Espresso Tales - Alexander Hanchett Smith [63]
“Betty was keen enough to open the garden to the public, but I eventually decided that it would not be wise. ‘One has to keep one’s head below the parapet,’ I said to her. ‘Put it above the parapet and people will take a pot shot at you.’
“She seemed surprised at this, and suggested that I was rather exaggerating the situation. Her nature is so sweet, I suppose, that she couldn’t imagine people behaving in a nasty way. But I had seen a lot of human nature and knew very well that there were people in the street who would be only too happy to have some excuse to pass hostile comments on me. I had already encountered it when I had proposed myself for membership of the local amenity association and had suggested that my legal expertise might be useful in dealing with any controversial planning applications that came up. It came back to me that one or two neighbours were saying that this offer on my part meant that I thought I knew more about bureaucratic procedures than they did. This was very unfair. I would never have implied that, and I had only put myself forward in order to be of use to the community.
“But some people are not interested in the public good; they are consumed by envy of anybody who might be just a little bit more enterprising than they are. I don’t wish to point any fingers politically, but I think that there might be one or two Scottish politicians who are perhaps a tiny bit guilty of harbouring such sentiments in their otherwise generous bosoms. But political sniping is not to my taste, and I shall say no more about that!
130 Bertie’s Plan Is Launched
“Time passed remarkably quickly. Betty and I had no family, which was a disappointment to us, I know, and I would wish that it could have been otherwise. But we have been blessed in so many other ways that I do not wish to dwell on what we might have missed. We have had a fortunate life, Betty and I, and it has been packed with more than its fair share of excitement. I should like to share some of that with you, and tell you, in particular, of some of my exciting legal cases, of how I played the Duke of Plaza-Toro in The Gondoliers at the Church Hill Theatre, of my racy friend Johnny Auchtermuchty, and of the occasion that I played bridge with no less a person than Angus, late Duke of Atholl.”
40. Bertie’s Plan Is Launched
As he made his way back to Scotland Street after his unfortunate experience in Dundas Street – unfortunate in the sense of having been stranded so ignominiously and terrifyingly in the middle of the traffic, yet fortunate in the sense of having been rescued by a well-known politician who happened to be walking up the hill at the time – Bertie felt utterly despondent. He had not hatched many plans in his brief life – his mother did his planning for him – and this scheme, with which he had been so pleased, had not even got off the ground. As he walked home, fingering the piece of chalk which he had in his pocket and which he had planned to use to leave a message for his proposed collaborator, Paddy, he decided that perhaps it was useless to rebel. It seemed to him that his mother would always outsmart him, whatever he tried to do, and she also had that powerful ally in the person of Dr Fairbairn. It was hopeless, thought Bertie, to attempt to take control of his life in the face of two such calculating opponents. Like a prisoner-of-war, he should perhaps just keep his head down and wait for the moment of liberation to come. That would be when he was eighteen, when Bertie understood that one became an adult and could leave Bertie’s Plan Is Launched