Espresso Tales 4ss-2

by Alexander McCall Smith

  The sight of the plastic bag, stamped with the familiar Jenners sign, was a reassurance to Pat in these unfamiliar and challenging circumstances. There was something about the name Jenners that provided the comfort one needed in dubious situations. An occasion on which you were asked to take off your clothes and put them in a Jenners bag was inherently less threatening than an occasion in which one was asked to put them in any other bag.

  Pat thanked the woman and stuffed her clothing into the bag.

  Then, leaving the bag in the tent, alongside a number of other bags (mostly from Jenners), she went out into the rain. On the grass ahead of her, in a cluster around a small portable table, a group of respectably-covered, mackintosh-clad picnickers were sipping on glasses of fruit punch. Pat was offered a glass and joined the group.

  “Your first time at one of our little gatherings?” asked a man on Pat’s left.

  She looked at him. He was wearing a large brown raincoat, In Moray Place Gardens

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  the collar of which was turned up around his neck. He had a small moustache which was now wet through. Little streams of water ran off the edges of the moustache and onto his cheeks.

  “Yes,” she replied. “I came here with a friend. I’m not really . . .”

  The man cut her short. “We have such tremendous fun,” he said. “Last month we went to Tantallon and had a picnic in the dunes. Unfortunately, there was a terrible biting wind and we all ended up wearing sou’westers, but we did our best. On most occasions we at least manage to go about bare-footed, even if that’s about it. That’s the way nudism is in Scotland, I suppose.

  We can’t actually remove our clothes. But everybody is very understanding about that.”

  Pat was about to ask what the point was, but the man continued. “Are you interested in stamps?” he asked.

  Pat shook her head. “Not really,” she said.

  “Pity,” he said. “I find stamps absolutely fascinating. I have a very fine collection. Do you not collect anything?”

  “Not really,” said Pat.

  “I used to collect birds’ eggs when I was a boy,” he went on.

  “But then that became rather a bad thing to do and I gave up.

  So many people were raiding nests that some species were becoming a bit threatened. So I moved on to playing-cards and then to share certificates. That’s my current enthusiasm.

  Scriptology. I go for South American railway bonds – that sort of thing. They have beautiful designs. Quite beautiful.”

  Pat looked into her fruit punch. Drops of rain were falling into it, creating tiny circles. Underfoot, the grass was becoming sodden; and now, from the east, a wind had started to blow. She looked about her. Peter was nowhere to be seen. But that did not matter, because she did not want to see him any more. She felt nothing for him, no interest, no antipathy, nothing.

  She turned to the man beside her. “I have to go home,” she said impulsively. “Goodbye.”

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  84. The Memory of Pigs

  Dr Fairbairn was grateful to Irene for making him face up to the guilt that had been plaguing him for so many years. He had suppressed the memory of his professional breach, and had done so effectively. Or so he told himself. The problem was that he knew full well that repression of that sort merely allowed the uncomfortable memory to do its work at another level. And it was inevitable that this would become apparent at a later stage, creating tension between the external Dr Fairbairn, the one the world saw, and the internal Dr Fairbairn, the one hidden from the world by that blue linen jacket with its special crumple-resistant qualities.

  On the day that Irene had forced him to admit to himself, and to her, that he had actually struck his celebrated patient, Wee Fraser, Dr Fairbairn returned to his flat in Sciennes in the late afternoon and prepared himself a round of tomato sandwiches and a pot of tea. The flat was empty when he went in as his wife worked long hours and tended not to come home until well after seven. For this reason, they usually dined late –

  sometimes not until after nine – and Dr Fairbairn found it necessary to have a snack to keep hunger at bay.

  Dr Fairbairn did the cooking. He had done this throughout their marriage, not only to show that he was a “new man”, but also because he found cooking a relaxing and creative activity.

  Indeed, as he stood above his saucepan, adding cream to scallops or delicately re-inflating porcini mushrooms with a judicious measure of boiling water, all sorts of thoughts would go through his mind. This, he felt, was the time in which his unconscious could order the experiences of the day, before dreams took over that function slightly later on. This theory, that one should think through things before the dreaming mind began to function, was one which he hoped to develop in a book. It would be called, he had decided, Pre-Dream Dreaming, and he anticipated that it would be every bit as successful as his well-known book on Wee Fraser. Of course there were other books to write, and these were jockeying for position in his already busy schedule. One The Memory of Pigs

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  of these was Eat Your Way to Mental Health, a title which had come to him during one of his sessions at the stove. He remembered exactly how it had happened. He had been lightly sautéing garlic in olive oil when it occurred to him that our attitudes towards food were often affected by our view of what other people would think about our eating the food in question. He stopped, and stared at the garlic. He liked the taste of garlic, as did his wife. And yet people, even garlic enthusiasts, were so cautious, almost apologetic about its use. Who – other than the French, of course – would even contemplate putting a clove of garlic in the oven, its head neatly chopped off and a drop of oil dribbled very gently onto the top, and then a few minutes later taking it out and eating it? With nothing to accompany it?

  And yet why should one not do that? The answer, of course, lay not in any culinary realm, but in a social one. Garlic smelled.

  People who ate garlic smelled. And nobody wants to smell.

  Now, most people would leave it at that. Dr Fairbairn, however, felt that social inhibitions of that sort – the desire not to smell – were probably much more harmful and limiting than people generally thought they were. A person who did not worry about how he appeared to others, or what others thought of him, would enjoy far more resolution, more inner tranquillity, than one who did. And one way of encouraging this resolution would be to get people to eat what they wanted to eat. If self-expression could be encouraged at the table, then self-expression would follow in other parts of a person’s life.

  On this particular insight, Dr Fairbairn had sketched out an entire theory of how inhibitions and anxieties could be addressed both in the kitchen and at the table. It would be called food therapy and it would become immensely popular.

  Other books would be written on the subject. There would be courses. There would be lecture tours. And he and Estelle, his wife, could leave Sciennes – charming though it undoubtedly was – and go and live somewhere like Palm Beach. That was a very pleasant prospect, and indeed gave rise to a new idea, 278 Encounter, Catharsis, Flight

  an autobiography, which perhaps could be called From Motherwell to Palm Beach.

  But now, sitting in an armchair in his flat in Sciennes, his tomato sandwiches on a plate before him, Dr Fairbairn thought of what lay ahead. Irene was right; he would have to seek out Wee Fraser and apologise to him for what he had done all those years ago. But first he would have to relive, in as vivid a way as possible, the precise sequence of events that had led him to raise his arm.

  He had been in his room with Wee Fraser. He had given the boy a small wooden farm set, consisting of a couple of pigs, a tiny tractor, a stylised farmer and his wife, and some blocks out of which to make walls and pens. There was enough there to allow the child to portray a wide range of internal dynamics. But Wee Fraser had insisted on laying the pigs on the ground upside down, with their tiny porcine legs pointing upwards.

  “No, Fraser,” Dr Fa
irbairn had said. “Piggies go like this.”

  And he had placed the pigs the right way up.

  “Dinnae,” said Wee Fraser, turning the pigs upside down again.

  Dr Fairbairn righted the pigs, and at that Wee Fraser turned his head and bit him hard. Dr Fairbairn then smacked Wee Fraser.

  That is what had to be redressed. He stood up. He would do it now. Right now. He would go to Burdiehouse and find Wee Fraser. He reached for his blue linen jacket.

  85. Encounter, Catharsis, Flight

  Dr Fairbairn left the flat in Sciennes and made his way to the nearby bus-stop on Causewayside. His mood was buoyant; now that he had made the decision to go, he was keen to be there as soon as possible. He was sure that he would find Wee Fraser.

  He had extracted the address from his original records and a Encounter, Catharsis, Flight

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  quick search of the telephone directory had revealed that there was still a family living there by the name of Maclean – Wee Fraser’s surname. If the bus did not take its time in coming, then he thought that he could be knocking on the front door of Wee Fraser’s house just before six, which would be a good time to catch them in, as that was when ordinary people (as both he and Irene called them) ate their tea.

  A bus arrived and Dr Fairbairn boarded it. Because of the time of day it was fairly full, and Dr Fairbairn had to move down to the back in order to find a seat. And even then it was a small seat, as he was obliged to perch beside a large woman in a floral dress. The woman looked at him with distaste, as if he had no right to sit down on space which she could so easily have flowed into. Dr Fairbairn caught her hostile glance and returned it.

  Schizoid, he thought.

  He looked at the other passengers. He did not travel by bus very often – in fact he never went anywhere by bus – and it was interesting for him to look at the faces of the people and speculate on their psychological problems. On the bench on the other side of the narrow aisle were a young man and young woman, dressed in nondescript clothes. The man wore jeans, the knees of which had become distressed and ripped. Then he had a tee-shirt on which was written the word NO. The young woman had very similar garb, although her tee-shirt had a more complicated message. It said: I’M NOT DRUNK, IT’S JUST

  THE WAY I’M STANDING.

  Dr Fairbairn stared at the tee-shirts and then at the faces of the couple. They were, he imagined, about nineteen or twenty, and reasonably composed in their appearance and manner. Why then did they wear tee-shirts with messages? Was it a question of fashion – others broadcast messages on their clothing and therefore they felt they had to do it too? That was a simple, but powerful explanation. The desire to conform in clothing was almost universal. Jeans were a statement that one was just like everybody else. They were the modern uniform, achieving a flat monotony of look that would have warmed the heart of Mao at his height of enthusiasm for the destruction of sartorial salience.

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  But messages, he thought, were different. In having something written on one’s clothing – written on the outside, be it noted – one was effectively making oneself into a walking bill-board. This meant that one’s clothing could make both a passive and an active ideological statement. The red shirt with the head of Che Guevera said: I sympathise with the struggle. And if this message was not clear enough, one could add the words la Lucha underneath. If one was really radical, then an exclamation mark could be added to that. Thus people whose shirt said la Lucha!

  were likely to be seen as far more credible activists than those timid souls whose shirts merely said la Lucha. And of course Spanish was mandatory for such messages. It didn’t sound quite the same to have on one’s shirt the word küzdelem, which is Hungarian for “struggle”.

  The whole point, though, of having writing on one’s shirt was an exhibitionist one. To draw attention to oneself through clothing is exhibitionist, and of course, as Dr Fairbairn knew very well, exhibitionism was a substitute for real giving, real intimacy. The exhibitionist appears to be giving, but is actually not giving at all. He trumpets out the message Look at me, but he does that only to avoid having to engage in a real encounter, a Encounter, Catharsis, Flight

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  real human exchange, with the other. The external is all that is on offer with the exhibitionist; the internal is hoarded, protected, Freudice: retained. The last person you see when you are confronted with an exhibitionist is the real person inside. That person is not on display.

  Dr Fairbairn glanced at the young man’s shirt with its negative message. NO was perhaps not too bad a message to be proclaiming. At least it was modest. At least it was not like the obscene messages that some people wore on their clothing. Such people were shameless exhibitionists, but they were also polluters of our common space.

  He shifted in his seat, which gave him a better view of the seats at the back of the bus. It was an average group of people: a young man in a suit (a bank-teller, perhaps, thought Dr Fairbairn), a person with a full shopping bag and a look of resignation about her (a woman, perhaps, he thought), an elderly man who had fallen asleep. And then, very near the back, sitting alongside his mother, whom Dr Fairbairn recognised after all these years . . . Wee Fraser himself.

  Dr Fairbairn caught his breath. He had prepared himself for a meeting with Wee Fraser, but had not prepared himself for a meeting on the bus. And now, faced with the reality of this 14-year-old boy, with his short hair and his aggressive lower lip, Dr Fairbairn was not at all sure what to do. Should he wait until they got off the bus, at which point he could himself alight, or should he go and speak to them now? Would it be awkward to say what he had to in the bus, or would he need privacy?

  He thought about this, indifferent to his surroundings, but when he looked out of the bus window he realised that they were almost at Burdiehouse. In fact, now they were there, and Wee Fraser and his mother were rising to their feet.

  Dr Fairbairn waited for them to pass, before he got up. As they made their way past, Wee Fraser looked at Dr Fairbairn, and his eyes narrowed. Somewhere, in the very recesses of his mind, a memory was at work.

  Dr Fairbairn stood up, and in so doing he inadvertently jostled Wee Fraser, who spun round, muttered aggressively and then, 282 In the Café St Honoré

  with extraordinary speed, launched his head forward and head-butted the psychotherapist.

  Almost instinctively, but moved, too, by sheer rage, Dr Fairbairn raised his fist and hit Wee Fraser soundly across the side of his chin. There was a crack as the jaw broke.

  “Maw! Maw!” wailed Wee Fraser, the words strangely slurred by the loosened jaw.

  Dr Fairbairn pushed his way up to the front of the bus and burst out of the door. We repeat our mistakes, he reflected, as he made his way hurriedly down the road. Endlessly. In ways that speak so eloquently of our deepest inner urges.

  86. In the Café St Honoré

  Janis and Gordon met that night at eight o’clock at the Café St Honoré. Gordon had suggested dinner, and Janis had readily accepted, as she had been hoping for an opportunity to give him the Crosbie which she had bought from Matthew. The painting had appealed to her when she first saw it, and when she took it home, to her house in the Stockbridge colonies, she had become even more taken with it. She had wrapped it carefully in the red gift paper which she used in her florist shop, and had written a short message on an accompanying card. For Gordon, who has made these last few months so happy for me – Janis.

  Gordon had suggested that he call for her in a taxi, but she had decided to walk up the hill to the dinner engagement, as it was a fine evening. The first signs of autumn could be detected by those on the look-out for them, a slight sharpening of the air, an attenuation of the light. But for now, on that still evening, there was still every reason to be out under the pale sky, every reason to be walking through the streets of Edinburgh with the prospect of conversation and companionship at one’s destina-tion. Which is what we are all looking for,
thought Janis – in our various ways.

  She thought about her day as she walked up Howe Street.

  In the Café St Honoré

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  They had been busy at the shop, and she and her two assistants had been exhausted when they closed the door at six. There had been a large delivery for two weddings they were doing the following day and there had also been a steady stream of customers. In the mid-afternoon, a man had come in and chosen a large spray of roses. She had prepared the flowers and had handed them to him.

  “They are for my wife,” he had said. “They are for her.”

  Janis had smiled. “I’m sure she will like them,” she had said.

  The man had looked down at the flowers, staring at them for several moments, and then she had realised . . . and he had raised his head again and she had seen the tears. She reached out and placed a hand on his forearm, to comfort him, and thought: We buy flowers for the dead. That is the one thing we buy for them.

  Such moments as those were part of the florist’s day, and were handled as professionally as she could manage. But it was impossible not to be reminded in her work of the transience of human life and of how we can transform it by moments of kindness and consideration.

  Gordon was already there when she arrived, seated in a table by the window. He rose to his feet, knocking over a glass as he did so. The glass rolled briefly on the table and then fell to the ground, splintering into fragments.

  “I’m so clumsy,” he said to the waiter who appeared to deal with the situation.

  “It’s nothing, sir,” said the waiter. “People do far worse than this. Whole tables of things end up on the floor.”

  She smiled in appreciation at the waiter’s kindness and then turned her attention to the menu which had been put in front of her. For a few minutes they discussed what they would have and then, in the brief silence that followed, she reached for the small parcel which she had placed at her feet.