Espresso Tales

This book has been optimized for viewing at a monitor setting of 1024 x 768 pixels.

Praise for Alexander McCall Smith’s 4 4 S C O T L A N D S T R E E T

The First Novel in the Series

“This soulful, sweet [book] will make you feel as though you live in Edinburgh, if only for a short while, and it’s a fine place to visit indeed. . . . Long live the folks on Scotland Street.” — The Times-Picayune (New Orleans)

“McCall Smith’s generous writing and dry humor, his gentleness and humanity, and his ability to evoke a place and a set of characters without caricature or condescen-sion have endeared his books . . . to readers.”

— The New York Times

“Entertaining and witty. . . . A sly send-up of society in Edinburgh.”

— The Orlando Sentinel

“A welcome addition to the McCall Smith repertoire. . . .

Few writers are better than McCall Smith at making the telling observation. . . . [And] it is far more fun to read

[than] Flaubert.”

— The Miami Herald

“Alexander McCall Smith is the most genial of writers and the most gentle of satirists. . . . [The] characters are great fun . . . [and] McCall Smith treats all of them with affection. . . . Life’s lessons are laid on in this novel with the lightest of touch.”

— Rocky Mountain News

“Pure McCall Smith. . . . A finely judged blend of wit and wisdom.”

— Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

“Amusing. . . . Endearing. . . . The possibility of romance, the ongoing ups and downs of the large, well-drawn cast of characters, the intricate plot and the way McCall Smith nimbly jumps from situation to situation work beautifully.”

— The Journal Gazette (Fort Wayne)

“Intelligent writing. . . . McCall Smith’s cast of characters is varied and well-drawn. . . . It’s a pleasure to read a novel that exercises your mind.”

— The Oakland Tribune

“[McCall Smith’s] sense of gentle but pointed humor is once again afoot in 44 Scotland Street. . . . The short chapters make for perfect bedtime reading.”

— The Seattle Times

“A joyous, charming portrait of city life and human foibles, which moves beyond its setting to deal with deep moral issues and love, desire and friendship. Without resorting to clichéd cliff-hangers, McCall Smith has mastered the short, episodic chapter endearingly.”

— Sunday Express

A l e x a n d e r M c C a l l S m i t h E S P R E S S O TA L E S

Alexander McCall Smith is the author of the huge international phenomenon, The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, and The Sunday Philosophy Club series.

He was born in what is now known as Zimbabwe, and he was a law professor at the University of Botswana and at Edinburgh University. He lives in Scotland. Visit his Web site at www.alexandermccallsmith.com.

books by Alexander McCall Smith

In The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency Tears of the Giraffe

Morality for Beautiful Girls

The Kalahari Typing School for Men The Full Cupboard of Life

In the Company of Cheerful Ladies

Blue Shoes and Happiness

In The Sunday Philosophy Club series

The Sunday Philosophy Club

Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

In the Portuguese Irregular Verbs series Portuguese Irregular Verbs

The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs

At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances In the 44 Scotland Street series

44 Scotland Street

Espresso Tales

The Girl Who Married a Lion and Other Tales from Africa i

E S P R E S S O T A L E S

ii

Chapter title

A l e x a n d e r

M c C a l l S m i t h

E S P R E S S O

T A L E S

Illustrations by I a i n M c I n t o s h a n c h o r b o o k s

A Division of Random House, Inc.

New York

F I R S T A N C H O R B O O K S E D I T I O N , J U LY 2 0 0 6

Copyright © 2005 by Alexander McCall Smith Illustrations copyright © 2005 by Iain McIntosh All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in Great Britain by Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd., Edinburgh, in 2 0 0 5 .

Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book is excerpted from a series that originally appeared in the Scotsman newspaper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McCall Smith, Alexander, 1 9 4 8 –

Espresso Tales : tales from 4 4 Scotland Street / Alexander McCall Smith ; illustrated by Iain McIntosh.

p. cm.

1 . Roommates—Fiction. 2 . Apartment houses—Fiction. 3 . Edinburgh (Scotland)—Social life and customs—Fiction. 4 . Humorous stories, English.

I. Title.

PR6 0 6 3 .C3 2 6 E8 7 2 0 0 6

8 2 3 ' . 9 1 7 —dc2 2

2 0 0 5 0 5 7 1 7 5

eISBN: 978-0-307-38639-7

www.anchorbooks.com

v1.0

Chapter title

v

Preface

This is volume two of a serial novel which I started to write in The Scotsman newspaper and which, at the time of publication of this book, I am still writing. The enjoyment which I have obtained from spinning this long-running tale of a house and its occupants in Edinburgh is, I hope, apparent on every page.

It has never been a chore. Not for a moment.

At the end of the first volume, 44 Scotland Street, I left matters unresolved for many of the characters. Now in Espresso Tales we see the continuation of many of the themes begun in volume one. Bertie, that immensely talented six-year-old, is still in therapy, and his plight seems to get worse and worse. Bruce, the unbearable narcissistic surveyor, is still as irritating as before, perhaps even more so. If there is any justice, he will get his come-uppance in this volume (but don’t count on that). And Domenica, that sage occupant of the top floor of 44 Scotland Street, continues to comment on the world with her mordant wit.

During the writing of this book, which appeared in daily parts in The Scotsman, I received comments from many readers. Some wrote in with suggestions; others occasionally upbraided me for the views which some of the characters expressed. I inadvertently ruffled the feathers of an entire Scottish town at one point, and at another I received a very reproachful letter from a convinced vegan. These, I suppose, are the consequences of writing a novel under the scrutiny of the public eye.

This is, of course, not a work of scrupulous social realism.

However, unlike in many other novels, all the places in this book exist, and a number of the characters are real people, who currently live in Edinburgh and who agreed to appear, as themselves, in this story. Other people have, for some reason, imagined that they xii

Preface

appear in this story, thinly (or otherwise) disguised. Alas, this is not true. There is no real Bertie; and even if there are many like Domenica, or Angus, or any of the other characters, I had no particular person in mind when writing about them.

When the last episode of this book was published in the newspaper, we had a party in the offices of The Scotsman. Many readers attended, and some gave me their frank assessment of what had happened in the series. Others came up to me and said, “You can’t stop now. There will have to be a third volume.” At the beginning of the evening I had decided that I would not write a third; by the end I had changed my mind. I am easily persuaded to continue to have fun. And why not?

This second volume is committed to press in gratitude to the readers of The Scotsman and in affection for this remarkable city and the people who make it one of the most vibrant and interesting places in the world. Again I express my thanks to those who accompanied me on this particular literary journey: to David Robinson, books editor of The Scotsman, to Iain Martin, editor of Scotland on Sunday, John McGurk, editor of The Scotsman, and Neville Moir of Polygon, that most perceptive and sympathetic of editors. And my thanks are given, too, to Florence Christie, leader of the fans of Bertie, and my friend, Michael Lamont, who has been one of the few readers who showed any sympathy for Bruce. And finally, I would like to thank William Lyons, arts editor of Scotland on Sunday, who gave me advice on wine matters and who features in the story as himself. Not having tasted Chateau Petrus myself, I assume that what he says about it is correct.

Alexander McCall Smith

Edinburgh

E S P R E S S O T A L E S

Chapter title

1

1. Semiotics, Pubs, Decisions

It was summer. The forward movement of the year, so tentative in the early months of spring, now seemed quite relentless.

The longest day, which always seemed to arrive indecently early, had passed in a bluster of wind and light rain, but had been followed by a glorious burst of warmth that penetrated the very stones of Edinburgh.

Out on the pavements, small clusters of tables and chairs appeared here and there, populated by knots of people who could hardly believe that they were sitting outside, in Scotland, in late summer. All of them knew that this simply could not last.

September was not far off, and after that, as was well-known to all but the most confused, was October – and darkness. And Scottish weather, true to its cultural traditions, made one thing abundantly clear: you paid for what you enjoyed, and you usually paid quite promptly. This was a principle which was inevitably observed by nature in Scotland. That vista of mountains and sea lochs was all very well, but what was that coming up behind you? A cloud of midges.

Pat Macgregor walked past just such café-hedonists on her way back to Scotland Street. She had crossed the town on foot earlier that day to have lunch with her father – her mother was still away, this time visiting another troublesome sister in Forfar

– and her father had invited her for Saturday lunch in the Canny Man’s on Morningside Road. This was a curious place, an Edinburgh institution, with its cluttered shelves of non-sequitur objects and its numerous pictures. And, like the trophies on the walls, the denizens of the place had more than passing historical or aesthetic interest about them. Here one might on a Saturday afternoon meet a well-known raconteur enjoying a glass of beer with an old friend, or, very occasionally, one

2

Semiotics, Pubs, Decisions

might spot Ramsey Dunbarton, from the Braids, who many years ago had played the Duke of Plaza-Toro in The Gondoliers at the Church Hill Theatre (with such conspicuous success).

There was no such interest that day. A mousy-looking man in a blue suit sat silently in a corner with a woman companion; the silence that reigned between them being broken only by the occasional sigh by one or other of them. He looked steadfastly down at the menu of open sandwiches, as if defeated by the choice and by life; her gaze moved about – out of the window, at the small slice of sky between the Morningside Road tene-ments, at the barman polishing glasses, at the tiles on the floor.

As she waited for her father to arrive, Pat found herself wondering at the road which had brought them to this arid point

– a lifetime of small talk, perhaps, that had simply run out of steam; or perhaps this is what came of being married. Surely not, she thought; her own parents were still able to look at one another and find at least something to say, although often there was a formality in their conversation that made her uncomfortable – as if they were talking a language, like court Japanese, that imposed heavily on them to be correct.

In Pat’s company, her father seemed more comfortable.

Leaning back in the bench seat at the Canny Man’s while he perused the menu, his conversation took its usual course, moving, by easy association, from topic to topic.

Semiotics, Pubs, Decisions

3

“This is, of course, the Canny Man’s,” he observed. “You’ll notice that the sign outside says something quite different. The Volunteer Arms. But everybody – or everybody in the know, that is – calls it the Canny Man’s. And that pub down on the way to Slateford is called the Gravediggers, although the sign outside says Athletic Arms. These are verbal tests, you see.

Designed to distinguish.”

Pat looked at him blankly. Her father was intelligible, but not all the time.

“These tests are designed to exclude others from the discourse

– just as the word discourse itself is designed to do. These words are intended to say to people: this is a group thing. If you don’t understand what we’re talking about, you’re not a member of the group.

“So, if you call this place the Canny Man’s it shows that you belong, that you know what’s what in Edinburgh. And that, you know, is what everybody wants, underneath. We want to belong.”

He laid the menu down on the table and looked at his daughter. “Do you know what the NB is?”

Pat shook her head and was about to reply that she did not; but he cut her short with a smile and a half-raised hand. “An unfair question,” he said. “At least to somebody of your age.

But anybody over forty would know that the NB is the North British Hotel, which is today called the Balmoral – that great pile down at the end of Princes Street. That was always the NB

until they irritatingly started to call it the Balmoral. And if you really want to make a point – to tell somebody that you were here before they were – that it’s your city – you can refer to it as the NB. Then at least some people won’t know what you’re talking about.”

“But why would anybody want that?” she asked.

“Because we like our private references,” he said. “And, as I’ve said, we want to feel that we belong. It’s a simple matter of feelings of security . . .”

He smiled at his daughter. “Talking of the NB Hotel, there was a wonderful poet called Robert Garioch. He wrote poems about Edinburgh and about the city and its foibles. He wrote a 4

Letting Go

poem about seeing people coming out of the NB Grill and getting into what he called a muckle great municipal Rolls-Royce. That said it all, you see. He said more about the city of his day in those few lines than many others would in fifty pages.”

He paused. “But, my dear, you must be hungry. And you said that you have something to tell me. You said that you’ve made a momentous decision, and I’m going on about semiotics and the poetry of Robert Garioch. Is it a really important decision

– really important?”

“It is,” said Pat. “It really is. It’s about my whole life, I think.”

“You think?”

“Yes, I think so.”

2. Letting Go

When his daughter had announced that she had made an important decision – an announcement casually dropped into the telephone conversation they had had before their lunch at the Canny Man’s in Morningside Road – Dr Macgregor had experienced a distressingly familiar pang of dread. Ever since Pat had chosen to spend her gap year in Australia, he had been haunted by the possibility that she would leave Scotland and simply not return. Australia was a world away, and it was full of possibilities. Anybody might be forgiven for going to Melbourne or Sydney – or even to Perth – and discovering that life in those places was fuller than the one they had led before.

There was more space in Australia, and more light – but it was also true that there was there an exhilarating freedom, precisely the sort of freedom that might appeal to a nineteen-year-old.

And there were young men, too, who must have been an additional lure. She might meet one of these and stay forever, forgetful of the fact that vigorous Australian males within a few years mutated into homo Australiensis suburbis, into drinkers of beer and into addicts of televised footie, butterflies, thus, into caterpillars.

Letting Go

5

So he had spent an anxious ten months wondering whether she would come back to Scotland and upbraiding himself constantly about the harbouring of such fears. He knew that it was wrong for parents to think this way, and had told many of his own patients that they should stop worrying about their offspring and let go. “You must be able to let go,” he had said, on countless occasions. “Your children must be allowed to lead their own lives.” And even as he uttered the words he realised the awful banality of what he said; but it was difficult, was it not, to talk about letting go without sounding like a passage from Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, which had views on such matters. The trouble with The Prophet was that it all sounded so profound when you first encountered it, and yet it was the sort of thing that one grew out of – just as one grew out of Jack Kerouac. It was entirely appropriate to have The Prophet on one’s shelves in one’s early twenties, but not, he thought, in one’s forties, or beyond. One must be prepared to let go of The Prophet.

And although he gave this advice to people, he found it difficult – almost impossible, in fact – to practise it himself. He and his wife, Maureen, had only one child; she was their future, not only in the genetic sense, but in an emotional one too. In the case of Dr Macgregor himself, this was particularly true. He enjoyed cordial relations with Maureen, but there was a distance between them which he realised could never be bridged. It had been apparent from the earliest years of the marriage that they really shared very few interests, and had little to talk about.

Her energies were focused on public causes and on her own, largely dysfunctional family. She had two difficult sisters and one difficult brother, and these siblings had duly spawned difficult and demanding children. So while she nominally lived in Edinburgh, in reality she spent a great deal of her time moving from relative to relative, coping with whatever crisis had freshly emerged. The sister in Angus – the one who drank – was particularly demanding. This manipulative sister really wanted Maureen to live with her, and to this end she longed for Maureen’s widowhood, and said as much, which was tactless.

There are many women whose lives would be immeasurably 6

Letting Go

improved by widowhood, but one should not always point that out.

The absenteeism of his wife had its natural consequence. Pat became for him the focus of his family feeling; she was his best friend, and, to the extent that the father and daughter relationship permitted, his confidante. Of course he knew of the dangers of this; that the investing of one’s entire world in a child was to give a powerful hostage to fortune, and that he should develop other friendships and ties. But he had somehow failed to do that. He was popular with his professional colleagues and he would have called many of these his friends, but there were limits to such friendships. People moved jobs; they went away; they developed new, outside friendships which were more absorbing than those of work. He should join a club, perhaps; but what clubs could he possibly take seriously? He had never had much interest in golf, and he was not sure whether he would approve of the ethos of a golf club, and what other clubs did people have in mind when they recommended membership as an antidote to loneliness? Perhaps they meant the Scottish Arts Club; he had walked past it one day and seen people having lunch in the dining room on the ground floor. He had stopped in his tracks and gazed in at the sight. A well-known journalist was holding court, it seemed, to an audience of antique dealers

– he knew one of them, a man with an exemplary moustache

– and portrait painters. They had full glasses of red wine before them and he saw, but could not hear, their laughter. For a moment he had been transfixed by this vision of fellowship and had thought: this is what I do not have. But although this sight had made him think that he might perhaps apply to join, he had done nothing about it, and he had gone back to his empty house that day (Pat had been in Australia and Maureen in Kelso, at her difficult brother’s house), and he had sat and reflected on loneliness and on how few, how very few, are the human bonds that lie between us and the state of being completely alone. How many such bonds did the average person have? Five? Ten? In his case, he thought, it seemed as if the answer was two.

Narcissism and Social Progress

7

So it was natural that he should feel trepidation about any decision that Pat should make, because that decision could always be to go back to Australia. That was what he dreaded above all else, because he knew that if she did that, he would lose her.

He wanted her to stay in Edinburgh, or go to Glasgow at the most. Her choice of St Andrews University was perfect in his mind; that was just up the road and completely unthreatening.

Now, in the cluttered surroundings of the Canny Man’s, he steeled himself for impending loss. “You said that you’d made a major decision?”

Pat looked at her father. “Yes. I’ve decided not to go to St Andrews after all.”

He caught his breath. She was returning to Australia. How few were the words needed to end a world.

3. Narcissism and Social Progress

Pat saw nothing in her father’s face of the hollow dread he felt.

He was accomplished at concealing his feelings, of course, as all psychiatrists must be. He had heard such a range of human confessions that very little would cause him so much as to raise an eyebrow or to betray, with so much as a transitory frown, disapproval over what people did, or thought, or perhaps thought about doing. And even now, as he sat like a convicted man awaiting his sentence, he showed nothing of his emotion.

“Yes,” said Pat. “I’ve written to St Andrews and told them that I don’t want the place next month. They’ve said that’s fine.”

“Fine,” echoed Dr Macgregor faintly. But how could it be fine? How could she turn down the offer from that marvellous place, with all that fun and all that student nonsense, and Raisin Week and Kate Kennedy and all those things? To turn that down before one had even sampled it was surely to turn your back on happiness.

“I’ve decided to go to Edinburgh University instead,” went on Pat. “I’ve been in touch with the people in George Square 8

Narcissism and Social Progress

and they say I can transfer my St Andrews place to them. So that’s what I’m going to do. Philosophy and English.”

For a moment Dr Macgregor said nothing. He looked down at his shoes and saw, as if for the first time, the pattern of the brogue. And then he looked up and glanced at his daughter, who was watching him, as if waiting for his reaction.

“You’re not cross with me, are you?” said Pat. “I know I’ve messed you around with the two gap years and now this change of plans. You aren’t cross with me?”

He reached out and placed his hand briefly on hers, and then moved his hand back.

“Cross is the last thing I am,” he said, and then burst out laughing. “Does that sound odd to you? Rather like the word order of a German or Yiddish speaker speaking English? They say things like, ‘Happy I’m not,’ don’t they? Remember the Katzenjammer Kids?”

Of course she didn’t. Nor did she know about Max und Morris nor Dagwood and Blondie, he suspected – those strange denizens of that curious nowhere world of the cartoon strips – although she did know about Oor Wullie and the Broons. Where exactly was that world, he wondered? Dundee and Glasgow respectively, perhaps, but not exactly.

Pat smiled. “I’m glad,” she said. “I just decided that I’m enjoying myself so much in Edinburgh that I should stay. Moving to St Andrews seemed to me to be an interruption in my life.

I’ve got friends here now . . .”

“And friends are so important,” interrupted her father, trying to think of which friends she had in mind, and trying all the time to control his wild, exuberant joy. There were school friends, of course; the people she had been with at the Academy during the last two years of her high school education. He knew that she kept in touch with them, but were those particular friendships strong enough to keep her in Edinburgh? Many of them had themselves gone off to university elsewhere, to Cambridge in one or two cases, or to Aberdeen or Glasgow.

Was there a boy, perhaps? There was that young man in the flat in Scotland Street, Bruce Anderson; she had obviously been keen Narcissism and Social Progress

9

on him but had thought better of it. What about Matthew, for whom she worked at the gallery? Was he the attraction? He might speculate, but any results of his speculation would not matter in the slightest. The important thing was that she was not going to Australia.

“Matthew says that I can continue to work part-time at his gallery,” Pat went on. “I can do some mornings for him and Saturdays too. He says . . .” She paused. Modesty might have prevented her from continuing, but she wanted to share with her father the compliment that Matthew had passed. “I hope you don’t think I’m boasting, but Matthew says that I have an eye for art and that the only way in which he thinks he can keep the gallery going is by having me there.”

“That’s good of him,” said her father, thinking, but not saying, dependence: weak male, looking for somebody to look after him.

“Mind you, I’m not surprised. You’ve always been good at art.

You’re good at everything, you know.”

She glanced at him sideways, reproving him for the compliment, which had been overheard at a neighbouring table and had led to suppressed smiles. “And I think that I’ll stay in Scotland Street,” she went on. “It’s an exciting place, you know.

There are all sorts of interesting people who live down there. I like it.”

“And you can put up with Bruce?”

“I can put up with him. He keeps to himself these days. He lost his job, you know, and he wants to do something else. He spends a lot of his time reading up about wine. I think he fancies himself as a wine merchant – or something of the sort.”

Dr Macgregor nodded. He had not met Bruce, and had no real interest in meeting him. He was accustomed to psychopaths, to those whose selfishness was so profound that they tipped over into a clinical category; he was patient with neurotics and depres-sives and those with schizoid disorders; but he could not abide narcissists. From what his daughter had told him of Bruce, he was a classic narcissist: the looking in mirrors, the preening, the delight in hair gel – all of this was pure narcissism. And the problem was that there was a positive epidemic of narcissism, 10

On the Way Back to Scotland Street encouraged by commercial manipulation and by the shallow values of Hollywood films. And interestingly enough, the real growth area was male narcissism. Young men were encouraged to dwell on themselves; to gaze at photographs of other young men, looking back at them as from the mirror. They loved this.

Edinburgh was full of them.

Hundreds of them, thousands, attended to by an army of hair-stylists, and outfitters. Yes, it was a profound social pathology. Reality television, which turned its eye on people who were doing nothing but being themselves, was the perfect expression of this trend. Let’s look at ourselves, it said. Aren’t we fascinating?

Dr Macgregor found himself thinking these thoughts, but stopped himself. It was true, of course, there was an abnormal level of narcissism in our society, but it did not do, he told himself, to spend too much time going on about it. Society changed. Narcissism was about love, ultimately, even if only love of self. And that was better than hate. By and large, Hate, of all the tempting gods, was the unhappiest today. He had his recruits, naturally, but they were relatively few, and vilified. Did it matter if young men thought of fashion and hair gel when, not all that many years ago, their thoughts had tended to turn to war and flags and the grim partisanship of the football terrace?

4. On the Way Back to Scotland Street Pat left the Canny Man’s and walked back up Morningside Road.

She was accompanied, as far as Church Hill Place, by her father, who said goodbye to her and turned off for home, elated by the news she had given him. She toyed with the idea of a bus, but it was a fine, late August afternoon and she decided to walk all the way back to Scotland Street. She was in no hurry to be anywhere. In fact it occurred to her that between then – Saturday afternoon – and the coming Monday morning, when she was On the Way Back to Scotland Street 11

due at the gallery, it made no difference at all where she was.

She had nothing planned. She was free.

It was the final week of the Festival, and of its burgeoning, undisciplined child, the Festival Fringe. In a corner of the Meadows, under the shadow of the University Library, a large tent had been pitched, hosting an itinerant Polish circus, the Great Circus of Krakow. A matinée performance was in progress and she heard a burst of applause from within the tent, and then laughter. As the laughter died down, a small brass band inside the tent struck up, playing at the frenzied pace that circus music seemed to like, a breathless, hurried march that accompanied what feats within? A troop of performing dogs? No longer allowed, she thought; frowned upon by protesters who had successfully lobbied the Council, although everybody knew that the one thing which dogs liked to do was to perform. Was it demeaning to dogs to be made to jump through hoops and stand on their hind legs and push prams? Making a lion jump through a hoop was one thing – that was undoubtedly cruel –

but could the objectors not see the distinction between a dog and a lion? Dogs are in on our human silliness; lions are not.

She paused, standing underneath a tree, watching the sides of the circus tent move slightly in the breeze. To its side stood a row of large motor caravans and a small catering van. A door suddenly opened in the side of one of the vans and a man tumbled out, as if pushed from within. Or so it seemed to Pat, who saw him fall, as if to regain his balance, and then convert the fall into the most extraordinary gymnastic display. He rolled forward, somersaulted, stood on his hands, his legs pointed skywards, and then flipped over onto his feet. The entire manoeuvre took less than a couple of seconds, and there he was, standing only a few yards away from her, facing her. He seemed as surprised to see her as she was him, and for a moment they stared at one another, speechless. She saw that he was wearing what must have been his performing outfit – a body-hugging stocking that covered him, shoulder to toe, in a glittery, red material.

He smiled at her and she saw that he had perfectly regular teeth, polished high white. She was struck by this smile, and 12

On the Way Back to Scotland Street would have been less so had he opened his mouth to a vista of dental disaster. Somehow that was what one expected of the circus; external glitter, but decay and pain within.

The performer took a few steps back, still looking at Pat and holding her gaze. Then, reaching behind him, but still facing her, he opened the door in the van which had slammed shut behind his undignified exit.

“Please?” he said to her. “Coffee? Or maybe a glass of wine?”

He gestured to the interior, which was lit, but only faintly.

Pat made out a table and a rail of bright outfits similar to the one he was wearing. At the side of the table were a pair of high-heel boots and a small side-drum.

He repeated his offer, bowing as he did so, the spandex outfit spreading obligingly to accommodate the rippling of muscles which the manoeuvre involved.

Pat hesitated. He had recovered from his bow and was standing straight, but was slightly shorter than she was, and she noticed that he now raised himself on his toes for the extra height, effortlessly, as might a ballet dancer, but spotted by her, and it was this that broke the sudden hypnotic spell which had fallen upon her.

She laughed. “No thank you,” she said, realising that the addition of the thank-you marked her out for what she was – and her Edinburgh origins.

He took her refusal in good spirit. “God be with you,” he said, and jumped back into the van. The door closed, and the moment was lost. Pat thought, as she walked away: I shall never be invited again into the living quarters of a Polish circus performer, and she laughed at the idea. Had she gone, then her life might have been different. She might have gone off with the circus, and married him in a dark church in Krakow, and borne the children of the gymnast, tiny, lithe children who would have been taught to leap from her lap and turn somersaults in the bath. And what was more, she thought: I might have become a Catholic.

It took her forty minutes to reach Scotland Street, as there were other Fringe performers to watch as she made her way On the Way Back to Scotland Street 13

down the hill. On the steps behind the National Gallery, she stopped for a moment while a group of students enacted a scene from Macbeth, a taster of their show that evening. There was an element of desperation in their performance, which suggested that they were at the end of an unrewarding stint on the Fringe.

Lady Macbeth upbraided her husband, a tall young man with the residue of teenage acne about his chin. Pat watched for a few minutes, trapped in a small audience. But then her chance to leave came: she had spotted Domenica Macdonald, her neighbour from across the landing at Scotland Street, and she could slip away to join her. Domenica was on the edge of a growing crowd that was surrounding a man dressed as Punchinello and who was about to swallow a sword. The performer held the sword above his upturned mouth and it glinted in the afternoon sunlight.

“Domenica,” she whispered. “Is he really going to do that?”

Domenica turned and smiled warmly. “How nice to see you,”

she said.

“I have always loved a spectacle, and there are spectacles galore at the moment. Of course he’s going to swallow it. And then we shall all applaud. We are very vulgar at heart, you know.

We love this sort of thing. All of us. We can’t resist it. Behind us in the gallery are all the treasures of Western art, as assem-bled for us by Sir Timothy Clifford, and we choose instead to watch a man swallowing a sword. Isn’t that peculiar?”

Pat nodded. It was very peculiar; of course it was; she began to say this, and then she stopped. Wasn’t that Sir Timothy Clifford himself, on the other side of the crowd, watching the sword swallower? She nudged Domenica, who looked in the direction in which Pat was pointing, and inclined her head in affirmation.

“He appreciates a bit of a spectacle,” Domenica said. “And why not? He’s put on such wonderful shows in the gallery.

Besides, art is theatre, is it not – and theatre art?”

14

Chapter title

5. All Downhill from Here

The sword was swallowed, and regurgitated, as had been expected. There were gasps, and then applause. Many of those present expressed the view that they would not like to try that

– no thank you! – and Sir Timothy was heard to mutter something about Titian before he retreated into his gallery.

Domenica, who had seen considerably more entertaining spectacles during her time in India, turned to Pat and said: “Such feats, without a religious dimension, are less impressive, I feel, than those that allude to the sacred. What’s the point of swallowing a sword if one gives the process no spiritual significance?”

Pat was puzzled by this remark, and as they crossed Princes Street to begin the walk back down the hill, she asked Domenica to explain.

“In India, we used to see such things from time to time,”

Domenica said. “We lived in Kerala, in the Christian south, but Hindu holy men used to pop down from time to time to remind us of the old gods. Some of these were fakirs, who would walk across beds of hot coals or swallow fire, or whatever. They did this to show that spirituality could conquer the body – could overcome the material world. And you could offer the whole thing up to the glory of the gods, which gave it a religious point.

But our sword swallower on the Mound won’t have any of that in mind, I’m afraid. Mere spectacle.”

Pat felt that she could add little to this. She had never been to India, and she knew nothing about Hinduism, or indeed about many of the other topics on which Domenica seemed to have a view. And yet she was open-minded enough to know that she did not know, and she was a listener. That was her gift.

The streets were crowded with Festival visitors, and their progress down Dundas Street was slow, interrupted by knots of people standing in the middle of the pavement, some, their eyes glazed, in a state of cultural indigestion, some consulting maps and programmes. Domenica gave directions to a puzzled Japanese couple and bowed politely at the end of her explanation, setting off a sequence of further bows and inclinations of the head.

All Downhill from Here

15

“They find us so rude, in general,” she said. “A few bows here and there serve to redress matters.” She paused for a moment. “And we smell a little rancid to them, you know. They are so hygienic, with their steam baths and so on. However much we wash it seems we have this slight smell, I understand, even Edinburgh people, would you believe? Heaven knows what they think of those parts of the country where they aren’t too attentive to bathing requirements.”

Pat smiled. This was vintage Domenica. Nobody else of her acquaintance would speak like this, and she found it curiously refreshing. Her own generation was too timid – beaten into compliance with a set of imposed views.

She looked about her, almost furtively. “And which parts would those be?” she asked.

Domenica waved a hand in the air. “Oh, there are various parts of the country where people haven’t washed a great deal.

Probably because they didn’t have enough taps and baths in the houses. It’s all very well for the middle classes to go on about cleanliness, but people used to have a terrible battle.

“Mind you, I had an aunt who was an officer in the Wrens during the war. She used to tell me that some of the recruits were charming, just charming, but she could never get them to wash. She had to force them into the showers. But I suspect that she was exaggerating. She had a slight tendency to egg things up a bit.

“That aunt had wonderful stories, you know. When they sent her off to officer training school in 1940 she was in a batch of twenty women. They all slept in those long Nissen huts – you can still see some of them standing if you go up to Cultybraggen, near Comrie. Well, there they all were, all thrown together. And my aunt, who was from Argyll, was thrown in with people from all over the shop. The woman in the bed next to hers was terribly grand – her uncle was an admiral or something like that – and when she joined up she brought her lady’s maid. Would you believe that? It sounds absolutely astonishing today, but that’s what she did – and the Navy allowed it! The maid enlisted at the same time and was given a bed at the end of the hut. She 16

All Downhill from Here

cleaned her mistress’s equipment, polished her shoes, made her bed, and all the rest. It was an absolute scream, but apparently nobody batted an eyelid. It was a different country then, you know.

“And apparently this grand person drank. Every night after lights were turned out in the hut, my aunt heard a bit of fiddling about in the next bed and then she heard ‘glug, glug . . .’ as she downed the gin. Every night! But there was a war on, I suppose, and people had to get by as best they could. Which they did, you know. They did just that and they very rarely complained.

Can you imagine how we’d behave today if we had to knuckle down and deal with another fascist monster on our doorstep?

We’d fold up in no time at all. We couldn’t do it – we simply couldn’t do it.” She paused, and for a moment, just a moment, looked doubtful. “Or am I simply making that great mistake, which everyone of my age makes, I suspect, and which leads us to believe that things have got worse? Are they worse, Pat?”

Pat was glad to be given the chance to answer. “No, they aren’t. If you look at it from the perspective of people of my age, things are much better now than they were then. Much better. Think of colonialism. Think of what was done to people at the receiving end of that. You couldn’t do that today.”

“That’s true,” said Domenica. “But since you mention these values – self-determination, human rights and the rest – my point is this: would we be able to defend them if push came to shove? Those young men who climbed into their Spitfires or whatever back then – many of them were your age, you know.

Twenty. Some even younger. They knew the odds. They knew they were going to die. Would the boys you were at school with do the same thing, do you think? Would they do it now? Be honest. What do you think?”

Pat was silent. She was not sure. But then the thought occurred to her: some of the girls would do it. Maybe that was the difference. Yes!

Chapter title

17

6. Domenica Gets into Top Gear

Deep in conversation on the subject of the defence of values, and courage, Pat and her neighbour, Domenica Macdonald, had now reached the point where Heriot Row becomes Abercromby Place. Domenica glanced at the Open Eye Gallery on the corner; a private viewing was in full swing and for a moment she wondered whether they should drop in and look at the pictures.

“That’s Tom Wilson’s gallery,” said Pat. “He’s been very good to Matthew. He’s given him advice and helped him. He’s a very nice man. And he can draw, too.”

“Well, that’s something,” said Domenica. “Very few artists can. They’ve stopped teaching people how to draw at the art colleges, with the result that very few of their graduates can represent the world they see about them. They can arrange it, of course – they can install the world – but they can’t represent it. At least not in any recognisable form. Do you think Mr Damien Hirst knows how to draw?”

“I have no idea,” said Pat, gazing at the knot of people who had spilled out onto the front steps of the gallery, glasses of wine in their hands. “He may – I don’t know. But Tom draws very well. He does portraits of people by drawing the things 18

Domenica Gets into Top Gear

they have. Bits and pieces that say something about their lives.

Letters. Books. A favourite place. Things like that.”

“Very interesting,” said Domenica. “I wonder how my life would be represented? Perhaps by the bed in Scotland Street in which I happened to be born, and in which I propose, in the fullness of time, to die.”

“Or something from India? The house you lived in?”

Domenica thought for a moment. “Too sad. I have a picture of my late husband’s electricity factory in Cochin. But I can’t bring myself to look at it. I really can’t.”

“Do you miss him badly?” asked Pat.

“Not in the slightest,” said Domenica. “I regret the hurt I caused him. And I regret his untimely electrocution – not that any electrocution, I suppose, can be considered timely. But I do feel a certain nostalgia for India itself, particularly for Kerala. For frangi-pani trees. For the sight of a man washing an elephant in the road.

For the sight of a group of little boys sitting in an old Ambassador car, down on its springs, pretending to drive it. For overstated advertisements for hair products in lurid purple and green. For white-washed churches where they set off fireworks on saints’ days.

Little things like that.” She looked at Pat. “Do you think Tom Wilson would be able to draw those things for me?”

“I’m sure he could,” said Pat. “Ask him. There he is in the doorway. That’s him.”

“I can’t intrude,” said Domenica. “Perhaps later.”

They crossed the road, having decided that the opening at the gallery was too crowded to allow them a view of the fishing boats and pagodas.

“We can stop over there for coffee,” suggested Domenica, pointing to the café immediately opposite the gallery. “Do you go in there very much? I rather like it.”

Pat explained that she usually frequented Big Lou’s coffee house slightly further down the hill. It being a Saturday afternoon, Big Lou’s, of course, was closed. And on a Saturday afternoon in the Festival it was very closed, as Big Lou did not approve, in general, of Festival visitors: “Gey pretentious,” Pat had heard her muttering.

Domenica Gets into Top Gear

19

“One must stick to what one knows,” observed Domenica. “I shall try Big Lou’s one day, but this is highly convenient for me and they have a very good range of olive oils. And as for their staff – well, you’ll see what I mean.”

They found a table at the back – the café was very crowded

– and Domenica glanced round at the other customers. A woman at a nearby table inclined her head slightly, and the man she was with nodded curtly in her direction.

“That couple over there,” whispered Domenica, returning the greeting. “They’re very friendly with that awful woman downstairs, Bertie’s mother. I think that they go to the floatarium together, or at least she does. I bumped into her on the stair one day and then I overheard their conversation while I was looking for my key – you know how sound travels on that stair. It was exactly what you would expect. Exactly.

All about some plan to start an orchestra for five-year-olds.

To be called the Edinburgh Junior Symphony. Can you believe it?

“And then, curiously enough, I met him when the two of them went to a talk at Ottakar’s Bookshop. Willy Dalrymple had just written a new book about India and was talking about it. It was wonderful stuff, and he told a marvellously funny story about a misunderstanding he had had with an official somewhere in India or Pakistan about the pronunciation of the name of that English cricketer, Mr Botham. The official pronounced this

‘bottom’, and this led to difficulties. Terribly funny.”

Domenica stopped, and for a moment there was a silence.

Then she leaned forward and whispered to Pat, “I mentioned the staff here. Look at them. Look at this young man who’s coming to serve us. Look at him. Doesn’t he look like Rupert Brooke? They’re all so tall – so willowy. But shh! Here he is.”

Pat felt embarrassed – the young man might so easily have heard what Domenica was saying; not, Pat thought, that Domenica would care too much about that. But she – Pat – did.

The waiter leaned forward to take their order, and Domenica smiled up at him.

“We’re probably going to be really rather unadventurous and 20

Anger and Apology

just order a couple of coffees,” she said. “Although some of those quiches over there look very tempting. Do you make them yourselves?”

The young man smiled. He glanced at Pat. “I don’t. I just work here part-time. Someone else makes them in the kitchen back there.”

“You’re a student?” asked Domenica brightly. “No, let me guess! You’re a student of . . . No, you defeat me! You’re going to have to help me. What are you a student of ?”

The young man laughed. “English,” he said.

“I see,” said Domenica. “I should have guessed that. You see, I thought that you bore an uncanny resemblance to Rupert Brooke, the poet. I don’t suppose anybody studies him any more.

Too light. You’ve heard of him, of course?”

“Yes,” said the young man. “I’ve heard of him. I’ve not read him, though.”

“Well, let me lend you one of his books,” said Domenica quickly. “Come round and have dinner with us some time and I’ll give you one. We live just round the corner – Scotland Street.

You know it?”

For a moment the young man hesitated. He looked quickly at Pat, who lowered her eyes, and blushed.

“Yes, I know it. I live in Cumberland Street, you see.”

“Perfect!” said Domenica. “Well, if you give me your name, I’ll leave a message for you here and we can arrange something.

I’ll get the book out to give to you.”

7. Anger and Apology

When Pat eventually got back to her flat in Scotland Street, she still felt angry over what Domenica had done. Their cups of coffee in Glass and Thompson’s delicatessen and café had been drunk largely in silence.

“I’ve done something to upset you, haven’t I?” said Domenica, after the silence became too obvious to remain unremarked Anger and Apology

21

upon. “Is it to do with what I said to that young man – what was his name again?”

“Peter.”

“Yes, Peter. A nice name, isn’t it?”

Pat said nothing. Domenica looked at her, and frowned. “I’m sorry. I really am. I had no idea that you would be so . . . well, so embarrassed by all that. I did it for you, you know.”

Pat looked up sharply. “You asked him to dinner, out of the blue, just like that – for me? ”

Domenica seemed surprised by this. “But of course I did! You don’t think that I go around picking up young men for my own sake, do you? Good heavens! I do have a sense of the appropriate, you know.”

“And it’s appropriate to go and ask perfect strangers to dinner to meet me? Do you consider that appropriate? How did you know that I wanted to meet him anyway? Just because he looks like some ridiculous poet you’ve read . . .”

Domenica put down her coffee cup – firmly. “Now wait a moment! I’m sorry if you think I’ve overstepped the mark, but I will not stand by while you refer to Rupert Brooke as a ridiculous poet. Have you read him? You have not! He wrote wonderful pastoral, allusive verse, and the story of his brief life – yes, his brief life – is really rather a moving one. So don’t call him a ridiculous poet. Please don’t. There are lots of ridiculous poets, but he wasn’t one of them. No.”

There was a further silence. Then Pat rose to her feet. “I think we should go. I’m sorry if I got upset – and I’m sorry if I offended you. It’s just that . . .”

They walked out of the delicatessen, passing Peter, working at the counter, as they did so. Pat looked away, but Domenica smiled at him, and he smiled back at her, although weakly, as one smiles at a new acquaintance of whom one is unsure.

“Look, it’s not such a terrible thing I’ve done,” said Domenica, as they went out into the street. “And if it embarrasses you, I suggest that we just forget the whole thing.”

She looked at Pat, who turned to her, frowning. “No,” she said. “Don’t do that.”

22

Anger and Apology

Domenica raised an eyebrow. “Oh? So you’d like me to invite him after all? Do I detect . . . do I detect a slight mellowing?”

Pat looked down at the ground. Her feelings were confused.

She was irritated by the assumptions that Domenica had made, but there was something about Peter that interested her, and she had seen that he had looked at her too, that he had noticed her.

There was something that her friends called “the look”, that glance, that second take, which gives everything away. One could not mistake the look when one received it; it was unambiguous.

Peter had given her the look. Had she been by herself, she would have not known what to do about it. They might have exchanged further glances, but it was difficult to take matters further when you were working, as he was. You could hardly say: “Here’s your coffee, and what are you doing afterwards?”

Perhaps people did say that, but it was not the most sophisti-cated of approaches and he would not have done that. And for much the same reason, she could hardly have said: “Thanks for the coffee, and what are you doing afterwards?” One did not say that to waiters, whatever the temptation.

So the fact of the matter was that Domenica must have intuit-ively worked out that there was potential in that casual encounter and had acted with swiftness and ingenuity. She had set up a meeting which would enable nature to take its course – if that was the course that nature intended to take. They would meet for dinner at Domenica’s flat and if the look were given again, then they could take it further. No doubt Domenica would ease the way, perhaps by suggesting that they go out after dinner to the Cumberland Bar and then she would herself decline on the grounds of tiredness, leaving the field open for the two of them.

I should be grateful to her, Pat thought, and now, back in her flat, she realised that she had been churlish. She wondered whether to cross the landing and apologise there and then, but she decided against that. An apology would lead to a conversation and she did not feel in the mood for further discussions. She felt slightly light-headed, in fact, as if she had drunk a glass of champagne on an empty stomach. She went through to her bedroom, lay down on her bed, and closed her eyes, imagining herself back in the café An Exchange of Cruel Insults

23

with Peter standing beside the table, staring at her. She remembered the way he stooped – like the other tall employees – and he put the coffee down in front of her and then looked up. What had he been wearing? She had hardly noticed, but it was a white shirt, was it not? And jeans, like everybody else. If one could not remember somebody’s trousers, then jeans were the safe default.

Indeed, “defaults” was a good name for jeans. I put on my defaults.

It sounded quite right.

She got up off her bed and picked up her key from the table. Bruce was in the flat – she had noticed that his door was closed, which inevitably meant that he was in – but she had no desire to talk to him. Bruce was history in every sense of the word. He was history at the firm of Macauley Holmes Richardson Black, where he had lost his job as a surveyor after being found having an intimate lunch in the Café St Honoré with the wife of his boss – an intimate and innocent lunch, but not so to the outside observer, unfortunately in this case his boss himself.

And he was history in Pat’s eyes, too, as she had quite recovered from her brief infatuation with him. How could I? she had asked herself, in agonising self-reproach. To which a Latinist, if there were one about, might have answered amor furor brevis est

– love (like anger) is a brief madness. The most prosaic of observations, but, like many such observations, acutely true. And one might add: if love is a brief madness, then it is often also sadness, and sometimes, alas, badness.

She left the flat and walked down to Henderson Row, where she bought a small bunch of flowers. This she subsequently placed outside Domenica’s door, where she might pick it up when next she opened it.

8. An Exchange of Cruel Insults

It was not that there was an atmosphere between Bruce and Pat; relations, in fact, were quite cordial. Bruce was indifferent 24

An Exchange of Cruel Insults

to the fact that she had rejected his advances (“her loss,” he told himself, “silly girl”). He knew, of course, that she had been besotted by him – any man would have realised that –

and for Bruce it was nothing in the least unusual for a woman to feel like that about him. Indeed, it was the normal way of things, and Bruce would have been surprised if Pat had not found herself in this position, sharing the flat, as they did, when she had every opportunity to be in close proximity to him. Poor girl! It must have been hard for her, he thought; rather like living with a full fridge or store-cupboard when one is on a strict diet. One may look, but not touch. What a pity!

There had been a brief period during which Pat had seemed to avoid him – and he had noticed that. However, he had been tolerant. If it helped her to stay out of his way for a few days, then that was her way of dealing with the situation and he would not force his company upon her. And after a while that awkward-ness passed, and there seemed to be no tension in the air when they coincided in the kitchen, or when they passed on telephone messages to one another.

Bruce was pleased that things had not become more fraught.

His life over the past couple of months had not been particularly easy, and he would not have enjoyed having to deal with domestic difficulties on top of what he had been experiencing elsewhere. To begin with, there had been the problem with the job. He had been planning to leave the firm and to move on to something more satisfying even before the show-down with his employer, Raeburn Todd, joint senior partner with his brother, Jock Todd, of Macauley Holmes Richardson Black, Chartered Surveyors and Factors. But it was unfortunate, from Bruce’s point of view, that this departure should have been on Todd’s terms rather than on his own. That had been extremely irritating.

What annoyed Bruce in particular about that episode was that when he was asked by Todd’s wife, Sasha, to lunch with her in the Café St Honoré, he had agreed to do this only out of charity.

He had no particular interest in her, and he had certainly not An Exchange of Cruel Insults

25

been planning any involvement with her, although it had been perfectly obvious to him at the South Edinburgh Conservative Ball that she found him attractive. That was understandable, of course, but he had not expected her to do anything about this, and indeed that fatal lunch was hardly a romantic encounter at all. It was true that when Todd walked into the Café St Honoré unexpectedly, he had found his wife holding Bruce’s hand in hers, over the table, but that had been purely in the context of their discussion about tennis prowess and the importance of having a strong wrist. If he were going to hold hands with a married woman in an Edinburgh restaurant, then he would do so under the table, not above.

And of course Todd had behaved in exactly the way one would have expected of him. He had fired him on the spot, right there in the Café St Honoré, using as his pretext the fact that he had put in a false report on a roof-space inspection some time back. That was typical of the man, in Bruce’s view

– to keep a little thing like that up his sleeve, waiting for his chance to use it. No harm had been done by that slight cutting of the corner. The client had been perfectly happy with the purchase, he had heard, and the seller was happy too. Everybody was happy, apart from Todd, who parroted on about professional standards and integrity. Blah, blah, blah, thought Bruce.

If everybody behaved in such a retentive way, he reflected, then would anything in this world ever get done? It would not. The world needed people of spirit – people of decisiveness; people who were prepared to see beyond the narrow rules, as long as they kept to the general spirit of things. That’s me, Bruce said to himself.

Bruce remembered very clearly each detail of that fatal afternoon. Todd had stormed out, closely followed by Sasha, who had run after him up the narrow cobbled lane outside the restaurant. From his table near the window, Bruce had seen the two of them standing on the corner of Thistle Street, yelling at one another, although he could hear nothing of what was said.

Presumably she was explaining to her husband that things were not as he imagined, and indeed after a few minutes Todd 26

An Exchange of Cruel Insults

appeared to calm down. They began to talk more calmly, and Sasha then leant forward and planted a kiss on her husband’s cheek.

The sight of this brought relief to Bruce, who concluded that the matter had been sorted out and that Sasha would return to the rest of her lunch and he would in due course return to his job. However, this did not happen, as Sasha merely walked off in the opposite direction, leaving Bruce to pay for his ruined lunch.

This outraged him. She had invited him, after all, having recently inherited four hundred thousand pounds, and she very specifically said that the lunch was on her. Now Bruce had to pay for both of them, as well as the wine, which he had offered to pay for anyway, but which was largely untouched. Still, at least he would get his job back, until the time arrived for him to resign on his own terms.

But that was not to be. He returned to the office half an hour or so later to find a note from Todd awaiting him on his desk.

He could speak to the cashier about his final cheque, the note said (he would be paid up to the end of that month), and would he please ensure that all personal effects were removed from his desk by four o’clock that afternoon? He should also return the mobile telephone which the firm had bought him and duly account for any personal calls that he had made on it during the period since the last bill.

Bruce stood there, quite still, the note in his hand. Several minutes passed before he let the piece of paper fall from his hand and he walked out of his office and made his way to the end of the corridor and pushed open Todd’s door.

“You should always knock,” said Todd. “What if I had a client in here with me? What then?”

“I’m going to take you to a tribunal,” said Bruce.

“Go ahead,” said Todd. “I’d already spoken to the lawyers about getting rid of you and they assured me that the making of a fraudulent survey report constitutes perfectly good grounds for dismissal. So by all means take me to a tribunal.”

Bruce opened his mouth to speak, and then closed it again.

It was difficult to know what to say. Then the words came to Sally’s Thoughts

27

him. “You have a ridiculous name, you know, Mr Todd. Raeburn!

That’s the name of a gas cooker, you know. That’s what you are, Mr Todd – you’re just a gas cooker.”

Raeburn Todd appeared undisturbed by the insult. “A gas cooker, am I?” he said quietly. “Well, I’ve just cooked your goose for you, young man, would you not say?”

9. Sally’s Thoughts

After he had lost his job – or resigned, as he put it – Bruce went home to Crieff for several days to lick his wounds. His parents had been concerned over his resignation, and they had quizzed him as to what lay behind it.

“It’s not much of a firm,” Bruce had explained airily. “I found myself – how shall I put it? – a bit thwarted. The job didn’t stretch me enough.”

His mother had nodded. “You thrive on new challenges, Brucie,” she said. “As a little boy you were like that. You were a very creative child.”

Bruce’s father had looked at him over the top of his spectacles. He was an accountant who specialised in the winding-up of companies, and he had a strong nose for lies and obfusca-tion. The trouble with my son, he thought, is that he’s vain.

He’s lost this job of his and he can’t bring himself to tell us.

Poor boy. I suppose I can’t blame him for that, but I wish he wouldn’t lie to us.

“What are you going to do?” asked his father. “How are things in surveying at the moment? Are they tight?”

Bruce shrugged, and looked out of the window of

“Lochnagar”, the family’s two-storey granite house in Crieff.

One thing one has to say about the parental house, he thought, is that it has a good view, down into the strath, over all that good farming land. I should marry the daughter of one of those farmers down there – those comfortable farmers (minor lairds, really, some of them) – and then things would be all right. I

28

Sally’s Thoughts

could raise Blackface sheep, in a small way, and some cattle, some arable. It would be an easy life.

But then there was the problem of the farmer’s daughter –

whoever she turned out to be. Some of them were all right, it had to be said, but then the ones he might find worth looking at tended to move to Edinburgh, or even to London, where they had jobs in public relations or possibly at Christie’s. At Christie’s, they were the ones who were sometimes allowed to hold up the vases and paintings at the auctions (provided, of course, that they had studied history of art at university, although sometimes a declared intention to study history of art was sufficient qualification). That was the problem; they had no desire to remain in Perthshire. That was until they became broody; things changed then, and the idea of living in the country with dogs (Labradors, usually, the dog of choice for such persons) and children suddenly became an attractive one.

Bruce sighed. Life seemed very predictable, whatever choice one made.

He looked back at his father, and held his gaze for a few moments. Then he looked away again. He knows, he thought.

He knows exactly what has happened. “I think I’ll try something different,” he replied quietly. “The wine business is interesting.

I might try that.”

Sally’s Thoughts

29

“You always had a good nose for wine, Brucie,” said his mother. “And for sniffing things out in general.” She cast a glance at her son’s hair. “Is that cloves, I smell, by the way? I love the scent of cloves. I think it’s marvellous that boys have all those different things to choose from at the chemist’s these days. Hair things and shaving things, that is.”

Over the next few days, he was looked after by his mother, and felt reassured. It still riled him to think of Todd and the injustice that had been done him, but after three days in Crieff the pain seemed to ease – unconditional maternal affirmation had its effect – and he found himself in a position to make decisions. He would return to Edinburgh, plan a holiday – a month or two perhaps, since he had the opportunity – and then he could start seriously to look for a job in the wine trade. He had some leads there. Will Lyons had more or less guaranteed that he would find something, and so, with any luck, he would be fixed up by, say, late September. That would be a good time to start in the wine trade, with Christmas and New Year sales coming up.

Bruce felt positively buoyed by the thought of a couple of months off, and spent the first few days after returning to Scotland Street in deciding where he would go. He had never been in the Far East, and he spoke to one or two people in the Cumberland Bar who had been to Thailand.

“Terrific country,” one of them said. “Just terrific. South –

terrific. North – terrific. Unconditionally terrific.”

That helped Bruce a bit, but gave him very little concrete information. What about Vietnam?

“Not quite as terrific as Thailand,” said the same person. “But terrific in its own way.”

Bruce was still seeing Sally, the American girl he had met in the Cumberland Bar. The relationship had not progressed as far as he had imagined it might, and he had decided that he most definitely would not ask her to marry him, but it was a convenient arrangement for both of them and they met one another once or twice a week, usually in the Cumberland Bar, and there-after they went to 44 Scotland Street, where they were able to continue their conversation.

30

Sally’s Thoughts

“I find him a bit of a drag,” Sally had written in an e-mail sent to her friend, Jane, who lived in Nantucket. “You don’t know Scotsmen, do you? Well, I’ll tell you a bit about them.

They’re usually quite pale, as if they’ve spent too much time indoors, which they often have (although I must say that Bruce is really good-looking, and a few months in Arizona or somewhere like that could really improve him). They like drinking, and they go on and on – and I really mean on and on – about soccer, even the relatively civilised ones (the ones you meet in the Cumberland Bar – and you should just see the rest!). Bruce doesn’t talk about soccer, but he makes up for it with rugby.

You won’t have even heard about rugby, Jane. It’s this really weird game, a bit like football – the proper football, the one we play – but without the shoulders. It’s very tribal. They run up and down a soggy pitch and bring one another down in hugs. I don’t think that’s the word they use for it – I think there’s some other term – but that’s what they are – hugs. And so it goes on.

“Bruce is all right, I suppose, for a couple of months. (So, OK, I’ve been bored. You can’t blame a girl who’s feeling bored.) But I would love – just love – to meet some nice, normal boy over here – you know what I mean? – somebody like that guy you met at Dartmouth (what was his name again? Remember him?!) But they just don’t exist. So I’ll make do with Bruce a little longer before I give him his pink slip and then it’s back home and we can meet up and you can introduce me to somebody. Agree?”

And Jane had written back: “Don’t worry. I’ve met the cutest guy at a party at the Martinsons’ and I’m saving him just for you! I’ve told him all about you and he’s really interested. So come home soon. You won’t believe your luck when you meet him. His name’s Billy, by the way. Isn’t that cute? Yale.”

Chapter title

31

10. Bruce’s Plan

When Sally revealed to Bruce that she was intending to return to the United States at the beginning of September, and that she would only come back to Scotland in November, for her gradu-ation, and for no more than a week at that, she was surprised that he took the news so calmly. There was a reason for his unruffled demeanour in the face of this impending separation: Bruce was, in fact, more than a little relieved that she would be going, as he was beginning to find her company slightly irksome. She’s neurotic, he thought; always probing into his reasons for doing and saying things, as American girls tended to do. Scottish girls were almost always more straightforward and less demanding; they did not ask you to explain yourself at every step, but accepted you for what you were, a man – and let you get on with it.

The roots of the difference lay in the very nature of the two societies: whatever Scotland was, it was not a matriarchy; whereas the United States was a profoundly matriarchal society – and much more feminine than would be suggested by all that male bravado.

That was a front, and a misleading one at that; underneath the male swagger lay a passive acceptance of female dominance – a fact not always appreciated by outsiders. And as a result, such people often fundamentally misread American society and assume that decisions articulated by men are male decisions – a serious mistake.

Although he had not reflected on the general issue of why American women behaved the way they did, Bruce found it very difficult to adjust to the independence which Sally showed in her relationship with him. In his view, it was only natural that the male should take the lead in most matters (“That’s the whole point of being a male,” he had once remarked to a friend who had consulted him about a fraying relationship). Women who did not accept this were, in Bruce’s view, self-evidently unhappy in their gender. They made very unstable girlfriends and were best avoided, even if they were sometimes every bit as enthusiastic as other women were in flinging themselves at him. Bruce knew that he was attractive even to women who were not interested in men 32

Bruce’s Plan

at all, although they often fought so hard against it and felt so bad about their feelings towards him. Go with the flow, he might have said. That is how Bruce thought.

The impending departure of Sally, rather curiously, added a zest to the relationship. Although neither would have thought of it in these terms, this was probably owing to the fact that neither now felt trapped, and a sense of freedom in a friendship

– or in a love affair – often adds a certain lightness to what might otherwise weigh heavily. It is not hard to be considerate, or even enthusiastic, towards those who are going away; in fact, they often appear much more attractive and desirable as friends than they did before they announced their intention to go. Now, after the decision to go is taken, the obligation of those who are staying behind is finite; we do not have to be nice to them for much longer – the smile need not be maintained into some distant and unknowable future.

For her part, knowledge of the fact that Bruce was about to be dropped made Sally feel slightly guilty, which caused her to be particularly affectionate towards him. She gave him several small and unexpected presents – a set of cuff links from Jenners, and a silk tie which she bought from Stewart Christie in Queen Street. And Bruce reciprocated with a box of Callard and Bowser nougat and a book of Edinburgh views taken by a well-known soft-focus photographer. “So that you can remember how happy you’ve been in Edinburgh,” he wrote on the title page of the book. “And to remind you of me.”

Sally was touched by this, but when she began to analyse the wording of his inscription, her irritation with Bruce resurfaced. Was he implying that her happiness in Edinburgh was directly attributable to her having met him? If so, that was nonsense. She had been perfectly happy before she had met him; indeed she had even been slightly happier then. So the inscription might more accurately have read: “To remind you of how happy you’ve been in Edinburgh, in spite of memories of me.” But people never wrote that sort of brutally honest thing in books, largely because people very rarely have a clear idea of the effect that they have on other people, or can bring A Bus for Bertie

33

themselves to admit it. And Bruce, as Sally had discovered, lacked both insight into himself and an understanding of how somebody like her might feel about somebody like him. I really am wasting my time with him, she said to herself; I may as well bring the whole thing to an end right now. And yet there was something compelling about him, something fascinating that drew her to him. Something to do with the way he looked, she thought; the lowest common denominator of such dalliances. The conclusion depressed her, but there it was: some relationships are a matter of the physical, try as we might to ennoble them. Ultimately, the reason why one person may stay with another may be as small a thing as the shape of the other’s nose.

Unaware of Sally’s doubts, Bruce assumed that she would find the separation difficult, and that she might wish to prolong their affair at a distance. So when the idea occurred to him of how he might spend a month or two before he started his new job in the autumn, he imagined that Sally would welcome the suggestion.

“I’ve got some good news for you,” he said casually, as they sat in the garden at the Cumberland Bar, enjoying some late Saturday afternoon sunshine.

She looked at him and smiled. The sun was in his hair, melting the gel. Poor Bruce!

“I can come to Nantucket with you,” said Bruce. “You’ve made me curious about it. We could spend a few weeks there maybe, at your place, and then do some travelling. I’ve always wanted to see New Orleans. We could go down there maybe.”

Sally stared at him. The moment had come, unexpected just then, but it had definitely arrived.

11. A Bus for Bertie

“We have to reach a decision,” said Irene Pollock, mother of Bertie, and neighbour, one floor down, of Pat, Bruce and Domenica. She looked at her husband and waited for him to speak.

34

A Bus for Bertie

He was sitting in the chair which he liked to occupy near one of the windows of the sitting room, immediately under the small reproduction Warhol which Irene had bought for him at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He had not been listening closely to what Irene was saying, as he had been thinking about a row which had blown up at the office – Stuart was a statistician in the Scottish Executive – and there had been an intense discussion in an internal meeting of how figures might be presented. The optimists had been pitted against the pessimists, and Stuart was not sure exactly into which camp he fitted. He believed that there were sometimes grounds for optimism and sometimes grounds for pessimism, and that one might on occasion choose between them at the level of subtle, and permissible, nuances but in general should stick to the truth, which was often uncomfortable.

All of this was some distance away from the matter which Irene was talking about, which was the issue of how their son, Bertie, the remarkably talented five-and-three-quarter-year-old, should get from Scotland Street, where they lived, to the school in Merchiston, in which he had now been enrolled.

“Obviously I shall go with him for the first year or so,” said Irene. “And I’ll pick him up at three in the afternoon or whenever it is that he finishes. But before we know where we are he’ll be big enough to go by himself, and we’ll have to make a decision.”

“About what?” Stuart asked, distractedly.

Irene felt vaguely irritated. There were times when Stuart’s mind seemed to be less focused than it might. And these occasions, she had noticed, were increasingly occurring when she was talking about something important to do with Bertie. Was he fully committed to the Bertie project? She would have to talk to him some time about that. One did not raise a little boy like Bertie without full commitment from both parents, and that meant a full commitment to all aspects of the project: educa-tional, social and psychological.

“About which bus he takes,” she said, the irritation creeping into her voice. “There are several possibilities, as you know. The A Bus for Bertie

35

23 or the 27. And there’s also the number 10 to be thought about.”

Stuart shrugged. “Which goes closer to the school?” he asked.

“The 27,” said Irene. “Both the 23 and the 27 go up Dundas Street and on to Tollcross. Then the 23 carries on up to Morningside, whereas the 27 turns right at the King’s Theatre and goes along Gilmore Place to Polwarth.”

“Oh,” said Stuart.

Irene looked out of the window, staring, while she spoke, at a window on the other side of the street. A woman stood at this window, brushing her hair. “If he took the 23,” Irene went on,

“he would get off in Bruntsfield and then walk along Merchiston Crescent and down Spylaw Road. It would take him about ten minutes to reach the school gate. Alternatively, if he took the 27, he would have a walk of about four minutes from a stop on Polwarth Terrace.”

“And the 10?”

“The number 10 is a different proposition,” said Irene. “That bus goes along Princes Street and ends up on Leith Walk. If he took that, he would have to walk along London Street and then up to the top of Leith Walk. It’s a slightly longer route, but there’s another factor involved there.”

Stuart raised an eyebrow. The ethics of statistical presentation seemed simple in comparison with the complexities of Edinburgh bus routes. “And this factor? What is it?”

“Going along London Street would remind him of the walk to the nursery school,” she said quietly. “That’s the route which I took him to that . . . that place.” She shuddered involuntarily, remembering her last confrontation with the nursery-school teacher, and that awful morning when Bertie had finally been suspended for writing graffiti, in Italian, in the children’s toilets.

That had been so unfair, so cruel. It was entirely natural for small boys to explore their environment in this way and to seek to express themselves. If there were any fault involved, then surely it was that of the nursery itself, which had failed to provide adequate stimulation for him; not that that woman who ran the place would even begin to understand that.

36

A Bus for Bertie

“I don’t want Bertie to be reminded of his suspension,” she said firmly. “So that rules out the number 10.”

“Fine,” said Stuart. “And if the 27 involves a shorter walk, then shouldn’t we opt for that? Is there much else to be discussed?”

“There is a difference between a 27 bus and a 23 bus,” said Irene. “It’s not just a question of which bus goes where.”

Stuart smiled. “The Morningside factor?”

Irene nodded. “Yes,” she said. “You could refer to it as that.

The 23 bus is probably the most middle-class bus there is. It’s the archetypical Edinburgh bus, if one uses the word Edinburgh in its pejorative sense. Do we want Bertie to become part of that whole Edinburgh scene? Is this not the reason why we’re sending him to a less-stuffy school? To get him away from that whole tight Edinburgh attitude, that whole middle-class, Merchant Company view of the world?”

“Then why don’t we send him to the school round the corner?” asked Stuart.

Irene shook her head. “Impossible. It’s a question of music lessons. It’s not their fault, but many schools don’t have the resources. It’s society’s fault. We let this happen. We’ve starved the schools of resources.”

Stuart was silent. There was a sense in which his wife was right. We had allowed state education to decline because we had not been prepared to make the sacrifices needed to support the schools. But it went deeper than that in places like Edinburgh, where the middle classes – or a large part of the middle classes

– had developed a parallel world for their children. But they would reply that all that they were doing was paying for that which the state did not provide. And this might be countered with the argument that their lack of commitment perpetuated this state failure. And so the debate went on.

“I don’t think that it matters too much,” he said calmly. “And, anyway, it looks as if the 27 is the solution. Unless . . .”

Irene hesitated. “The 27 can get a bit rough sometimes,”

she said, almost apologetically. “There are some bits of Oxgangs . . .”

A Thin Summer

37

“Then it’s the 23,” said Stuart.

Irene hesitated for a moment, but only a moment. “Yes,” she said. “The 23.”

12. A Thin Summer

Bertie had not enjoyed a particularly good summer. It had seemed to him – as it seems to all small boys – that the months of summer would be endless, a long, hazy succession of days of adventure and excitement. But that was not how the summer had actually turned out.

To begin with, they had barely left the city in spite of his repeated requests that they go somewhere – anywhere. Even the Pentland Hills would have done. He had heard that there were lochs there in which you could catch trout. A boy who lived in Fettes Row had told Bertie that he went there with his father and they had both caught two trout. It was easy, said the boy; you put the fly in the water and the trout jumped out and ate it. “Even somebody like you could do it,” the boy went on.

“Can I go fishing in the Pentlands?” Bertie asked his mother.

“That boy who lives in Fettes Row went fishing with his dad and caught two trout. You like trout, Mummy. I could catch some for you. And I could catch some almonds to put on top of the trout.”

“If that’s a joke, Bertie,” said Irene severely, “then it’s not very funny. Fishing is cruel. Think of the poor trout swimming around in the loch and then some unkind boy from Fettes Row comes and howks them out of the water and that’s the end of the trout. Would you want to do that sort of thing? I’m sure you wouldn’t. Anyway, we couldn’t get out to the Pentlands.

Your father has parked the car somewhere and we’re going to have to find it. I just don’t have the time to look for it right now.”

Bertie thought for a moment. “But you eat trout, don’t you?

38

A Thin Summer

You and Daddy both eat trout. I’ve seen you. Isn’t it just as cruel to eat trout as to catch them? What’s the difference?”

“There’s an important difference,” said Irene. “I’ll explain it to you some time, but not at the moment.” She paused. “Bertie, you know that Mummy does her best for you, don’t you? You know that I love you very much and only want you to be happy?”

Bertie looked down at the floor. “Yes,” he said quietly. “It’s just that I don’t seem to have much fun. I want to have a bit more fun. That boy in Fettes Row has more fun than I do.”

“Oh, Bertie, you can’t say that! Look at all the fun you have!

There’s your saxophone – you love playing that. I bet that boy wouldn’t know how to play the saxophone, or anything for that matter. Anybody can fish – very few boys can play the saxophone. And then there’s your Italian lessons, and your yoga, and . . .” Irene was about to say “and your psychotherapy” but stopped. She was not sure if Bertie was enjoying that as much as she was, and it was best, perhaps, not to mention it in this particular conversation.

Bertie was certainly not enjoying his psychotherapy. It was not that he actively disliked Dr Fairbairn, the prominent psychotherapist and author of the seminal study on that three-year-old tyrant, Wee Fraser; no, it was not that he disliked him, it was more a question of finding Dr Fairbairn quite impene-trably odd. In fact, Bertie was convinced that Dr Fairbairn was mad, and that the only viable strategy was for him to humour him, hoping thereby to avoid becoming the target of Dr Fairbairn’s unpredictable wrath.

This strategy of humouring had produced the desired effect on the psychotherapist. He found Bertie increasingly co-operative and indeed felt that there were depths to the boy’s psyche that would repay very serious study. There was even the possibility of a paper there – something for the British Journal of Child Psychotherapy or Studia Kleinia perhaps. But that was a long-term goal; the more immediate task, in Dr Fairbairn’s view, was to discover what dynamics were operating in Bertie’s developing ego structure and to work out what blockages were preventing him from developing a more integrated personality.

A Thin Summer

39

Dr Fairbairn was something of a pioneer, and one of the techniques that he had advanced was what he called “Fairbairn’s List Approach”. In this, the child patient was invited to write a list of those matters which were most distressing and to rank these in order of seriousness. This was nothing new in psychotherapy; indeed, some perfectly ordinary parents, un-tutored in the techniques of Freud and Klein, had used just such a system in dealing with their unhappy or difficult children. “Tell me what’s worrying you – write it down and then we’ll have a look.”

That was all very well, and in many cases it helped to iden-tify the conflict points in the parent/child relationship. But what made Dr Fairbairn’s technique so advanced was that in addition to writing down the matter that was troubling or unsatisfactory, the child was invited to write down, in a separate column, who he thought was responsible for the state of affairs in question. In Dr Fairbairn’s opinion, this gave a direct and useful insight into the child’s view of the problem-producing dynamic.

Bertie had been asked to do this. “I want you to make a list,”

said Dr Fairbairn, giving Bertie a piece of paper. “I want you to write a list of things that make you unhappy – things you don’t like to do or would like to change. Then draw an arrow from each thing on the list – a nice long arrow, with feathers if you like – and at the end of the arrow you should put down whose fault that particular thing is. Do you want me to show you how to do it, Bertie?”

“Yes please,” said Bertie. “You make your list, Dr Fairbairn, and then I’ll make mine.”

Dr Fairbairn laughed. “I’ll not make a full list. You’re not my therapist, Bertie! Remember that! No, I’ll just make a little list just to give you the idea – here, pass me that pencil – a list of two or three things.”

The distinguished psychotherapist took the pencil handed to him by Bertie and quickly wrote a few lines on a piece of paper.

“There,” he said. “You see how it’s done.”

Bertie looked at Dr Fairbairn’s list. What on earth did this 40

Bertie’s List

mean? And what was that word? – he had never encountered that word before. He would have to look it up when he had the chance.

Now it was his turn. Dr Fairbairn passed him a fresh piece of paper. Bertie took the pencil and looked up at the ceiling.

There was so much wrong with his life that it was difficult to know where to start. Ranking would be the difficult part; the blaming would be much, much easier.

13. Bertie’s List

It took Bertie no more than ten minutes to write down his list of things that distressed him and to assign an order of magni-tude to each. But after a certain amount of crossing out and rewriting, he handed the paper over to Dr Fairbairn, who had been paging through a journal while Bertie worked.

“Now then,” said Dr Fairbairn cheerfully. “Let’s see what’s troubling you. Do you mind if I read it out, Bertie?”

“No,” said Bertie. “But don’t show it to anybody else. Will you burn it after you’ve read it?”

“Heavens no!” exclaimed Dr Fairbairn. “I’ll put it in this file where nobody else can see it. This list will be too important to burn.”

“I don’t want Mummy to see it,” said Bertie anxiously.

“She won’t,” said Dr Fairbairn. “You can trust me.”

“But you’ve already told her some of the things I told you,”

said Bertie.

Dr Fairbairn looked out of the window. “Have I? Well, perhaps a few little things. And surely you wouldn’t want to keep secrets from Mummy, would you?”

“Yes I would,” said Bertie.

“Very well,” said Dr Fairbairn. “This list remains absolutely secret. Nobody else – not even Mummy – will see it. You have my word on that.”

But Bertie did not trust Dr Fairbairn, and even as the Bertie’s List

41

psychotherapist started to read, he had begun to regret ever having committed these thoughts to paper.

“Number 1,” read Dr Fairbairn. “People making me do things I don’t want to do. I hate this. I hate this. Every day I have to do things that other people want me to do and it leaves me no time to do any of the things I want to do. And nobody asks me what I want to do, anyway.” And then there was an arrow, rather like an ornate arrow of the sort used by Red Indian braves, pointing at the word Mummy, which was written in capitals.

Dr Fairbairn looked up from the paper and stared at Bertie for a moment over his spectacles. “Number 2,” he read on. “Not being allowed to go fishing or go to Waverley station to see the trains. This makes me very sad. Other boys do these things –

why can’t I? It would make me so happy to be able to do this.”

And then the arrow, pointing again to the word Mummy.

“Number 3. Not having a friend. I hate not having a friend.

All I want to do is to play with other boys and do the things they do. I want to go fishing with a friend. I want to go camping with him and make a fire and cook sausages. I’ve never been allowed to do any of these things.” The arrow of blame pointed off to the right, to the word Mummy.

Dr Fairbairn frowned. All the blame seemed to be focused on his mother. It was not unusual for mothers to be blamed for many misfortunes, but to be the sole blame figure was excep-tional – and worrying.

He looked at the last item on the list. “Number 4,” he read out. “Having a pink bedroom. What if other boys saw this?

What would they do? What if it gets out at school that I have a pink bedroom? What then?” And the blame, again, was laid fairly and squarely at Irene’s door.

There was silence for a moment after the list had been read out. What puzzled Dr Fairbairn was that all this hostility was being directed towards the mother and none appeared to be directed against the father. This was unusual, because at this stage of his development Bertie might have been expected to be experiencing an Oedipal rejection of his father, whom, quite 42

Bertie’s List

naturally, he would see as a rival for the affection of the mother.

Yet Bertie in no sense appeared to be resenting his father’s share of his mother; indeed, it would seem that Bertie took the view that his father was welcome to his mother, if that’s what he wanted.

Dr Fairbairn looked at Bertie. This was a highly intelligent child – the most intelligent he had ever encountered, in fact –

and perhaps the psychic drama was playing itself out in a rather different way in his case. The underlying dynamics, of course, must be the same, but it was possible that Bertie’s understanding of adult feelings had enabled him to bypass some of the normal stages. So if Bertie had detected some fundamental pathology in the relationship between Stuart and Irene – a pathology which meant that maternal affections were in no danger of being diverted from Bertie to his father – then he might have decided that Oedipal feelings were simply unnecessary and a waste of energy. Why bother to view your father as a rival when he was clearly no competition?

Another possibility was that Bertie felt intense Oedipal jealousies, but was clever enough to conceal them. If this were the case, then he would have to try to winkle them out through dream analysis, as they would certainly turn up there. But before that, there were questions that could be asked.

“Bertie,” began Dr Fairbairn. “This list of yours is very interesting. Poor Mummy! Is she that bad?”

“Yes,” said Bertie.

“I’m sure she isn’t,” said Dr Fairbairn. He paused. The next question, and its answer, would be vital. Oedipus would be lurking somewhere, and it would require no more than a tiny cue to get him to display himself in all his darkness. “If Mummy were that wicked, then would Daddy love her? Surely not. And yet he does love her, doesn’t he? Mummy and Daddy must love one another, and you must know that.”

Bertie narrowed his eyes. This was obviously a trap and he must be very careful. He could tell that Mummy liked Dr Fairbairn, and possibly liked him even more than she liked Daddy. So this was Dr Fairbairn trying to find out whether he Pat and Bruce Work It Out

43

had a chance of seeing more of Mummy. And that would mean more psychotherapy, because that was how they saw one another, at the beginning and end of the psychotherapy session.

At all costs he must discourage Dr Fairbairn from thinking that.

“Mummy and Daddy are very happy,” said Bertie firmly.

“They like to hold hands all the time.”

Dr Fairbairn raised an eyebrow, but barely noticeably. It was clear to him that Bertie was in denial of matrimonial dishar-mony. He had to be made to express this.

“I’m going to give you a little notebook, Bertie,” he said.

“And I want you to write down your dreams for me. Will you do that?”

Bertie sighed.

14. Pat and Bruce Work It Out

“So you’re staying?” asked Bruce. They were standing in the kitchen, the two of them. Pat was waiting for the kettle to boil so that she could make herself a cup of coffee. Bruce had come in to make toast: he liked to eat toast when he was feeling in-secure, and now he needed toast.

“If that’s all right with you,” said Pat. “I’ve given up my place at St Andrews and transferred to Edinburgh. I’ll need somewhere to live, and I’d like to stay on here if you don’t mind.”

Bruce shrugged. “That’s fine by me,” he said. “My first test of a good tenant is whether the rent is paid. You’ve always paid.”

“And your other tests?” asked Pat.

“Noise,” said Bruce. “And tidiness. You’re fine on both of those. I never hear you and you don’t mess up the kitchen. You’ll do just fine.”

“Thanks,” said Pat.

A silence then followed. Bruce raised himself up and sat on one of the surfaces, his legs dangling down over the edge. Pat looked at the kettle, which was slow to boil. She had to talk to 44

Pat and Bruce Work It Out

him, of course, but she still felt slightly ill at ease in his presence. It was hard for things to be completely easy, she thought, after what she had once felt for him.

At last she broke the silence. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you, Bruce,” she said. “Those other rooms. Is anybody ever going to live in them? Those two – those people who went to Greece – are they ever going to come back?”

Bruce laughed. “They paid until the beginning of August,”

he said. “It was their choice. They wanted to keep the rooms while they went travelling. I was expecting to have heard from them by now, but I haven’t. I suppose I’ll give them a month’s grace and then clear the rooms and get somebody else.” He paused. “Why do you ask? Do you know somebody who’s looking for somewhere to live?”

“No,” said Pat. “I just thought . . . Well, I suppose I thought that it might be easier for us to have somebody else staying here.”

Bruce smiled. “A bit crowded with just the two of us? Is that what you mean?”

Pat drew in her breath. It was exactly what she had meant –

and why should she not feel this? It was perfectly reasonable to suggest that the presence of a couple of other people should make life in a communal flat a little easier.

Everybody who had ever shared a flat knew that two was more difficult than three, and three was more difficult than five.

Bruce must know this too, and was being deliberately perverse in pretending not to.

“All right,” said Bruce. “I know what you mean. I’ll give them two weeks to get in touch and then I’ll move their stuff into the cupboard and we can get somebody else. What do you want?

Boy or girl?”

Pat thought for a moment. The presence of another girl would be useful, as they could support one another in the face of Bruce.

But what if this girl behaved as she had done and fell for Bruce?

That would be very difficult. A boy would be simpler.

“Let’s get a boy,” she said. “Maybe you’ll meet somebody at work . . .” She stopped, realising the tactlessness of her remark.

Pat and Bruce Work It Out

45

She had quickly guessed that Bruce had lost his job, rather than resigned, as he claimed.

“I wouldn’t have anybody from that place,” said Bruce quickly.

“Of course not,” said Pat. “What about Sally? Would she know anybody? Maybe an American student at the university.

She must meet people like that who are looking for somewhere to live.”

Bruce was silent for a moment. He looked at Pat resentfully.

“Sally’s history,” he muttered. “Since last night.”

Pat caught her breath. That was two tactless remarks in the space of one minute. Could she manage a third? So Sally was history? Well, that meant that she had got rid of Bruce, and that he was the one who was history! She wanted to say to him: So you’re history – again! But did not, of course. One never told people who were history that they were history. They knew it all right; there was no need to rub it in.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said. “What happened?”

Bruce slipped down off the surface and moved over to the toaster. He put two slices of bread into the slot and depressed the lever. Toast would make him feel better; it always did.

“Oh, she became a bit too clingy,” he said casually. “You know how it is. You’re getting on fine with somebody and then all of a sudden they want more and more of you. It just gets too much.

So I gave her her freedom.”

Pat listened to this with interest. It was as if he was Gavin Maxwell talking about an otter, or Joy Adamson talking about a lioness. I gave her her freedom.

“You let her go?” she asked, trying to conceal her amusement.

“You could say that,” said Bruce.

“I see,” said Pat. “And where did she want to go? Back to America?”

“She would have stayed here to be with me,” said Bruce. “But I didn’t want to be selfish. I didn’t want to put her in a position where she had to choose between me and . . .”

“And the United States?” prompted Pat.

“Something like that,” said Bruce.

“Poor girl,” said Pat. “It must have been so hard for her.”

46

Pat and Bruce Work It Out

Bruce nodded. “I think it was.” His toast popped up and he reached for the butter. “But water under the bridge, as they say.

Let’s not talk about it any more. Let’s look to the future. Plenty of other girls – know what I mean?”

“Of course there are,” said Pat. “And you’ve got a lot in your life as it is.”

Bruce looked at her. “Are you winding me up?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Pat. “Sorry. I couldn’t help it. You see, wouldn’t it be easier to tell the truth? Wouldn’t it be easier to admit that you’ve lost your job and your girlfriend? Then I could tell you how sorry I am and that might help a little, just a bit. Instead of which you stand there and spin a story about resigning and giving people their freedom and all the rest. It’s all a lie, isn’t it, Bruce?”

Bruce, who had been buttering the toast as he spoke, stopped what he was doing. He looked down at the plate, and moved the toast slowly to one side, putting down the knife.

Then his shoulders began to heave and he turned and walked out of the room, leaving Pat in the kitchen, alone with her sudden guilt.

Chapter title

47

15. Domenica Advises

“I feel terrible,” said Pat to Domenica. “I could have stopped myself, but I didn’t. And then, suddenly, he seemed to crumple.”

“Crumple?” asked Domenica, taking a sip of her sherry. It was a lovely thought. “Deflate?”

“Yes,” said Pat. “And that was it. He left the kitchen – and I felt terribly guilty. After all, he’s lost his job and now he’s lost his girlfriend. I suppose he just felt a bit vulnerable – and I made it all the worse for him by crowing.”

Domenica shook her head. “You didn’t crow. You just told him a few truths about himself. I suspect that you did him a good turn.”

Pat thought about this. Perhaps it was time for Bruce to be deflated, and perhaps she was the person who had to do it. And yet it had not been easy and she had felt bad about it; so bad that she had come straight through to speak to Domenica.

“Not that your good turn will have much effect,” Domenica went on. “I don’t think that a few painful moments will have much long-term impact on that young man. Yes, he’s feeling miserable, and he might do a little bit of thinking as a result of what you said. But people don’t change all that radically on the basis of a few remarks made to them. It takes much more than that. In fact, there’s the view that people don’t change at all. I think that’s a bit extreme. But don’t expect too much change.”

Pat frowned. Surely people did change. They changed as they matured. She remembered herself at fourteen. She was a different person now. “People grow up, though,” she said. “They change as they grow up. We all do.”

Domenica waved a hand in the air. “Oh, we all grow up. But once the personality is formed, I don’t think that you get a great deal of change. Bruce is a narcissist, as we’ve all agreed. Do you see him becoming something different? Can you imagine him not looking in mirrors and worrying about his hair? Can you imagine him thinking that people don’t fancy him? I can’t. Not for the moment.” She put her glass down on the table and looked at Pat. “How old is Bruce, by the way?”

48

Domenica Advises

“He’s twenty-five,” said Pat. “Or just twenty-six. Somewhere around there.”

Domenica looked thoughtful. “Well, that’s rather interesting.

Men are slower, you know. They mature rather later than we do. We get there in our early twenties, but they take rather longer than that. Indeed, I believe that there’s a school of psychology that holds that men are not fully responsible until they reach the age of twenty-eight.”

Pat thought this was rather late. And what did it mean to say that men were not fully responsible until that age? Could they not be blamed for what they did? “Isn’t that a bit late?” she asked. “I thought that we were held responsible from . . .” From what age were we held responsible? Was it sixteen? Or eighteen?

Young people ended up in court, did they not, and were held to account for what they had done? But at what age did all that start?

Domenica noticed Pat’s surprise. “Twenty-eight does seem a bit late,” she said. “But there’s at least something to it. If you look at the crime figures they seem to bear this out. Young men commit crimes – ones that get noticed – between seventeen and twenty-four, twenty-five. Then they stop.” She thought for a moment and smiled at some recollection. “I knew a fiscal,” she went on. “He spent his time prosecuting young men up in Dunfermline. Day in, day out. The same things. Assault. Theft.

So on. And he said that he saw the same people, from the same families, all the time. Then he said something very funny, which I shall always remember. He said that the fiscals saw the same young men regularly between the age of seventeen and twenty-six, and then the next time they saw them was when they were forty-five and they had hit somebody at their daughter’s wedding!

What a comment!”

“But probably true?”

“Undoubtedly true,” agreed Domenica. “On two counts.

Weddings can be violent affairs, and everything runs in families. You’ve heard me on genetic determinism before, haven’t you? But that’s another topic. Let’s get back to excuses, and change, and Bruce. If you think that twenty-eight is a bit late Domenica Advises

49

for responsibility – true responsibility – to appear, then what would you say to forty?”

“Very late.”

Domenica laughed. “Yes, maybe. But again, if you ask people to describe how they’ve behaved over the years, you will often find that they say they’ve looked at it very differently, according to the stage of life that they’re at. Here I am, for example, sitting here with all the wisdom of my sixty years – what a thought, sixty! – and I can definitely see how I’ve looked at things differently after forty. I’m less tolerant of bad behaviour, I think, than I used to be. And why do you think that is?”

Pat shrugged. “You get a bit more set in your ways? You become more judgmental?”

“And what is wrong with being judgmental?” Domenica asked indignantly. “It drives me mad to hear people say: ‘Don’t be judgmental.’ That’s moral philosophy at the level of an Australian soap opera. If people weren’t judgmental, how could we possibly have a moral viewpoint in society? We wouldn’t have the first clue where we were. All rational discourse about what we should do would grind to a halt. No, whatever you do, don’t fall for that weak-minded nonsense about not being judgmental. Don’t be excessively judgmental, if you like, but always – always – be prepared to make a judgment. Otherwise you’ll go through life not really knowing what you mean.”

Pat was silent. She had not come to see Domenica to discuss developmental psychology. She had come to talk about Bruce, and, specifically, to ask what she should do.

“Very interesting,” she said quietly. “But what should I do?

Do you think I should apologise to Bruce?”

“Nothing to apologise about,” snapped Domenica.

“I feel so sorry for him,” said Pat. “I feel . . .”

“Don’t,” interrupted Domenica. “Be judgmental. He told you a series of lies. And even if he isn’t quite twenty-eight yet, he should know better.”

“More judgmentalism?”

“Absolutely,” said Domenica. “Silly young man. What a waste of space!”

50

Chapter title

16. Bertie Goes to School Eventually Irene would have liked to have driven Bertie to his first day at the Steiner School, but there was the issue of the location of their car and she was obliged to begin as she intended to continue

– by catching the 23 bus as it laboured up the hill from Canonmills.

“It would be nice to be able to run Bertie to school,” she had remarked to Stuart the previous evening, “but not knowing exactly where the car is makes it somewhat difficult, would you not agree?”

“Don’t look at me,” said Stuart. “You were the last to use it.

You parked it. You find it.”

Irene pursed her lips. “Excuse me,” she said. “I very rarely use that car, and I certainly was not the last one to drive it. You drove it when you went through to Glasgow for that meeting a couple of months ago. Remember? It was that meeting when you bumped into that person who used to live next to your parents in Dunoon. I distinctly remember your telling me that.

And that was the last time the car was used. So you parked it –

not me.”

Stuart was silent. Irene glanced at him with satisfaction. “Try to remember the journey back,” she said. “You would have come in on the Corstorphine Road, would you not, and driven back through Murrayfield? Did you turn off at the West End? Did you come along Queen Street? Try to remember.”

Stuart remained silent, looking up at the ceiling. Then he looked down at the floor.

“Well?” pressed Irene. “Did you come back that way?”

Stuart turned to her. “I came back by train,” he said quietly.

“I remember it because I saw the Minister on the train, eating a banana muffin, and he said hello to me and I was impressed that he had remembered me. I remember thinking how nice it was of him to make the effort. He sees so many civil servants.”

“Yes, yes,” said Irene. “The Minister. Banana muffins. But the car. What about the car?”

“Are you sure that I drove there?” asked Stuart weakly, Bertie Goes to School Eventually

51

although he knew the answer even as he asked the question.

Irene would remember exactly; she always did.

For a few moments there was complete silence. Then Irene spoke. “I saw you get into it,” she said. “You waved goodbye and drove off. So what does this mean?”

When Stuart replied his voice was barely audible. “Then it’s still in Glasgow,” he said. He waved a hand in a westerly direction. “Somewhere over there.”

Irene’s tone was icy. “You mean that you have left the car –

our car – in Glasgow? That it’s been there for several months?

And you completely forgot about it?”

“So it would appear,” said Stuart. He sounded wretched. He was in awe of Irene, and he hated to be the object of her scorn.

“I must have caught the train without thinking.”

“Well, that’s just fine, then,” said Irene. “That’s the end of our car. It’ll be stripped bare by now. Or stolen.”

Stuart attempted to defend himself. “I’m sure that I parked it legally,” he said. “Which means that it’s probably still there.

Perhaps the battery will be flat, but that may be all.”

Irene failed to respond to his optimism. “When you say it will still be there,” she said evenly, “what exactly do you mean by there? Where precisely is there?”

“Glasgow,” said Stuart.

“Where in Glasgow? Glasgow’s a big city.”

“Near the Dumbarton Road,” said Stuart. “Somewhere . . .

somewhere there. That’s where my meeting was. Just off the Dumbarton Road.”

“Well, I suggest that you go and find it as soon as possible,”

said Irene, adding: “If you can.”

Stuart nodded miserably. He would go through to Glasgow next weekend, by train, and take a taxi out to the Dumbarton Road. He had a vague recollection of where he might have parked, in a quiet cul-de-sac, and there was no reason why the car should not still be there. People left their cars for months at the roadside, and the cars survived. It was different, of course, if one had a fashionable or tempting car, like the car that Domenica Macdonald drove – that sort of car would be bound 52

Bertie Goes to School Eventually

to attract the attention of joy-riders or vandals – but their car, an old Volvo estate, would be unlikely to catch anybody’s eye.

And then it occurred to him that when he made the trip over to Glasgow, he would take Bertie with him. He would take him away from whatever classes Irene had planned for him – Saturday was saxophone in the morning, if he remembered correctly, and junior life-drawing in the afternoon – and he would take him with him on the train. Bertie would love that. He had hardly ever been on a train before, Stuart realised, and yet that was exactly the sort of thing that a father should do with his son. He felt a momentary pang. I’ve been a bad father, he thought. I’ve left the fathering to Irene. I’ve failed my son.

No more was said about the car that evening and the next morning Irene was too busy getting Bertie ready for school to talk to Stuart about cars, or anything else. She had awoken Bertie early and dressed him in his best OshKosh dungarees.

“Such smart dungarees,” said Irene.

Bertie looked doubtful. “Do other boys wear them?” he asked.

“Dungarees? Of course they do,” Irene reassured him. “Go down to Stockbridge and see all those boys in dungarees.”

“But theirs aren’t pink.”

“Nor are yours, Bertie,” scolded Irene. “These are crushed strawberry. They are not pink.” She looked at her watch. “And we don’t have the time to sit around and talk about dungarees.

Look at the time. You’re going to have to get used to being in time for school. It’s not like . . .”

She was about to say “nursery school”, but stopped herself.

In time, Bertie would forget about nursery school and the ignominy of his suspension. His psychotherapy would help –

she knew that – but ultimately it was time, simple, old-fashioned time that was the healer.

They ate a quick breakfast and set off for Dundas Street.

Irene noticed that Bertie avoided treading on the lines in the pavement, and sighed. There were definite signs of neurosis there, she thought; Dr Fairbairn must be informed. As she thought this, she pictured Dr Fairbairn in his consulting room, Down Among the Innocents

53

wearing that rather natty jacket that he liked to wear. He was such a sympathetic man, and so attuned to the feelings of others, just as one could expect. It would be wonderful to be married to a man like that, rather than to a statistician in the Scottish Executive. She glanced down at Bertie, as if afraid that he might read her disloyal thoughts, and he looked up at her.

“It’s all right, Mummy,” he said quietly. “I know what you’re thinking.”

17. Down Among the Innocents

Sitting at his new desk, with his name printed out in large letters in front of him, Bertie stared at his new classmates. There were fifteen of them, eight boys and seven girls, none of whom he knew. He at least had the advantage over them; he could read the names of all the others, whereas most of them could not.

He looked at the placards: Luke, Marcus, Merlin, Tofu, Larch, Christoph, Hiawatha and Kim (boys); and Jocasta, Angel, Lakshmi, Skye, Pansy, Jade and Olive (girls).

He looked in vain for Jock, the boy he had met at his inter-view and whom he wanted so much to be his friend, but there was no sign of him. So he had gone to Watson’s, Bertie concluded; it was just as I thought. Jock would be at Watson’s that very morning, playing rugby perhaps, rather than sitting in a circle with Tofu and the rest.

There was a short talk from Miss Harmony, the teacher, a tall woman with an encouraging smile, who explained what fun going to school was. They would learn so much, she said, and enjoy themselves in the process. There would be music, too, and they would shortly start on the recorder.

“It’s like a whistle,” said the teacher. “You blow it and – peep

– out comes some music. Such fun!”

“And very well suited to early music,” said Bertie brightly.

There was a silence, and the teacher spun round. “What was that, Bertie? Did you say something, Liebling?”

54

Down Among the Innocents

“I said that the recorder is very well suited to playing Renaissance music,” he said. “Italian music, for example. The Lamento di Tristan. That sort of thing.”

“She said it goes peep, ” said Tofu, looking accusingly at Bertie.

“Or does it go poop? Hah!”

All the children thought this was extremely funny, and laughed loudly. Tofu smiled modestly.

The teacher sighed. “We don’t laugh at things like that,” she said softly. “We must learn that such things just aren’t funny.

Tofu, darling, remember that we’re quite grown-up now. And you, Bertie, what an interesting thing to say. Can you play the recorder already?”

“A bit,” said Bertie. “The fingering isn’t all that hard. It’s easier than playing the saxophone.”

“Sexophone?” said Tofu, smiling at the resultant giggles.

The teacher glared at him. “Bertie said ‘saxophone’, Tofu.

Perhaps you did not hear him correctly.” She turned to Bertie.

“And do you play the saxophone, Bertie?”

“Yes,” said Bertie. “But I don’t have it with me.”

“No,” said the teacher. “So I see. Well, I’m sure that we shall all have the chance to hear you playing the saxophone some time soon. The saxophone, boys and girls, was invented by a man called Arthur Sax, a Frenchman. He made many beautiful brass instruments.”

“Adolf Sax,” corrected Bertie politely. “And he was Belgian.”

The teacher looked at Bertie, and then at Tofu, who had started to tickle the girl sitting next to him.

“Tofu, dear,” she said firmly. “Girls don’t like being tickled.”

“Oh don’t they?” said Tofu. “I know lots of girls who like being tickled. They like it a lot.”

The teacher was silent. It was time for some diversion, she felt. She crossed the room to the cupboard and opened the door.

The children watched closely as she took out a pile of old copies of the Guardian and handed a folded copy to each child.

“Now you’ll know what this is,” she said.

A forest of hands shot up. “It’s the Guardian, ” the innocents cried out.

Down Among the Innocents

55

“Well done,” she said. “And can anybody name another newspaper for me?”

There was complete silence. The children looked at one another in puzzlement. Then Bertie spoke. There were plenty of other newspapers, and he had read a number of them. There was the Scotsman and the Herald and a newspaper called the Daily Telegraph.

“The Daily Telegraph,” he said.

The teacher looked at him. “Perhaps,” she said. Then, turning to the class in general she gave them their instructions. They were to fold the Guardian up, she said, and then they were to try to cut out the shape of a man. Then, when they unfolded it, they would have lots of little men, all joined together in a chain.

Picking up a copy herself, she demonstrated the folding and the cutting. “There,” she said, holding up the result. “Look at that long line of little men, all holding hands.”

“Gays,” said Tofu.

The teacher put down her paper cut-out. “Tofu, dear, if you wouldn’t mind just going and standing outside the door for five minutes. And while you’re there, you can think about the things that you say.”

“Shall I hit him for you?” asked Larch, a burly boy with a very short hair-cut.

“No,” said the teacher quickly, and then, under her breath so that nobody might hear, she muttered: “Not just yet.”

When the time came for the morning interval, Bertie went out into the playground by himself. He was aware of the fact that he alone was wearing dungarees and he smarted with embarrassment. Tofu, for example, had electric sneakers that sent out small pulses of light each time he took a step, and even Merlin, who was wearing obviously home-made sandals and a rainbow-coloured jacket, at least had normal trousers.

Bertie felt miserable: everybody else seemed to have made a friend already, or even more than one friend. Tofu had a knot of four or five others around him, even including somebody from one of the classes above. Bertie had nobody, so when 56

On the Way Home

Tofu came up to him a few minutes later, he had nobody to defend him.

“Dungarees!” the other boy said contemptuously. “Or are they pyjamas?”

“It’s not my fault,” said Bertie. “It’s my mother.”

Tofu looked at him and sneered. “Dungarees are good for falling over in,” he said suddenly. “Like this.” And with that he gave Bertie a push, causing him to fall to the ground. There was laughter, and Tofu walked off.

Bertie picked himself up off the ground and dusted his dungarees. There was a large brown patch on one of the knees. As he attended to this, he became aware of the fact that a girl was standing beside him. It was Olive.

“Poor Bertie,” she said. “It’s not your fault that you look so silly. It really isn’t. And that Tofu is a horrid boy. Everybody knows he’s horrid.” She paused. “But I suppose we should feel sorry for him.”

“Why?” asked Bertie. “Why should we feel sorry for him?”

“Because he doesn’t have a mummy,” explained Olive. “She was a vegan and she starved to death. My dad told me all about it.”

Bertie was horrified. “And what about his daddy?” he asked.

“Has he got a daddy?”

“Yes,” said Olive. “But he’s a vegan too, so he won’t last long either.”

“And Tofu himself ? ” whispered Bertie.

“He’s very hungry,” Olive replied. “We were at nursery together, and I saw him stealing ham sandwiches from the others’

lunch boxes. Yes, he’s very hungry. In fact, he’s not going to last too long himself. So cheer up, Bertie! Cheer up!”

18. On the Way Home

For the first few days, they went home early. Irene was there at the school gate, in good time, along with all the other parents, waiting for the children to be released. She looked On the Way Home

57

about her, seeing whether she recognised anybody: she knew that the parents of the other children would see a lot of one another over the years ahead, and she was interested to find out what they were like. Most of the faces were unfamiliar, although there was one woman whom she had met somewhere or other and who nodded in her direction. Where had it been?

Yoga? The floatarium? Edinburgh was like that; there were so many familiar faces but they were often difficult to place exactly.

Her gaze moved discreetly over the other parental faces. They were much as she expected; ordinary, reasonable people, just like herself. Irene felt comfortable.

“Warm, isn’t it?” said a voice just behind her.

She turned and looked at the speaker. He was a tall man, with a rather thin face, and dark hair swept back over his head.

He was wearing a pair of bottle-green slacks and a thin, denim jacket.

“I’m Barnabas Miller,” he said, reaching out to shake her hand. “I’m Tofu’s father. And you’re . . .”

“Bertie’s mother,” said Irene. And then, laughing, she added:

“I have a name as well, I suppose. Irene Pollock.”

Barnabas nodded. “No doubt we’ll all meet at the parents’

evenings,” he said. “They’re very good with that sort of occasion. This is a very happy school.”

“Yes,” said Irene. “No doubt we will.” She paused. “And Tofu

– it was Tofu, wasn’t it? – was he at nursery here?”

“Yes,” said Barnabas. “We took him out for a while – minor behavioural issues – and then he went back. He’s a very expressive child. I looked after him at home while I was writing my book. My wife is often away. She lectures on diet.”

(Note: Olive was wrong, of course; Tofu’s mother may have been thin, but she was still quick – in the old-fashioned sense of the word. )

Irene was interested. “Your book? What do you write?”

“I’ve just had a new one come out,” said Barnabas. “The Sorrow of the Nuts. I don’t imagine that you’ve read it.”

“Sorry,” said Irene. “What is it? Fiction?”

58

On the Way Home

Barnabas shook his head. “No. It’s a holistic nutrition book.

It examines the proposition that nuts have energy fields – and some form of morphic resonance. You’ll have heard of Rupert Sheldrake, I take it?”

Irene had, but only just. “The man who wrote The New Science of Life? ”

“Yes,” said Barnabas. “He’s the one who pointed out that there are resonant energy fields that contain biologically significant information. He proved it with the milk-top hypothesis.”

Irene frowned. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I did look at that book, ages ago, and I’ve forgotten . . .”

“No need to apologise,” said Barnabas. “Sheldrake reminds us that before the war birds had worked out how to peck away at the foil tops of milk bottles and drink the top of the milk on the doorstep. It took them some time to learn this, but eventually they did. Then along came the war and they stopped using those foil tops – metal had to be kept for other uses.

And so several generations of birds never saw those milk tops.

Then, after the war they were able to introduce those tops again and, lo and behold, the birds knew immediately what to do.”

On the Way Home

59

“And Sheldrake says?”

“That the only way in which the birds could have picked up that knowledge would be if there had been some sort of energy field which contained that information for them. He calls it morphic resonance.”

Irene reflected on this. It was challenging stuff. “And your book?” she asked.

“It explores the possibility that nuts have feelings,” said Barnabas solemnly. “And it concludes that they do. Not feelings in the sense that we might use the term about ourselves, but feelings in the sense of some form of quasi-conscious response to the world.” He paused. “Not everyone would agree with me, of course. But it does have major dietary implications.”

“It means that eating nuts is cruel?” prompted Irene.

“Not exactly,” said Barnabas. “But it might be thought inconsiderate.”

“Do you eat them yourself ?” asked Irene. “Not that I mean to be personal. I hope you don’t mind my asking.”

“I’m in the process of giving them up,” said Barnabas. “After all, I feel that I should practise at least some of what I preach.”

Irene was about to say something when there was a sudden noise of shouting and laughing and the children streamed out of the building. When Bertie saw Irene, he seemed to hesitate for a few seconds, but then came forward to her.

“Well, Bertie,” asked Irene. “How was it? How was your first day of school? Did you learn anything?”

“I learned a little about life,” said Bertie.

“Good,” said Irene. “Now let’s go home. We’ll get the 23

from up the road.”

They walked back up Spylaw Road and on towards Bruntsfield. They were just in time for a 23 bus as it came up the road from Holy Corner.

“We shall sit on the top, Bertie,” said Irene. “We can look out and see what’s happening on the pavement.”

They found seats and sat down on the upper deck. Bertie was silent as the bus started its journey back. He looked down at the dirt stain on the knee of his trousers, the stain caused by 60

Matthew’s Situation

the assault perpetrated on him by the poor, doomed Tofu. Could Olive be right that he was starving to death? Were people allowed to starve to death these days, now that the Labour Party was in power? Surely not.

Irene was lost in her thoughts too. The bus had stopped near a bank cash machine, and she noticed a young man, blanket around his legs, sitting on the pavement right next to the machine. As people came to draw their money, he looked up at them and asked for change. The sight made her angry. He was able-bodied, was he not? He was young enough to work, or draw benefit if he could not: what right did he have to impor-tune people in this way? People had the right to draw money, she felt, without being subjected to any pressure. And where were the police? Did they stand by and tolerate this? It appeared that they did.

She stopped herself. Should I be thinking like this? she wondered. Like what? She supplied her own answer: like a Conservative. The problem was that whenever the Conservatives made a policy statement these days she found herself agreeing with it. That was awkward, in her book, and she put the thought out of her mind. But then the thought occurred to her: perhaps I’m a Conservative leftist. That sounded much more respectable than being a leftist Conservative. But what exactly was the difference?

19. Matthew’s Situation

Matthew, proprietor of the Something Special Gallery, and Pat’s employer of four months’ standing, opened the gallery that morning rather earlier than usual. Pat often arrived well before he did. She came in shortly after nine, at a time when all the other galleries in the area were still firmly closed. And what would have been the point of their opening that early? People did not buy paintings at that hour, and indeed the sort of people who bought paintings were still enjoying a leisurely breakfast then or were hard at work in their offices.

Matthew’s Situation

61

Matthew had tried to work out exactly who his customers were. He had read few business books, but had eventually picked one more or less at random from the business section of a bookshop, that section so distinguished by such titles as Cut out the Competition! and The New Executive You. His choice was called Retail Success: Ten Secrets Revealed. Matthew thought the title absurd but had found the book more interesting than he had imagined it would be. Retail, it appeared, was a complicated process, in which people who were unwilling, for entirely understandable reasons, to hand over their money to others, were persuaded by those very others to do just that. That was secret number one: nobody really wanted to buy anything. It was then revealed that the second secret, closely allied to the first, was that even if people were persuaded to hand over their money, they wished to minimise the extent to which they did so. This led the authors of the book to counsel the reader to encourage unanticipated overspend.

Matthew’s business career had not been conspicuously successful. Indeed, it had been a dismal failure: each time his father had set him up in a new enterprise it had not lasted long.

If, then, there were secrets to business success, he was not party to them. His last business before the gallery had been a travel agency, which had failed as well, largely due to the incompetence of the two members of staff whom Matthew had employed and whom he had not had the courage, nor the business acumen, to dismiss. One of these employees had made a series of bad mistakes, usually of a geographical nature, but also, occasionally, of a linguistic one. One client had been sold a package holiday to Turkey, in the belief that it was Greece, and another who was travelling to Strasbourg and who wished to be booked into the Hotel de Paris there, had unfortunately been booked into the Hotel de Strasbourg in Paris. This sort of thing happened all the time.

Matthew had, in fact, tackled the young man about his geographical ignorance.

“Did they teach you geography at school?” he had asked, after one particularly awkward geographical mix-up (involving 62

Matthew’s Situation

a confusion between British Columbia in Canada and the Republic of Colombia).

“What?” asked the young man.

“Geography,” said Matthew. “You know – the world. Maps.

Where things are.”

The young man shook his head. “Dunno,” he said. “Don’t think so.”

“Clearly not,” said Matthew. “Tell me: which do you think is further south – India or Australia?”

The young man shook his head. “Difficult,” he said. “Not sure.”

Matthew had sighed, and left it at that. And the travel agency had limped on, and then collapsed, and he had gone back to his father apologetically and reported the failure.

Matthew’s father had not been surprised. “You’ve got to be tougher, son,” he had said. “You have to have a clear business plan and then stick to it. Set targets. Beat them. Look for ways of cutting costs. Businesses can’t be left just to tick over. They go under if you do that.”

Matthew had nodded. The problem was that he was not very good with people. He was too soft. He paid them too much and he could never bring himself to criticise their performance. He was not cut out for business. And that was well understood by his father, who had come to the realisation that even if the best thing for his son was to find him a business, that was no more than a facade – a sinecure, in other words. So when he heard that one of the tenants in a building he owned in Edinburgh, a gallery, was going to close, it seemed the perfect opportunity. Matthew could run that. He need not make any money, as long as he did not make too much of a loss. Perhaps a loss of fifteen to twenty thousand pounds a year would be about right, although he could carry much more than that, if need be. To Matthew’s astonishment, at the end of the first quarter’s trading, the gallery appeared to have made a modest profit. He had arranged an appointment with his accountant, a man who acted for one of his father’s companies, and they had gone over the accounts together.

“I must say that is amazing,” said the accountant, pointing to Matthew’s Situation

63

the balance sheet which he had prepared for Matthew. “I’m quite astonished. You’re showing a profit.” He said this, and then immediately felt embarrassed. It was tantamount to saying that he expected Matthew to fail – which of course he did.

Matthew had not noticed the slight; he looked at the figures.

“According to this, I’ve made eleven thousand pounds in three months. Are you sure there’s no mistake?”

The accountant smiled. “We’re very careful about that. And I’ve checked the spread-sheets. You’ve made just over eleven thousand, as it says there. Profit. But remember, trading goes in cycles. A good quarter doesn’t make a good year.”

“But even if I made no more this year, that’s still a respectable profit . . .” he tailed off, and then added, “for me.”

The accountant nodded. “I’ve told your old man. I hope you don’t mind. He’s been quite chirpy over the last few weeks, I think. This news cheered him up even more.”

Matthew barely took in this news about his father, so ecstatic was he over the gallery’s success. And the news from Pat, that she was going to stay in Edinburgh and could continue to work part-time while at university, had boosted Matthew’s spirits. In fact, he realised that Pat had had a great deal to do with this profit. She was good at sales. She knew the ten secrets of retail, even if she did not know that she knew them. He must talk to her about that.

Having opened the gallery that morning, and having switched on the lights that illuminated the paintings, Matthew sat back in his chair and browsed through an auction catalogue that had arrived the previous day. There was to be a sale of Scottish art at Hopetoun House, and it occurred to him that now was the time for him to start buying. With that eleven thousand pounds’

profit behind him he could go to the bank and get a line of credit for the expansion of his stock. Not little, frippery things, but big paintings. A Hornel perhaps.

He was thinking of this when he heard the bell which sounded as the front door opened. It would be Pat. He looked up. It was not. It was his father.

64

Chapter title

20. Second Flowering

Matthew greeted his father warmly. Although they had not always been on the easiest of terms, particularly in the days of Matthew’s earlier business failures, they had come to understand one another, and with that understanding had come a comfortable and undemanding relationship. Matthew’s father, Gordon, came to appreciate the fact that even if his son was a bad businessman, he was honest and well-meaning, and would not disgrace him in any way. And for his part, Matthew had reached that stage in life when one accepts parents for what they are. His father’s world – the world of Rotary clubs and business lunches – would never be his own world, but did that matter?

Matthew did not know it, but Gordon felt strongly guilty about him. He felt this guilt because he believed that he had been a failure as a father. While other fathers had made time to spend with their sons, he had not. He had gone to none of the school plays which Matthew had appeared in, and had even missed the school production of Carousel, in which Matthew had played Billy Bigelow and his friend, Mark, had played Mr Snow.

He had been too busy with business affairs and with the social life that went with that. Then Matthew had grown up and left home and he had tried to make it up to him by setting him up in businesses and putting money in his bank account. And now it was too late.

Matthew rose to greet his father. “A nice surprise,” he said.

“Want to buy a painting?”

Gordon smiled. “I have simple tastes in art,” he said.

“Highland scenes. Seascapes.”

“We have both of those,” said Matthew. “And a very rare Vettriano abstract.”

“I came to say hello,” said Gordon. “I was on my way to the lawyers in Charlotte Square. They look after me very well, those people. I’m seeing them at eleven, and I thought I’d drop in and see how things were going. I gather you’re turning in a profit.”

Second Flowering

65

Matthew sat back in his chair and smiled. “Yes,” he said.

“Surprised?”

Gordon looked down. My son knows what I think of him, he thought. He expects me to be surprised if he does anything well. And that’s my fault; nobody else’s – mine.

“I wanted to congratulate you,” he said. “Yes, I was a little bit surprised. But perhaps . . . perhaps you’ve found your niche.

And good for you.”

Matthew looked at his father. There was something about him which was slightly different. He had had a haircut, yes, and he was losing a bit of weight. But there was something else.

Were his clothes slightly younger in style ?

“You look in good shape,” he said. “Have you started going to the gym?”

Gordon blushed. “As a matter of fact, I have. Nothing too strenuous, of course. A bit of weight training and those running machines – you know, the ones which make you sweat. I do about two hours a week.”

Matthew raised an eyebrow. “Do you go by yourself ?”

Gordon hesitated before he answered. “Actually,” he began,

“I have somebody who goes with me. She does aerobics and I do my running and pushing weights.”

Matthew said nothing for a moment. She. That would explain the change. He had found a girlfriend. “Good,” he said, after a while. “It’s nice to have company. Who is she, by the way?”

Gordon moved across the room. He continued the conversation as he leaned forward to examine a painting.

“Nice landscape this,” he said. “She’s called Janis. I met her a few months ago at the Barbours’. Remember them? They send their regards. Anyway, Janis was at a dinner party there and . . .

and, well, we hit it off. I’d like you to meet her.”

Matthew looked across the room. Why was it so hard to imagine one’s parents having an emotional life? There was no reason why this should be so, but it just was. And his father, of all people! What could any woman possibly see in him . . . apart from money, of course?

66

Second Flowering

“What does . . . what does Janis do?” he asked.

“She owns a flower shop,” said Gordon. “It’s a nice little business. People still buy flowers, you know. She says that flowers are all about guilt. Men buy flowers because they feel guilty about something. About neglecting their wives, about all that sort of thing . . .” He tailed off. And what about neglect of sons?

he thought. What about that?

Matthew listened to this information. A woman who owned a flower shop? There was nothing wrong with that, of course, but he could picture her – alone in her flower shop, amidst all those carnations and bunches of red roses, waiting for her chance. And along comes his father, with his GBP 11.2 million (or that was the figure that Matthew had last heard) and, well, it would be infinitely better, would it not, than selling flowers to guilty husbands. Gold-digger, he thought.

Gordon turned round from the painting he had been examining. “I’d like you to meet her,” he said. “How about dinner in the club this Friday? Would that suit?”

There was something almost pathetically eager in his tone that made Matthew regret what he had been thinking; more guilt, but this time the son’s rather than the father’s. There was so much guilt in Edinburgh, everywhere one turned. Everyone felt guilty about something. Guilt. Guilt.

“Yes,” said Matthew, guiltily. “I could be free. What time?”

“Seven-guilty,” said Gordon, and then rapidly correcting himself, “I mean seven-thirty.”

“Fine,” said Matthew. “I look forward to meeting . . .”

“Janis,” supplied his father. “With an is, not an ice. ”

Matthew wondered whether this made a difference. He had a very clear idea of what she would be like, however she spelled her name. Blonde hair. And sharp features. And a nose for money.

They moved on to other subjects. Gordon had recently sold off one of his businesses and told Matthew about what had happened to it in its new hands. Then he related developments at the golf club, where a new secretary had been appointed and had upset some of the members by unilaterally changing the Demographic Discussions

67

date of the annual dinner dance, a small thing perhaps, but a big thing for some.

And there was more of that sort of news, although Matthew paid even less attention to it than usual. He was wondering: what if I didn’t have my father behind me? What if somebody came along and took all that support away from me? How would I react to being done out of my inheritance? Badly, he thought.

21. Demographic Discussions

Pat came into the gallery to find Matthew at his desk, sunk in thought. She looked at her watch. “You’re in early,” she said brightly. Matthew looked up at her and mumbled a good-morning.

Since his father had left ten minutes earlier, he had been sitting at his desk thinking of the implications of Janis. It was possible – just possible – that she had no ulterior intent, that her interest in his father was emotional rather than pecuniary.

But was that likely? Matthew could not imagine that anybody could find his father attractive; indeed, he was a most un-romantic figure, with his thoughts of balance-sheets and the Watsonian Club and Rotary lunches. Could any woman find any of that interesting? Surely not. And yet, and yet . . . It was one of the constant surprises of this life, Matthew had found, that women found men attractive, against all the odds, and irrespective of the sort of man involved. The most appalling men had their partners, did they not, and these women often appeared to like them. There were so many examples of that, including people in the public eye. It was well-known, for instance, that psychopaths took rather well to the world of business and that modern business culture encouraged precisely that sort of personality. Some of these business moguls were often much sought after by women. Why? Because such men were cave-men, without their physical clubs, perhaps, but with 68

Demographic Discussions

the modern equivalent, and there were some women who simply found such men interesting.

And of course one had to remember – and Matthew did –

that there were many women whose condition was one of quiet desperation. There were many women who wanted a man and who simply could not find one, for demographic or other reasons. Such women will accept anybody who comes along and shows the remotest interest, even my father, thought Matthew.

He looked up at Pat. “Why are there so few men, do you think, Pat?”

He asked the question without thinking, and was immediately embarrassed. But Pat smiled at him, apparently unsurprised to be greeted this early in the morning with such a query.

“Well,” she said. “Are there so few men? Aren’t there roughly the same number – to begin with – and only a little bit later, when the men die off, does the number of women go up? Isn’t that the way it works?”

Matthew frowned. “That may be true,” he said. “That may be true in terms of strict numbers, but why is it that even before the point at which men start to die off, there do not seem to be enough men to . . . to go round? Isn’t that what women find?”

Pat thought about this for a moment. Matthew was probably right; there never seemed to be enough men to satisfy women. Now that sounded odd; she would not put it quite that way. There never seemed enough men to provide each woman who was looking for a man with a man. That was it.

Yes, Matthew was right. “Yes,” she said. “It’s not easy to find a boyfriend these days. I know plenty of people who would love to find a man, but can’t find one. We don’t know where they’ve gone. Disappeared.”

Matthew thought: you could look under your nose, you know.

What about me? But said nothing. Somehow, he suspected, he did not count in this particular reckoning.

“Why is it?” he said. “What’s happened?”

Pat thought that he must know; but Matthew had always struck her as being unworldly. Perhaps he was unaware.

Demographic Discussions

69

“Some men aren’t interested, Matthew,” she said. “You do realise that, don’t you?”

“Oh, I know about all that,” said Matthew. “But how many men are like that?”

Pat looked out of the window, as if to assess the passers-by.

“Quite a lot,” she said. “It depends where you are, of course.

Edinburgh’s more like that than Auchtermuchty, you know. And San Francisco is more like that than Kansas City. Ten per cent?”

“Well, that leaves ninety per cent.”

Pat shook her head. There had been a major change in social possibilities for men. They had been trapped, too, by the very structures that had trapped women, and now they had been freed of those and were enjoying that freedom. “No, it doesn’t,” she said. “Of those ninety per cent, a very large percentage now aren’t interested not because they’re not interested – so to speak

– but because they’re perfectly happy by themselves. Women clutter their lives. They don’t need women any more. There are maybe . . .” She plucked a figure out of the air . . . “Twenty per cent of men who think that they’re better off by themselves. So if you add the ten per cent who aren’t available anyway, that means thirty per cent who are out of it, so to speak.”

70

Chow

Matthew thought about this. “But surely there will be the same number of women who drop out too? There’ll be women who don’t like men and women who may like men but who don’t want any involvement with them. So surely these two cancel one another out, and you end up with two equal groups?”

Pat was sure that this was wrong. The objection to Matthew’s theory, at least from her point of view, was that she had not met many women who would prefer to be by themselves rather than with a man, if a suitable man came along. But that, of course, meant nothing – and she was intelligent enough to see it. One should not generalise from one’s own experience, because one’s own experience was coloured by one’s own initial assumptions and perspective. If you like men, then you’ll end up in the company of those who like men too, and then you reach the conclusion that the whole world likes men. And that clearly was not true.

She sat down, facing Matthew. She was puzzled. “Why are you asking about all this?”

“It’s because my father seems to have found a girlfriend,” he said glumly. “And I don’t know what she sees in him.”

Pat had met Matthew’s father on a previous visit he had paid to the gallery. “But your father’s very nice,” she said. She paused, before adding: “And tremendously rich.”

22. Chow

“Now tell me, Bertie,” said Dr Fairbairn, straightening the crease of his trousers as he crossed his knees. “Tell me: have you written your dreams down in that little notebook I gave you?” Bertie did not cross his legs. He was unsure about Dr Fairbairn, and he wanted to be ready to leap to his feet if the psychotherapist became more than usually bizarre in his state-ments. The best escape route, Bertie had decided, would be to dart round the side of his desk, leap over the psychotherapist’s leather-padded couch, and burst through the door that led into Chow

71

the waiting room. From there he could launch himself down the stairs, sliding down the banister, if need be, and run out into the safety of the street. No doubt somebody would call the police and Dr Fairbairn would be led off to Carstairs, which Bertie understood to be the place where people of this sort sometimes ended up. They would take good care of him there, as the doctors would all be friends of his and would perhaps allow him to play golf in the hospital grounds while he was getting better.

He looked at Dr Fairbairn. He noticed that the tie which the psychotherapist frequently wore – the one with the teddy-bear motif – was missing, and that in its place there was a dark silk tie with a question-mark motif. Why would Dr Fairbairn have a question-mark on his tie? Bertie was intrigued.

“Yes, I’ve written down my dreams,” said Bertie. “But can you tell me, Dr Fairbairn: why have you got those question-marks on your tie?”

Dr Fairbairn laughed. “You’re always very observant about what I’m wearing, Bertie. Why do you think this is?”

“Because I can see your tie,” said Bertie. “I have to look at you when I talk to you and I see what you’re wearing.”

Dr Fairbairn stared at Bertie. “You’re not jealous, are you, Bertie? You’re not jealous of my tie, are you?”

Bertie drew a deep breath. Why should he think that he should be jealous, when he already had a tie at home? “No, I’m not jealous,” he said. “I just wondered.”

Dr Fairbairn nodded. “You wouldn’t by any chance have thought of cutting my tie off ? Have you thought that about your father’s ties?”

Bertie’s eyes narrowed. Would they let Dr Fairbairn wear a tie in Carstairs? he wondered. Or would they take it away from him? Would they cut if off ? Dr Fairbairn was always going on about other people’s anxieties that things would be cut off; well, it would teach him a lesson if somebody came and cut his own tie off. That would serve him right.

“I’ve never wanted to do that,” he said quietly. “I like Daddy’s ties. He’s a got a tartan one that he sometimes wears with his kilt.”

72

Chow

The mention of a kilt seemed to interest Dr Fairbairn, who wrote something down on his pad of paper. The psychotherapist opened his mouth to speak, but Bertie was too quick for him. “My dream,” he said, fishing into his pocket for the notebook he had been given. “We mustn’t forget my dream.”

Dr Fairbairn smiled. “Of course,” he said. “Why don’t you tell me all about it? I’m very interested in your dreams, Bertie.

Dreams are very important, you know.”

Bertie opened the notebook. He did not think that dreams were important. In fact, he thought that dreams were silly, and hardly worth remembering at all. Indeed, he had been quite unable to remember many dreams recently and had been obliged to resort to a dream he had experienced some months ago, so as to humour Dr Fairbairn.

Dr Fairbairn stared at Bertie. What a strange little boy this was – only six years old, and how determined, how astonishingly determined he was to suppress the Oedipal urge. It would come out, of course, but it might take some time, and dream analysis could help. All would be revealed. There would be father figures galore in this dream; just wait and see!

“I was on a train,” read Bertie. “I was on a train and the train was going through the countryside. There were fields on either side of it and there were people standing in the fields waving to us as we went past.”

“Were these people men or women?” asked Dr Fairbairn gently, his pencil moving quickly across the paper. They would be men, of course: fathers . . . watching, scrutinising.

“Girls,” said Bertie. “Girls with wide-brimmed hats. All of them were girls.”

Dr Fairbairn nodded. “I see,” he said. “Girls.” Waving goodbye to girls? To mother, of course; that was mother in the field, being left behind by the masculine train.

“Yes,” said Bertie. “Should I go on, Dr Fairbairn?”

“Of course.”

“I looked out of the window of the train and then I went back into the compartment. It was an old train, and there were separate compartments, with wood panels on the walls. I sat Chow

73

there for a while, and then I got up and went out into the corridor. It was a long corridor and I began to walk down it, looking into the other compartments as I went along.”

“And who was in the compartments?” asked Dr Fairbairn.

“Was your father there?”

“No,” said Bertie. “I did not see my father. He must have been in his office – at the Scottish Executive. No, I did not recognise anybody on the train. They were all strangers.

Strangers and dogs.”

“Dogs?” interrupted Dr Fairbairn. “How interesting!”

“One of the dogs was a big furry dog. He looked at me and barked.”

Bertie looked at Dr Fairbairn, who had stopped writing when he mentioned the dog and who was staring at him in a very strange way. He wondered whether the time had come to make his escape, but the psychotherapist did not move. Dr Fairbairn was thinking about the dog. A large furry dog could only be one thing . . . a chow. And that, as every follower of Vienna was only too aware, was precisely the breed of dog owned by Sigmund Freud. Already the title of a paper was forming in his mind: Echoes of the Freudian Chow: nocturnal symbols and a six-year-old boy.

“Chow,” said Dr Fairbairn quietly.

Bertie looked up sharply. This must be a signal.

“Ciao,” he said quickly, and rose to his feet.

For a moment, Dr Fairbairn looked puzzled, but then he glanced at his watch and nodded to Bertie. He wanted to speak to Irene, and there would be ten minutes or so before his next patient arrived.

“Ask Mummy to come in for a moment,” he said to Bertie.

“You don’t mind waiting in the waiting room, do you?”

Bertie did, but did not say it. There was no point. There was nothing he could do to make his life more as he wanted it to be. His life was so limited, so small in its room. Waiting.

Listening. Being lectured to. Told to write his dreams down.

Taken to the floatarium. Forced to learn Italian. And there were years of this ahead of him – year upon endless year.

74

Chapter title

23. An Astonishing Revelation Is Almost Made Bertie sat quietly in the waiting room, paging through a magazine. He hated it when his mother went in for what she described as her “few quick words” with Dr Fairbairn. To begin with, it would be more than a few words, and they were never quick –

she would be ages, he thought – and then he knew that they were discussing him, and he resented that.

Dr Fairbairn had promised him that he would not tell his mother about that list he had made him write down, but Bertie was sure that he would do just that, and would in all prob-ability show it to her too. Dr Fairbairn was simply too unstable to be trusted, Bertie thought, and it astonished him that nobody had yet noticed just how dangerous he was. They would find out one of these days, of course, when Dr Fairbairn finally attacked one of his patients, and then he would be able to say that he had seen it all along. But until then nobody would listen to him.

Bertie turned the pages of his magazine, an old copy of Scottish Field. He liked this magazine, because it had pictures of people fishing and advertisements for waterproof clothing, for fishing tackle, and for multi-bladed penknives. Bertie had seen an article on how to tie a fly, and had been fascinated by what he had read. He could try that, perhaps, if only somebody would teach him – which of course they never would. He imagined that that was the sort of thing one learned at Watson’s, with boys like Jock; and what fun it would be to cut up the little bits of feather and then tie them together to resemble a fly. That would be far more fun than cutting up old copies of the Guardian to make chains of paper men.

Bertie found himself perusing the social section, at the end of the magazine. He studied the pictures carefully. The life depicted there looked such fun. There had been a vintage-car rally, and a party afterwards, and the people were standing about their old cars, drinking glasses of champagne, their motoring glasses pushed over the brow of their heads. They were handsome, exciting-looking people, and the cars were so beautiful; An Astonishing Revelation Is Almost Made 75

unlike our car, thought Bertie – and we don’t even know where our car is parked.

He stared at the people in the photograph. A tall man was smiling at the camera – that was Mr Roddy Martine, it said underneath. It would be wonderful to be as tall as that, thought Bertie. Nobody would try to push Mr Roddy Martine over, thought Bertie; they wouldn’t dare. And next to him was a kind-looking man with a moustache – Mr Charlie Maclean, it said.

He was holding a fishing rod and smiling. What fun they were all having, thought Bertie. At least there are some people in Scotland who can have some fun. Perhaps Mr Charlie Maclean had a son, he thought, and I could meet him and he could be my friend, as Jock so nearly was. There was no photograph of Dr Fairbairn, Bertie observed, nor one of anybody he knew.

Even Mr Dalyell, that nice man he had met in Valvona and Crolla, was not pictured here. Bertie sighed.

Inside the consulting room, Irene sat in the chair so recently vacated by Bertie. She looked at Dr Fairbairn and noticed his tie. She always noticed his clothes – the lightweight blue linen jacket, perfectly pressed in spite of linen being such a difficult material. And the tie, with its enigmatic decoration; of course that was just right: life was a quest, and why should ties not reflect the fact?

“Linen’s so difficult,” she said. “How on earth do you manage to keep your jacket so uncrumpled? Linen defeats me.”

Dr Fairbairn smiled; a modest smile, thought Irene. There was nothing triumphalist about Dr Fairbairn, even if he had the insights.

“This is a mixture, actually,” said the psychotherapist. “It’s mostly linen, but they’ve added an artificial fibre – just a little.

It makes all the difference. I hardly have to iron this jacket.”

“I must get the details,” said Irene. “I have a linen top which looks just like Auden’s face.”

“After the geological catastrophe?” asked Dr Fairbairn. “Or before?”

This was a very clever reference – in fact, both of these were very clever references, and they both allowed themselves a small 76

An Astonishing Revelation Is Almost Made smile of satisfaction. Auden had referred to the sudden deep lining of his features – caused by a skin condition – as a geological catastrophe. Few people knew this, of course, but they did.

“He might have written In Praise of Linen, ” went on Dr Fairbairn. “If it form the one material . . .”

“Which we, the inconstant ones . . .” supplied Irene.

“It is chiefly because it is difficult to iron,” ended Dr Fairbairn, with a flourish.

They both giggled. Irene looked down at Dr Fairbairn’s houndstooth trousers – such a discreet check, she thought – and at his highly-polished shoes.

“You take such trouble with your clothing,” she said. “So few Scotsmen do.” She paused. “But I suppose we should talk about Bertie.”

“Yes,” said Dr Fairbairn, frowning slightly. “We did a bit of dream work today. Made a start on it at least.”

“He never says anything about his dreams,” said Irene. “He’s gone quite silent on me, in fact. It’s almost as if my little boy has become a stranger.”

Dr Fairbairn nodded. “You must expect that.” He paused.

“Any signs of further obsessional behaviour?”

Irene looked up at the ceiling. There had been nothing quite as bad as the setting fire to Stuart’s Guardian, but there certainly had been little things. There had been deliberate mistakes with Italian verbs (a mixing up of past participles, for example), and there had been reluctance, marked reluctance, to practise his scales for his grade seven saxophone examination. But apart from that, there had been very little one could put one’s finger on.

Dr Fairbairn waited for Irene to say something, but she was silent. “Of course, Bertie could be affected by tensions within the home – if there are any. Do you mind if I ask you about that? Do you mind?”

Irene looked down at the floor. “Of course, you can ask,” she said. “And the answer that I’d give you would be this. Yes. There are tensions, but they’re not my fault. It’s not my fault that I’m bored. Yes, I’m bored. I feel like a wretched Madame Bovary.

I’m trapped, and my only way out, my only way out to a life Bruce Meets a Friend

77

that is bigger, and more exciting, is through my little boy. My little boy who will grow up to be everything that his father is not. I am determined on that, Dr Fairbairn, I really am.”

Dr Fairbairn waited for her to finish. Her voice had risen; now it subsided, and she sat quite mute, as though exhausted by the dangerous intimacy of the confession.

“I’m trapped too,” he said very quietly. “And you know, I’ve got something to confess to you.”

Irene looked up sharply. “What is that?” she whispered.

“The time’s not right,” said Dr Fairbairn. “Perhaps later.”

24. Bruce Meets a Friend

Now that he had time on his hands, Bruce tended to stay in bed until well after eleven in the morning. He had never been keen on getting up early, in spite of having been brought up in an early-rising household, and now that he did not have to get in by nine to the offices of Macauley Holmes Richardson Black he was making the most of the opportunity to lie in bed, drifting between sleep and a delicious state of semi-wakefulness.

It was a time to think, or, rather, to dream; to luxuriate in fantasy – with thoughts of the ideal date, for example; or the car one would purchase if money were no object. The ideal date would be something like Sally – no, he would not think of her again, that stuck-up American girl who had the gall (and bad judgment) to tell him that she did not want to see him again.

How dare she! Who did she think she was, telling him that she didn’t want him to go over to Nantucket with her? And as for Nantucket – who had even heard of the place; some remote island with a thin beach and cold water? What made her think for even a moment that he really wanted to go there, rather than being prepared to accompany her as a gesture to her sense of disappointment over their impending separation?

It hardly did to think of all this, and Bruce, turning over crossly in his bed, tried to think of something else. There were 78

Bruce Meets a Friend

plenty of other girls waiting for him, positively counting the minutes before he would say something to them, give them some sign of favour.

That morning he stayed in bed until twelve. Then, lazily swinging his legs over the side of the bed, allowing himself just the quickest of glances at the full-length mirror at the other end of the room, he dressed himself slowly – a pair of jeans, a rugby shirt, slip-on brown shoes. Then there was hair gel to apply and a quick shave in front of another mirror, one that enlarged the face. He stroked his chin, applying a small amount of sandalwood cologne. There was no sign of ageing, he thought; no wrinkles –

yet – no sagging. Some people began to age in their twenties, or even before; not me, thought Bruce. I do not sag. Pas moi!

He left the flat, bounding down the common stairway two steps at a time, his footsteps echoing against the walls. Then out on to the street and a quick walk uphill and around the corner to the Cumberland Bar, where George Salter was waiting for him.

They shook hands. “Long time,” said George.

Bruce nodded. He liked George, whom he had known since Crieff days. They were an unlikely pair, in many respects; George, who was much shorter than Bruce, with fair, close-cropped hair and a slight chubbiness, lacked Bruce’s dress sense and feeling for the cool. His clothes, which always seemed slightly too tight for him, would never have been worn by Bruce; poor George, thought Bruce, with amusement; he really doesn’t get it.

For all his failure to keep up with Bruce, George admired his old friend immensely. At school, he had worshipped him, to be rewarded with the occasional invitation and the general sense of privilege that went with being associated with somebody such as Bruce. He would have liked to have been as confident as Bruce was; to have had his flair; to have been able to talk like him – which I shall never be able to do, he concluded miserably, simply because I’m not clever enough. Bruce is clever.

George bought Bruce a drink and they made their way to a table.

“I hear you’ve resigned,” said George. “Fed up?”

Bruce Meets a Friend

79

Bruce looked carelessly at the door. “Absolutely,” he said. “I was bored out of my skin. It was the same thing every day, that job. Sheer tedium.” He paused, and took a sip of his pint of Guinness. “Of course, they begged me to stay.”

“Offered more money?”

“That sort of thing,” said Bruce. “But no deal.”

George smiled ruefully. “I admire your determination,” he said. “Last time I was offered more money to stay, I accepted it like a shot.”

Bruce looked at his friend. Would anybody seriously have offered George money to stay? It seemed a somewhat unlikely claim.

“So what now?” asked George. “Are you looking around?”

“I’ve got a few irons in the fire,” Bruce said casually. “One, in particular. The wine business.”

George’s expression revealed that he was impressed. Bruce would be an ideal wine dealer in his view. He looked the part.

Bruce inspected his fingernails. “Yes,” he went on. “It’s an interesting business, one way and another. You have to know what you’re doing, but I’ve got the basics and can pick up the rest as I go along. I thought that I might do the MW course.”

George was enthusiastic. “Great idea. You’d have no difficulty with that. You’d walk it. Remember how easy you found Higher Physics.”

“Maybe,” said Bruce. “It’s not in the bag yet, though.”

There was a silence, during which Bruce glanced at George once or twice. An idea was forming in his mind. It was strange, he thought, that it had not occurred to him before, but it was really very obvious once one began to think of it. George, for all his shortcomings, had one major asset. He had capital.

“Are you interested in wine?” Bruce asked.

“Very,” said George. “I don’t know as much about it as you do, of course. But I like it. Sure.”

Bruce thought quickly. If he had some capital at his disposal, then he would not have to look for a job in the wine trade: he could make his own job. He could take a lease on a shop somewhere in the New Town and start from there. Wine was 80

Agreement Is Reached

expensive, and one would need . . . what? One hundred thousand to start with?

He picked up his glass and tipped it back to drain the dregs of the Guinness.

“Let me buy you a drink,” he said to George. “And then I want to tell you about a scheme I’ve just thought up. And it involves you!”

George looked up at his friend with frank admiration. He had always wanted to be Bruce, but never could be; a silly, irrational desire.

“Great,” he said. “Me? Great.”

25. Agreement Is Reached

“All right,” said Bruce. “This is the deal.”

George smiled at him. “Go ahead.”

“You’ve got some capital, haven’t you?” Bruce said. “I don’t know what you’ve done with it, of course. But I assume that it’s reasonably intact.”

George shrugged. “Reasonably,” he said. “The market’s taken a hit, but I was never very keen on those dot-coms, and so I’m all right. Fairly safe stuff, I think.”

Bruce lowered his voice. “Do you mind my asking: who manages it?”

“Most of it is with a stockbroker over in Glasgow,” said George. “He moves it around.”

“Bonds?”

“Some,” said George. “Equities. A property fund. They say that you should spread the risk.”

Bruce laughed. “And they’re right,” he said, adding: “Except sometimes they’re so careful that you have no risk at all. They let things stagnate.”

George frowned. “Do you think . . . ?” He tailed off.

“Yes,” said Bruce. “I’m prepared to bet that you’re safe as the proverbial Banque d’Angleterre, but just as dull. Nothing’s ever Agreement Is Reached

81

going to happen to your capital. Pure stagnation, George, my friend.”

George looked at Bruce with his small, pale eyes. “But . . .”

“But if you look to see who’s really making money,” said Bruce,

“who’s really coining it in: it’s the venture capital people, that’s who.”

George took a sip of his beer. “I thought that they didn’t necessarily do so well. There’s risk there, isn’t there?”

Bruce exploded into laughter. “Didn’t do too well? Have you seen the return they get? Twenty, thirty per cent. Easy.” He paused. “Of course, some of their projects don’t come up with the readies when the time’s come to offload, but those are the exceptions. Believe me, I’ve seen it.”

George smiled weakly. “You make me seem very unadventurous.”

Bruce patted him on the shoulder. “Just a bit, George. Just a bit.” He paused. The moment was right, he judged, and he was confident that George would agree. “But listen, here’s the plan. I’m prepared to cut you in on my wine business in return for an investment from you. We’ll split the profits down the middle, but you needn’t lift a finger. I’ll run the business. I’ll do the work. You . . . you’re the venture capitalist. This is your chance to get a piece of the action.”

He watched for George’s reaction, which was slow in coming.

For a moment he wondered if he had been too quick to bring up the proposition, in which case he could merely give him time to think. George was not particularly quick on his feet – he had never been – and perhaps he would need time. But he would surely come round in the end, which should be in no more than an hour or so. In Bruce’s experience, George always came round to his suggestions.

George looked down at the table. “How much are you thinking of ?” he asked.

Bruce looked his friend in the eye. “We don’t want to be under-capitalised,” he said. “There’s nothing worse than starting a business at half-cock. If you do that, then you give the opposition a head start. I’ve seen under-capitalised businesses go under time and time again.”

82

Agreement Is Reached

“Have you?” asked George. “Which ones?”

“Too many to mention,” Bruce replied quickly. “Believe me.”

“So how much?” asked George.

“One . . .” Bruce faltered, and stopped. “Fifty thousand,” he said. “Fifty thousand will set us up as long as the lease is not too expensive. Do you think you could manage that?”

George puckered his lips. It was a weak, fleshy gesture, thought Bruce, but he controlled his irritation and smiled encouragingly at his friend.

“I suppose I could,” said George, hesitantly. “I could sell some bonds and switch the funds. It wouldn’t break the bank.”

Bruce chuckled with delight, leaning forward to pat his friend on the back. “You’ve just made the best decision of your financial life,” he said. “We’re going to be going places together, you and me.”

George moved his lips in a hesitant smile. “I hope so.”

Over the next hour, Bruce outlined his plans. They were still in an incipient state, but they gathered flesh as he went along.

He knew of a suitable shop, as it happened. He had surveyed it for the firm and the lease had then fallen through. He would Agreement Is Reached

83

be able to get it from the landlord for a reasonable rate if they moved quickly. And then there was the stock. That he could get from the wholesalers, although he would probably have to go and buy some of it himself from the growers. That would be fun, and he could take George along too, although . . .

perhaps not. George was slightly heavy-going – although very generous, it had to be admitted, and a most loyal friend – and a trip to Bordeaux would hardly be improved by his tagging along.

George suddenly smiled. “We could go and buy the wine together,” he said brightly. “You and me. We could fly to Bordeaux and then hire a car and drive round the vineyards, sampling the product. That would be great.”

“Yes,” said Bruce. “We might do that. Although we wouldn’t be able to leave the business too long, you know. Maybe it would be best to order from wholesalers.”

“You’re the expert,” said George.

Later, back in the flat, Bruce sat in his chair and contemplated what he had done. After George’s agreement, which had really been given remarkably promptly, it had occurred to him that he should perhaps have given his friend some time to mull over his proposal – perhaps a day or two. He also wondered whether it was quite right to spring the suggestion on him in the Cumberland Bar, in a social setting. But he quickly disposed of these objections. George was a responsible adult – even if a slightly malleable one – and he had given his agreement voluntarily. And the proposition itself was not a bad one. It was not as if he were asking him to invest in some highly speculative mining shares; quite the contrary. He was offering him a stake in a business, with stock, and premises, and, what was most important of all, expertise. There was no substitute for expertise; that was the real capital of a business and their venture would have it in abundance.

And then there was the question of the name. Anderson would have to come into it, of course, and Salter too, in recognition of the source of the capital. Anderson and Salter, Vintners. That sounded good. But Bruce had a better idea, and the mere thought 84

Bertie’s Idea

of it thrilled him: Anderson et Salter, Vinotheque. Brilliant!

thought Bruce. World beating!

26. Bertie’s Idea

While Bruce and George were having their meeting in the Cumberland Bar, during which they sealed the terms of their forthcoming partnership agreement, Bertie and his mother were in a George Street clothing shop. Bertie needed new socks, Irene had decided, as did Stuart. It was extraordinary how male socks migrated; virtually every wash produced a deficit of socks, but never of shirts or towels or indeed anything else. She had tried the expedient of securing each sock to its partner with a twist of thread, but this had simply resulted in the loss of two socks rather than one. It defied belief.

“Perhaps socks dissolve,” Bertie had suggested. “Or go down the plug hole.”

“Possibly,” said Irene. “But we must be rational, Bertie. These socks cannot disappear in the washing machine – they must get lost at some other stage in proceedings.”

“But then they’d turn up,” said Bertie. “And they don’t, do they?”

“We shall have to leave the issue for the time being,” Irene said firmly. “There is a rational explanation for everything, as you well know.”

“Except missing socks,” muttered Bertie.

Irene chose to ignore this last comment. One had to combat irrational, magical thinking in children, but there were times and places to do this, and this was neither. One also had to choose one’s issue, and the problem with missing socks was that the rational interpretation seemed quite inadequate. It was the sort of issue on which Arthur Koestler might have expressed a view, and perhaps had even done so, for all she knew.

Now, standing in a corner of Aitken and Niven in George Street, she surveyed the available socks. Stuart would get grey Bertie’s Idea

85

socks, as usual, as they seemed to suit him so well, while Bertie would get a couple of pairs of dark green ones – if they had them in his size. She picked up the socks and began to examine them. Bertie, seeing his mother occupied, drifted off. He had spied a rugby ball which was displayed on the top of a low cabinet. It had been signed by several players and behind it, on a stretch frame, was a rugby shirt. All Blacks, the legend on the shirt said, and Bertie’s heart gave a leap. They were very famous, those All Blacks, and they performed a frightening ritual dance before they played. Bertie had seen that on television and had been struck by the fierceness of it all. It must be very intimidating to face the All Blacks at Murrayfield and see them dancing this frightening dance right in front of you. Would he be brave enough to stand up to it, he wondered, or would he run off the field and back into the dressing room? It would be entirely understandable if one did that, although the crowd would not like it at all. They would boo and jeer, Bertie thought, if half the Scottish rugby team ran off the field in the face of the war dance of the All Blacks.

Bertie’s gaze moved on from the rugby shirt. There was a framed photograph behind it, propped up against a stack of drawers in which various rugby garments were stored. He moved towards the photograph and stared more closely at it.

It was a photograph of a smiling man, and it was signed. Bertie read the signature: Gavin Hastings. He stood back and looked at the picture. He liked the look of Mr Hastings, who seemed to be gazing out at him in a kind way. It would be nice to know somebody like Mr Hastings, who might invite him to watch rugby with him or who might even toss a ball to him for him to catch. What fun it would be to play rugby with Mr Hastings.

Bertie turned away. His mother was still looking at socks, examining the labels in order to exclude any which contained nylon. It would take her a long time, thought Bertie; Irene was a slow shopper and liked to scrutinise everything very carefully before she bought it. This could have its difficulties. There had been more than one unseemly row with the local greengrocer 86

Bertie’s Idea

when he had asked her to stop squeezing the avocado pears to determine their ripeness. And the fishmonger had also objected when Irene had so shamelessly picked up his fish from the slab and smelled it very carefully, wrinkling her nose with disgust as she did so. Both of these occasions had embarrassed Bertie, in spite of his being used to her behaving in this fashion. It would be nice to have a normal mother, he had thought; but even normal mothers could be embarrassing to their children.

Bertie looked about him. He usually found shops rather boring, but this one, he decided, was fairly interesting. He looked at a rack of dinner suits, reaching out to feel the velvet, and behind that – what was that? – a row of kilt jackets in green tweed with buttons made of horn. Then Bertie saw a sign pointing into the next room, and stopped. School blazers, it said.

Glancing over his shoulder at his mother, Bertie made his way over to the few steps that led down into the next room. He moved forward slowly, and peered in the direction indicated by the sign. Yes, there they were! A whole row of Watson’s plum-coloured blazers, in all the sizes. Bertie approached the rack. He reached out to touch the sleeve of one of the blazers – one that would be about his size – and then, in a sudden rush of excitement, he slipped it off its hanger and began to put it on. He could hardly believe that he was doing this, and his breath came to him in short, excited gasps.

There was a full-length mirror nearby and Bertie turned sideways-on to get a glimpse of how he looked. He saw the reflection of the badge, that wonderful crest, and he smelled the new-wool smell of the fabric. It was a perfect fit, just perfect, and he looked so good in it – just like a real Watson’s boy. And it was while he was standing there, looking at himself in the mirror, that Bertie’s idea came to him. It was an idea that was quite simple, when one came to think of it, but of immense significance for Bertie. It was a bold plan, an astonishing plan, but there was no reason why it would not work. All one had to do was to be brave.

And then, from behind him, so unexpected as to make him start, a voice: “Well, young man. Well?”

Chapter title

87

27. Socks

Bertie looked up at the man who was standing behind him. It was one of the assistants, smartly dressed in a dark suit. He was peering at Bertie through half-moon glasses and his expression was bemused.

“Well, young man,” he said again. “Is that a good fit, do you think?”

Bertie glanced in the mirror again. “Yes,” he said nervously.

“I was just trying it on. I wasn’t going to steal it.”

The man laughed. “I didn’t for one moment think you were going to steal it,” he said. “Good heavens, no. I assumed that you were trying it on for size. And you say that it fits?”

Bertie unbuttoned the blazer and began to take it off. “It fits very well,” he said. “It’s very nice.”

“It’s a good brand, that one,” said the man, taking the blazer from Bertie and dusting it down before replacing it on the rack.

“Tell me, do you enjoy Watson’s?”

Bertie looked down at the floor. “I don’t go there,” he said sheepishly.

The man raised an eyebrow. “You don’t go there? But you were trying on the blazer . . .”

“I’d like to go there,” said Bertie. “I thought that I would see what it was like to wear a Watson’s blazer.”

The man adjusted his glasses. “I see,” he said. “Well, I suppose that’s fair enough. Where do you go to school?”

“Steiner’s,” said Bertie.

“A very good school,” said the man. “You’re lucky. We hear very good reports of it.”

“I know,” said Bertie. “It is very nice. But there’s no rugby . . .”

The man nodded. “I suppose if one wants rugby then one would need to find somewhere else. Are you very keen?”

Bertie nodded enthusiastically. “Very,” he said. “I’ve never had the chance to play, but I’d love to.” He paused. “Does Mr Hastings come in here?” he asked.

The man nodded. “Quite often. Do you know him?”

88

Socks

Bertie hesitated for a moment before replying. “Yes,” he said.

“I know him.”

He did not know why he said this. It was something to do with wanting to be something that he was not; something to do with wish-fulfilment; something to do with freedom.

“I’ll tell him about you next time he comes in,” said the man.

“What’s your name?”

Bertie hesitated again, and then replied: “Jock.”

“Well, Jock. Perhaps you’d better go over there to see your mother. Look, she must be wondering where you are.”

Bertie saw Irene picking up a sock and scrutinising it. She caught his eye and beckoned him over. The man came with him.

“Can I advise you on those?” he asked. “Are they for Jock?”

Bertie froze. Then, leaning forward very quickly, he snatched the sock from his mother.

“I like this sock,” he blustered. “I like it very much.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Irene. “That sock is Daddy’s size.

You need something much smaller.”

The man indicated to a drawer. “We have a good selection of boys’ socks here,” he said. “We should be able to find something suitable for Jock.”

Irene looked puzzled. “For Jock?” she asked.

“Yes,” said the man, pointing to Bertie.

Again Bertie acted quickly. “He said for sock,” he said to his mother. “Sock, not Jock.”

The man smiled. “Does Jock need socks or not?” he asked patiently.

“I have no idea,” said Irene. “I would, however, like socks for Bertie here, if you have something suitable.”

The man looked at Bertie. “I thought you said your name was Jock,” he said.

Irene frowned, and looked down at Bertie. “Did you, Bertie?

Why did you say you were called Jock?”

Bertie looked down at the floor. “It was a mistake,” he said.

Irene turned to the man. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Young boys can be very fanciful.”

“No matter,” said the man. “Perhaps he’d like to be called Socks

89

Jock. I remember wanting to be called Joe when I was a little boy. I wrote the name Joe in all my books.”

Irene appeared to lose interest in this conversation and returned to the subject of socks. Bertie, feeling miserable, stood by while the adults talked. The blazer had been wonderful; such a smart garment, and it fitted him so well. His plan depended on that blazer, but it would not be easy to get hold of it. When he had tried it on, he had looked at the price ticket and had made a mental note of what it cost. It was a lot of money, of course, but Bertie had been prudent. Every birthday, when he had received a present from his aunt in Jedburgh, he had put the money into his savings account at the bank. This sum now stood at over one hundred and eighty pounds, and it would easily cover the cost of the blazer. But how would he be able to buy it? He was never allowed to come into town on his own, and his mother would surely notice it if, on their next visit to George Street, Bertie darted into Aitken and Niven and came out with a large parcel. No, he would have to get somebody else to draw the money from his account and then go up to George Street and buy it for him. But who?

On the way back down the hill, Bertie was deep in thought, as was Irene. She was wondering why Bertie should have chosen to call himself Jock. It was such a strange thing to do, and she would have to report it to Dr Fairbairn in advance of Bertie’s next psychotherapy session. The thought occurred to her that Bertie was possibly suffering from a dissociative condition in which multiple personalities were beginning to manifest their presence. Jock could be one of these personae. She looked down at Bertie, who was staring at the pavement as he walked along.

Was he avoiding the lines again? she wondered.

Bertie looked up and smiled, as if he had suddenly worked out the answer to a recalcitrant problem. And indeed he had.

He had remembered the boy round the corner, Paddy, the one who lived on Fettes Row and who went fishing in the Pentlands.

He was allowed to walk around the streets in freedom with his friends. Bertie would ask him. He would give him his card and ask him to withdraw the money from the bank machine. Then 90

Lonely Tonight

Paddy could go up to George Street, buy the blazer for Bertie, and deliver it in secret.

Irene noticed Bertie’s expression and frowned. “What are you thinking about, Bertie, dear?” she asked.

And Bertie gave that answer with which all parents are so wearily familiar. “Nothing,” he said.

28. Lonely Tonight

At the end of work that day, Matthew had asked Pat whether she would be interested in going to a film at the Film Theatre in Lothian Road.

“The crowd’s going,” he said.

Pat had heard of the crowd, and was vaguely interested in meeting them. The fact that the invitation was from Matthew was potentially problematic, as there was no possibility of a romantic association between them and she did not want to encourage any false hopes on his part. And yet there was no reason to avoid all social contact with him, particularly if there were to be other people there. So she agreed.

“What’s the film?” she asked.

“Something Italian,” Matthew said. “Do you like Italian films?”