44 Scotland Street

concede, was just possible. The most surprising people lived in Portobello, including at least some creative people.

And was Dr Fairbairn married, with children perhaps? This was even more difficult to determine than the question of where he might live. She had glanced at his left hand and had seen no ring, but that meant nothing these days. There were even some people who put rings on the relevant finger in order to flout convention or to throw others off the scent, whatever the scent 174

Post-analysis Analysis

was. And Dr Fairbairn might not be married at all but might have a partner, and children by that partner. Or he might not be interested at all.

That, of course, was the most difficult issue to determine.

Irene knew that there were people who were just not interested at all, just as there were people who were not in the slightest bit interested in tennis. This did not mean that they were resentful of people who played tennis, or of people who liked to watch tennis; it’s just that tennis meant nothing to them.

They made their way slowly towards Valvona and Crolla. Bertie was still cautiously avoiding stepping on the lines in the pavement, frowning with concentration on the task, but this was unnoticed by Irene, who was still lost in speculation over the private life of Dr Fairbairn. There was something about him which suggested that he did not have a wife or partner. It was difficult to put one’s finger on this, but it was a rather lost look, a look of being uncared for. One sometimes saw this in men who had no women to look after them. Gay men were different, Irene thought. They looked after themselves very well, but straight men tended to look dishevelled and slightly neglected if they had nobody.

Mind you, she thought, that young man at the top of the stair, Bruce, looked far from neglected. He put that substance on his hair – what was it, lubricant? – and he was always rather smartly dressed. She had talked to him on several occasions and he had been perfectly civil. He had once even let Bertie touch his en brosse hair after Bertie had made a remark about how good it looked. Bruce had bent down and said to Bertie as the little boy had gingerly reached out to touch his head: “You could look like this one day too – if you’re lucky!”

It had been an odd remark, but they had all laughed. Afterwards Bertie had asked several questions about Bruce, but Irene had answered them vaguely. Little boys liked to have heroes, as Melanie Klein pointed out, and she was not sure whether that young man was a suitable choice. Nor did she encourage Bertie’s open admiration for that Macdonald woman’s Mercedes-Benz. Bertie had enquired whether they might ask if he could have a ride in it one day, and she had given an unequivocal no to that request.

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175

“We have our own car,” said Irene. “A much more sensible car than that, I might add.”

“But we never go in our car,” complained Bertie. “Where is it?”

“It’s parked,” said Irene curtly.

“Where?” asked Bertie. “Where is our car parked?”

Irene did not know. Stuart had parked it somewhere or other a few weeks ago and she had no idea where this was. So she gave a simple reply. “Outside,” she said, as they arrived at their destination.

65. A Meeting in Valvona and Crolla They walked past the shelves in Valvona and Crolla, each looking at the items at his and her particular eye-level. Irene gazed at packets of pasta; not ordinary, hard pasta of the sort that one might see in a supermarket, vulgar spaghetti and the like, but obscure, complicated egg-rich pastas – tagliatelle and other rare varieties. These cost twice as much as vulgar pasta, but tasted infinitely better. Vulgar pasta tasted like cardboard, Irene thought, and she could never understand how people could actually eat it. Probably because they knew no better, she decided.

Ordinary people – as Irene called them – were remarkably in the dark, and often simply did not realise how in the dark they were. Fortunately, ordinary people were beginning to develop more sophisticated habits, brought about, in part, by overseas travel, not that Spain helped very much, thought Irene.

Down at his eye-level, Bertie saw tinned fish and sea-food, Portuguese sardines and Sicilian octopus. The pictures on these tins were intriguing. The Portuguese sardines were portrayed as swimming contentedly in a small shoal near the surface of the sea, while in the background there was a wild coast with high cliffs and mountains behind. Bertie had been to Portugal, and some of it, he recalled, had looked just like that. They had eaten sardines there, too, every night, though the sardines had looked less happy than those portrayed on the tin.

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A Meeting in Valvona and Crolla

After they had completed their shopping, they had gone through to the cafe and latte had been ordered.

“Well, Bertie,” said Irene cheerfully. “What did you think of Dr Fairbairn?”

Bertie appeared to think for a moment. “He was very kind,”

he said. “He didn’t smack me when he called me a naughty boy.”

Irene’s eyes widened. “He did not call you a naughty boy,” she protested. “He asked you whether you had been a naughty boy, that’s all. And I didn’t think that he meant it.”

“Why did he say it then?” asked Bertie. “Why did he call me a naughty boy?”

Irene drew in her breath. This would require very careful handling. It had been unwise of Dr Fairbairn to use the term

“naughty boy” in the first place, but then he probably had not realised just how bright Bertie was. Other boys would have seen this remark as a bit of harmless banter – a joke really – but Bertie was far too sensitive for that. Bertie had cried when he had seen a picture of the unfinished parliament building in the newspapers. That showed real sensitivity. “It’s so sad,” he had said. “All that building and building and it’s never finished. Can we not help them, Mummy?”

She would have to mention to Dr Fairbairn – very tactfully, of course – that he was sensitive to suggestion, unlike Wee Fraser perhaps. Wee Fraser had not been a sensitive boy, by all accounts, and even when his ego had been re-assembled at the end of the analysis, he had not seemed to have developed any particularly sensitive