She felt his gaze upon her, a quizzical, slightly bemused look, and she wondered what it meant. It was as if he was sounding her out, determining whether she could respond to those images of Australia, that evocation of atmosphere. And she could, of course, and was about to say something herself about the Australian countryside and the effect it had wrought upon her when there was a knock at the door. He looked away, the spell broken, and answered.
The door half-opened and a head appeared. It was a young woman, of about Pat’s age, or a year or two older. The young woman looked briefly at Peter and then at Pat. “Sorry to interrupt,” she said. “The thermostat on the hot water has stuck again. Can you fiddle with it like you did last time?”
Peter put down his coffee cup and rose from the bed. “Of course,” he said. Then, half-turning to Pat, he said: “By the way, this is Joe.”
Pat nodded a greeting, which Joe returned with a cheerful wave. Then, while Peter and Joe were out of the room, Pat looked up at the ceiling and smiled. Josephine and Fergus: rather a different picture from the one she had imagined. And this meant that Peter was quite possible now, although there was still the question of T. Who was T and did she (or he) take the photograph of the skinny-dipping in Greece? She could always ask Peter directly, but then that would reveal that she had 164
Stuart interrupted her. “Thank you. I’m sure that he’d like the train ride. You know how he feels about trains. Little boys . . .”
Irene nodded impatiently. “Yes, yes,” she said, buttering her toast. She knew how little boys – or some of them – felt about trains, but that was no reason to encourage them. Little boys felt that way about trains because they were socially encouraged to do so – and she was sure that it was Stuart who had brought trains into the picture; she certainly had not. There was nothing inherent in the make-up of boys that attracted them to trains.
Boys and girls were genetically indistinguishable, in her view (apart from the odd chromosome), and it was social conditioning that produced interests such as trains, in the case of boys, and, quite appallingly, dolls in the case of girls. Irene had never played with dolls, but had Stuart played with trains as a boy? They had never discussed the matter, but she had a good idea as to what the answer would be.
“Don’t spend more time in Glasgow than you have to,” she said. “Bertie’s going to miss his yoga class as it is, and I don’t want him to miss his saxophone lesson as well.”
“It would be nice to take him down to Gourock or somewhere like that,” Stuart ventured. “He would probably like to see the ferries. We could even pick up some fish and chips.”
Irene laughed ominously. “And a deep-fried Mars Bar while you’re about it?”
Stuart thought that Bertie would probably rather enjoy that,
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but had the good sense not to say it. He was looking forward to the outing and he did not want to provoke Irene into offering to accompany them. It was good to be going off alone with his son – as a father should do from time to time. Bertie hardly spoke to him these days; he seemed to have withdrawn into a world from which he, Stuart, was excluded, and this was worrying. Yet Stuart found it difficult to know what to say to Bertie, or to anybody else for that matter. He was a naturally quiet man, and throughout his marriage to Irene, whom he admired for her strength of character and her intellectual vision, he had left it to her to do the talking. She had always been in charge of what she called the Bertie project, and he had left it to her to make the decisions about the little boy. But beneath this acceptance there was a vague unease on his part that he was not much of a father to Bertie, and Bertie’s distance from him had fuelled this unease. And when that dreadful incident had occurred and Bertie had set fire to his copy of the
For his part, Bertie was fond enough of his father, but he wished that he would be somewhat less passive. It seemed to him that his father led a very dull life, with his daily journey to the Scottish Executive and all those statistics. Bertie was good at mathematics, and had absorbed the basic principles of calculus, but did not think that it would be very satisfying to do mathematics all day, as his father did. And what did the Scottish Executive need all those statistics for in the first place? Bertie wondered. Surely there was a limit to the number of statistics one needed.
When Bertie was told that he was going to Glasgow with his father, and on a train to boot, he let out a yelp of delight.
“That means we’ll go to Waverley Station?” he asked. He had seen pictures of Waverley Station but he had never been there, as far as he could remember.
“Yes,” said Stuart. “And we’ll get on the Glasgow train and 166
Bertie was sure that he would, and gave vent to his pleasure with a further yelp.
“Now remember to wear your duffel coat over your dungarees,” his mother said. “And wash your hands before you eat anything. Glasgow is not a very salubrious place, and I don’t want you catching anything there.”
Bertie listened but said nothing. He would not wash his hands in Glasgow, as his mother would not be there to make him.
Being in Glasgow, in fact, would be like being eighteen, the age which Bertie yearned for above anything else. After you were eighteen you never had to listen to your mother again, and that, thought Bertie, would be nirvana indeed.
“Glasgow’s not all that bad,” said Stuart mildly. “They’ve got the Burrell and then there’s . . .”
Irene cut him off. “And the mortality statistics?” she snapped.
“The smoking? The drinking? The heart disease?”
