Bruce shook his head. “Durham?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” said Gav. “Durham’s the place for debbie girls. This other place is just for thicko men. They do a lot of agriculture degrees. Sports sciences—that’s another one for the thickos. You can actually study golf somewhere. Did you know that? You get a place on the course as long as you can count up to eighteen. The number of holes in a course, you see. Count up to nineteen and you get a scholarship. That’s all they ask. No Highers or anything like that.”

  “Amazing,” said Bruce. He took a swig of his beer. “But what about this girl?”

  “Which girl?”

  “The one Sally saw at the party you were talking about.”

  “Oh yes, that girl. Well, Sally actually knows her and told me all about her. Her name’s Jenny, and she’s a looker, I’m telling you.”

  Bruce waited. There were plenty of lookers. Edinburgh was crawling with lookers, he thought.

  “Her old man’s called Harry. He’s got a place near Peebles. And one somewhere up in teuchter territory—Inverness-shire, I think. He’s loaded.”

  Bruce listened.

  “He has a whole stretch of some salmon river up north.”

  Bruce shrugged. “There are hardly any salmon these days. I was reading somewhere that on one of those rivers they caught just one last year. One fish.”

  “That’s the Russians,” said Gav. “The Russians and the Spanish. They’re taking the fish out at sea. Anyway, this Jenny’s old man is the real McCoy.”

  Bruce was cool. “Oh yes?”

  “Yes. Seriously. Big time, I tell you.”

  Bruce explained that he was not sure.

  “But she wants to meet you,” said Gav. “How can you say no in these circumstances?”

  For a short while Bruce said nothing. Then he asked about the place near Peebles. What was it like?

  “It’s an estate,” Gav said. “Not far from Traquair—you know that place? Not far from there. They’ve got a big pheasant shoot, you know. And their place up in Inverness is massive. Twenty-eight thousand acres, somebody said.”

  Bruce took this in. “So why hasn’t she got a boyfriend?” he asked.

  “She did have one,” said Gav. “He left her.”

  “Why?”

  “Who can tell? People leave one another. They get fed up with somebody’s face and they quit. You can’t blame them sometimes.” Gav paused. “But that isn’t the point. The point, Bruce-o, is that she’s seen you and likes the look of you. She wants to meet you. What have you got to lose?”

  “Well, put that way—nothing, I suppose.”

  “And if you can’t stand her, well, you make an excuse and leave it at that. No harm done. You must have dumped plenty of women in your time.”

  Bruce grinned. “My quota,” he said.

  Gav laughed at the joke. Some things never changed: they were back at school together in their last year. My quota. Then he said, “And what about you? Have you ever been dumped?”

  Bruce shook his head. “Me? No. I do the dumping, not them. You know how it is.”

  Gav looked doubtful. “Funny, that. I heard from Fridgie that that Australian dame had given you the old heave-ho. For some extreme sports guy up on Skye.”

  Bruce made a dismissive gesture. “We split up,” he said. “Mutual consent.”

  “I see.”

  “She wanted me back,” Bruce continued. “I said: ‘You had your chance, girl. Too late.’ Great gnashing of teeth. Sobs. Danced around me with no clothes on. The works. But no, I’d made up my mind.”

  “Her loss,” said Gav.

  Bruce drained his glass of the last of his beer. In the brewer’s mirror on the wall behind him, he caught sight of himself. The light was just right, he thought; it made him look even better than usual. But then he thought: looks don’t last for ever. When he looked in the mirror in five, ten years’ time, what would he see? He would still be handsome, of course, but handsome old. And there was nothing more tragic, Bruce thought, than handsome old. You were reminded by handsome old of what had been, and was no more; handsome old spoke of the past, of loss, of what was now gone. Handsome old was the bitty glory of Calton Hill and the faded splendour of those old Edinburgh hotels, still dignified old matrons in spite of attempts to rejuvenate them with swanky new names. People and buildings, thought Bruce, are much the same, when it came down to it. The thought was a disturbing one. You are at a crossroads…

  Gav had thought of something else. “And another thing,” he said. “Her old man, Harry Whatever—he owns a distillery.”

  Bruce looked up sharply. “Owns it?”

  “Yes. The whole lot. It’s been in the family for yonks. They make a rather good single malt.”

  Bruce looked back at the mirror. A distillery. Single malt. These things opened doors. Good seats at Murrayfield. Drinks in the Scottish Rugby Union boardroom—with the players. Highland Cathedral. The works.

  “Next week?” he said to Gav.

  22

  The Desperation of Dan

  For Bertie, the realisation that his life was going to be better now that his mother had gone to Aberdeen came the second Saturday after her departure with a phone call from that northern quarter. Nicola took the call, but was listened in to by Bertie, who was in his room at the time reading Scouting for Boys. This book had been banned by Irene, who kept a list of off-limits publications almost as long as the infamous Index Librorum Prohibitorum maintained by the Vatican until only a few decades ago. That index, of course, not only contained The Three Musketeers, but also Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. Irene would not have sought to have such reach in her censorship of Bertie’s reading matter, but her list certainly contained Baden-Powell’s useful treatise on how to use tracking skills in the bush, how to light a campfire, and how to send signals from hilltop to hilltop by means of heliograph. It also contained many of the publications emanating from the Dundee fastness of Messrs DC Thomson, whose nose for what people want to read had long been an unerring one.

  So it was that Bertie had been told that both the Beano and the Dandy were unwelcome in the house, as were any of the Commando comics that emerged from Dundee—those breathless re-creations of the Second World War, full of shouts of Banzai! and Schweinhund! and peopled by square-jawed, salt-of-the-earth British NCOs.

  Bertie had brought home a copy of the Dandy, loaned to him by Tofu on payment of twenty pence. “And you’d better return it tomorrow, Bertie,” Tofu had warned. “If you don’t, it’s fifty pence a day penalty. Every day, that is. Fifty pence. So you’d jolly well better remember.”

  He was enjoying the adventures of Desperate Dan when Irene had pounced.

  “That, Bertie,” she said, “is the most dreadful rubbish. What are those Thomson people thinking about?”

  “But I love it, Mummy,” said Bertie. “Everybody does. There’s this man called Desperate Dan, you see, who eats cow pie and is really strong. Tofu says that he can tear telephone books in half with his bare hands.”

  Irene paged through the confiscated comic. “Desperate Dan indeed,” she snorted. “A complete male stereotype. I ask you, Bertie! Really!” And underneath her breath she muttered, “Heteronormative, too.”

  “But he really is strong, Mummy. What’s wrong with being strong?”

  Irene sighed. “Physical strength is often accompanied by the wrong attitudes, Bertie. I don’t expect you fully to understand that”—Irene was never one to split an infinitive—“but one day you will, Bertie, and you’ll thank Mummy for it.”

  That was the end of the Dandy, and Bertie’s reading of such literature was thereafter confined to the school playground, where Tofu allowed him, for five pence a time, to read the comics that he bought at the newsstand in Bruntsfield. But now, with Irene’s move, a new post-censorship era had opened in Scotland Street, and Bertie was able to read Scouting for Boys openly as well as peruse copies of the Beano rented from Tofu.

  Nicola, who had stepped into Irene’s shoes on her departure, was perfectly relaxed about Bertie’s reading matter. She had discreetly disposed of an entire shelf of the works of Carl Gustav Jung and Melanie Klein that Irene had stored in Bertie’s room, and replaced them with the Babar books of Jean and Laurent de Brunhoff, the collected Secret Seven adventures in their original unbowdlerised editions, and the subtly anarchistic writings of Roald Dahl.

  Bertie liked all of those, and when he asked after the fate of what had been there before, it was out of idle curiosity rather than regret.

  “What did you do with all those books by Mr. Jung?” he asked.

  Nicola was evasive, but only slightly so. According to one way of looking at it, she had taken an unpardonable liberty in disposing of property that was quite clearly not her own, but according to another—the view that she took herself—she had simply uncluttered the room to make way for more pertinent content.

  “I found a new home for those books, Bertie,” she said. “I’m sure Mummy would be happy to know that they’ve gone to that big charity book sale we have. They like getting books like that, Bertie. My friend Mary Davidson collects them and then sells them up in George Street—all for a very good cause, Bertie.”

  “And that other friend of yours, Granny,” said Bertie. “Mr. Holloway. I’ve seen him carrying boxes of books around the corner. Were those books by Mr. Jung too, do you think?”

  “Possibly,” said Nicola. “This part of Edinburgh is full of books by Jung, I think.”

  “What about Glasgow?” asked Bertie. “Is it full of books by Mr. Jung too?”

  “I doubt it,” said Nicola.

  Later, listening to Nicola speaking on the phone in the hall, Bertie realized that what was being said meant freedom for him. There had been talk of Irene’s coming down from Aberdeen that weekend, but the one-sided conversation that Bertie now heard gave joyous warning that this visit would now not take place.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” said Nicola. “But there we are. The boys will be disappointed, of course, but it gives them something to look forward to.”

  There was silence as Irene, on the other end of the line in Aberdeen, responded.

  Then Nicola again. “Of course, I’ll take him to yoga. Yes, yes. I know where it is.”

  A further silence, broken at length by, “I shall pass that message on to Stuart. I believe he’s spoken to the psychotherapist.”

  Silence.

  “Yes, carrots. Yes, definitely. I’ve puréed them and I did not put sugar in them. I never do.”

  The conversation did not last long after that, and Bertie withdrew from the door where he had been eavesdropping. The important thing was not psychotherapy or carrots—it was the fact that his mother would not be coming down for the weekend. Edinburgh now lay before Bertie like a fabled, golden city. He had the whole weekend to do what he wanted to do. His grandmother would allow that—she always did. So he would accept the invitation that Ranald Braveheart Macpherson had extended to spend the day with him. He knew that his grandmother wanted to go to Valvona & Crolla, but that could be done before he went up to Ranald’s house. And she would get him panforte di Siena when they were there. She did not disapprove of panforte, nor of panettone. Oh, joy to be alive and to be free! Oh, joy! Oh, joy!

  23

  A Very Special Olive Oil

  Nicola saw no reason why Bertie should not spend the day with Ranald Braveheart Macpherson. She liked Ranald every bit as much as she disliked Olive, whom she regarded as an incipient Irene. By contrast, in Nicola’s view Ranald was an entirely suitable friend for Bertie, even if his parents, whom admittedly she did not know very well, seemed to be somewhat tiresome. Ranald’s father drank a bit much, Nicola thought, and his mother was given to expostulating on all sorts of subjects of which she, in Nicola’s opinion at least, had little or no grasp. She had also heard the occasional rumor about Ranald’s father’s business, Macpherson Securities and General Holdings, but she knew that comments of that sort were often motivated by envy and emanated from people who had no securities themselves and, indeed, no holdings either.

  “It’s a very good idea for you to go to Ranald’s,” Nicola told Bertie. “But first I think we should go to Valvona & Crolla. I need to get one or two things there.”

  Bertie was very happy to agree to that. Nicola phoned Ranald’s mother and made the arrangements. After the trip to Valvona & Crolla, they would all travel up on the 23 bus, Bertie would be dropped, and then Nicola would take Ulysses for an ice cream at Luca’s at Holy Corner. Ulysses had no social life of his own, and an ice cream at Luca’s would, for him, count as a major socialising experience.

  At Valvona & Crolla Nicola worked through her shopping list with Bertie’s help. There was cheese to be bought—a wedge from a mouth-watering quarter-wheel of Parmesan; there were slices to be pared from a large Milanese salami; there were sun-dried tomatoes, Puglian olives, porcini mushrooms, and balsamic vinegar all to be acquired. Then there were egg-based tagliatelle, artichoke hearts, and a small jar of Simone Calugi’s whole summer truffle to complete the list.

  Bertie, who had been brought up on Italian food by the Italophile Irene, was completely at home in the delicatessen. He was able to point Nicola in the right direction for any of the things she needed, and to express a remarkably informed opinion on the choices available to her.

  “You must get that olive oil over there,” Bertie said to his grandmother, pointing to a bottle of rich green estate oil. “That’s the one Mummy always bought.”

  Nicola suppressed the urge to reject the oil out of hand, saying instead, “Well, there’s a lot to be said for continuity, Bertie.”

  “It’s called Poggio Lamentano,” said Bertie. “And it comes from Italy.”

  Nicola smiled. “I’d noticed there’s a fair amount of Italian produce here, Bertie.”

  “Mr. Zyw makes it,” said Bertie. “He grows the olives and then makes them into oil. He has somebody put the oil in bottles, and then Mrs. Contini brings them to Edinburgh. That’s the way it works, Granny.”

  Bertie reached out for one of the bottles, just within his reach. As he did so, though, he toppled, and snatching at the bottle for support, he brought it crashing down. There was a muted explosive sound as the glass shattered and the viscous green liquid spread across the floor. Bertie struggled to regain his balance and was almost on the point of falling over the fragmented glass when Nicola caught him by the arm, pulling him back on his feet.

  “Oh, Bertie,” she exclaimed. “Watch out!”

  Bertie stood disconsolate, his shoes spattered with olive oil. He looked up at his grandmother, an expression of horror on his face.

  “Oh, Granny, I didn’t mean to drop it. It sort of…sort of…” He could manage no more as tears sprang to his eyes.

  Nicola embraced him. “Oh, Bertie, it doesn’t matter. Olive oil’s just olive oil. The important thing is that you didn’t hurt yourself.”

  In his misery, Bertie just managed to get his words out. “I can pay for it, Granny. I’ve got some money in my piggy bank. I can pay for it. I’ve got enough.”

  “Oh, you don’t need to pay for it, darling. I can do that. It wasn’t your fault.”

  A voice came from behind them. “Of course it wasn’t your fault, Bertie. It was nobody’s fault, and it won’t take us a moment to clean that up.”

  Nicola turned around, to see Mary Contini standing behind her. She had not met her before, but recognized her from photographs in her books.

  “I’m terribly sorry,” Nicola said. “He was reaching out and somehow lost his balance.”

  Mary produced a handkerchief and gave it to Bertie. “There, Bertie. You wipe your tears away and then we can have a bit of panforte di Siena. I seem to remember that you like that—and who doesn’t?”

  Bertie took the handkerchief and wiped his eyes.

  “I’ll get somebody to clear this up,” said Mary Contini. “You go through to the café at the back and I’ll come along and join you.”

  Nicola ushered Bertie around the pool of olive oil and along the corridor to the café. “Now, isn’t that kind?” she said to Bertie. “An accident is an accident. Everybody understands that. You know that, don’t you?”

  Bertie nodded. “I didn’t mean to do it,” he said.

  “Of course you didn’t, Bertie.” Her heart went out to the little boy, to the little scrap of humanity that was her grandson; whose life so far, she felt, had been blighted by that shrill ideologue of a mother with her pressure and ambitions and consistent failure to understand what went on in a seven-year-old head—and a seven-year-old heart. She wanted to embrace him, to pick him up then and there, in the middle of the shop, among the salamis and the cheeses and the surviving bottles of Tuscan olive oil, and hug him to her and say Don’t worry, Bertie; don’t worry about anything—anything at all. In fact, at moments like this, she thought, she could only too easily fold her arms around anybody and say the same thing to them. Because the world was so full of anxiety and conflict and it was so unnecessary that this should be so, when all of us, in our heart of hearts, wanted the same thing, which was love and understanding and gentleness.

  Mary Contini met them in the café. She had a freshly opened panforte di Siena and placed this on the table in front of Bertie. For Nicola, she had a fresh bottle of Poggio Lamentano extra-virgin olive oil, a tricolor Italian ribbon tied about its neck. “A gift from me,” she said.

  Bertie was eyeing the panforte. “Why wait, Bertie?” said Mary. “Tuck in.”

  24

  Bonnie Charlie’s Noo Awa…

  Having picked up Ulysses from Stuart’s care, Nicola was free to accompany Bertie and his small brother by bus to Ranald Braveheart Macpherson’s house. Irene had always referred to this house as la casa di Macpherson, in a rather sarcastic, disapproving tone, as if the Macphersons themselves had given it a pretentious name. In fact, Irene frequently gave houses names that she thought the owners might apply to them in innocence of the mockery they would attract. A retired financier, for example, would live in a house called Dun Speculatin, while couples whom she considered hopelessly suburban would be described as occupying Mon Actual Repos. Others might live in Bourgeois Towers, or La Maison des Nouveaux Riches, or simply Nouveau Riche.