she said to herself; I may as well bring the whole thing to an end right now. And yet there was something compelling about him, something fascinating that drew her to him. Something to do with the way he looked, she thought; the lowest common denominator of such dalliances. The conclusion depressed her, but there it was: some relationships are a matter of the physical, try as we might to ennoble them. Ultimately, the reason why one person may stay with another may be as small a thing as the shape of the other’s nose.
Unaware of Sally’s doubts, Bruce assumed that she would find the separation difficult, and that she might wish to prolong their affair at a distance. So when the idea occurred to him of how he might spend a month or two before he started his new job in the autumn, he imagined that Sally would welcome the suggestion.
“I’ve got some good news for you,” he said casually, as they sat in the garden at the Cumberland Bar, enjoying some late Saturday afternoon sunshine.
She looked at him and smiled. The sun was in his hair, melting the gel. Poor Bruce!
“I can come to Nantucket with you,” said Bruce. “You’ve made me curious about it. We could spend a few weeks there maybe, at your place, and then do some travelling. I’ve always wanted to see New Orleans. We could go down there maybe.”
Sally stared at him. The moment had come, unexpected just then, but it had definitely arrived.
“We have to reach a decision,” said Irene Pollock, mother of Bertie, and neighbour, one floor down, of Pat, Bruce and Domenica. She looked at her husband and waited for him to speak.
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He was sitting in the chair which he liked to occupy near one of the windows of the sitting room, immediately under the small reproduction Warhol which Irene had bought for him at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He had not been listening closely to what Irene was saying, as he had been thinking about a row which had blown up at the office – Stuart was a statistician in the Scottish Executive – and there had been an intense discussion in an internal meeting of how figures might be presented. The optimists had been pitted against the pessimists, and Stuart was not sure exactly into which camp he fitted. He believed that there were sometimes grounds for optimism and sometimes grounds for pessimism, and that one might on occasion choose between them at the level of subtle, and permissible, nuances but in general should stick to the truth, which was often uncomfortable.
All of this was some distance away from the matter which Irene was talking about, which was the issue of how their son, Bertie, the remarkably talented five-and-three-quarter-year-old, should get from Scotland Street, where they lived, to the school in Merchiston, in which he had now been enrolled.
“Obviously I shall go with him for the first year or so,” said Irene. “And I’ll pick him up at three in the afternoon or whenever it is that he finishes. But before we know where we are he’ll be big enough to go by himself, and we’ll have to make a decision.”
“About what?” Stuart asked, distractedly.
Irene felt vaguely irritated. There were times when Stuart’s mind seemed to be less focused than it might. And these occasions, she had noticed, were increasingly occurring when she was talking about something important to do with Bertie. Was he fully committed to the Bertie project? She would have to talk to him some time about that. One did not raise a little boy like Bertie without full commitment from both parents, and that meant a full commitment to all aspects of the project: educa-tional, social and psychological.
“About which bus he takes,” she said, the irritation creeping into her voice. “There are several possibilities, as you know. The
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23 or the 27. And there’s also the number 10 to be thought about.”
Stuart shrugged. “Which goes closer to the school?” he asked.
“The 27,” said Irene. “Both the 23 and the 27 go up Dundas Street and on to Tollcross. Then the 23 carries on up to Morningside, whereas the 27 turns right at the King’s Theatre and goes along Gilmore Place to Polwarth.”
“Oh,” said Stuart.
Irene looked out of the window, staring, while she spoke, at a window on the other side of the street. A woman stood at this window, brushing her hair. “If he took the 23,” Irene went on,
“he would get off in Bruntsfield and then walk along Merchiston Crescent and down Spylaw Road. It would take him about ten minutes to reach the school gate. Alternatively, if he took the 27, he would have a walk of about four minutes from a stop on Polwarth Terrace.”
“And the 10?”
“The number 10 is a different proposition,” said Irene. “That bus goes along Princes Street and ends up on Leith Walk. If he took that, he would have to walk along London Street and then up to the top of Leith Walk. It’s a slightly longer route, but there’s another factor involved there.”
Stuart raised an eyebrow. The ethics of statistical presentation seemed simple in comparison with the complexities of Edinburgh bus routes. “And this factor? What is it?”
“Going along London Street would remind him of the walk to the nursery school,” she said quietly. “That’s the route which I took him to that . . . that place.” She shuddered involuntarily, remembering her last confrontation with the nursery-school teacher, and that awful morning when Bertie had finally been suspended for writing graffiti, in Italian, in the children’s toilets.
That had been so unfair, so cruel. It was entirely natural for small boys to explore their environment in this way and to seek to express themselves. If there were any fault involved, then surely it was that of the nursery itself, which had failed to provide adequate stimulation for him; not that that woman who ran the place would even begin to understand that.
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“I don’t want Bertie to be reminded of his suspension,” she said firmly. “So that rules out the number 10.”
“Fine,” said Stuart. “And if the 27 involves a shorter walk, then shouldn’t we opt for that? Is there much else to
