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His progress in music was equally meteoric. At the age of four, he was playing the soprano recorder with some facility, and had made a start on rudimentary music theory. By five, he had embarked – or been embarked, perhaps – on the study of the saxophone, and on this instrument he made particularly rapid progress. He showed an early propensity for the playing of jazz, although Irene was slightly uneasy about this, as she was not convinced that jazz encouraged the same musical rigour as did classical music. Bertie’s rendition of ‘As Time Goes By’, although hardly jazz, was easy on the ear, and indeed had been much appreciated by Pat, whose bedroom in 44 Scotland Street lay immediately above the room in which Bertie practised.
But all this hot-housing produced precisely that reaction which any reasonable parent might have foreseen: Bertie rebelled, first by minor acts of non-cooperation (occasionally refusing to talk Italian) and then by major gestures (burning his father’s copy of
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his father. This had improved the situation, but if leopards do not change their spots, neither does the
– the condition in which she now found herself – had a strange effect: it led to renewed vigour in her desire to impose her views on others. This was probably a result of the loss of control she felt of her body and world: as the sheer brute fact of carrying another life within her resulted in a diminution of her sense of personal autonomy, so her need to assert herself in other respects grew.
This manifested itself in a variety of ways, but most remarkably in an increase in the number of altercations in which she became involved. There was the famous campaign against Nurse Forbes of the National Childbirth Trust, and then there was the terrible row over the Pollock car, which once again had gone missing. It was Bertie who had precipitated the row over the car when he made an apparently innocent observation. “Mummy,”
he said. “You know how you left our car at the top of Scotland Street, outside Mr Demarco’s house? Well, it’s not there any-more.”
“Nonsense!” expostulated Irene. “Of course it’s there.” She was replying to the question which Bertie had posed about the disappearance of the Pollock car. Of course the car was parked in Scotland Street – she herself had parked it there only two days earlier, when she had driven to Valvona and Crolla to stock up on sun-dried tomatoes and olives. She distinctly remembered parking it because she had almost run over one of the cats which sauntered about the street and which had narrowly escaped being crushed by the back wheels of Irene’s reversing Volvo. For a moment or two, she thought that she had actually crushed the cat, as she felt a slight bump, which proved to be nothing more than a folded up newspaper which somebody had dropped and 36
which had become a sodden mound in the gutter.
“You must have been looking in the wrong place, Bertie,” she said. “Maybe you were looking at the other side of the street.
Our car is on the left as you go up the hill. Did you look on the right?”
“No,” said Bertie. “I looked on the left. And it wasn’t there, Mummy. I promise you.”
Irene frowned. Bertie was a very observant little boy and would normally not make a mistake about this sort of thing.
But it was impossible that she had inadvertently parked the car somewhere else and forgotten about it. That was the sort of thing that Stuart was always doing; indeed, on one occasion he had parked the car in Glasgow and then returned to Edinburgh by train. That had been disastrous, as the car had sat across there for weeks, if not months. Perhaps Stuart had used the car since she had parked it. That would provide a rational explanation for its absence from the street, if it was absent; but then had Stuart driven the car over the past few days? He had not said anything about it, and he had hardly had the time to do much driving, as he and his colleagues were all working against a looming deadline on a report at his office in the Scottish Executive and he was not coming back home until after ten at night. It was unlikely, then, that such a simple explanation would be found.
“I tell you what, Bertie,” she said. “We’ll take a little walk and see whether the car is there or not. I need to take more exercise now that I’m pregnant.”
“Is it good for the baby?” asked Bertie, reaching out to lay a hand against his mother’s stomach.
“I’m sure it is,” said Irene. “Babies thrive if the maternal circulation is good. And a healthy mother means a healthy baby, Bertie!”
Bertie looked up at his mother. There was so much he wanted to say to her, but his conversations with her never seemed to go the way he wanted them to go. What he wanted to ask about was whether the arrival of the baby would change things for him.
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He decided to try. “When the new baby arrives, Mummy,”
he began, “will things be different?”
Irene smiled. “Oh yes,” she said. “Oh yes, they will! Babies make a terrible noise, I’m afraid, Bertie – even well-behaved Edinburgh babies! So we must expect a few disturbed nights until the baby settles. But you shouldn’t hear him at your end of the corridor. I’m sure you won’t be woken up.”
Bertie thought for a moment. “But what I was wondering about was whether you’ll be very busy. Will you be very busy, Mummy?”
“Of course,” said Irene. “New babies are very demanding creatures. Even you were demanding, Bertie. You sometimes became quite niggly for some reason. I used to play you Mozart to calm you down. It always worked. You loved ‘
