The World According to Bertie

by Alexander McCall Smith

  She broke off, and Matthew for a moment thought that she had begun to cry.

  ‘I’d like to come and see you,’ he said firmly. ‘If I get a taxi now, I’ll be at your place in ten, fifteen minutes.’

  She sounded tearful. ‘I don’t know. I really don’t . . .’

  ‘No, I’ll be there,’ said Matthew. ‘Ten minutes. Just wait for me.’

  He put down the receiver and went into his bedroom to change into a new ultramarine shirt. But then he stopped. He looked at the shirt that he had laid on the bed. No, that shirt was not him; that was Pat’s idea of what she thought he should be. The real Matthew, the one that wanted to go and help Elspeth Harmony in whatever distress she was suffering, was not the Matthew of ultramarine shirts and charcoal trousers; it was the Matthew of distressed-oatmeal sweaters and crushed-strawberry trousers; that was who he was, and that was the person whom he wished Elspeth Harmony to know.

  The taxi arrived promptly, and Matthew gave the driver instructions. They travelled in silence and, in the light traffic, they were there in little more than ten minutes.

  ‘Number 18?’ asked the driver as they entered the small cul-de-sac. ‘I had an aunt who lived at number 8. Dead now, of course, but she used to make terrific scones. We used to go there for tea as children. There were always scones. And she made us kids eat up. Come on now, plenty more scones. Come on!’

  Matthew smiled. There used always to be scones. The taxi driver was much older, but even Matthew’s Scotland had changed since his own childhood, not all that many years ago. Things like that were less common – aunts who made scones. There were career aunts now, who had no time to bake scones.

  They stopped outside number 18 and he looked up towards the third floor, where Elspeth Harmony lived. There were window-boxes at two of the windows and a small splash of red. Nasturtiums. He smiled again.

  She let him in, and he could tell that she had been crying. He moved forward and put an arm around her shoulder.

  ‘You mustn’t cry,’ he said. ‘You mustn’t.’

  ‘I feel so stupid,’ she said. ‘I feel that I’ve let everyone down.’

  ‘Tell me exactly what happened,’ said Matthew.

  She told him, and he listened carefully. When she had finished, he shook his head in astonishment. ‘So all you did was give her a little pinch on the ear?’

  Elspeth nodded. ‘There was really no excuse,’ she said. ‘But there are one or two of the children who are seriously provocative. There’s a boy called Tofu, who really tries my patience. And then there’s Olive, whose ear . . . whose ear I pinched.’

  ‘It’s entirely understandable,’ said Matthew. ‘Teaching is so demanding, and you get so little support. That pinch will have done Olive no harm – probably a lot of good.’

  ‘Do you really think so?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Matthew. But then he went on, rather sadly: ‘But I suppose that’s not the world we live in, with all these regulations and busybodies about.’ He paused. ‘I think you’ve struck a blow for sanity. Or rather, pinched one.’

  Elspeth thought this very funny, and laughed.

  ‘I’m rather fed up with teaching anyway,’ she said.

  Matthew thought: if you married me, then you’d never have to work again. Unless you wanted to, of course.

  84. A Tattooed Man

  Dr Hugo Fairbairn, author of that seminal work of child psychotherapy, Shattered to Pieces: Ego Dissolution in a Three-Year-Old Tyrant, was walking in from his flat in Sciennes, on the south side of Edinburgh, to his consulting rooms in Queen Street. It was as fine a day as Edinburgh had enjoyed for some weeks, with the temperature being sufficiently high to encourage shirt-sleeves, but not so high as to provoke some men to remove their shirts altogether. A few more degrees and that would, of course, happen, and many men who should, out of consideration for others, remain shirted would strip to the waist, treating passers-by to expanses of flesh that was far from Mediterranean in its appearance, but was pallid and perhaps somewhat less than firm. After all, thought Dr Fairbairn, this was what Auden had described as a beer and potato culture – in contrast to the culture of the Mezzogiorno, which he had then been enjoying; and beer and potatoes led to heaviness, both of the spirit and of the flesh.

  Of course, it was not every male who felt inclined to strip down in the better weather; lawyers did not, and for a moment Dr Fairbairn imagined the scene if lawyers, striding up the Mound on their way to court, were to take off their white shirts in the same way as did building workers; such a ridiculous notion, but it did show, he thought, just how firmly we are embedded in social and professional roles. He, naturally enough, did not dress in a manner which in any way showed an acceptance of imposed roles. His blue linen jacket, with matching tie, could have been worn by anybody; it was classless garb of the sort that said nothing about him other than that he liked blue, and linen. And that was exactly as Dr Fairbairn wanted it.

  He had been looking down at the pavement; now he looked up, to see a young man approaching him, without his shirt. The psychotherapist suppressed a smile: never believe that you will not see something, he thought – because you will. This does not mean that the thing that you think you will not see will crop up – what it does mean is that you may think that you have seen something which you actually have not.

  But this young man, walking along the pavement in the slanting morning sun, was real enough, as was the large tattoo on his left shoulder. It was an aggressive-looking tattoo, depicting what appeared to be a mountain lion engaged in mortal combat with what appeared to be a buffalo. Or was it a wildebeest? Dr Fairbairn imagined himself stopping and asking the young man if he could clarify the situation. Is that a wildebeest? One might ask, but such questions could be misinterpreted. As Dr Fairbairn knew, men could not look too closely at the tattoos of others, without risking misunderstandings. But it was a mistake, he knew, to assume that somebody who provided the canvas for such a scene of combat would have an aggressive personality. This was not the case; a real softie might have a tattoo of a mountain lion for that very reason – he was a real softie.

  These reflections made him remember that Wee Fraser, the boy whose analysis he had written about in Shattered to Pieces, had a tattoo, even though he was only three years old. He had had inscribed in capital letters across the back of his neck Made in Scotland, just below the hairline. When he had first noticed it, Dr Fairbairn had been astonished, and had wondered if somebody had written this in ballpoint ink on the boy’s skin, as some form of joke. But closer examination had revealed that it was a real tattoo.

  ‘You have something written on the back of your neck, Fraser,’ he had said gently. ‘What is it?’

  Fraser had replied in very crude terms, indicating that it was no business of Dr Fairbairn’s, using language which nobody would expect so young a child to know; but then, Dr Fairbairn reflected, he would have heard these words on the BBC, and so perhaps it was inevitable. And some people had always wanted their children to speak BBC English, and were now getting their wish fulfilled in this unusual way.

  ‘You mustn’t talk like that, Fraser,’ he said. ‘Those are bad words. Bad!’

  At the end of the session Fraser’s father, a fireman, had appeared to collect his son and Dr Fairbairn had taken the opportunity to ask why Fraser had Made in Scotland tattooed on the back of his neck.

  ‘Because he was,’ said the father simply, and had winked at the psychotherapist.

  That encounter was never mentioned in Shattered to Pieces. Nor was that fateful occasion on which Dr Fairbairn had smacked Wee Fraser after the boy had bitten him, an episode which Dr Fairbairn had attempted to forget, but which kept coming back to haunt him, reminding him of his weakness. Indeed, the memory came back to him now, as he walked past the tattooed man; but he put it out of his mind, muttering: ‘We do not go back to the painful past.’

  Dr Fairbairn was looking forward to the day ahead. He had a few hours to himself at the beginning, which would provide
an opportunity to deal with correspondence and to do some further work on a paper that he was preparing for a conference, in collaboration with a well-known child psychotherapist from Buenos Aires. The conference was to be held in Florence, and for a moment he reflected on how pleasant it would be to be in Florence again, enjoying the always very generous hospitality of the Italian Association for Child Psychotherapy, an association whose corpulent president placed great emphasis on the importance of elaborate conference dinners and a good cultural programme. At the last such conference, when Dr Fairbairn had given his paper on early manifestations of the Oedipus complex, the delegates had been taken to a restaurant on the banks of the Arno where, as the sun set, they had been treated to a chocolate pudding borne in on a trolley, the pudding being in the shape of Vesuvius (the chef was a Neapolitan). The pudding’s very shape had been enough to draw gasps of admiration from those present; which gasps turned to exclamations of surprise when fireworks within the chocolate crater had erupted into incandescent flows of sparks, like bright jets of lava, like tiny exhalations of fiery gold.

  85. A Dangerous Turn in the Conversation

  Dr Fairbairn was pleased with the amount of work he had got through by the time Irene arrived in his consulting rooms at eleven o’clock.

  ‘I have had a very satisfactory morning, so far,’ he said, as he ushered her into the room. Then he thought that the words ‘so far’ might suggest that the morning was about to change, which had not been the meaning he had intended to convey. So he quickly added: ‘Not that I’m suggesting the tenor of the day will change because of your arrival. Au contraire.’

  Irene waved a hand airily. ‘I did not interpret it in that way at all,’ she said. ‘Have you been seeing patients?’

  Dr Fairbairn waited until Irene had sat herself down before he continued. ‘No, not at all. I’m working on a paper, long-distance, with Ettore Esteves Balado,’ he said. ‘He’s an Argentine I met on the circuit, and we found ourselves interested in much the same area. We’re writing on the Lacanian perspective on transference.’ He paused, smiling at Irene. ‘And it’s going very well. We’re practically finished.’

  Irene looked at his blue linen jacket. Linen was such a difficult material, with its propensity to crumple. She had a white linen blouse with a matching skirt which she loved to wear, but which crumpled so quickly that after five or ten minutes she looked like, well, Stuart had put it rather tactlessly, like a handkerchief that had been left out in the rain. It was an odd analogy, that, and she wondered what the Lacanian interpretation might be. We did not choose our words simply for their expressive power; our words were the manifestation of the conflicts of our unconscious, indeed they themselves formed the unconscious itself. Lacan had made that quite clear, and Irene was inclined to agree. She did not think that we could find a stable unconscious; our unconscious was really a stream of interactions between words that we used to express our desires and conflicts.

  So when Stuart had made those remarks about a handkerchief in the rain, he did not mean that her linen outfit was a handker-chief left out in the rain, or indeed even looked like one. What his words revealed was that he feared disorder (or rain) and that he wanted her, Irene, to be perfect, to be ironed. And that, of course, suggested that he looked to her for stability to control his sense of impermanence and flux, his confusion. No surprises there, she thought: of course he did. Stuart might have many good points, but in Irene’s view, strength – what people called backbone, or even bottom – was not Stuart’s strong suit. Mind you, it was strange that people should use the word ‘bottom’ for strength or courage. What was the Lacanian significance of that?

  Her eyes returned to Dr Fairbairn’s blue linen jacket. He had said something, she recalled, about the combination of fibres in the jacket, and that must be the reason it looked so uncrumpled. The question in her mind, though, was: at what point did the insertion of other fibres deprive the material of the qualities of real linen? If it was merely a treatment of the linen, then that was one thing; if, however, it involved polyester or something of that sort, could one still call it linen?

  Dr Fairbairn, aware of her gaze, fingered the cuff of his sleeve self-consciously. ‘I’ll give you a copy of the paper,’ he said. ‘When it’s finished. I know of your interest in these things.’

  ‘Argentina?’ said Irene.

  ‘Yes, Buenos Aires. My friend Ettore is one of their best-known analysts there. He has a very extensive practice.’

  Irene nodded. She had heard that there were more psychoanalysts in Buenos Aires than anywhere else in the world, but was not sure why this should be. It seemed strange to her that a country associ-ated with gauchos and pampas should also have all those analysts. She asked Dr Fairbairn why.

  ‘Ah!’ he said. ‘That is the question for Argentine analysts. They’re immensely fortunate, you know. Everyone, or virtually everyone, in Buenos Aires is undergoing analysis. It’s very common indeed.’

  ‘Surprising,’ said Irene. ‘Mind you, the Argentine psyche is perhaps a bit . . .’

  ‘Fractured,’ said Dr Fairbairn. ‘They’re a very charming people, but they have a somewhat confused history. They go in for dreams, the South Americans. Look at Peronism. What did it mean? Evita? Who was she?’

  For a moment, they were both silent. Then he continued. ‘I think the reason Freud is so popular in Argentina is, like most of these things, explained by a series of coincidences. It just so happened that at the time that Freudian ideas were becoming popular in Europe, the Argentine public was in a receptive mood for scientific ideas. You must remember that Argentina in the twenties and thirties was a very fashionable place.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Irene. She was not going to let him think that she knew nothing about all that. ‘The tango . . .’

  ‘Hah!’ said Dr Fairbairn. ‘The tango was actually invented by a Uruguayan. The Argentines claimed him, but he was born in Uruguay.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘But no matter,’ he went on. ‘The point is that Jornada, one of the most popular newspapers in Buenos Aires, actually started a daily psychoanalytical column in the early thirties. It appeared under the byline “Freudiano”, and readers were invited to send in their dreams for analysis by Freudiano. The paper then told them what the dreams revealed – all in Freudian terms.’

  ‘But what a brilliant idea!’ said Irene. ‘Perhaps The Scotsman could do that.’

  ‘Are we not perhaps a little too inhibited in Scotland?’ asked Dr Fairbairn.

  ‘But that’s exactly the problem,’ said Irene heatedly. ‘If we were to . . . to open up a bit, then we would all become so much more . . .’

  Dr Fairbairn waited. ‘Like the Argentines?’ he ventured.

  Irene laughed. ‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘They’ve had a tendency to go in for dictators, haven’t they?’

  ‘Father figures,’ said Dr Fairbairn.

  ‘And generals too,’ added Irene.

  ‘Military figures,’ said Dr Fairbairn.

  ‘But they do dance so marvellously,’ mused Irene. ‘And there’s something deeply appealing about a Latin American type. They’re so tactile.’

  Dr Fairbairn watched her. This conversation was fascinating, but it was straying into dangerous territory. He should bring it back to the topic in hand, which was not the history of Freudian theory in Buenos Aires, nor Latin American sultriness, but Bertie. How was Bertie doing? And, in particular, how was he getting on with his new brother, Ulysses? But that triggered another thought in his mind: where exactly was Ulysses? He asked the question.

  86. Bertie and the Baby: an Expert Explanation

  ‘Ulysses is in the waiting room,’ said Irene. ‘In his baby buggy. Sound asleep.’

  ‘I see,’ said Dr Fairbairn. ‘And how is Bertie reacting to him?’

  Irene was always ready to see psychological problems, but she had to admit that in his dealing with his brother, Bertie showed very little sign of resentment.

  ‘He’s very acceptin
g,’ she said. ‘There appears to be no jealousy, although . . .’ She hesitated. She had remembered Bertie’s comments on the baby that had been mistakenly brought back from the council nursery. That had been slightly worrying.

  Dr Fairbairn raised an eyebrow. ‘Although?’

  ‘Although he did make a curious remark about exchanging Ulysses.’

  This was greeted with great interest by Dr Fairbairn, who leaned forward, eager to hear more. ‘Please elucidate,’ he urged Irene. ‘Exchange?’

  Irene had not intended to discuss the incident in which Ulysses had been parked in his baby buggy outside Valvona & Crolla – she was not sure how well either she or Stuart emerged from that tale– but now she had to explain.

  ‘It was a most unfortunate slip on my husband’s part,’ she said, almost apologetically. ‘He left Ulysses outside Valvona & Crolla.’

  ‘A handbag?’ said Dr Fairbairn, and smiled; he thought this quite a clever reference, and was disappointed when Irene looked at him in puzzlement.

  ‘The Importance—’ he began.

  ‘Of being Ulysses!’ capped Irene. She had understood all along of course, and had merely affected puzzlement.

  Dr Fairbairn had to acknowledge her victory with a nod of the head. ‘But, please proceed. What happened?’

  ‘Well, he was found,’ said Irene. ‘Somebody must have called the police and they took him off to the council emergency nursery. We went there very quickly, of course, and retrieved Ulysses, or the baby we thought was Ulysses. In fact, it was a girl.’ She paused. ‘And unfortunately, Bertie made the discovery. He saw that this baby didn’t have . . . well, he thought that the relevant part had fallen off.’

  Dr Fairbairn made a quick note on his pad of paper. ‘That’s most unfortunate,’ he said. ‘But it clearly reveals castration anxieties. As you know, most boys are worried about that.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Irene. And she wondered for a moment about Stuart.