44 Scotland Street (24 page)

Laden with prizes, the party began to break up. The Ramsey Dunbartons’ taxi arrived to take them the short distance back to Morningside Drive and Bruce telephoned for a cab back to Scotland Street. Then he remembered the underpants. He had intended to slip into them earlier on, but had almost forgotten his state of undress. Now, as he remembered that the pants were in his sporran, it occurred to him that the simplest way of returning them to their owner would be to put them in the pocket of Todd’s coat, which he knew had been hung in the cloakroom on the ground floor.

Making his excuses, Bruce left the small knot of guests around the table and made his way to the cloakroom. There, as he had expected, was Todd’s black Crombie coat with its velvet collar. Bruce crossed the room quickly, extracting the underpants from his sporran as he did so. Then, fumbling in the folds of the coat, he slipped the pants into the right-hand pocket.

“Did you enjoy yourself?”

It was Todd, standing at the door.

“That’s my coat,” said Todd. “Yours is over there, isn’t it?”

Bruce laughed nervously. “I must have had too much to drink,” he said. “So it is!”

He moved over towards his coat and took it off the hook. Then he turned and looked at Todd, who was watching him suspiciously. As he put on his coat, he felt Todd’s eyes remain on him. It was very disconcerting. Bruce was used to being looked at – in an admiring way – but this was different.

61. Bertie Begins Therapy

For Irene Pollock, the mother of that most talented five-yearold, Bertie, the decision to seek advice from the Scottish Institute of Human Relations was an entirely appropriate response to a trying set of circumstances. Bertie’s sudden outburst at the Floatarium – when he had so unexpectedly declared his opposition to speaking Italian and learning the saxophone – had been only the first sign of a worryingly rebellious attitude. Although it was difficult to put a finger on any particular incident or comment (other than his extraordinary behaviour at the Floatarium, which followed hard on the heels of the graffiti incident) there was no doubt that he was less co-operative than he used to be. An indication of this attitude was his subtle abandonment of the first names which he had been encouraged to use when addressing his parents;
Irene
and
Stuart
had come so naturally to him, and seemed so right; now it was
Mummy
and
Daddy
– terms which were acceptable when used by Irene or Stuart themselves, but which seemed disturbingly hierarchical – even reactionary – when uttered by Bertie.

And then there had been a shift in attitude towards his room. One afternoon she had gone into his room – which she called his
space
– to discover Bertie standing in the middle of his rug, staring disconsolately at the walls. He had not said anything at first, but she had formed the distinct impression that he was thinking about the colour – a reassuring pink – and might even have been imagining the walls in another colour.

“You’re very lucky to have a space like this,” said Irene, pre-emptively. “You really are.”

Bertie looked at her briefly, almost in reproach, and had then turned away. “Other boys have different spaces,” he said. “They have trains and things.”

“Other boys are not as lucky as you are,” Irene countered. “Other boys are forced into moulds, you know. Forced to play football, for example. Horrid things like that. Do you understand what I mean? We’re giving you something very different, Bertie. We’re giving you the gift of freedom from gender roles.”

“Trains are free,” muttered Bertie.

Irene struggled to contain her frustration. It was not easy, but she succeeded. “Are they?” she asked gently. “Why are trains free, Bertie? Why do you say that?”

Bertie sighed. “Trains go out into the night. Remember Mr Auden’s poem, Mummy, the one you read to me once.
This is
the night mail crossing the border/ Bringing the cheque and the postal
order
.”

Irene nodded. She had given him W.H. Auden rather than A.A. Milne in the belief that the insights of Auden would be infinitely better for him than middle-class juvenile nonsense about being halfway up the stairs or changing the guard at Buckingham Palace and all the rest.

“I could read you more Auden, if you like,” she said. “There’s that lovely poem about …”

“
Streams
,” interrupted Bertie. “I’d like the poem about streams because he talks about two baby locomotives, remember it? He says the god of mortal doting is pulled over the lawn by two baby locomotives.”

Irene stared at Bertie. Where on earth did this obsession with trains come from? Neither she nor Stuart talked about trains very much, if ever, and yet he seemed to think of nothing else. She closed her eyes for a moment and imagined herself arriving at Waverley Station at some time in the future, say ten years from now. And there, standing on the platform, notebook in hand, wearing a blue anorak, would be Bertie, trainspotting, in the company of several other Aspergeresque youths.

She left the room, the space, quietly. If there was nothing that could be done about it, then this retreat of Bertie into a rejection of everything she and Stuart stood for would be a bitter pill to swallow. But there was something they could do – there was a great deal
she
could do. Therapy – solid, Kleinian therapy – would move Bertie through this dangerous period; therapy would deal with the envy and the other ego issues which were causing this flowering of hate and negativity. And then all would be well. Even if the therapy were to take a year – and she well understood how slow analysis could be – there would still be plenty of time to have Bertie’s ego development sorted out by the time he was due to begin at the Rudolf Steiner School. All that was required was love and patience; the love of a parent who knew that it was only too easy to become a harsh figure, and the patience of one who understood that bad behaviour was merely the product of frustrated longing for that which one wanted to love. Bertie wanted to love the Italian language and the saxophone; in his heart of hearts he associated those with that fundamental object of affection, the good breast, and he would return to a more fulfilling relationship with these things, the things of the mind and the soul, once he had resolved his Oedipal issues.

And so it was that Irene dressed Bertie in his best OshKosh dungarees and set off for an appointment with Dr Hugo Fairbairn at the Institute. They had time on their hands, and they took a circuitous route, walking along Abercromby Place so that they might look down into the gardens.

“Look, Bertie,” said Irene, pointing to a shrub that was displaying a riot of blossom. “Look at the little flowers on that bush.”

Bertie looked down, and then turned away sharply. “Mahonia,” he said. “I hate mahonia. I hate flowers.”

Irene caught her breath. There was no doubt but that this visit to the therapist was coming not a moment too soon.

62. The Rucksack of Guilt

Dr Hugo Fairbairn was unrelated to the distinguished psychoanalyst Ronald Fairbairn, whose colourful son, the late Nicholas Fairbairn, had so enlivened the Scottish firmament with his surprising remarks and invigorating attitudes. Not many people now knew about Fairbairn père, but his name still counted for something in the history of the psychoanalytical movement, along with names such as Winnicott, Ferenczi, and, of course, Klein. For Hugo Fairbairn, the name was something of a professional asset, as others would make the false assumption of relationship and assume that he was too modest to mention it. This gave him authority in the psychoanalytical movement – with its dynastic tendencies – and had undoubtedly helped him in establishing his practice. Aided by his name, his rise to eminence had been rapid; he had appeared on conference platforms at the Tavistock, and had been referred to in several articles in
The Analytical Review
. In due course, his elegantly-written case-history,
Shattered to Pieces: Ego Dissolution in a Threeyearold Tyrant
, had become something of a classic. Indeed, one reviewer had gone so far as to suggest that Fairbairn’s threeyear-old tyrant, Wee Fraser, might be heading for the same sort of immortality as that famous patient whose analysis was written up by Freud – Little Hans, who had feared that the Viennese dray horses might bite him. This, of course, was a grossly inflated claim – no case, ever, anywhere, could be as important as those upon which Freud himself had pronounced – but it was still true that there were some very interesting aspects of Wee Fraser’s troubled psyche. This boy had none of Hans’s neurotic dreads – and that was what made him so interesting. Rather than fear that he might be bitten, Wee Fraser had himself bitten a number of others, including a Liberal Democratic councillor who had called at the door and Dr Fairbairn himself, thus eliciting that famous line in the case history: “The young patient then attempted the oral incorporation of the analyst.”

Irene, of course, had heard of Dr Fairbairn, and had attended a lecture which he had given on Wee Fraser at the Royal Scottish Museum. She had every confidence in him and in his ability to get to the heart of Bertie’s malaise, and she secretly entertained thoughts of Bertie in due course appearing in the psychoanalytical literature.
A Remarkably Talented Boy and his Problems in Adjusting to a Mediocre
Society
. That would be a possible title; and the text itself would be extremely interesting. There would have to be, of course, a complete exposure of Christabel Macfadzean and her lack of understanding of Bertie (and children in general). She, poor woman, would stand for the essential poverty of the bourgeois imagination, a cipher for everything that was wrong with Edinburgh itself.

She allowed herself the luxury of these thoughts as they completed their journey, Bertie trailing slightly behind her, hands in his pockets, still, she noticed, trying to avoid standing on the cracks.

“Where are we going anyway?” muttered Bertie.

“We’re going for therapy,” said Irene. She had never concealed anything from Bertie and this, of all occasions, was one on which a frank explanation was required.

“What happens at therapy?” asked Bertie, a note of anxiety now entering his voice. “Do other boys have therapy? Will there be other boys there?”

“Of course other boys have therapy,” said Irene, reassuringly. “You may not see other boys, but they do go there. Lots of boys have therapy.”

Bertie thought for a moment. “Am I having therapy because I’m suspended?” he asked.

Irene frowned. “Your suspension from nursery was a nonsense,” she said. “You mustn’t feel that you have been suspended at all. Just ignore it.”

“But am I suspended?” asked Bertie. “Like a cancelled train? Am I cancelled?”

“No,” said Irene, gritting her teeth at the persistent, worrying train references. “That woman tried to suspend you, but I withdrew you before she could do so. You can’t be suspended if you’re withdrawn.” She paused. They were now standing outside the entrance to the Institute, and it was time to go in.

“We can talk about all that later on,” she said. “Now we must go in and meet Dr Fairbairn. I’m sure that you’ll like him.” And there was certainly nothing forbidding in Dr Fairbairn’s manner when the two of them were shown into his consulting room. He was dressed in a loose-fitting cord jacket and a pair of slightly rumpled charcoal slacks. He greeted them warmly, bending down to shake hands with Bertie and addressing Irene formally as Mrs Pollock.

Irene knew that she would like him. She usually made snap judgments of people – it had taken her no more than a few minutes to get the measure of Christabel Macfadzean, for example – and she seldom revised her opinions after she had formed them. People were, in her experience, either possible or impossible. Hugo Fairbairn was clearly possible, and she would have judged him so even had she been unaware of his background and his writings.

Dr Fairbairn gestured to a small circle of easy chairs at one side of the room. “Let’s sit down,” he said, smiling at Bertie as he spoke. “Then we can have a little chat.”

They took their places and Irene glanced at Dr Fairbairn. In spite of her interest in these matters, she had never actually consulted a psychotherapist before (analysis was ruinously expensive, Stuart had pointed out; the cost of a mortgage, more or less). If she had been able to afford it, Irene would have shown no hesitation in undergoing analysis, not that she had any
issues
to resolve – there was nothing wrong with her, in her view – but the whole process of discovery of that which drives one would be fascinating, would it not? A whole range of new resentments might surface; new understandings of what one’s parents were doing to one; renewed access to those little secrets of childhood; light upon the dark furniture of the mind.

But that was not what Bertie needed. His conflicts were fresh and current, not buried deep in the experience of the past. But how would Dr Fairbairn elucidate these things? Through Kleinian play therapy?

“What’s the trouble then?” asked Dr Fairbairn, rubbing his hands together as he spoke. “Been a naughty boy?”

Irene could not prevent herself from gasping. This was a very direct approach, almost naïve in its directness, and yet he must know what he was doing. This was, after all, the author of
Shattered to Pieces
.

Bertie stared at Dr Fairbairn. For a moment he did nothing, and then he winced, as if bracing himself for a slap.

Dr Fairbairn’s eyes narrowed. He threw a glance at Irene, who was looking at Bertie and frowning.

“You aren’t here to be punished,” said Dr Fairbairn. “Did you think I was going to smack you?”

“Yes,” said Bertie. “I thought that you were going to smack me for thinking bad thoughts.”

Dr Fairbairn smiled. “No, Bertie, I’d never do that. Analysts don’t smack people.”