“How nice,” said Miss Macfadzean, glancing at her watch.
“Such noble people the Italians, sometimes.”
“Yes,” said Irene. “And he’s recently passed Grade six saxophone. Grade six.”
“What an active little boy!” said Miss Macfadzean. “I’m surprised that he finds time to come to playgroup! We’re obviously very lucky to have him.”
“He needs more stimulation,” Irene pressed on. “If you could find the time to work with his reading . . .”
“Out of the question,” said Miss Macfadzean. “There are all the other children to think about. I’m sorry.” She paused for a moment. “Anyway, I did want to have a word with you about Bertie’s behaviour. He needs to work a bit more on his co-operation with other children. He’s not exactly gifted in that respect. Sometimes there are
“Incidents?”
“Yes,” went on Miss Macfadzean. “He likes the train set. But he must learn to share it a bit more. He destroyed a rather nice little station set-up that one of the other children had made. He said that he had blown it up. He said it was something to do with politics.”
Irene smiled. “Dear Bertie! That’s the trouble, you see.
He’s so much more advanced than the other children. They won’t know anything about politics. They won’t even know the word.”
“No, they won’t,” agreed Miss Macfadzean. “But he shouldn’t really spoil their games. We have to teach them how to live and let live. We have to encourage socialisation.”
“Bertie knows all about socialisation,” said Irene quickly.
“The problem is that all the other children are . . . well, sorry to have to say this, but they’re just not up to him. They won’t understand him. And that means he gets frustrated. You have to see it from his point of view.”
Miss Macfadzean glanced at her watch again. “Perhaps he needs to be left alone a bit more. Perhaps he needs a little more space to be a five-year-old boy. Do you think . . .?” She tailed off weakly, disconcerted by Irene’s stare.
47
“Bertie is a very special child,” Irene said quietly. “But not everyone seems to understand that.” She glanced at Miss Macfadzean, who looked away again. It was hopeless, Irene thought; hopeless.
The unsatisfactory interview over, Irene walked back to Scotland Street, giving a wide birth to the section of pavement which had been the cause of her downfall. She knew very well what Miss Macfadzean had thought of her; it had been apparent in her every look and in her every insulting remark. She thought that here was another pushy mother – one of those women who thinks that their child is special and is not getting enough attention.
That’s what she thought about her, and it was all so wrong, such an unfair judgment. They had never pushed Bertie – not for one moment. Everything that they had done with him had been done because he wanted it. He had asked for a saxophone. He had asked to learn Italian after they had gone to buy sun-dried tomatoes at Valvona and Crolla. They had never pushed him to do any of this.
And what did that woman mean when she talked about the space to be a five-year-old boy? What exactly did that mean? If it meant that they had to deny Bertie’s natural curiosity about the world, then that was outrageous. If a child asked about something, you could hardly deny his request for information.
There are certain difficulties with Christabel Macfadzean, thought Irene. Firstly, she’s a cow. Now, that was putting it simply.
But even as she thought this – and it gave her some satisfaction to think in these terms – Irene realised that such thoughts were unworthy of her. That’s how ordinary people thought. She knew that the real difficulty lay in the fact that this woman purported to run an advanced playgroup (the brochure claimed that they adhered to the latest educational principles, whatever those were).
48
In spite of these claims, this woman knew nothing about how children behaved. She had made some sarcastic reference to her
Had Christabel Macfadzean been familiar with the merest snippets of Kleinian theory, she would immediately have understood that when Bertie blew up that other child’s train station, this was purely because he was expressing, in a person-object sense, his fundamental anxieties over the fact that society would never allow him to marry his mother. This was obvious.
It was remarkable, when one came to think of it, that Bertie should behave so like Richard, the boy whom Melanie Klein analysed during the war. Richard had drawn pictures of German aeroplanes swooping in for attack, thus expressing the anxieties he felt about the Second World War, and about his mother. In destroying the train station, Bertie had merely acted out what Richard must have felt. Irene stopped. A remarkable thought had occurred to her. Had Bertie read Klein? He was an avid reader, but probably not, unless, of course, he had been dipping into the books on her shelves . . . If he had been reading Klein, then he might unconsciously have mirrored Richard’s behaviour
It angered Irene just to think about it, and for a few moments she paused, standing quite still in the middle of the pavement, her eyes closed, battling with her anger. She had been going to the Floatarium recently and she imagined herself back in the tank, lying there in perfect silence. This sort of envisioning always helped.
She would take Bertie to the Floatarium next time and put him in the tank. He would like that, because he had an interA Modest Gift
