The World According to Bertie

told.”

She took the package and unwrapped it. “Thank you,” she said. “I didn’t expect that. But thank you.”

Matthew blushed. His heart was racing now, but he felt a curious elation. “And I bought you an extra little present to make up for my clumsiness,” he said. “Here.”

He thrust the parcelled-up Meissen figure into her hands and waited for her to unwrap it.

“But you can’t!” she protested. “You really can’t. The vase was one thing, this is . . .”

“Please,” said Matthew. “Please just unwrap it. Go on.”

She removed the bubble wrap carefully. When the figure was half-exposed, she stopped, and looked up at Matthew. “I really can’t accept this,” she said. “You’re very kind, but I can’t.”

Matthew held up his hands. “But why not? Why?”

She looked down at the figure and removed the last of the wrapping. “Because I know what this cost,” she said quietly.

“And I can’t accept a present like this from somebody I don’t even know.”

Matthew looked down at the floor in sheer, bitter frustration.

It was such a familiar experience for him; every time he tried to get close to somebody, it ended this way – with a rebuff. He 234 She Could Not Help but Hear the Conversation knew that buying this present was an extravagant gesture, an unusual thing to do, but he thought that perhaps this one time it would work. But now he could see her recoiling, embarrassed, eager to end their brief acquaintance.

He thought quickly. He would be decisive; he had nothing to lose.

“I understand,” he said. “It’s just that I wanted to get you something.” He paused. He would speak. “You see, the moment I saw you, the very first moment, I . . . well, I fell for you. I know it sounds corny, and I’m sorry if that embarrasses you, but there it is. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before.

Nothing.”

She cradled the Meissen figure. “I don’t know what to think,”

she said. “I’m sorry.” But then she looked up at him. “You’ve been very honest,” she said. “You really have. So I should be honest too. When I saw you, I felt I rather liked you. But . . .

But we don’t even know each other’s names.”

“I’m Matthew,” Matthew blurted out.

“And I’m Elspeth,” she said. “Elspeth Harmony.”

Matthew reached out to take the Meissen figure from her.

“Let’s put this down somewhere,” he said. Then he asked: “What do you do, Elspeth?”

“I’m a teacher,” she said. “At the Rudolf Steiner School.”

Matthew thought of Bertie. “There’s a little boy called Bertie,”

he began. “He lives near here. In Scotland Street.”

“One of mine!” said Miss Harmony.

70. She Could Not Help but Hear the Conversation Domenica Macdonald was aware that something was happening downstairs. One of the great glories of 44 Scotland Street, she had always felt, was the fact that noise did not travel – with the exception of Bertie’s saxophone practice – and that, as a result, one heard little of the neighbours’ private lives. This was thanks She Could Not Help but Hear the Conversation 235

to Edinburgh architecture, and the generosity of construction methods which prevailed during the building of the great Georgian and Victorian sweeps of Edinburgh. In Scotland Street, the walls were a good two feet thick, of which solid stone formed the greatest part.

Used to this as she was, Domenica was always astonished to see the sheer flimsiness of walls in other places, particularly in postwar British construction, with its mean proportions (oppressive, low ceilings) and its weak structures (paper-thin walls).

She had noticed how different things were on the Continent, where even very modest houses in countries such as France or Germany seemed so much more solid. But that was part of a larger problem – the problem of the meanness and cheapness which had crept into British life. And there was an impermanence too, which reached its height in the building of that great and silly edifice, the Millennium Dome, a “muckle great tent,”

as Angus Lordie had described it. “That could have been a cathedral or a great museum,” said Angus, “but don’t expect anything as morally serious as that these days. Smoke and mirrors. Big tents.”

Edinburgh at least could be grateful that it was, to a very large extent, made of stone, and that this gave a degree of privacy to domestic life. But in a tenement, if there was noise on the common stair, that could carry. As in the cave of Dionysius in Syracuse, a whisper at the bottom of the stair might be heard with some clarity at the top. And similarly, each door that gave onto the landing might be an ear as to what was said directly outside, with the result that remarks about neighbours had to be limited to the charitable or the complimentary until one was inside one’s own flat; at that point, true opinions might be voiced – might be shouted even, if that helped – without any danger that the object of the opinion might hear.

Domenica had heard none of the discussion that preceded the dreadful discovery below that the wrong baby had been picked up at the council emergency nursery. Nor had she heard the cries of alarm that accompanied the actual discovery. But 236 She Could Not Help but Hear the Conversation what she had heard that day was a great banging of doors and hurried footfall on the stairs as the Pollock family headed off to the nursery in search of the missing Ulysses. This had caused her to look out of the window and to see Irene, Stuart, and Bertie piling into a waiting taxi and racing off in the direction of Drummond Place. Where, she wondered, was the baby?