Matthew agreed. “Sometimes people just don’t learn. We repeat our mistakes, don’t we?”

  Matthew’s coffee was now ready and Big Lou passed him the steaming latte. “One consolation of being over forty,” she said, “is that you have the pleasure of seeing people under forty fail to grasp things that you know they’ll grasp when they’re over forty.” And then she added, “If you see what I mean.”

  Matthew took a sip of his coffee. “Schadenfreude,” he said. “Which means—”

  Big Lou cut him short. “Oh, I ken all aboot your actual Schadenfreude, Matthew. Don’t think I don’t know about that.”

  Matthew was apologetic. “Sorry, Lou. I didn’t mean to be…”

  “Condescending,” supplied Big Lou. “No, but as it happens I’ve read all about Schadenfreude.” She paused. “Pleasure in the discomfort of others. It’s strange, isn’t it?”

  “Something to do with envy?” asked Matthew.

  “Aye, envy’s a gey powerful emotion, Matthew. Lots of folk want what others have.”

  Matthew sighed. “I know all about that, Lou. I suppose I’m pretty lucky…”

  Big Lou nodded. “Aye, you are. And do you find that other people envy you? Do you notice it?”

  Matthew did. He had much to be grateful for, and he was very much aware that those who have much to be grateful for must be tactful in their enjoyment of their good fortune. He had Elspeth and the triplets; he had his gallery, with his desk and the chair that gave such good lumbar support; he had…oh, one could spend a long time enumerating the things he had, and yet there was poor Pat, who had such an appealing manner and was so well informed on twentieth-century Scottish art, and she had nobody to go home to in the evening other than those dreadful flatmates.

  “Big Lou,” he said, “we must do something for Pat. We have to find somebody for her. A boyfriend.”

  Big Lou looked dubious. “Tricky,” she said. “Matchmaking, Matthew, almost always ends in disaster.”

  “Nonsense,” said Matthew. “Not true.”

  8

  He Loved Him More Than Ice Cream

  Back at Nine Mile Burn that evening, as the late July sun painted the distant Moorfoot Hills with a mellow gold, Matthew drove slowly down the drive, thinking of his earlier conversation with Big Lou. He had not given much thought to her warning once he returned to the gallery; he had been too busy hanging a new exhibition to think about much else. But now, as the house came into view beyond the cluster of ill-behaved rhododendrons, he remembered her words. You think you’re helping people, she had said, and in reality you’re making everything worse. I’ve seen it time and time again, Matthew. Dinna interfere; just dinna interfere.

  As he parked the car in front of the house, he saw the three boys, toddlers now, but steady enough on their feet and eager to get into every nook and cranny, every out-of-bounds kitchen cupboard; keen, with all the delighted enthusiasm of that age, to press buttons on devices, flick the switches of lights, and generally poke, prod and dismantle the world about them. There they were, their noses pressed to the window of the porch, with James, the au pair, standing grinning behind them. They loved James—they loved him as much as they loved their building bricks and their old-fashioned Noah’s Ark; they loved him as much as they loved the Toffee Fudgie-Wudgie ice cream that Matthew occasionally picked up for them from Luca’s ice-cream parlor at Holy Corner in Morningside. That fact Matthew had learned directly from Rognvald, who had remarked one day, apropos of nothing, “Please don’t make James die, Daddy. I love him more than ice cream.”

  Matthew had been rendered momentarily speechless. The discovery of language by children brought forth the most extraordinary remarks, and one should not be surprised by anything. But this…

  “I’m not going to make anybody die, Rognvald,” he said. “James isn’t going to die, my darling.”

  “Good,” said Rognvald.

  Matthew wondered what had occasioned this strange concern on Rognvald’s part. Had Elspeth talked to the boys about death? Now he remembered: they had recently lost a budgie, and the boys had found the bird, small, blue, and lifeless, on the floor of its cage. Elspeth had come across them shaking the bird, trying to prise open its beak with a fork, and she had been obliged to explain to them that the budgie could not be brought back to life.

  “He’s gone to heaven,” she said, aware, even as she spoke, that this explanation created as many questions as it purported to answer.

  And that proved to be the case. Where was heaven? Did people go there too? Were there lavatories up there? These theological complexities, she realized, could not be answered, and she had brought the discussion to an end by giving a piece of toffee to each boy. This stuck their jaws together, and silenced them—a simple expedient, even if not one advocated in most contemporary child-rearing manuals. Later, when she told Matthew about it, he had said that he did not want to bring the boys up to believe in things that were not there. “Ghosts, heaven, all those things,” he said. “Why fill kids’ minds with nonexistent clutter? They only find out the truth later on.”

  “And Santa?” asked Elspeth. “And the tooth fairy?”

  Matthew hesitated. How dedicated a rationalist did one have to be to deny the existence of Santa Claus? One of his own clearest early memories was of the moment when he had been told of the nonexistence of Santa. The truth had been conveyed to him by his father, as they stood outside in the garden of the family house at Fairmilehead. Matthew had been looking up at the night sky, which was clear, and studded by fields of distant stars.

  “Which way is the North Pole?” he had asked his father. “I want to see if we can see Santa.”

  His father, bending down, had whispered in his ear, “You don’t believe in all that, do you, Matthew? Now that you’re a big boy, you don’t have to pretend.”

  But he had not been pretending. He had believed in Santa in the same way in which he believed in Waverley Station or the Flying Scotsman, or any of the other things he could touch and see.

  His father had continued, “You still get presents, you know, even if you don’t believe any more.”

  That had calmed his fears, but it had still been an overwhelming, sad moment for him. Now, remembering that disappointment, he realized that Santa was the one myth that we might try to preserve when all others had been debunked or expired. It was a small sprig of hope in a relentless world, a tiny island in the shrinking domain of childhood innocence. Talking animals, A. A. Milne, counting rhymes, nursery stories were all being taken over by the mass-produced, de-cultured electronica of modern childhood.

  Now he saw the boys wave, their faces full of excitement and smiles. To be welcomed back by dogs and children, thought Matthew—what a privilege that was; and suddenly, unexpectedly, he felt a cold hand of dread about his heart. These things, this love and warmth, were so vulnerable, given to us on the most temporary of terms. And yet we took them for granted, against all the evidence of every actuary there ever was; we assumed that they would last for ever. What was that poem? It was something of Auden’s, he remembered, a poem he had heard recited in a film about weddings and a funeral, when the poet had said: I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

  James brought the boys out to greet him. They clutched at their father, hugging his legs; they bombarded him with questions and urgent news, delivered breathlessly. He thought: I was wrong. I was wrong.

  Elspeth appeared. She kissed him. She said: “Come into the kitchen and talk to me while I make the boys’ tea.”

  Matthew came from a home where they said dinner rather than tea. But now, in the warmth of this family welcome, he realized that it really should have been tea all along.

  9

  Bacon without Nitrites

  With the triplets safely in bed, Matthew, Elspeth and James sat down at the kitchen table. They ate there most evenings, other than when there were guests, when Matthew would lay the table in the dining room, setting out the place mats with their views of the Grassmarket, the Castle, and Heriot’s; the silver candlesticks—Edinburgh hallmarked—that had been a wedding present from his late uncle, and the heavy Stuart Crystal glasses of which Elspeth’s parents had divested themselves on downsizing. Around the kitchen table, the setting was much more contemporary: Danish cutlery, so advanced conceptually as to make it difficult to distinguish knife from fork; plates from a design approved by the Museum of Modern Art in New York; and cranberry-colored glasses that Elspeth had first seen in House and Garden which sat very well with the shade of red she had chosen for their recently installed Aga. This, after all, was haut-bourgeois Edinburgh, although admittedly a few miles out of kilter.

  James had been with them for two months now. He had joined the household at a time of real crisis. Clare, the Australian au pair who had preceded him, had been a success with the triplets, but had ultimately proved to be unreliable. She had taken up with Bruce, who had, much to Matthew’s surprise, met his match in her. Clare was an extreme sports enthusiast, and had insisted Bruce accompany her on an ill-fated para-mountain-biking trip to Skye. Para-mountain-biking is one of the more dangerous of the extreme sports, involving, as it does, cycling over the edge of a cliff or down a steep hillside on a bicycle attached to a large kite-like wing. The theory is that the cyclist, along with the mountain bike, sails upwards, in the way of a glider caught in ascending thermals. The sensation is said to be like no other: the earth shrinks beneath one, the wind, unconstrained by any surrounding structure, envelops the rider with its touch, and by continuing to turn the pedals one feels as if one is actually riding across the sky.

  It is not, of course, a sport for everyone, and Bruce, for all his courage, did not take to it. On that initial launch into the wind blowing in off the Minch, Bruce reached a height of several hundred feet before his supporting wing suddenly dipped and pushed him swiftly downwards. He managed to land, but did so with such force that he fell from the mountain bike, caught his left hand in the spokes of the front wheel, and suffered minor lacerations to his brow. Clare was concerned, but only momentarily so; she had come under the spell of the instructor, and joined him in laughing good-naturedly at Bruce’s ignominious landing. After that, she and Bruce parted company and she went off to Callander with the instructor, last heard of at a folk music festival on South Uist. This left Matthew and Elspeth in urgent need of replacement domestic support. And into that vacuum stepped an unlikely candidate—James, the nineteen-year-old godson of Matthew’s friend, the Duke of Johannesburg, who had sold them the house at Nine Mile Burn. James had left James Gillespie’s School in Edinburgh, where he had been the winner of the German Language Cup, the Senior Art Prize, and the Lord Provost’s Award for General Attitude. Matthew had been hesitant about taking on a male au pair; Elspeth less so. “Don’t be so old-fashioned,” she said to him. “These days it makes no difference. Boys, girls—it’s all the same.”

  Matthew had struggled with this claim. Were boys and girls all the same? He knew that the days in which there were male roles and female roles were well and truly over, at least with regard to employment and public office, but he had a lingering feeling that the personal psychologies of men and women had not yet coalesced into a truly androgynous composite. It struck him that there were still differences of outlook, and that even if men had become gentler and more sympathetic, and women, by the same token, had become harder and less feeling, there were still members of both sexes who held on to the old categories of male and female interests. There were still plenty of men, Matthew felt, who did not much care about their appearance and therefore did not use facial moisturiser; these men were never more content than watching football or drinking beer, or indeed doing both of these at the same time, and in an unmoisturised state. These men still existed, and until they were finally rooted out and reconstructed they could not be entirely ignored.

  Matthew was not sure that a young man would have the patience to cope with the triplets. And would he feel comfortable in doing the things that an au pair in charge of small children had to do? The boys were still imperfectly toilet-trained and that was not necessarily something that everybody could cope with. And would he be able to cuddle them and comfort them when they scraped their knees—as they were always doing—or acquired the bruises that were the inevitable concomitant of running around the furniture at low level?

  Elspeth thought he could be capable of doing all of this, and she proved to be right. James soon revealed himself to be more than capable of looking after the boys, as well as being an enthusiastic house-cleaner. He cycled to the supermarket in Penicuik, where he did the shopping unbidden, but with economy and insight into the household’s needs. He fixed the dishwasher when its complicated filter system clogged and regurgitated; and he was, they discovered to their delight, a talented and inventive cook.

  So when they sat down to dinner that evening, the Danish cutlery and the MOMA-approved plates at the ready, it was to a meal concocted by James.

  “I got hold of some scallops,” he said. “And I’ve made some bacon to go with them.”

  “Made bacon?” asked Matthew.

  It was Elspeth who answered. “James cures his own bacon,” she said, “don’t you, James?”

  James smiled sweetly. “I do. I cure in a mixture of salt and spices. Which means there are no nitrites in it.”

  “You don’t want nitrites,” said Elspeth.

  “No, you don’t,” said James, rising from the table to check up on a pan on the Aga. “And it’s really quite easy. You get hold of a pork loin and you rub the salt into it. Really rub it in. And you mix the spices with the salt—nutmeg, cinnamon even—that sort of thing. Then you put it in a plastic bag and put it in the fridge for three days.”

  “It dries out in the fridge,” said Elspeth. “Then it’s ready.”

  Matthew gazed at James, who had returned to the table. James smiled back at him, the dimples in his cheeks appearing as his smile broadened. He is very attractive, thought Matthew—adding, very quickly, to women, that is. And then he thought: Pat? No. Ridiculous thought. Inappropriate. But then…

  10

  An Inadvisable Home Construction Project

  The scallops and the nitrite-free bacon had been perfectly prepared.

  “How do you do it, James?” said Matthew as he finished off the last morsel on his plate.

  James looked down modestly. “It’s not all that complicated,” he replied. “The trick with scallops is not to wash them, of course. That stops them absorbing water. And then never overcook. That’s rule number one when dealing with any seafood.”

  Elspeth agreed with this. “Some people wreck lobster,” she said. “They boil it until it becomes all rubbery. It’s awful.”

  Matthew nodded. He did not like rubbery lobster; in fact, he had become wary of eating lobster ever since, on a trip to France, he had seen live lobsters being tossed into a pot of boiling water with Gallic insouciance. He was sure he had heard their screams—high-pitched, whistling sounds—as they met their agonizing deaths. People said that this was impossible; that lobsters had no voice at all, were mute, as oysters or mussels undoubtedly were; but even if that were true, he wondered how anybody could toss a living creature into boiling water. And yet, and yet…here was this bacon on his plate, and that had once been a pig, an intelligent, emotionally receptive animal that had perhaps experienced all the joy of nosing about in a muddy field and feeling the sun on its back.

  He wondered about scallops. He felt no particular compunction in eating them as he very much doubted whether they had any of the attributes that made for moral status. A pig might have thoughts, might experience emotion; a scallop would hardly think, or even be conscious in the sense in which we thought of consciousness. Their watery existence, resting on the sand of some distant seabed, did not involve any real sense of a past, a present, and a future. Nor, he imagined, were scallops aware of the fact that they were scallops; unlike pigs, which were conscious of being pigs…Or were they? Did pigs know they were pigs, or did they think that everything around them was just part of an undifferentiated reality that revolved around, and created, an all-enveloping state of piggishness?

  He became aware that Elspeth had said something about sauce, but he did not hear it. Nor did he pay much attention to the reply James gave. He said something about using a small amount of chili, but then Elspeth asked, “Where did you learn to cook, James? Was it at home?”

  They had met James’s parents. His father was an accountant and his mother a primary school teacher. They had struck Matthew as being a fairly typical middle-aged couple; the father, Hugh, looked as if he was the type of man who might be able to cook. It was the Duke of Johannesburg, though, who had inspired James’s culinary expertise.

  “My uncle,” the young man said. “Well, he’s my godfather really, but I’ve always called him Uncle Joburg and I really think he’s forgotten I’m not his nephew.” He paused. “You know he’s not a real duke? Well, not entirely, because his father never really got the dukedom that the government of the time had promised him. He felt cheated.”

  “As well he might,” said Matthew. “Governments can’t just promise to do things and then decide not do them.”

  “But that’s exactly what many of them do,” Elspeth pointed out. “They say something when they’re out of power and then, once they’re in, they do the exact opposite.”

  Matthew laughed. “I’m remembering the Lib Dems,” he said. “They made a promise before they went into coalition with the Tories and then they had to confess that being in power was very different and they couldn’t do what they said they’d do.”

  “But at least they had the honesty to say it,” Elspeth cut in.