The World According to Bertie

case, Pat was telling the truth, as she always did. There really was an essay to be completed and it really did have to be handed in to Dr Fantouse the following Monday. And this indeed was the reason why she declined Matthew’s invitation to the Czech film at the Cameo cinema.

Pat closed the gallery shortly after three that afternoon.

Matthew had not returned and business was slack – nonexistent, 8

Famous Sons and Gothic Seasoning in fact, with not a single person coming in to look at the paintings. This is what, in the retail trade, is called light footfall, there being no commercial term – other than death – to describe the situation where absolutely nobody came in and nothing was sold. So Pat, having locked the cash-box in the safe and set the alarm, left the gallery and waited on the other side of the road for the 23 bus that would take her back to within a short walk of the parental home – once more her home too –

in the Grange, that well-set suburb on the south side of the Meadows.

Pat’s parents lived in Dick Place, a street which had prompted even the sombre prose of the great architectural historian John Gifford and his collaborators into striking adjectival saliences.

Dick Place, they write in their guide to the buildings of Edinburgh, is a street of “polite villas” – a description which may fairly be applied to vast swathes of Edinburgh suburbia.

But then they warn us of “Gothic seasoning,” mild in some cases and wild in others, and go on to observe how, in the case of one singled-out house, “tottering crowstepped porches and skeleton chimneys contrast with massive bald outshoots.” But Dick Place is not distinguished only by architectural exuberance; like so many streets in Edinburgh, it has its famous sons. At its junction with Findhorn Place is the house in which the inventor of the digestive biscuit once lived; not the only house in Edinburgh to be associated with baking distinction – in West Castle Road, in neighbouring Merchiston, there once lived the father of the modern Jaffa Cake, a confection which owes its name to the viscous orange jelly lurking under the upper coating of chocolate. No plaque reminds the passer-by of these glories, although there should be one; for those who invent biscuits bring great pleasure to many.

Pat’s father, a psychiatrist, found the location very convenient.

In the mornings, he could walk from his front door to the front gate of the Royal Edinburgh Hospital within fifteen minutes, and if he was consulting privately in Moray Place he could walk there in twenty-five minutes. The walk to Moray Place was Famous Sons and Gothic Seasoning 9

something of a paysage moralise – easier on the way down than on the way back, when the cares of patients would have been deposited on his shoulders, making Frederick Street and the Mound seem so much steeper and Queen Street so much longer.

But apart from this undoubted convenience, what suited him about Dick Place was the leafy quiet of the garden that surrounded the house on all four sides. If they were to pass any comment on Dr Macgregor’s garden, John Gifford and his friends might be sniffy about the small stone conservatory and potting shed, with its fluted and rusticated mullions; they might even describe the whole thing as “an oddity,” but for Dr Macgregor it was his sanctuary, the place where he might in perfect and undisturbed peace sit and read the Journal of the Royal College of Psychiatry or the Journal of Neurology, Neuro-surgery, and Psychiatry.

When Pat came home that Saturday, Dr Macgregor was ensconced in the conservatory, a small pile of such journals beside him. He became aware of his daughter’s presence as she opened the French windows across the lawn, but he was so thoroughly immersed in his reading that he looked up only when Pat pushed open the conservatory door and stood before him.

“That must be interesting,” she said.

He smiled, taking off his glasses and placing them down on the table beside him. “Very,” he said. “Some of these articles are intriguing, to say the least. Do you know what Ganser’s Syndrome is? That’s what I was reading about.”

Pat shook her head. “No idea,” she said.

Dr Macgregor gestured to the journal lying open on his lap.

“I was just reading this case report about it. A classic case of Ganser’s walked through the author’s door. He was asked what the capital of France was and he replied Marseilles. And how many legs does a centipede have? Ninety-nine. When did the Second World War begin? Nineteen thirty-eight. And so on.

Do you see the pattern?”

“Just marginally out on everything?”

“Yes. People who have Ganser’s talk just round the edge. Dr 10

Some Words of Warning from Pat’s Father Ganser identified it and he called that aspect of it the Vorbeireden.

They may not know that they’re doing it, but their answers to your questions will always be just a little bit off- beam.”

Pat looked at her father in astonishment. “How odd! Why?”

Dr Macgregor spread his hands in a gesture of acceptance.

“It’s probably a response to intolerable stress. Reality is so awful that they veer off in this peculiar direction; they enter a state of dissociation. This poor man in the report had lost his job, lost his wife, lost everything, in fact, and was being pursued by the police for something or other. You can imagine that one might start to dissociate in such circumstances.” He paused.

“Anyway, you’re home.”

He smiled at Pat and was about to ask her what sort of morning she had had, but then Pat said: “Remember Bruce? I saw him this morning. Or at least I thought I saw him.”

“You thought you saw him?”

“It may not have been him. Maybe I just thought that it was him. Maybe it was somebody who was just dressed like Bruce.”