“And?” asked a member.
“We had made arrangements for screens. We had paid a deposit on screens that would be deployed all the way round the Ross Pavilion and its seating so that people in Princes Street Gardens couldn’t complain. Nobody would have seen us—or so we thought.”
The meeting steeled itself for the worst. It had been an evening of uniformly bad news, and nothing would have surprised the members by this stage.
“The Edinburgh civic authorities had a complaint from the people up in Ramsay Garden. In fact, it was a petition that a lot of them signed. They said that they looked down directly onto the Ross Pavilion and they would see our dancing. They said they would be shocked, and they were entitled not to be shocked. And do you know what? The City Council agreed.”
“We’re sunk,” said one of the members.
“What can we do?” asked another.
“Nothing,” said the Chairman.
“People have got it in for us,” said the Secretary. “Sometimes, you know, I feel defeated—utterly defeated.”
Falling Veils of White
Stuart Pollock, statistician, husband and father, sometime community councillor, former committee member (co-opted) of the Edinburgh North Balkans Appeal and, many years ago, member of the Scottish Universities Ski Club, was now also Stuart Pollock, lover of the young woman engaged in research for a PhD in twentieth-century Scottish poetry whom he had met over pasta and salad in Henderson’s in Hanover Street. This last status had crept up on him; he had not set out to become anybody’s lover; he had done nothing to seek out somebody else; she had simply been sitting there, looked sympathetic when he had spilled butternut squash soup on his jacket, and that was that.
Of course, something like a high-risk love affair only happens if the ground is fertile, and in Stuart’s case, although he would never have recognised this himself, the ground was more than ready for something like this. He was not by nature a fickle or disloyal man; quite the contrary, in fact. Stuart had never pursued novelty in his life; he had never questioned his role as a provider; he had never tried to evade the responsibilities of fatherhood. In many respects, he was exactly the sort of man whom the dispensers of advice in women’s magazines urge their troubled readers to seek out. He was a solid, reliable man; he was the antithesis of the spiv-like Lotharios who break female hearts with such gay abandon. He was middle Scotland. He was middle management. He was middle man.
But he had been trapped. From the start, Irene had been the dominant figure in the marriage. That might have been survivable—many people accept a certain degree of dominance in their relationships—but when it becomes as extreme as it had in Stuart and Irene’s marriage, when it means that all freedom to hold different, or indeed any, opinions is withheld, then the position of the trapped party may become intolerable.
He loved his sons. He would have done anything for them—and did. He wanted Bertie to have what Bertie so desperately wanted. He wanted him to live the life of a small boy, which was a business of Swiss Army penknives, of fishing in the Pentland Hills, of reading stories about other boys who go off to sea, or have dogs, or do any of the other things that small boys aspire to do. Stuart wanted that for Bertie, but Irene did not. For her, the Bertie Project was based on the notion of the malleability of masculine character. She wanted Bertie to be free of the stereotypes of gender. She wanted him to be in touch with his inner girl. She wanted him to view Swiss Army penknives as instruments of oppression. It may never be overtly stated, but Swiss Army penknives were not intended for girls. They were something by which boys could define themselves in contradistinction to girls. The possession of a Swiss Army penknife was a statement proclaiming, I am a boy. Irene saw all that quite clearly, and she would not allow it. It was as simple as that. No pasarán!
But anybody—anybody with the slightest psychological insight—could have warned Irene that what she was engaged in was a prolonged exercise in castration. It was not necessary to be an unreformed Freudian, to accept every diktat from Vienna, to realise that Irene was seeking to diminish males, and that sooner or later the male whom she was seeking to diminish in this radical way—the victim of her psychological surgery—might realise the peril in which he stood and do something about it, something symbolic, such as finding a woman who had no castration agenda—even finding her in Henderson’s salad restaurant—and becoming complicit with that woman (becoming complicit being a demotic Edinburgh way of referring to engaging in physical intimacy).
Thus did the prospect of deliverance present itself to Stuart. And in his break for freedom, Stuart found that his monochrome world of subservience became a brightly coloured one of intense and passionate feeling. He had found somebody who liked him. He had found somebody who listened to what he had to say and who did not say that he was wrong, or reactionary, or an affront to the orthodoxy dictated somewhere down in North London or wherever it was that Irene’s spiritual headquarters had its tents. Slowly, this sense of freedom began to illuminate his daily life. He began to read newspapers other than the one from which Irene obtained confirmation of most of her opinions. He listened to what people of a range of views had to say. Like a figure crouched over an interdicted radio set, fearful of disturbance, he tuned into forbidden frequencies and listened to the exchange of untrammelled messages, to the expression of scepticism and dissent. He felt more Scottish, because Irene’s control, her power, seemed to come from somewhere else altogether. He would not accept it; he would not.
Katie, his companion on this heady voyage, read him poetry under her skylight. Officially, he was working late on a demanding office project; in reality he was in Howe Street, listening to her, saying to her things that he had said to nobody for years, confessing his weaknesses, his fears, his private reflections.
She understood. She read him the work of her twentieth-century Scottish poets; it seemed to him that much of this was written for the two of them, so perfectly did it express what he was feeling. And she wrote poems for him, too, saying apologetically, “I know I’m not much good as a poet, but I’d like you to read this one.” And he would say, “But no, you’re marvellous, and I love everything you write—I really do.”
She composed a special poem. “It’s not about us,” she said. “But it’s about love, about a man thinking of somebody. Anyway, here it is.”
She wrote it out and gave it to him:
He thinks of her
Forgive me for telling you
That without you the day
Seems frozen, the land
Is touched with white rime,
The trees are stark against
A sky of distant blue,
Washed out by the absence
Of warmth and anything
But cold sunlight.
Forgive me for telling you
That the air outside the cabin
Of a plane in high flight
Is fifty degrees below;
Here ice crystals form
In falling veils of white,
So cold we cannot live;
I cannot live without you,
Forgive me for telling you that.
Stuart read it and smiled. He thought of how, when one looked up into the sky, one might see those curtain-like, almost transparent clouds so high up, shifting veils of white. Those were ice crystals. How lovely. How lovely.
He read the poem again, and then put it in his pocket.
Thoughts on the 23 Bus
The next day Irene accompanied Bertie to school as usual on the 23 bus. As the bus laboured up the first of the hills that lay between the New Town and the Steiner School, Bertie looked out of the window at the trees in the Queen Street Gardens. He felt that he knew those trees particularly well, since they—or their tops—constituted the lower frame of the view from his psychotherapist’s waiting room. He had lost count of the hours he had spent in that waiting room, paging through old copies of Scottish Field, as his mother, closeted in the consulting room with Dr. Fairbairn and
then with his Australian successor, Dr. Sinclair, discussed…discussed what? Him, he supposed.
He could not understand how he could possibly take up so much of their time, but had concluded that the reason why they discussed him at such length was that they had nothing else to talk about. That, it seemed to him, was a persistent problem faced by adults: they simply did not have enough to do. And because there were so many of them, and so few real things to do, they had to invent roles for themselves, and then spend a great deal of time arguing with one another about who should occupy these roles and then, when they were in them, what they should do with them.
Bertie was prepared to help them, of course, and when it came to his psychotherapy this help took the form of making up dreams and, indeed, anything else that he felt might interest the psychotherapist. This did not come naturally to him, as one of Bertie’s most striking characteristics was his utter truthfulness—rare amongst children, most of whom are prepared to lie when it suits them. But psychotherapy, he decided, was different, and charity, at the very least, required him to invent colourful dreams that would keep poor Dr. Sinclair from having nothing to talk about and therefore having to go back to Australia.
He had discovered that Dr. Sinclair was particularly interested in dreams featuring buildings, spires, and columns of any sort. Bertie could not understand why this should be so, but had decided that it must have something to do with his having been abandoned as a child on a column somewhere and haunted by the thought ever since. If that were the case, then in making up these dreams he felt he was helping Dr. Sinclair in some way to get over something that must have been bothering him for a long time.
“I dreamed of the Eiffel Tower last night,” Bertie had revealed only the previous week.
Dr. Sinclair made a note on his pad. “Very interesting, Bertie. Tell me about it.”
“Well, there wasn’t very much in the dream, Dr. Sinclair. It was just the Eiffel Tower. You know what it’s like. It’s this big metal tower in the middle of Paris…”
Dr. Sinclair smiled. “Yes, I know about the Eiffel Tower, Bertie. But what else happened? Can you remember what else happened?”
Bertie thought. If he did not come up with something else, then Dr. Sinclair would have nothing to talk to his mother about, and that meant that he would have more psychotherapy time rather than sitting in the waiting room with Scottish Field while Irene used up the therapeutic hour.
“Actually, there were two Eiffel Towers,” Bertie said. “And one Eiffel Tower was…” he hesitated. “It was the other tower’s father, I think. That was very funny, Dr. Sinclair. A tower can’t have a father…”
Dr. Sinclair was scribbling frantically on his notepad, and Bertie knew that he was on the right track.
And so it went on, and so he contemplated the tops of the Queen Street trees, mute witnesses to those endless hours in the consulting room, talking at such length about imaginary dreams. Would that ever stop? Would the clouds ever part suddenly and a golden chariot reveal itself, the driver of which might say, “Come Bertie, come away with me, come to Glasgow…”?
His reverie was interrupted by his mother, who pointed out that they were now passing the National Gallery of Scotland. “Remind me, Bertie,” she was saying, “to take you to look at the Poussins. We haven’t looked at the Poussins for a long time, have we?”
“No, Mummy,” said Bertie. “I’m not sure that I like the way Mr. Poussin painted.”
Irene laughed. “Of course you like the way he painted, Bertie. Such nonsense. Of course you like it.”
“I like the way Mr. Raeburn painted, Mummy. I like that picture of the minister skating on Duddingston Loch. I like that very much.”
Irene made a dismissive gesture. “Too sentimental, Bertie. Patriarchal too. That minister may look all innocent, but he was part of a church that was thoroughly repressive.”
Bertie said nothing, and Irene switched the subject to the forthcoming school production of Macbeth. “Are rehearsals going well, Bertie?”
Bertie was silent.
“Well, Bertie?”
“Why did Mr. Shakespeare write everything in poetry?” he asked. “Did people speak in poetry in those days?”
Irene laughed. “That’s a perfectly sensible question, Bertie. No, they didn’t speak in poetry. That was all made up by Shakespeare.”
“Daddy likes poetry,” said Bertie. “He doesn’t speak in poetry, but he likes to read it.”
Irene was not particularly interested. “I don’t think that Daddy reads much poetry, Bertie. Daddy’s more interested in figures, I suppose.”
“But I found a poem in the pocket of his jacket. You know the one—the brown jacket he got from that shop at the far end of Queen Street. The one he likes to wear when he wants to look smart.”
Irene frowned. “A poem, Bertie? In a book?”
Bertie shook his head. “No, it was written on a piece of paper.”
“By Daddy? Did Daddy write the poem on a piece of paper?”
Again Bertie shook his head. “No, it wasn’t his writing.”
Irene now seemed more interested. “Somebody else’s writing? Not printed?”
“I don’t know whose writing it was,” said Bertie.
They were now passing the National Library. From where she sat in the bus, Irene looked out to see the Hew Lorimer figures, carved in stone, standing in their niches in silent reproach. These were the figures of the arts of civilisation, and one—Irene was not quite sure which one it was—represented Poetry, and another Justice…
“What was the poem about, Bertie?” she asked.
Bertie tried to remember. “It was about cold things,” he said. “I think frost came into it, or snow maybe. I can’t remember exactly which. And then it said something like I can’t live without you.” He paused. “Why can’t people live without other people, Mummy? Can you tell me why?”
I Cannot Live Without You
Irene did not linger long at the school gate, but dispatched Bertie without ceremony and then made her way purposefully, with Ulysses asleep in his pushchair, to the nearest bus stop. This was not her normal bus stop and would entail catching a 27 bus rather than the preferable 23, but needs must. She wanted to get back to Scotland Street as soon as possible to look in the pocket of Stuart’s jacket and see this curious poem that Bertie had mentioned. There was no reason why Stuart should not have a poem in the pocket of his jacket—he liked to read Burns from time to time—but as Bertie had described it, this was not Burns. National poets never wrote I cannot live without you unless, of course, they were writing about their country, in which case they were positively encouraged to reveal that they could not live without you, the you being the country, of course, or the idea of the country.
Alighting from the bus, she walked briskly along Great King Street and into Drummond Place, or Haute Drummond Place, as Irene called it, in sarcastic reference to what she saw as the denizens of the haute-bourgeoisie who lived there. Then into Scotland Street itself, and into the flat, and, having deposited Ulysses, still asleep in his pushchair, in the hall, into the bedroom and now, standing before the wardrobe, she opened the door…
The brown jacket, limp and innocent on its hanger, was extracted. She felt in the left pocket first—nothing—and then in the right, where she found a piece of paper. She took this out. It had been folded neatly, like a shopping list found and put away.
She opened it. Bertie had been right: it was not Stuart’s writing. She read the poem. Forgive me for telling you / That without you the day seems frozen…
It was a love poem. Stuart had a love poem in his pocket. And then she thought: he loves me, my husband loves me, and has a love poem for me in his pocket…
But then she thought: this poem is not addressed to me. This poem is addressed to Stuart.
She read it again, this time sitting down. She closed her eyes. Then, when she opened them again, she dropped the poem to the floor. It fluttered down, a thing of lightness in every s
ense, and landed on the carpet, on one of the Turkish medallions that formed the rug’s border. I cannot live without you…Who could not live without whom?
She reached forward to pick up the piece of paper, and she felt for a moment dizzy, as one might when the blood leaves the head. But I am going the wrong way, she thought; in reaching forward the blood should go to my head rather than leave it. What did it matter? What did it matter if she keeled over there and then and died because the blood had all gone the wrong way, and Stuart would find her and he could reflect on living without her, then, which would teach him…
She stood up. She turned round, and then sat down again, but only for a few brief seconds. Was the poem copied from some book—some anthology of love poetry, perhaps, like that one edited by Antonia Fraser? That book of Scottish love poems with the Celtic heart in red—the Scottish heart—on the cover and those little wood-engravings inside? That book?
She suddenly thought of Angus. Angus Lordie was a poet—or fancied himself as one. She had seen one or two of his poems published in some journal somewhere, and of course he sometimes read them at occasions in Scotland Street. Perhaps Angus had written this poem and then asked Stuart to take a look at it—as a critic of some sort. But why would he ask Stuart, of all people?
She made up her mind. Ulysses could be left sleeping in his pushchair for a few minutes; she would go downstairs and show the poem to Angus, and ask him if he wrote it.
She went downstairs and rang the bell. There was barking inside the flat—that ridiculous, malodorous dog, thought Irene—and then the door opened and Angus was standing there in his stockinged feet, holding a copy of a newspaper.
“Irene! What a pleasant surprise.”
She knew he did not mean it.
“May I come in?”
“Of course, of course. Would you like something…a glass of sherry perhaps, no, hardly appropriate; look at the time—silly me. I assure you I am not in the habit of drinking sherry at nine thirty in the morning, and nor is Domenica. I cannot speak for her on all matters, but on that one I feel…”
The Bertie Project Page 24