“Of course there are,” said Pat. “And you’ve got a lot in your life as it is.”
Bruce looked at her. “Are you winding me up?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Pat. “Sorry. I couldn’t help it. You see, wouldn’t it be easier to tell the truth? Wouldn’t it be easier to admit that you’ve lost your job and your girlfriend? Then I could tell you how sorry I am and that might help a little, just a bit. Instead of which you stand there and spin a story about resigning and giving people their freedom and all the rest. It’s all a lie, isn’t it, Bruce?”
Bruce, who had been buttering the toast as he spoke, stopped what he was doing. He looked down at the plate, and moved the toast slowly to one side, putting down the knife.
Then his shoulders began to heave and he turned and walked out of the room, leaving Pat in the kitchen, alone with her sudden guilt.
47
“I feel terrible,” said Pat to Domenica. “I could have stopped myself, but I didn’t. And then, suddenly, he seemed to crumple.”
“Crumple?” asked Domenica, taking a sip of her sherry. It was a lovely thought. “Deflate?”
“Yes,” said Pat. “And that was it. He left the kitchen – and I felt terribly guilty. After all, he’s lost his job and now he’s lost his girlfriend. I suppose he just felt a bit vulnerable – and I made it all the worse for him by crowing.”
Domenica shook her head. “You didn’t crow. You just told him a few truths about himself. I suspect that you did him a good turn.”
Pat thought about this. Perhaps it was time for Bruce to be deflated, and perhaps she was the person who had to do it. And yet it had not been easy and she had felt bad about it; so bad that she had come straight through to speak to Domenica.
“Not that your good turn will have much effect,” Domenica went on. “I don’t think that a few painful moments will have much long-term impact on that young man. Yes, he’s feeling miserable, and he might do a little bit of thinking as a result of what you said. But people don’t change all that radically on the basis of a few remarks made to them. It takes much more than that. In fact, there’s the view that people don’t change at all. I think that’s a bit extreme. But don’t expect too much change.”
Pat frowned. Surely people did change. They changed as they matured. She remembered herself at fourteen. She was a different person now. “People grow up, though,” she said. “They change as they grow up. We all do.”
Domenica waved a hand in the air. “Oh, we all grow up. But once the personality is formed, I don’t think that you get a great deal of change. Bruce is a narcissist, as we’ve all agreed. Do you see him becoming something different? Can you imagine him not looking in mirrors and worrying about his hair? Can you imagine him thinking that people don’t fancy him? I can’t. Not for the moment.” She put her glass down on the table and looked at Pat. “How old is Bruce, by the way?”
48
“He’s twenty-five,” said Pat. “Or just twenty-six. Somewhere around there.”
Domenica looked thoughtful. “Well, that’s rather interesting.
Men are slower, you know. They mature rather later than we do. We get there in our early twenties, but they take rather longer than that. Indeed, I believe that there’s a school of psychology that holds that men are not fully responsible until they reach the age of twenty-eight.”
Pat thought this was rather late. And what did it mean to say that men were not fully responsible until that age? Could they not be blamed for what they did? “Isn’t that a bit late?” she asked. “I thought that we were held responsible from . . .” From what age were we held responsible? Was it sixteen? Or eighteen?
Young people ended up in court, did they not, and were held to account for what they had done? But at what age did all that start?
Domenica noticed Pat’s surprise. “Twenty-eight does seem a bit late,” she said. “But there’s at least something to it. If you look at the crime figures they seem to bear this out. Young men commit crimes – ones that get noticed – between seventeen and twenty-four, twenty-five. Then they stop.” She thought for a moment and smiled at some recollection. “I knew a fiscal,” she went on. “He spent his time prosecuting young men up in Dunfermline. Day in, day out. The same things. Assault. Theft.
So on. And he said that he saw the same people, from the same families, all the time. Then he said something very funny, which I shall always remember. He said that the fiscals saw the same young men regularly between the age of seventeen and twenty-six, and then the next time they saw them was when they were forty-five and they had hit somebody at their daughter’s wedding!
What a comment!”
“But probably true?”
“Undoubtedly true,” agreed Domenica. “On two counts.
Weddings can be violent affairs, and everything runs in families. You’ve heard me on genetic determinism before, haven’t you? But that’s another topic. Let’s get back to excuses, and change, and Bruce. If you think that twenty-eight is a bit late
49
for responsibility – true responsibility – to appear, then what would you say to forty?”
“Very late.”
Domenica laughed. “Yes, maybe. But again, if you ask people to describe how they’ve behaved over the years, you will often find that they say they’ve looked at it very differently, according to the stage of life that they’re at. Here I am, for example, sitting here with all the wisdom of my sixty years – what a thought, sixty! – and I can definitely see how I’ve looked at things differently after forty. I’m less tolerant of bad behaviour, I think, than I used
