The World According to Bertie

imperceptibly.

This city is so beautiful, she thought, so intriguing. If one had it, the city, as one’s lover, that would be almost enough, almost enough.

56. So Many Moves – Time to Make the Next One Moving, thought Bruce, had become rather familiar. Within the space of a year there had been his move from Edinburgh to London, where there were several moves, and then the move back to Edinburgh. His first flat in London had been a shared one in Fulham. He had liked that and would have been prepared to stay there longer, but had been unable to resist an offer he had received to move in with friends in Notting Hill. That had suited him perfectly; the flat was a couple of doors from an Italian restaurant and a small set of film studios. The film people often ate in the restaurant, along with other creative types, and this

188 So Many Moves – Time to Make the Next One appealed greatly to Bruce. They had been stand-offish, though, and had not welcomed an overture which Bruce had once made, when he had offered their table an olive from a plate of olives on his own table. Bruce had thought this rude; there was something symbolic about rejecting an olive – or was the symbolism attached purely to whole olive branches? In spite of that, he still felt that by living there, and eating from time to time in that particular restaurant, he was at the heart of this fashionable and vibrant part of London. Je suis arrive, he said to himself and reflected on how unimportant and faraway Scotland now seemed.

But things in London had not worked out quite as Bruce had planned. The flat in Notting Hill was expensive, even when the rent was divided three ways, and Bruce soon found that the money he had brought with him – most of it from that highly lucrative Chateau Petrus deal – soon haemorrhaged away, as money has a habit of doing in London. There was no shortage of work there, of course, but not all of it was the sort of work that Bruce wanted to do, and he began to think with a degree of regret of the job with Macauley Holmes Richardson Black, the Edinburgh surveyors. It had been time to move on from that, of course, and he could not imagine himself doing that sort of work for the rest of his life, but it had been steady and reasonably well paid, and often involved free tickets to Murrayfield for the rugby, even for the popular game against England, for which tickets were always in such short supply.

So Many Moves – Time to Make the Next One 189

It was all the fault of that awful Todd woman, thought Bruce.

She had accosted him – yes, accosted – in that bookshop in George Street and virtually forced him to take her to lunch at the Cafe St Honore. Of course I should have been on my guard, he thought: Edinburgh was full of women like that who were itching for an affair with a younger man, particularly somebody like me, and I should have shown a little bit more savvy. But what made it all so unjust was that nothing had happened, and it was only because her husband had come into the restaurant at the precise moment that this rapacious woman had seized his hand that the situation had become awkward.

Nothing like that had happened in London, of course, but over the months it had become apparent to Bruce that the reality of life in London was one of struggle; people worked hard, put up with cramped conditions, and had to travel miles to conduct their social lives – they struggled. With the inherent good nature of the English, they generally remained remarkably cheerful about all this, but such hardships began to wear Bruce down.

He looked back with longing to the days when he had been able to walk to work – even to go home for lunch or for a quick dalliance with a girlfriend if he so desired; that was impossible in London. He remembered how he could walk from the Cumberland Bar to Murrayfield Stadium in half an hour, with his friends, and then walk with them to a dinner and a party thereafter. And he remembered those friends: Gordon, Hamish, Iain, Simon, Fergus . . . and he found that he missed them.

So there had been the move back to Edinburgh and into the flat in Comely Bank owned by his friend Neil. Now there was the move out of that flat and into the flat in Howe Street owned by Julia Donald. So many moves . . . He zipped up his suitcase and moved it off the bed and onto the floor. Caroline, Neil’s wife, was standing in the doorway, watching him, and Bruce turned round to face her.

“Well,” he said. “That’s more or less it. I hope I haven’t left anything. If I have, give it to the Oxfam shop.” He paused. He did not like the way that Caroline watched him; it was distinctly 190 So Many Moves – Time to Make the Next One disconcerting, and he wondered if she did it to Neil too. I could never put up with being married to somebody like her, thought Bruce; poor Neil.

“Neil said that I should offer to drive you over there,” Caroline said. “Would you like me to do that?”

Bruce considered the offer for a moment. It was significant, he thought, that she had said that Neil had made the suggestion. She was not making the offer, her husband was. “No thanks,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to put you out. I’ll phone for a cab.”

She nodded. “Do you want to leave anything for the phone?”

she said.

“Sorry?”

“For your phone calls,” she said. “Sometimes when one stays somewhere one leaves money for one’s share of the phone bill.

That sometimes happens.”

Bruce blushed. This woman was the end. She was le fin, he thought.

“I haven’t kept a note,” he said. “Sorry. Maybe I should have noted down the length of the calls. You know, something like: Edinburgh to Glasgow, two minutes ten seconds. That sort of thing.” His lip curled as he spoke; she would hardly understand sarcasm, he thought; such people rarely do.

“Yes,” she said. “Maybe you should have.”

Bruce looked down at his suitcase. “You’ve got a problem, Caroline,” he said. “You’ve got a big problem. Maybe with phones, but also with men, I’d say, and I’m sorry about that, because there are lots of men about, you know.”

Caroline’s reply came quickly. “Not with all men,” she said.

“Just some.”

Bruce shrugged. “Whatever,” he said. He picked up his suitcase; there was no point in prolonging this. “You’ve been very kind,” he said. “Thanks for everything.”

Caroline did not move from the doorway. “My conditioner,”