Espresso Tales

boys around all the time?

“So what if it’s an invitation?” Bertie said. “Tofu told me not to talk about it.”

“Ha!” crowed Olive. “I knew that’s what it was. He invited Bertie Receives an Invitation

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me to his sixth birthday party last year. I refused. So did all the other girls he invited. He tried to get us to pay ten pounds to come. Did you know that? He tried to sell tickets to his own party.”

Bertie said nothing, and Olive continued. “I heard that the party was pretty awful anyway,” she said. “Vegan parties are always very dull. You get sweetened bean sprouts and water.

That’s all. Certainly not worth ten pounds.”

Bertie felt that he had to defend his friend in the face of this onslaught. “We’re going bowling,” he said. “Merlin and Hiawatha are coming too.”

“Merlin and Hiawatha!” exclaimed Olive. “What wimps! I’m glad I’m not going to that party. I suppose Merlin will wear that stupid rainbow-coloured coat of his and Hiawatha will wear those horrid jungle boots he keeps going on about. They’ll make him take those boots off, you know. They won’t allow boots like that in the bowling alley. And then people will smell his socks, which always stink the place out. Pansy says that she was ill –

actually threw up – the first time Hiawatha removed his boots for gym. Boy, is it going to be a stinky party that one!”

It was clear to Bertie that Olive was jealous. It was a pity that Tofu had not invited her, as if he had then she would have been less keen to run the party down. But Bertie was not going to let her destroy his pleasure in the invitation and so he deliberately turned his back on her and concentrated on the story that was being read out.

“You’re in denial,” Olive whispered to him. “You know what happens to people in denial?”

Bertie turned round. “What?” he said. “What happens to people in denial?”

Olive looked at him in a superior way. She had clearly worried him and she was enjoying the power that this gave her. “They get lockjaw,” she said. “It’s well-known. They get lockjaw and they can’t open their mouth. The doctors have to knock their teeth out with a hammer to pour some soup in. That’s what happens.”

Bertie looked at Olive contemptuously. “You’re the one who 210 Bertie’s Invitation Is Considered should get lockjaw,” he whispered. “That would stop you saying all these horrid things.”

Olive stared at him. Her nostrils were flared and her eyes were wide with fury. Then she started to cry.

Miss Harmony looked up from the story. “What is the trouble, Olive?” she said. “What’s wrong, dear?”

“It’s this boy,” Olive sobbed, pointing at Bertie. “He says that he hopes that I get lockjaw.”

“Bertie?” said Miss Harmony. “Did you say that you hope that Olive got lockjaw?”

Bertie looked down at the floor. It was all so unfair. He had not started the conversation about lockjaw – it was all Olive’s fault, and now he was getting the blame.

“I take it from your silence that it’s true,” said Miss Harmony, rising to her feet. “Now, Bertie, I’m very, very disappointed in you. It’s a terrible thing to say to somebody that you hope they get lockjaw. You know that, don’t you?”

“What if you got lockjaw while you were kissing somebody?”

interjected Tofu. “Would you get stuck to their lips?”

Everybody laughed at this, and Tofu smirked with pleasure.

“That’s not at all funny, Tofu, Liebling,” said Miss Harmony.

“Then why did everybody laugh?” asked Tofu.

64. Bertie’s Invitation Is Considered Irene Pollock was late in collecting Bertie from school that afternoon. She had been preparing for her Melanie Klein Reading Group, which would be meeting that evening, and she had become absorbed in a particularly fascinating account of the Kleinian attitude to the survival of the primitive. Irene was clear where she stood on this point: there was no doubt in her mind but that our primitive impulses remain with us throughout our life and that their influence cannot be overestimated. This view of human nature, as being envious and tormented, was in Irene’s view obviously borne out by the inner psychic drama which we Bertie’s Invitation Is Considered

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all experience if only we stop to think about it. Irene thought that it was quite clear that we are all confronted by primitive urges – even in Edinburgh – and these primitive urges and fears make for a turbulent inner life, marked by all sorts of destructive phantasies).

The topic for discussion at the reading group that evening was a problematic choice, suggested by one of the more reticent members of the group. Indeed, this member was probably a borderline-Kleinian, given her sympathy for the approach of Anna Freud, and Irene wondered whether this person might not be happier out of the reading group altogether. Her ambiva-lence, she felt, was eloquently demonstrated by the topic she had suggested for discussion: Was Melanie Klein a nice person?

When Irene had first seen this topic she had expressed immediate doubt. What a naive question! Did she expect a genius of Melanie Klein’s stamp to be a simpering optimist? Did she expect benignity rather than creative turbulence?

Of course she knew what sort of things would be said. She knew that somebody was bound to point to the facts of Melanie Klein’s life, which were hardly edifying (to the bourgeois optimist). Somebody would point out that Melanie Klein started out life in a dysfunctional family and that from this inauspicious start everything went in a fairly negative direction. Indeed, she suffered that most serious of setbacks for those who took their inspira-tion from Vienna: her own analyst died. And then, when it came time for Melanie herself to die, her daughter, Melitta, unreconciled to her mother because of differences of psychoanalytical interpretation between them, gave a lecture