Espresso Tales

“Girls,” said Bertie. “Girls with wide-brimmed hats. All of them were girls.”

Dr Fairbairn nodded. “I see,” he said. “Girls.” Waving goodbye to girls? To mother, of course; that was mother in the field, being left behind by the masculine train.

“Yes,” said Bertie. “Should I go on, Dr Fairbairn?”

“Of course.”

“I looked out of the window of the train and then I went back into the compartment. It was an old train, and there were separate compartments, with wood panels on the walls. I sat Chow

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there for a while, and then I got up and went out into the corridor. It was a long corridor and I began to walk down it, looking into the other compartments as I went along.”

“And who was in the compartments?” asked Dr Fairbairn.

“Was your father there?”

“No,” said Bertie. “I did not see my father. He must have been in his office – at the Scottish Executive. No, I did not recognise anybody on the train. They were all strangers.

Strangers and dogs.”

“Dogs?” interrupted Dr Fairbairn. “How interesting!”

“One of the dogs was a big furry dog. He looked at me and barked.”

Bertie looked at Dr Fairbairn, who had stopped writing when he mentioned the dog and who was staring at him in a very strange way. He wondered whether the time had come to make his escape, but the psychotherapist did not move. Dr Fairbairn was thinking about the dog. A large furry dog could only be one thing . . . a chow. And that, as every follower of Vienna was only too aware, was precisely the breed of dog owned by Sigmund Freud. Already the title of a paper was forming in his mind: Echoes of the Freudian Chow: nocturnal symbols and a six-year-old boy.

“Chow,” said Dr Fairbairn quietly.

Bertie looked up sharply. This must be a signal.

“Ciao,” he said quickly, and rose to his feet.

For a moment, Dr Fairbairn looked puzzled, but then he glanced at his watch and nodded to Bertie. He wanted to speak to Irene, and there would be ten minutes or so before his next patient arrived.

“Ask Mummy to come in for a moment,” he said to Bertie.

“You don’t mind waiting in the waiting room, do you?”

Bertie did, but did not say it. There was no point. There was nothing he could do to make his life more as he wanted it to be. His life was so limited, so small in its room. Waiting.

Listening. Being lectured to. Told to write his dreams down.

Taken to the floatarium. Forced to learn Italian. And there were years of this ahead of him – year upon endless year.

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Chapter title

23. An Astonishing Revelation Is Almost Made Bertie sat quietly in the waiting room, paging through a magazine. He hated it when his mother went in for what she described as her “few quick words” with Dr Fairbairn. To begin with, it would be more than a few words, and they were never quick –

she would be ages, he thought – and then he knew that they were discussing him, and he resented that.

Dr Fairbairn had promised him that he would not tell his mother about that list he had made him write down, but Bertie was sure that he would do just that, and would in all prob-ability show it to her too. Dr Fairbairn was simply too unstable to be trusted, Bertie thought, and it astonished him that nobody had yet noticed just how dangerous he was. They would find out one of these days, of course, when Dr Fairbairn finally attacked one of his patients, and then he would be able to say that he had seen it all along. But until then nobody would listen to him.

Bertie turned the pages of his magazine, an old copy of Scottish Field. He liked this magazine, because it had pictures of people fishing and advertisements for waterproof clothing, for fishing tackle, and for multi-bladed penknives. Bertie had seen an article on how to tie a fly, and had been fascinated by what he had read. He could try that, perhaps, if only somebody would teach him – which of course they never would. He imagined that that was the sort of thing one learned at Watson’s, with boys like Jock; and what fun it would be to cut up the little bits of feather and then tie them together to resemble a fly. That would be far more fun than cutting up old copies of the Guardian to make chains of paper men.

Bertie found himself perusing the social section, at the end of the magazine. He studied the pictures carefully. The life depicted there looked such fun. There had been a vintage-car rally, and a party afterwards, and the people were standing about their old cars, drinking glasses of champagne, their motoring glasses pushed over the brow of their heads. They were handsome, exciting-looking people, and the cars were so beautiful; An Astonishing Revelation Is Almost Made 75

unlike our car, thought Bertie – and we don’t even know where our car is parked.

He stared at the people in the photograph. A tall man was smiling at the camera – that was Mr Roddy Martine, it said underneath. It would be wonderful to be as tall as that, thought Bertie. Nobody would try to push Mr Roddy Martine over, thought Bertie; they wouldn’t dare. And next to him was a kind-looking man with a moustache – Mr Charlie Maclean, it said.

He was holding a fishing rod and smiling. What fun they were all having, thought Bertie. At least there are some people in Scotland who can have some fun. Perhaps Mr Charlie Maclean had a son, he thought, and I could meet him and he could be my friend, as Jock so nearly was. There was no photograph of Dr Fairbairn, Bertie