44 Scotland Street (26 page)

Mind you, she thought, that young man at the top of the stair, Bruce, looked far from neglected. He put that substance on his hair – what was it, lubricant? – and he was always rather smartly dressed. She had talked to him on several occasions and he had been perfectly civil. He had once even let Bertie touch his
en
brosse
hair after Bertie had made a remark about how good it looked. Bruce had bent down and said to Bertie as the little boy had gingerly reached out to touch his head: “You could look like this one day too – if you’re lucky!”

It had been an odd remark, but they had all laughed. Afterwards Bertie had asked several questions about Bruce, but Irene had answered them vaguely. Little boys liked to have heroes, as Melanie Klein pointed out, and she was not sure whether that young man was a suitable choice. Nor did she encourage Bertie’s open admiration for that Macdonald woman’s Mercedes-Benz. Bertie had enquired whether they might ask if he could have a ride in it one day, and she had given an unequivocal no to that request.

“We have our own car,” said Irene. “A much more sensible car than that, I might add.”

“But we never go in our car,” complained Bertie. “Where is it?”

“It’s parked,” said Irene curtly.

“Where?” asked Bertie. “Where is our car parked?”

Irene did not know. Stuart had parked it somewhere or other a few weeks ago and she had no idea where this was. So she gave a simple reply. “Outside,” she said, as they arrived at their destination.

65. A Meeting in Valvona and Crolla

They walked past the shelves in Valvona and Crolla, each looking at the items at his and her particular eye-level. Irene gazed at packets of pasta; not ordinary, hard pasta of the sort that one might see in a supermarket, vulgar spaghetti and the like, but obscure, complicated egg-rich pastas – tagliatelle and other rare varieties. These cost twice as much as vulgar pasta, but tasted infinitely better. Vulgar pasta tasted like cardboard, Irene thought, and she could never understand how people could actually eat it. Probably because they knew no better, she decided. Ordinary people – as Irene called them – were remarkably in the dark, and often simply did not realise how in the dark they were. Fortunately, ordinary people were beginning to develop more sophisticated habits, brought about, in part, by overseas travel, not that Spain helped very much, thought Irene.

Down at his eye-level, Bertie saw tinned fish and sea-food, Portuguese sardines and Sicilian octopus. The pictures on these tins were intriguing. The Portuguese sardines were portrayed as swimming contentedly in a small shoal near the surface of the sea, while in the background there was a wild coast with high cliffs and mountains behind. Bertie had been to Portugal, and some of it, he recalled, had looked just like that. They had eaten sardines there, too, every night, though the sardines had looked less happy than those portrayed on the tin.

After they had completed their shopping, they had gone through to the café and latte had been ordered.

“Well, Bertie,” said Irene cheerfully. “What did you think of Dr Fairbairn?”

Bertie appeared to think for a moment. “He was very kind,” he said. “He didn’t smack me when he called me a naughty boy.”

Irene’s eyes widened. “He did
not
call you a naughty boy,” she protested. “He asked you whether you had been a naughty boy, that’s all. And I didn’t think that he meant it.”

“Why did he say it then?” asked Bertie. “Why did he call me a naughty boy?”

Irene drew in her breath. This would require very careful handling. It had been unwise of Dr Fairbairn to use the term “naughty boy” in the first place, but then he probably had not realised just how bright Bertie was. Other boys would have seen this remark as a bit of harmless banter – a joke really – but Bertie was far too sensitive for that. Bertie had cried when he had seen a picture of the unfinished parliament building in the newspapers. That showed real sensitivity. “It’s so sad,” he had said. “All that building and building and it’s never finished. Can we not help them, Mummy?”

She would have to mention to Dr Fairbairn – very tactfully, of course – that he was sensitive to suggestion, unlike Wee Fraser perhaps. Wee Fraser had not been a sensitive boy, by all accounts, and even when his ego had been re-assembled at the end of the analysis, he had not seemed to have developed any particularly sensitive traits. He had stopped biting people, of course, which amounted to a slightly more sensitive approach to life, but in other respects one could probably not hope for much change.

“Bertie,” she began, “when Dr Fairbairn asked you – asked you, mind – whether you had been a naughty boy, he was referring to how other people might have reacted to your behaviour. This is different from saying that you had been a naughty boy. His tone was ironic. If he really thought that you had been naughty, then he wouldn’t have used those words. You do understand that, don’t you?”

Bertie said nothing. He had been naughty, he thought: he had written on the nursery walls. Surely that was quintessentially naughty. And he wanted to be naughty. That was the whole point. If they kept making him learn Italian and play the saxophone and all the other things, he would show them. He would punish them, and they would stop. That was how grown-ups, people like Mrs Klein, whose book he had read, thought. And this Doctor Fairbairn person, who had hardly talked to him at all and who hadn’t even been interested in his joke – the only way to make him take any notice would be to do something really naughty. Perhaps I should bite him, thought Bertie. Then he will really take notice and tell them to drop the Italian and the saxophone. They might even be persuaded not to send me to the Steiner School and send me to Watson’s instead, where there are uniforms and rugby and things like that. And secret societies too, Bertie thought, although those might only be for after you’ve left.

Irene looked at her son. There was so much promise there – such an extraordinary level of ability – and she would not let her project for him be derailed. She stopped herself; train metaphors were
not
what she wanted here.

“Bertie,” she said gently, “I want you to know that Stuart loves you very much. It’s quite natural for boys to feel confused about their fathers and, well, I suppose one might say that it’s natural for boys to feel threatened by their fathers. Dr Fairbairn will help you to get over this. That’s what Dr Fairbairn is for.”

Bertie looked at her. What was all this? He liked his father very much, and when he had set fire to his copy of
The Guardian
it had nothing to do with his feelings for his father. Why would they just not leave him alone? Why did they force him to do all these things? Those were the questions which worried Bertie.

Irene reached for her latte and took a sip. She glanced around her. The café was uncrowded, and she let her gaze run slowly over the few people who were there. There was a woman in her mid-thirties, a blonde, with hair held back with an Alice band. Irene noticed that she had that look about her which goes with bored affluence. Her husband, no doubt, was a fund manager or something similar. There would be a couple of children, and she was whiling away the hours before it was time to collect them

from school. The children would be exactly like her, thought Irene, right down to the Alice band (if they were girls). She smiled. People were so predictable.

Her gaze moved to the next table. There was a young couple poring over
The Scotsman
property section. Irene looked at their faces. Yes, they were anxious, she thought. How difficult for them, struggling to find a place to live in that competitive, overpriced market. And what would they find at the end of the day? A two-bedroomed flat for the price of a small farm in Australia. Mind you, she had no idea what small farms cost in Australia, but she imagined that it was not very much. She had read somewhere that people sometimes gave such farms away, just to get off them. I would never, ever farm in Australia, she said to herself, and shuddered at the thought. Heat. Dust. Drought.

Then she stopped. A man was sitting by himself at the table beyond that. He was reading a newspaper, and nursing a small cup of espresso. There was a file with some papers sticking out of it on the table in front of him, but his attention was fixed on the newspaper.

“Bertie,” she whispered. “That man over there. The one reading the paper. Do you recognise him? He looks very familiar.”

Bertie followed his mother’s gaze.

“Yes,” he said. “I’ve seen his picture in the paper. I know who that is.”

“Who is it then?” asked Irene. She had thought that Bertie would know. He was a very attentive boy.

“That’s Mr Dalyell,” said Bertie.

66. Mr Dalyell’s Question

Although Bertie was Irene’s creation, in both the biological and the metaphorical sense, she was constantly astonished by the things that he knew and that he occasionally revealed so casually. His recognition of Tam Dalyell, purely from newspaper photographs, was a case in point. How many five-year-olds were there in Edinburgh, or anywhere else for that matter, who would recognise the redoubtable politician? None, she imagined. It was even possible that there were many adults who would not know the name, given the contemporary obsession with an entirely superficial celebrity. People had no difficulty in recognising rock musicians and actresses, people for whom Irene had the most profound distaste, but they had great difficulty in recognising those who actually did things of value. So while they would know who all the current actors and footballers were (or at least the good looking ones like Mr Grant and Mr Beckham), they could not be expected to know about people who did something to change the world for the better. Except Bertie, it would seem: Bertie knew.

Irene gazed at her son with pride. There had been moments in the last few days when she had even begun to doubt the whole Bertie project. Her thoughts had been dangerously seditious; perhaps it would have been better not to teach him Italian, nor the saxophone. She actively thought that, but quickly corrected herself: what a waste that would have been, what a criminal waste! And so she had overcome those temptations – temptations of mediocrity, or ordinariness – and persisted. And now, quite unexpectedly, had come the reward: the recognition of Mr Dalyell in Valvona and Crolla.

“Did you read about him, Bertie?” she asked, her voice lowered lest Tam Dalyell hear them talking about him.

Bertie, who had been served a latte with a generous portion of chocolate sprinkled across the surface, took a sip of the creamy liquid, sucking in the chocolate froth with puckered lips.

“Don’t make that noise,” began Irene automatically, but stopped. Private noises were inevitable with children and she had read they should not be unduly inhibited. Those who were

TAM DALYELL: Labour Party politician (born 1932) who was MP for West Lothian for more than 20 years before becoming MP for Linlithgow.

stopped from making these ordinary human noises took it out on the world later on – Irene had read that somewhere and had been impressed by the insight. It was so true, she thought. Oppression was the preserve of the oppressed. The child who is scolded into silence makes others silent later on. It was so true, and yet it was so difficult to rid oneself of the censorious urge when it came to children. They made such a noise. They smelled. And little boys were so brutal in their approach to the world, kicking and shoving and breaking things, just as men did; it was so tempting to subdue these little boys with rules and reproach.

“I know all about Mr Dalyell,” said Bertie, wiping the chocolate residue from his lips. “He asked a famous question.”

Irene listened to this without any great interest. Scottish politics were of no consequence to her – even Scottish politics in the Westminster context. Although she had been born in Scotland and had been educated there, her outlook transcended that background. She belonged to that sector of society which somehow did not regard itself as located anywhere in particular. To be located, thought Irene, was to be provincial and narrow. She was
above
location.

Bertie looked again in the direction of the man at the table. Then he took another sip of his latte and turned to Irene.

“Or it’s Mr Harper,” he said.

Irene looked puzzled. “Or?”

“Yes,” said Bertie, as if explaining something very simple to one who could not be expected to grasp the self-evident. “Mr Harper is the leader of the Greens. Mr Dalyell is one of the Reds. That man over there is either Mr Dalyell or Mr Harper. It’s difficult to say, Mummy.”

Irene cast a glance over in the direction of the mysterious politician. Bertie was right: there might well be a strong resemblance between Tam Dalyell and Robin Harper, and certainly if one asked the average five-year-old to say which was which one would not expect a clear answer. But there was nothing average about Bertie, of course.