44 Scotland Street: Glasgow – a promised land

He had to put up with some flaunting of birthdays by those who had them. “No birthday yet, Bertie?” crowed Olive. “I’ve had a birthday, as you may have noticed, and Pansy has had one too. Even Tofu’s had a birthday, although he didn’t deserve one. What about you? Still six?”

At this rate, he thought, it would be an interminably long time before he turned eighteen – the age at which, according to the law of Scotland, he believed you could leave your mother and go to live wherever you liked. In his case he imagined it would be Glasgow, a promised land that lay only forty miles away to the west, where there would be no psychotherapy, no yoga classes, no Italian conversazione, and no prohibition on owning a Swiss Army penknife. Glasgow represented freedom – a life in which you could do what you liked and do it when you liked. As a small boy who had been told what to do since as long as he could remember, he could not imagine anything headier, anything more exhilarating than that.

Yet these thoughts of freedom were tinged with guilt, for although Bertie might be forgiven for dreaming of freedom from his mother, he could not rid himself of a nagging disquiet. He had encouraged his mother to go off to the Persian Gulf, and this meant that what happened there was his fault. That, of course, is how children think: they blame themselves for the misfortunes of their parents. If something goes wrong with the world, it’s my fault. I did it. That was a heavy burden of guilt for so young a set of shoulders, and the strain was telling.

The trip to the Gulf had come about after Irene had entered a competition to compose a new slogan for a desert sheikdom, and rather to her surprise she had won. Her suggestion – So much sand – and so close at hand! – came to her almost without thinking, and it was this spontaneity, perhaps, along with its undoubted veracity, that made her entry stand out above others. Some of those other entries, of course, were made by those who seemed to be quite unfamiliar with the region. From lush forests to Alpine pastures – we’ve got it all! was an enthusiastic entry, but not one that disclosed much knowledge of physical geography. More truthful was the entry, It’s air-conditioned! That had the merit, too, of being brief, but could perhaps be applied to rather too many places and did not quite capture – or so the judges thought – the particular essence of the sheikdom. And as for the entrant who suggested Not much here! – that was downright rude and was tossed aside without further consideration.

Irene had duly been awarded the prize, which consisted of five days on the Gulf coast with all expenses paid. Unfortunately the five days proved to be an underestimate: after having been mistaken for the new wife of a Bedouin sheik and being consigned to a harem in the desert, Irene had now spent almost two months in a desert fastness. British diplomats had done their best to arrange for her return, but these matters can be difficult, and there had been many misunderstandings. At least a message had been allowed out, in which Irene said: Am working on attitudes here. Don’t worry about me. In fact, quite content to stay pro tem.

It was a brief and rather enigmatic message, and the British consular authorities had been doubtful as to its genuineness. Irene’s husband, though, had been convinced that this was indeed Irene: working on attitudes had a certain ring to it that he thought could only come from his wife.

“It’s the sort of thing she says,” said Stuart. “It really does sound like her.”

“But what can she mean?” asked a puzzled official at the other end of the telephone line.

Stuart paused. He did not wish to be disloyal. “She is very enthusiastic about changing attitudes,” he volunteered.

There was a brief silence at the other end of the line. “Whose attitudes?”

Stuart thought for a moment. “I suppose everybody’s,” he said. “That’s not to say that she doesn’t recognise the validity of other points of view … I’m not saying that.”

The official, trained in diplomacy, sensed that this was a sensitive area. “Of course,” he said quickly. “And if you feel that she really wrote that, then that, at least, is a good sign. It means that relations with her … her host are probably quite good. And that helps, of course.”

The conversation had concluded shortly after that with the advice that there was very little that anybody could do but to wait for the wheels of desert bureaucracy to grind at whatever pace they were accustomed to grinding. There was every chance, the official suggested, that Irene might return before a forthcoming round of trade talks between the United Kingdom and local states.

“Nobody wants this sort of thing to be brought up at ministerial level,” said the official. “It sours relations unnecessarily. She’ll suddenly reappear – I’m pretty confident of that.”

Stuart had passed this reassurance on to Bertie. “The people in London say that Mummy will come back,” he said. “Her holiday is just taking a little bit longer than we thought.”

Bertie had frowned. He was not quite sure whether he wanted his mother to come back; life without her had clear benefits, and if she was happy enough in the desert, then surely it was unkind to persuade her to come back.

“I think she might be happier over there,” he said to his father. “It’s much warmer than Scotland, Daddy, and you know that Mummy likes warm weather. And some of those places are really nice, you know. Look at Dubai – people love going there. Perhaps we should let her stay for …” He did a rapid calculation. “Twelve years?”

If Irene stayed in the desert for a further twelve years, then when she came back to Scotland he would be eighteen, and … He hardly dared hope.

• Alexander McCall Smith welcomes comments from readers. Write to him c/o The Editor, The Scotsman, Level 7, Orchard Brae House, 30 Queensferry Road, Edinburgh, EH4 2HS or via e-mail at [email protected].