of this is what Stuart was, and all of these descrip-tors he now mulled over as he walked home early, making his
way down Waterloo Place after a long and tedious meeting in the neo-Stalinist St Andrew’s House.
A life might be summed up within such short compass, thought Stuart. He saw actuaries do it in their assessments in which we were all so reduced to become, for instance, a single female, aged thirty-two, nonsmoker, resident of the Central Belt – so truncated a description of what that person probably was, about her life and its saliences, but useful for the purposes for which they made these abridgements. Such a person had an allotted span, which the actuaries might reel off in much the same way as a fairground fortune-teller might do from the lines of the hand or on the turn of the Tarot card. You have thirty years before the environmental risk of living in the Central Belt becomes significant. The fortune-teller was not so direct, and certainly less clinical, but it amounted to the same advice: beware.
It had been a long-drawn-out meeting, and a frustrating one, in which Stuart, together with four other colleagues and a couple of parliamentarians, had been looking at health statistics. The news from Scotland was bad, and the Executive was looking for ways of making it sound just a little bit better. Nobody liked to pick on Glasgow, a vigorous and entertaining city, but the inescapable fact was that everybody knew that it had the worst diet in Western Europe and the highest rate of heart disease.
Was there any way in which this information might be presented to the world in a slightly more positive way? “Such as?” Stuart had asked.
This question had not gone down well. The politicians had looked at one another, and then at Stuart. Did one have to restrict the area in question to Western Europe? Could one not compare the Glaswegian diet with, say, diets in countries where there was a similar penchant for high-fat, high-sodium, high-risk food? Such as parts of the United States, particularly those parts with the highest obesity rates? Yes, but although the United States has a similar fondness for pizza, they don’t actually fry it, as they do in Scotland. There’s a difference there.
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Stuart smiled as he negotiated the corner at the end of Waterloo Place and began to walk towards Picardy Place. As a statistician, he thought, I’m a messenger; that’s what I do. And, like all messengers, some people would prefer to shoot me.
He looked down the street at the people walking towards him, young, old, in-between. After that day’s meeting, it was taking some time for him to move back from the professional to the personal. Here, approaching him, was a sixty-year-old woman, with two point four children, twenty-three years to go, with a weekly income of . . . and so on. Now there were carbon footprints to consider, too, and that was fun. This woman was walking, but had probably taken a bus. She did not go on holiday to distant destinations, Spain at the most, and so she used little aviation fuel. Her carbon footprint was probably not too bad, particularly by comparison with . . . with those who went to international conferences on carbon footprints. The thought amused him, and he smiled again.
“You laughing at me, son?”
The woman had stopped in front of him.
Stuart was startled. “What? Laughing at you? No, not at all.”
“Because I dinnae like being laughed at,” said the woman, shaking a finger at him.
“Of course not.”
She gave him a scowl and then moved on. Chastened, Stuart
continued his walk. The trouble with allowing one’s thoughts to wander was that people might misunderstand. So he put statistics out of his mind and began to think of what lay ahead of him. Bertie had to be taken to his saxophone lesson, and he would do that, as Irene had her hands full with Ulysses. That suited Stuart rather well, as he found that the late afternoon was a difficult time for Ulysses, who tended to girn until he had his bath and his evening feed. Stuart had rather forgotten Bertie’s infancy, what it was like, and the presence of a young baby in the flat was proving trying. At least going off to the lesson would give him the chance to get out with Bertie, which he wanted to do more often.
They had once gone through to Glasgow together on the train and that had been such a success, or at least the journey itself had been. The meeting in Glasgow with that dreadful Lard O’Connor had been a bit of a nightmare, Stuart recalled, but they had emerged unscathed, and Irene and Bertie’s subsequent encounter with Lard, when he had shown up unannounced in Scotland Street, had been mercifully brief. It was important that Bertie should know that such people as Lard O’Connor and his henchmen existed, that he should not think that the whole world was like Edinburgh. There were people who did assume that, and who were rudely surprised when they travelled furth of the city; going to London, for example, could be a terrible shock for people from Edinburgh.
Stuart wanted to spend more time with Bertie and – the awkward thought came unbidden – less time with Irene. That was a terrible thought, and he suppressed it immediately.
He loved and admired Irene, even if she was sometimes a bit outspoken in her convictions. Then another awkward thought intruded: if he wanted to spend less time with Irene, Bertie probably wanted exactly the same thing. But should I, a father, he asked himself, try to save my son from his mother? Was there a general answer to that, he wondered, an answer for all fathers and all sons, or did it depend on the mother?
“Ask Lewis Morrison when he thinks Bertie will be ready for his Grade Eight exam,” said Irene, as Stuart helped Bertie into his coat.
“But he’s just done his Grade Seven,” Stuart pointed out.
“Two months ago.” He looked down at Bertie and patted him on the shoulder. “And we got a distinction, didn’t we, my boy?”
“The sight reading was a very easy piece,” said Bertie modestly.
“Even Ulysses could have played it. If his fingers were long enough.”
“There you are,” said Irene. “Bertie’s obviously ready for the next hurdle.”
