Espresso Tales 4ss-2

by Alexander McCall Smith

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  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?

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  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 F
airbairn, and even as the Bertie’s List

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  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?