his crumple-free blue linen jacket; so unlike virtually all other men she had ever met. Men were such a disappointing group, on the whole; so out of touch with their feminine side, so rooted in the dull practicalities of life; and yet here was Dr Fairbairn, who just understood.
She sighed. Stuart would never understand. He knew nothing of psychodynamics; he knew nothing of the unconscious; he knew nothing, really.
“Of course,” she said suddenly. “There’s always Ulysses.”
Dr Fairbairn said nothing. He picked up his pen and stroked it gently. “Oh yes?” he said noncommittedly.
“Ulysses will have identity conflicts, will he not? When he’s old enough to question who he is?”
“We all wonder who we are,” said Dr Fairbairn distantly.
“Who doesn’t?”
“So Ulysses will look at his family and think: who are these people? Who’s my mother, who’s my brother, who’s . . .” She broke off. She had almost said “Who’s my father?” but decided not to.
Dr Fairbairn was staring down at his desk. Then he looked 294
There was. “He’s had a bit of trauma at school,” said Irene.
“That will probably come out. His class teacher has been suspended, and he’ll no doubt lose her. She pinched one of the girls. A nice child called Olive.”
“Goodness me!” said Dr Fairbairn.
“Yes,” Irene continued, “I heard about it from Bertie, and of course I had to raise it with the school.”
“You reported it?”
“Yes,” said Irene. “I couldn’t stand by.”
He thought for a moment. “But Bertie was very fond of that teacher, wasn’t he? He always spoke so warmly of her. Don’t you think that he might blame you for the fact that he’s losing her?”
Irene was silent.
Dr Fairbairn, realising that Irene seemed unwilling to pursue the matter, gave a shrug. “No matter. These losses are an inevitable part of life. We lose so much, and all we can hope is that our separation anxiety is kept within reasonable bounds. I have lost so much. You, no doubt, have done so too.”
He looked out of the window. He was a lonely man, and he only wanted to help others. He wanted to help them to recover a bit of what they had lost, and it gave him great pleasure when he did that; it was like making something whole again, mending a broken object. Each of us, you see, has a secret Eden, which we feel has been lost. If we can find it again, we will be happy, but Edens are not easily regained, no matter how hard we look, no matter how desperately we want to find them.
the Duke of Johannesburg’s party; she was too young for that, she knew, and yet she was unwilling to hurt Matthew, who was, she also knew, in his turn unwilling to hurt her. She would never settle down with him; she would never settle down with anybody, or at least not just yet. She stopped herself. That was simply untrue. If somebody came who swept her off her feet, who intoxicated her with his appeal, well, it would be very pleasant to settle down with such a person. If one is really in love, really, then the idea of spending all one’s time in the company of the person one loves, tucked away somewhere, was surely irresistible. That was the whole point, was it not, about slow boats to China – they provided a lot of time to spend with another. And would she have wanted to get on a slow boat to China with Matthew? The answer was no. Or with Wolf? The thought was in one sense appalling – Wolf was bad – but, but . . .
For a moment, she thought of the cabin on this slow boat, in which she and Wolf were sequestered, and she saw herself and Wolf in this cabin, and there was only a half-light and the engine of the boat was throbbing away in the distance somewhere and it was warm and . . . She stopped herself again. This was a full-blown fantasy, and she wondered if it was a good thing to be walking down one side of George Square, fantasising about a boy such as Wolf, while around her others, whose minds were no doubt on higher things, made their way to and from lectures.
Or were they fantasising too?
She had reached the bottom of the west side of George Square, the point where the road dipped down sharply to a row of old stables on one side and Basil Spence’s University Library on the other. She had not been paying much attention to her surroundings, and so she was surprised when she found herself drawing abreast of Dr Geoffrey Fantouse, Reader in the History of Art at the University of Edinburgh, expert in the Quattrocento, and the man whose seminars on aesthetics she attended every Wednesday morning – together with fifteen other students, including Wolf, who sat, smouldering, on the 296
“Miss Macgregor?”
Pat slowed down. “Dr Fantouse. Sorry, I was thinking. I wasn’t looking.” And she had been thinking, of course, though he would never guess about what.
Dr Fantouse smiled. “As an aesthetician,” he said, “I would be inclined to suggest that one should first look, then think.”
Pat thought for a moment. She did not immediately realise that this was a joke, but then she understood that it was, and she laughed politely. Dr Fantouse looked proud, in a modest sort of way.
It was clear that they were both walking in the same direction – across the Meadows, that broad, tree-lined expanse of park that separated the university area from the semi-Gothic nineteenth-century tenements of Marchmont – and so Pat fell into step with the aesthetician.
