He loved him more than ice-cream
Back at Nine Mile Burn that evening, as the late July sun painted the distant Moorfoot Hills with a mellow gold, Matthew drove slowly down the drive, thinking of his earlier conversation with Big Lou. He had not given much thought to her warning once he returned to the gallery; he had been too busy hanging a new exhibition to think about much else. But now, as the house came into view beyond the cluster of ill-behaved rhododendrons, he remembered her words. You think you’re helping people, she had said. And in reality, you’re making everything worse. I’ve seen it time and time again, Matthew. Dinna interfere; just dinna interfere.
As he parked the car in front of the house, he saw the three boys, toddlers now, but steady enough on their feet and eager to get into every nook and cranny, every out-of-bounds kitchen cupboard; keen, with all the delighted enthusiasm of that age to press buttons on devices, flick the switches of lights, and generally poke, prod and dismantle the world about them. There they were, their noses pressed to the window of the porch, with James, the au pair, standing grinning behind them. They loved James – they loved him as much as they loved their building bricks and their old-fashioned Noah’s Ark; they loved him as much as they loved the Toffee Fudgie-wudgie ice cream that Matthew occasionally picked up for them from Luca’s ice-cream parlour at Holy Corner in Morningside – that fact Matthew had learned directly from Rognvald, who had remarked one day, à propos of nothing, “Please don’t make James die, Daddy. I love him more than ice-cream.”
Matthew had been rendered momentarily speechless. The discovery of language by children brought forth the most extraordinary remarks, and one should not be surprised by anything. But this …
“I’m not going to make anybody die, Rognvald,” he said. “James isn’t going to die, my darling.”
“Good,” said Rognvald. Matthew wondered what had occasioned this strange concern on Rognvald’s part. Had Elspeth talked to the boys about death? Now he remembered: they had recently lost a budgie, and the boys had found the bird, small, blue, and lifeless on the floor of its cage. Elspeth had come across them shaking the bird, trying to prise open its beak with a fork, and she had been obliged to explain to them that the budgie could not be brought back to life.
“He’s gone to heaven,” she said, aware, even as she spoke, that this explanation created as many questions as it purported to answer.
And that proved to be the case. Where was heaven? Did people go there too? Were there toilets up there? These theological complexities, she realised, could not be answered, and she had brought the discussion to an end by giving a piece of toffee to each boy. This stuck their jaws together, and silenced them – a simple expedient, even if not one advocated in most contemporary child-rearing manuals. Later, when she told Matthew about it, he had said that he did not want to bring the boys up to believe in things that were not there. “Ghosts, heaven, all those things,” he said. “Why fill kids’ minds with non-existent clutter? They only find out the truth later on.”
“And Santa?” asked Elspeth. “And the tooth fairy?”
Matthew hesitated. How dedicated a rationalist did one have to be to deny the existence of Santa Claus? One of his own clearest early memories was of the moment when he had been told of the non-existence of Santa. The truth had been conveyed to him by his father, as they stood outside in the garden of the family house at Fairmilehead. Matthew had been looking up at the night sky, which was clear, and studded by fields of distant stars.
“Which way is the North Pole?” he had asked his father. “I want to see if we can see Santa.”
His father, bending down, had whispered in his ear, “You don’t believe in all that, do you, Matthew? Now that you’re a big boy, you don’t have to pretend.”
But he had not been pretending. He had believed in Santa in the same way in which he believed in Waverley Station or the Flying Scotsman, or any of the other things he could touch and see.
His father had continued, “You still get presents, you know, even if you don’t believe any more.”
That had calmed his fears, but it had still been an overwhelming, sad moment for him. Now, remembering that disappointment, he realised that Santa was the one myth that we might try to preserve when all others had been debunked or expired. It was a small sprig of hope in a relentless world, a tiny island in the shrinking domain of childhood innocence. Talking animals, AA Milne, counting rhymes, nursery stories were all being taken over by the mass-produced, de-cultured electronica of modern childhood.
Now he saw the boys wave, their faces full of excitement and smiles. To be welcomed back by dogs and children, thought Matthew – what a privilege that was; and suddenly, unexpectedly, he felt a cold hand of dread about his heart. These things, this love and warmth, were so vulnerable, given to us on the most temporary of terms. And yet we took them for granted, against all the evidence of every actuary there ever was; we assumed that it would last forever. What was that poem? It was something of Auden’s, he remembered, a poem he had heard recited in a film about weddings and a funeral, when the poet had said: I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.
James brought the boys out to greet him. They clutched at their father, hugging his legs; they bombarded him with questions and urgent news, delivered breathlessly. He thought: I was wrong. I was wrong.
Elspeth appeared. She kissed him. She said: “Come into the kitchen and talk to me while I make the boys’ tea.”
Matthew came from a home where they said dinner rather than tea. But now, in the warmth of this family welcome, he realised that it really should have been tea all along.
© 2018 Alexander Mccall Smith Alexander Mccall Smith welcomes comments from readers. Write to him c/o The Editor, The Scotsman, Orchard Brae House, 30 Queensferry Road, Edinburgh, EH4 2HS or via e-mail at scotlandstreet@scotsman.com
‘He saw the boys wave, their faces full of excitement. To be welcomed back by dogs and children, thought Matthew – what
a privilege that was; suddenly, he felt a cold hand of dread’