken all sales records and had provided him with the funds to order a pair of Lobb shoes.

  By great good fortune, Angus and his father had near-identical feet, and when Angus left school, his father passed his shoes on to him. Angus accepted the gift with a degree of concealed embarrassment: at the age of eighteen, when one is busy shaking off parental influence, who wants a pair of bespoke Lobb shoes? At the Edinburgh College of Art at the time, shoes were being worn, of course, but these shoes were concepts or statements, rather than shoes simpliciter. So Angus relegated the Lobb brogues to a cupboard and wore, instead, a pair of Hush Puppies of tobacco-coloured suede, threaded with red laces – a touch that met with the wholehearted approval of his fellow students. “Radical,” they said – high praise in those innocent days.

  At a crucial stage in life – somewhere in one’s mid-thirties – the merits of well-made shoes dawn on one, and that was what happened to Angus. He wore the shoes to his father’s funeral, and as he and farming neighbours carried him to his final rest, a tear fell from Angus’s eye onto the cap of one of the shoes. Not every man, he thought, will live to see such a thing: his tears falling onto a shoe into which he had, both metaphorically and otherwise, stepped.

  Alongside the Lobb shoes, in as complete a contrast as could be imagined, was a pair of Belgian shoes, those light-weight, indoor shoes that are made only in Belgium and are completely unsuitable for active use. Angus had been given these by Domenica, whose eye had been caught by them on a trip to London.

  “You can’t wear them out of doors,” she said, as she pre-sented him with them. “The Belgians, it would seem, don’t get out much.”

  Angus smiled. “How drôle,” he said.

  Domenica accepted the compliment with an inclination of her head. “Belgium is a bit of a mystery to me,” she said. “I don’t feel I’ve ever really grasped it, if you see what I mean.”[*]