Four-oven Agas

have whatever you want,” he said. “We can afford it.”

“I feel guilty,” she said.

“About being able to afford things?” She sighed. “I suppose so.”

“That means you’ve got a heart. Anybody who doesn’t feel at least a little guilty about good fortune doesn’t have much of a heart, if you ask me.”

Elspeth thought about this. “I’m not sure. I’ve met people, I suppose, who seem to take it for granted. They act as if they’re naturally entitled to everything they have.”

She looked intently at Matthew. “Matthew, I don’t come from your world. We never had any money. There was never anything left over.”

He smiled. “So what?”

She gestured around the kitchen, with its expensive Aga – four ovens – and its capacious German dishwasher. “It’s just that we have everything – and we’ve had remembered seeing that when he first took it out for a drive. Two thousand miles, he thought, was a long distance – from Edinburgh to Inverness and back about six times.

Elspeth was looking at him with a mixture of pity and affection. He doesn’t get it,

she thought. He just doesn’t get it.

“I don’t think those things really count as necessities,” she said mildly. “I was talking about the things one needs.”

He was staring at her. “I can’t help being … being me,” he said quietly. “I can’t help it.” And then he warmed to his theme. “You know, Elspeth, there’s something really unfair going on. People judge other people for things that aren’t their fault. I can’t help coming from where I come from, can I?”

“Nobody was judging you for that …” “Aren’t they?” asked Matthew. “I think they may, you know. If you have … well, advantages in life – an easy start, let’s say were? What about that? Should you dislike somebody for being brought up in a particular way? Surely that’s one thing one can’t help oneself?”

He remembered reading something in the paper that had leapt out at him. “I saw that one of the colleges at Cambridge boasted the other day about not admitting a single student that year who had been at an independent school. Not one. And they were proud of the fact.”

“Well, you know what Cambridge is like …”

“No, that’s not the point, Elspeth. It means that they turned down lots of people who had the qualifications to get in. They turned them down because of something that was nothing to do with any choice, any single choice, made by those applicants. None of them actually chose their social class.”

Elspeth was silent for a few moments. She thought this an insidious argument, because if you accepted it, then you merely endorsed the continued privilege of those who had the best start in life. And that, she thought, was not the result you wanted to get. She had always felt that. Individual merit was all very well, but individual merit in this context merely cemented the status quo. The children of doctors and lawyers continued to have the best chance of becoming doctors and lawyers themselves. That was the way the merit principle had always worked, and that would be its result until somebody threw a spanner in the social works. Only then would things change.

Then she said, “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.”

Matthew looked puzzled. “What’s that got to do with it?” he asked. “Everything,” she said. Matthew sighed. “And what about the Scottish universities?” he said. “What about them?”

“They effectively discriminate against Scottish students because Scottish students don’t pay fees. So it’s easier to get a place if you come from somewhere else. How’s that for an injustice?”

“That can’t be true,” Elspeth said. “I just don’t believe that.”