The World According to Bertie

find a job would be less urgent. Julia, as everybody in Edinburgh knew, was not impe-cunious. An indulgent father, the owner of three large hotels and a slice of a peninsula in Argyll, made sure that his daughter wanted for nothing. It was surprising, thought Bruce, that she had not been snapped up by some fortune hunter. If she went to London, there would be a real danger of that happening. And that was why he was doing her a good turn. That’s what it was: an act of pure selflessness – considerate and sympathetic, pure altruism.

13. Matthew Gets Ideas from a Blank Canvas After he had finished his cup of coffee at Big Lou’s, Matthew made his way back across Dundas Street to the gallery. It was always a bit of a wrench leaving Big Lou: he felt she was the most relaxing, easy company, rather like a mother, he thought –

if one had the right sort of mother. Or an aunt perhaps, the sort of person with whom one could just pass time without the need to say anything. Not that Matthew had ever had an aunt like that, although he did have vague childhood memories of an aunt of his father’s who lived with them for a time and who worked all day, and every day, at tapestry. Matthew’s father had told him an amusing story about this aunt’s older brother, a man who suffered from a mild mental handicap and who had been taken in by Matthew’s grandfather. Uncle Jimmy had been a kind man, Matthew’s father said, and although there was little other contribution he could make to the household, he had been adept at fixing clocks.

“During the war, Jimmy had been largely uninterested in what was going on,” Matthew’s father had said. “But he was in great demand as a fixer of clocks, and his war service consisted of repairing the clocks of naval vessels that came into the Clyde.

They brought the clocks round to the house because he couldn’t really be left wandering around the ships unattended.

“After the war, he was disappointed that his supply of ships’

clocks dropped off. He liked the shape of these clocks, and it was not much fun going back to the fixing of mantelpiece clocks for the neighbours. Eventually he asked why there were so few ships coming in and was told that the war had finished three years ago.”

“Oh,” said Uncle Jimmy. “Who won, then?”

Matthew’s father had for some reason found this story vastly amusing, but Matthew thought: poor Uncle Jimmy, and remembered those Japanese soldiers who had come out of the jungle twenty, thirty years after the end of the war. Presumably they knew who won, or did they?

42

Matthew Gets Ideas from a Blank Canvas He unlocked the door of the gallery, removing the notice which said Back in half an hour. Surveying his desk, from which he had earlier cleared the day’s mail, he realised that there was not much to do that morning. In fact, once he thought about it, there was nothing at all. He was up to date with his correspondence, such as it was; he had paged through all the catalogues for the forthcoming auctions and knew exactly which pictures he would bid for. There were no invoices to send out, no bills to be paid. There was simply nothing to do.

For a few moments, he thought of what lay ahead of him.

Would he be doing this for the rest of his life – sitting here, waiting for something to happen? And if that was all there was to it, then what exactly was the point? The artists whose work he sold were at least making things, leaving something behind them, a corpus of work. He, by contrast, would make nothing, leave nothing behind.

But was that not the fate of so many of us? Most people who made their way to work each day, who sat in offices or factories, doing something which probably did not vary a lot –

pushing pieces of paper about or moving things from one place to another – these people might equally well look at their lives and ask what the point was.

Or should one really not ask that question, simply because the question in itself was a pointless one? Perhaps there was no real point to our existence – or none that we could discern –

and that meant that the real question that had to be asked was this: How can I make my life bearable? We are here whether we like it or not, and by and large we seem to have a need to continue. In that case, the real question to be addressed is: How are we going to make the experience of being here as fulfilling, as good as possible? That is what Matthew thought.

He was dwelling on this when he saw Angus Lordie walk past, carrying a parcel. On impulse, Matthew waved and gestured to him to come in.

“I was on my way to Big Lou’s,” Angus said. “And you?”

“Going nowhere,” said Matthew. “Sitting. Thinking.”

Matthew Gets Ideas from a Blank Canvas 43

“About?”

Matthew waved a hand in the air. “About this and that. The big questions.” He paused. “Any news of Cyril?”

Angus shook his head. “In the pound,” he said. “It makes my blood boil just to think of it. Cyril will be sitting there wondering what on earth he did to deserve this. Have people no mercy?”

“They used to try animals for crimes,” said Matthew thoughtfully. “Back in medieval times. I read something about it once.

They had trials for pigs and goats and the like. And then they punished them. Burned them alive.”

Angus said nothing, but Matthew realised that he had touched a raw nerve and changed the subject. He gestured to the parcel that Angus was carrying.

“That’s a painting?”

“It will be,” said Angus. “At the moment it’s just a primed canvas. There’s a man down in Canonmills who does this for me. I can’t be bothered to make stretchers and all the rest.”

“Well, don’t leave it lying about,” said Matthew. “It might be picked up and entered for the Turner Prize. You know the sort of rubbish they like. Piles of bricks and unmade beds and all the rest.”

“But they wouldn’t even consider this,” said Angus. “Although it’s only a primed canvas, it comes too close to painting for them.”