44 Scotland Street 4ss-1

by Alexander McCall Smith

  One could not describe Bruce as cruel. Nor cold, for that matter.

  “No,” she said. “I can’t see him being unkind in that way.”

  “Not a psychopath,” said her father simply.

  103. And Then

  Pat went back to Scotland Street that night. Her father had asked her whether she wanted to stay at home, but she had already decided that she would go back. She could not go home every time something went wrong, and then, if she did not return, Bruce would have effectively driven her out. She could imagine what he would think

  – and say – about her: Far too immature – couldn’t cope. Fell head over heels for me and then disappeared. Typical! No, Bruce would not be allowed that victory; she would go back to the flat and face him.

  There would be no row; she would just be cool, and collected. And if he alluded in any way to what had happened she would simply say that she was no longer interested, which was the truth anyway.

  She would be strong. More than that; she would be indifferent.

  She walked up the stair at 44 Scotland Street, up the cold, echoing stair. She walked past the Pollock door, with its anti-nuclear power sticker and she thought for a moment of Bertie, whom she had not seen for some time and whose saxophone seemed to have fallen silent. It was a week or more since she 300

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  had heard him playing, and on that occasion the music had seemed remote and dispirited, almost sad. It was, she recalled, a version of Eric Satie’s Gymnopédie, a piece written for piano but playable on the saxophone by a dexterous player. It was haunting music, but in Bertie’s hands had seemed merely haunted. It was not surprising, of course, if that little boy was unhappy; anybody would be unhappy with Irene for a mother, or so she had been told by Domenica, who felt that Bertie was being prevented from being a little boy. How different had Pat’s own childhood been. She had been allowed to be whoever she wanted to be, and had taken full advantage of this, pretending for three weeks at the age of thirteen to be Austrian (trying for her parents) and then Californian (extremely trying). Mothers like Irene were bad enough for daughters, Pat thought, but were frequently lethal for boys. Daughters could survive a powerful mother, but boys found it almost impossible. Such boys were often severely damaged and spent the rest of their lives running away from their mothers, or from anybody who remotely reminded them of their mothers; either that, or they became their mothers, in a desperate, misguided act of psychological self-defence.

  In spite of her determination to face up to Bruce, she found that her hand was trembling as she inserted her key into the front door of the flat. As she turned the key and began to push the door open, she felt that she was being watched, and spun round and looked behind her, at Domenica’s flat across the landing.

  That door was closed, but the tiny glass spy-hole positioned at eye-level above Domenica’s brass name plate suddenly changed from dark to light, as if somebody within, looking out onto the landing, had moved away from the door. Had Domenica been watching her? Pat turned away and then quickly looked over her shoulder again. The spy-hole was darkened again.

  Pat closed the door behind her and switched on the light in the hall. It was eleven o’clock, and Bruce’s door was shut.

  There was no light coming from beneath the door and she was emboldened to move forward slowly and silently. She thought that she could hear music coming from his room, but it was very faint and she did not wish to go right up to the door; or did And Then

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  she? Treading softly, she returned to the light switch and turned off the hall light, and stood there in the darkness, her heart beating violently within her. She closed her eyes. He was there, in that room, and he had said to her that his door was always open. But what did she feel about him? She had been overcome with revulsion by what he had said to her earlier that evening and she had gone away despising him, hating him. But she could not really hate him, not really. She could not be cross with him, however arrogant and annoying he was. She simply could not.

  She slipped out of her shoes and crossed the hall again and stood directly outside his door. There was no music – that had been imagined or had drifted in from somewhere else. Now there was just silence, and the beating of her heart, and her breath that came in short bursts. Never before had she felt like this; never, and this in spite of everything that had been said to her by her father, all that clarity of mind and vision overcome by nothing more than mere concupiscence.

  Very slowly, she reached for the handle of his door and began to turn it. The handle was silent, fortunately, and the door moved slightly ajar as she pushed at it. Hardly daring to breathe, astonished at what she was doing, at her brazen act, she moved slowly through the open door and stood there, just over the threshold, in Bruce’s room.

  The room was not in complete darkness, as the curtains did not quite meet in the middle and some light came in from outside; light that fell, slanted, upon the bed near the window. Bruce lay there, half covered by a sheet, his dark hair a deep shadow on the pillow, one arm crooked under his head, and one foot and ankle protruding from the sheet at the foot of the bed.

  Pat looked and saw the rise and fall of his chest and the flat of his midriff and she felt as if she would sway and stumble. She could reach out easily, so very easily, and touch him, touch this vision of beauty; she could lay her hand upon his shoulder, or upon his chest, but did not do so, and just stood there quietly, struggling with the temptation which was before her. And as she did so, she thought of something that Angus Lordie had said when he had quoted from Sydney Goodsir Smith, who talked 302

  The Place We Are Going To

  of the earth spinning around in the emptiness. Yes, the earth spun in a great void in which our tiny issues and concerns were really nothing, and what small pleasure or meaning we could extract from this life we should surely clutch before our instant was over.

  She took a step forward, and was closer to him now, but stopped, and quickly turned away and walked out of the room.

  Bruce had been awake, and she had seen his eyes open at the last moment as she approached and the smile that flickered, just visible, about his lips.

  104. The Place We Are Going To

  Sitting on the top deck of a number 23 bus, bound for an interview at the Rudolf Steiner School, Irene and Bertie looked down on the passing traffic and on the pedestrians going about their daily business.

  “It would have been easier to go by car,” Bertie observed. “We could have parked in Spylaw Road. The booklet said there was plenty of parking in Spylaw Road.”

  “Travelling by bus is more responsible,” said Irene. “We must respect the planet.”

  “Which planet?” asked Bertie. He had a map of the planets in his room – or his space as it was called – and he had learned the names of many of them. Which planet did his mother mean?

  “Planet Earth,” said Irene. “The one we are currently occupying, as you may have noticed, Bertie.”

  Bertie considered this for a moment. He had great respect for the planet, but he also respected cars. And it was still a mystery to him as to what had happened to their own car. He had last seen it five weeks earlier; now it had disappeared.

  “Where is our car, Mummy?” he asked quietly.

  “Our car is parked,” Irene replied.

  “Where?”

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  Irene’s tone was short when she replied. “I don’t know. Daddy parked it. Ask him.”

  “I did,” said Bertie. “He said that you parked it somewhere.”

  Irene frowned. Had she parked the car? She tried to remember when she had last driven it, but it seemed so long ago. Deciding to leave the conversation where it stood, she looked out of the bus window, over Princes Street Gardens and towards the distant, confident shape of the Caledonian Hotel.

  This trip to the Steiner School for an interview had been Dr Fairbairn’s idea, although she had accepted it, eventually.

 
; “Bertie must be able to move on,” said the psychotherapist.

  “We all need to move on, even when we’re five.”

  Irene looked pained. If Bertie moved on, then where, in the most general sense, would he go? And where would that leave her, his mother? Bertie was hers, her creation.

  Dr Fairbairn picked up her concern, and sought to reassure her. “Moving on means that you may have to let go a bit,” he said gently. “Letting go is very important.”

  This did not help Irene, and her expression made her disquiet clear. Melanie Klein would never have approved of the term moving on, which had a distinctly post-modern ring to it. Nor did she speak of closure, which was another word that in her opinion was overworked and clichéd. She had imagined Dr Fairbairn to be above such terms, but here he was using the words as easily as he might talk about the weightier concepts of transference and repression. She decided to sound him out about closure.

  “And closure?” she said hesitantly, as one might propose something slightly risqué.

  “Oh, he certainly needs closure,” said Dr Fairbairn. “He needs closure over that Guardian incident. And then we need closure on trains. Bertie’s trains need to reach their terminus.”

  Irene looked at Dr Fairbairn. This was a most puzzling remark to make, and perhaps he would explain. But he did not.

  “First we should think of how he can move on,” said Dr Fairbairn. “Bertie needs a sense of where he’s going. He needs to have a horizon.”

  “Well,” said Irene, slightly resentfully. “I can hardly be accused 304

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  of not offering him a sense of his future. When I take him to saxophone lessons I point out to him how pleased he will be in the future that he worked at the instrument. Later, much later, it will be a useful social accomplishment.”

  Dr Fairbairn nodded vaguely. “Saxophone?” he said. “Is an ability to play the saxophone a social accomplishment or is it an anti-social accomplishment? No reason to ask that, of course; just wondering.”

  Irene was quick to answer. “Saxophones provide a lot of pleasure for a lot of people,” she said. “Bertie loves his saxophone.”

  (She was ignoring, or had forgotten perhaps, that awful scene in the Floatarium where Bertie had shouted, quite unambiguously, Non mi piace il sassofono.)

  “Oral behaviour,” muttered Dr Fairbairn. “One puts the saxophone mouthpiece in the mouth. That’s oral.”

  “But you have to do that with a wind instrument,” began Irene.

  “And even if you have no oral fixation might you not still want to play the saxophone? Just for the music?”

  “One might think that,” said Dr Fairbairn, “if one were being naïve. But you and I know, don’t we, that explanations at that level, attractive though they may be, simply obscure the symbolic nature of the conduct in question. Let us never forget that the apparent reason for doing something is almost always not the real reason for doing it.

  “Take the building of the Scottish Parliament,” went on Dr Fairbairn, warming to the theme. “People think that the fact that it is taking so long is because of all sorts of problems with designs and plans and so on. But have we stopped to ask ourselves whether the people of Scotland actually want to finish it? Could it not be that we are taking so much time to finish it because we know that once we finish it we’ll have to take responsibility for Scotland’s affairs? Westminster, in other words, is Mother – and indeed doesn’t it call itself the Mother of Parliaments? It does – the language itself gives it all away.

  So Mother has asked us to build a parliament and that is exactly what we are doing. But when we finish, we fear that Mother will ask us to go away – or, worse, still, Mother will go away Bertie’s Friend

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  herself. Many people don’t really want that. They want Mother still to be there. So they’re doing everything they can to drag out the process of construction.

  “And here’s another thing. Why does the parliament building look as if it’s been made out of children’s wooden building blocks?

  Isn’t that obvious? It’s because we want to please Mother by doing something juvenile, because we know that Mother herself doesn’t want us to grow up. That’s why it looks so juvenile. We’ll win Mother’s approval by doing something which confirms our child-like dependence.”

  Irene listened to all this with growing enthusiasm. What a brilliant analysis of modern Scotland! And he was right, too, about saxophones; of course they were oral things and she was no doubt running a risk of fixing Bertie in the oral stage by encouraging him to play one. But at least she knew now, and the fact that she knew would mean that she could overcome the sub-text of her actions. So she could continue to encourage Bertie to play the saxophone, while at the same time helping him to progress through the oral stage to a more mature identity.

  She looked at Dr Fairbairn. “What you say is obviously true,”

  she said. “But I wonder: what shall I do to move Bertie on?”

  “Give him a clear sense of where he’s going next,” replied Dr Fairbairn. “Take him to the place he’s going to. That is what we all need – to see the place we’re going to.”

  105. Bertie’s Friend

  Bertie sat in a small waiting room while Irene talked to the director of admissions at the Steiner School. He was not alone; on the other side of the simply-furnished room was a boy of about his own age, or perhaps slightly older, a boy with tousled fair hair, freckles around the cheek bones, and a missing front tooth. Bertie, who was wearing corduroy dungarees and his red 306

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  lace-up shoes, noticed that this boy was wearing jeans and a checked shirt. It was a splendid outfit, thought Bertie – the sort of outfit which he would have seen cowboys wearing in cowboy films, had he ever been allowed to watch any.

  For a time they avoided eye contact, staring instead at the brightly-coloured pictures on the wall and the pattern of the tiles on the floor.

  Every so often, though, one of the boys would sneak a glance at the other, and then quickly look away before he was noticed.

  Eventually, though, they glanced at the same time, and their eyes locked together. Bertie opened his mouth to speak, but the other boy spoke first.

  “My name’s Jock,” said the boy. “What’s your name?”

  Bertie caught his breath. Jock was a wonderful name to have

  – it was so strong, so friendly. Life must be easy if one were lucky enough to be called Jock. But instead they had called him Bertie, and of course he could hardly tell this boy that.

  “I don’t usually give my name,” Bertie said. “Sorry.”

  Jock frowned. ‘You can tell me. I won’t tell anybody.”

  Bertie looked Jock squarely in the eye. “You can’t break promises, you know.”

  “I know that,” said Jock. “And I never would.”

  “Bertie,” said Bertie.

  “Hah!” said Jock.

  A short silence followed. Then Bertie said: “Are you going to Steiner’s?”

  Jock shook his head. “I’ve come here for them to look at me,”

  he said. “But I don’t think my parents will send me here. I’m going to go to Watson’s.”

  Bertie’s eyes narrowed. Watson’s! That was where he wanted to go – that was where they played rugby and had secret societies. That was where real boys went; sensitive boys came to the Steiner School. The thought caused him a pang of anguish. He would have liked Jock to be his friend, but now it seemed as if they would be going to different schools. All Bertie wanted was a friend – another boy who would like the same sort of things that he liked – trains and things of that sort. And he had no such person.

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  “I envy you going to Watson’s,” said Bertie. “You’re lucky.

  Will you play rugby?”

  “Yes,” said Jock. “I’ve already started going to rugby for the under-sixes.”

  The words
stabbed at Bertie. Rugby was the game he wanted to play – like that nice man, Bruce, who lived on the stair. But he had never had the chance, and it was clear, too, that his mother disapproved of Bruce, and of Mrs Macdonald, and of everyone, really, except for Dr Fairbairn, who was mad, as far as Bertie could work out. Would Irene disapprove of his new friend, Jock?

  He thought she probably would.

  “Do you like trains?” Bertie asked suddenly.

  Jock took the sudden change of subject in his stride. “I love them,” he said.

  Bertie looked wistful. “Have you . . . have you ever been on a train?” he asked.

  Jock nodded. “Of course,” he said. “I went to London on a train, and back again. And I’ve been to Dundee. I went over the Forth Bridge and the Tay Bridge. Then we came back and went over the bridges again. That’s four times over a bridge altogether.

  Or does that make five?”

  “Four,” said Bertie. What did it matter if Jock was no good at mathematics? – he played rugby and was just the sort of friend for whom Bertie had longed all his life.

  “And I’ve got a model train set in my room,” Jock went on.

  “I’ve got a Flying Scotsman. It goes under my bed and round the chair. I’ve got bridges too, and a station.”

  Bertie was silent for a moment. Then he spoke. “You’re lucky,”

  he said. And then repeated: “You’re lucky.”

  Jock looked at him. Then he stood up and crossed the room to sit next to Bertie.

  “You’re sad about something,” he said quietly. “What’s wrong?”

  Bertie looked into the face of his new friend, gazing at the freckles and the space where the tooth had been. “I don’t have much fun,” he said. “And I’ve got no friends.”

  “You’ve got me,” said Jock. “We could become blood brothers. One of my babysitters read me a story about some 308

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  boys who became blood brothers. They cut their hands just there and they mixed their blood together. And that makes you a blood brother.”

  “Doesn’t it hurt?” asked Bertie.

  “No,” said Jock. “We could become blood brothers right now.