Scotland Street Volume 18, Chapter 11: On this tiny, spinning planet

“You wanted to discuss something?” Nicola asked.

“Yes,” replied Stuart. “I’ve had a call from up north.”

Nicola knew what that meant. Up north had become their way of referring to Irene, the sobriquet having been coined by Nicola, and often accompanied by a slight wince that she hoped Stuart would not notice.

“What did she want?” asked Nicola., stopping for a moment as she walked down Dundas Street.

“I think we need to talk about it,” said Stuart.

“Give me an idea.”

“No,” said Stuart. “It’s tricky.”

Nicola did not press him. She was suddenly filled with dread and was not so sure that she wanted to hear what he had to say while she was walking along the street. Irene sometimes made her want to tear her hair and stamp her feet in frustration, and she thought that might not be appropriate out in the open, in Dundas Street. Stuart and Irene now lived separate lives, but Irene was still there, with her visits to Edinburgh to see the boys. Nicola could have coped with that – she accepted that as their mother Irene should continue to be a presence in their lives – but that did not mean that she wanted her to be a part of Stuart’s life as well.

Stuart was weak. He was a kind man – a good man, really – but when it came to standing up to Irene, he had never managed to draw any lines. He had been dominated, right from the beginning, by a woman who could not help herself from trying to shape the lives of those with whom she came in contact. Irene was a shrew – it was as simple as that. She was a termagant.

Nicola put her phone back in her pocket and resumed her journey. She glanced up at the sky; the forecast had spoken of rain, but it seemed clear enough. In the distance, over the roofs of Canonmills and Trinity, the hills of Fife were bathed in afternoon sun.

A woman walking up the road passed her on the pavement, and their eyes met briefly. The woman smiled, and her lips moved in a whispered, inaudible good afternoon. Nicola smiled back, and the two women shared a transient moment of mutual recognition – we are together on this tiny, spinning planet. Nicola looked back up at the sky, at infinity.

We’re all lonely; we’re all shipwrecked on this planetary rock; all we have is one another, and then only for the briefest moment in all these countless billions of years that make up time. Why spend that time fretting? Why spend that time grumbling about one another, or worse, when we should be cherishing one another; when we should be trying to relieve the pain of this world; when we should be extracting from each of our precious minutes such joy and happiness as we can?

So arresting were these unexpected thoughts that Nicola stopped and for a few minutes stood where she was, indifferent to passers-by, to the 23 bus that laboured uphill past her on its southwards journey to Morningside, almost unaware of the cyclist who had stopped on the other side of the street when a bag of potatoes he had been carrying in his rucksack had spilled out onto the road. Some of the potatoes had started to roll down the steep gradient of that section of Dundas Street; others had already been crushed by passing cars.

But Nicola thought nothing of that: her mind was on charity and on the fact that she was showing a marked lack of that quality in the way she thought about Irene. Yes, she was unbearable, but was that her fault? Every woman had a potential excuse for her shortcomings, just as every man had. The causes were different. In the case of women, it was often what had been done to them by a male-dominated society, by insensitive or exploitative men. In the case of men, it was often because of damage wrought by a vision of masculinity to which they had to aspire. That was a problem in Scotland – a big problem that had been there for centuries and was still unresolved.

She pulled herself together. You could not stand in Dundas Street and think about such issues while people about you were getting on with their ordinary lives. It would look odd, and none of us liked to look odd – although on occasion there was every reason for us to stop and look up at the sky, and think about how we get through life, from one day to the next, and how at many times we fail, even as we try to do better. And how at times, if we are honest with ourselves, we just want to sit down and cry.

Now she noticed the cyclist. He had picked up some of his potatoes and was dusting them off before replacing them in his rucksack. She wondered about that. In general, she was an adherent of the three-second rule: if you pick food up within three seconds of its falling to the floor you will be all right. There was no truth to that, but she followed it because it was one of those rules that made life easier – and rules that make life easier are worth believing in, even if you have your doubts.

But dropping things in the street was another matter altogether. The gutters were insanitary – even in Edinburgh – and she was concerned that the young man replacing his potatoes could pick up something rather nasty. But was she his keeper? Were the potatoes of others strictly their own affair?

On impulse, she crossed the street.

“I don’t think you should eat those potatoes,” she said. “You never know what …”

He looked at her in surprise. He was a man of about her age – somewhere in his late fifties, but of athletic build: he was evidently a regular cyclist. She saw that he had blue eyes. She saw that he was wearing a red bandana.

“They’ll be all right,” he said.

Nicola shook her head. “Let me buy you some more. There’s that shop down there. They sell potatoes.”

© Alexander McCall Smith, 2025. Bertie’s Theory of Ice Cream will be published by Polygon in August, price £17.99. The author welcomes comment from readers and can be contacted at [email protected]