The Importance of Being Seven by Alexander McCall Smith Page B

for these factories, they sounded intriguing, but where were they? ‘Where are these factories, Mummy? Have you ever been to them?’
    Irene did not answer for a moment. ‘They’re in Glasgow, Bertie. But that’s neither here nor there. The point is that dressing up in kilts hardly solves the problems of the day, does it? Anybody can put on a kilt, but that changes nothing, does it?’
    Bertie wanted to say, maybe they feel better in a kilt, but something in his mother’s expression told him that this would notbe helpful. He would wear a kilt when he was eighteen, he decided. His mother would not be able to stop him then, and anyway, he would be living in Glasgow by then. He would move to Glasgow on the day after his eighteenth birthday. He would stay in Edinburgh on the actual birthday, to lull his mother into a false sense of security, but on the very next day he would move to Glasgow. He would learn how to speak Glaswegian – he would buy a book to help him do that – and he would only come back to Edinburgh once a year, or once every other year perhaps. That all lay ahead.
    Uniforms were anathema to Irene, but her objections to the cub scouts went deeper than that. These had not been expressed to Bertie – other than in a rather vague, disapproving way – but had been articulated very clearly to Stuart.
    ‘Your insistence that Bertie should be allowed to continue with this scouting nonsense is really very unhelpful,’ she had said to her husband. ‘You know my feelings on the matter, and yet you went and told him that it was all right. Well, it’s not all right, Stuart. It really isn’t.’
    Stuart looked out of the window. The matter had been raised in the kitchen, where he and Irene were sitting with a glass of wine while they waited for a pot of potatoes to boil. Bertie was in his room, practising his saxophone.
    ‘But he loves it,’ said Stuart. ‘You’ve seen his face when he gets ready on Fridays. He obviously has a whale of a time.’
    Stuart continued to gaze out of the window. In the evening sky above the city, the sun had touched a bank of high cumulus with reddish-gold; behind that, the thin white line of a jet’s vapour trail, heading west, high over Scotland. Stuart imagined the people in the jet, in their tube of metal, hurtling through the attenuated air at thirty thousand feet. He imagined the pilots, sitting in front of their glowing instruments, thinking the thoughts that pilots think. What a fine career it must be; one would see one’s wife so infrequently – three days out of seven, perhaps. Or if one were on long-haul duty, perhaps even a whole week might go past before one saw her. That was if one was a man, he corrected himselfquickly. There were women pilots, of course, and they would see their husbands – or their partners, Stuart again corrected himself – equally infrequently. Indeed, if two pilots married, or entered into a civil partnership – Stuart corrected himself yet again – then they might never see one another at all. It would all be a question of rotas and their adjustment; and surely the airlines would be sympathetic to a request to arrange duties in such a way that one never had to see one’s wife. Surely they would understand …
    ‘Stuart? Are you with me here? Or are you in one of your dissociative states?’
    Stuart shook his head. ‘I’m listening,’ he said.
    ‘I was saying that it’s a matter of real regret that you interfered over this scouting issue.’
    Stuart frowned. ‘Interfered?’
    ‘Yes.’
    He looked at her. When I’m fifty, he thought, I’m going to go and live in Glasgow. By myself. On my fiftieth birthday. On the very day.

23. The Insouciance of Tofu
     
    That Friday evening, Bertie was ready for cub scouts at least half an hour before he was due to travel up to Holy Corner on the 23 bus. They were going to play games that evening; Akela had promised that, and Bertie was excited. He would have liked to play games more often,