Espresso Tales

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “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: educational, social and psychological.

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

  “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…”

  “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? 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 Fai
rbairn quite impenetrably 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.

  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, untutored 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 identify 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 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 magnitude 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 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 exceptional–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 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 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 disharmony. 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 insecure, 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.”