The World According to Bertie

didn’t like him.

You told me so yourself, Mummy.”

Irene glanced away. “Bertie,” she said, “you really mustn’t put words into my mouth. I did not say that I disliked Hiawatha.

All I said was that I didn’t like the way Hiawatha . . . well, not to beat about the bush, I didn’t like the way that Hiawatha smelled. He really is a rather unsavoury little boy.”

“But if you don’t like somebody’s smell,” said Bertie, “doesn’t that mean that you don’t like them?”

“Not at all,” countered Irene. “You can dislike the way a person smells without disliking them, in their essence.” She paused. “And anyway, Bertie, I really don’t think that this conversation is getting us anywhere. We were really meant to be talking about Dr Fairbairn. I was giving you an answer to the question that you asked about stopping your psychotherapy. And the answer, Bertie, is that you must keep up with it until Dr Fairbairn tells us that there’s no longer any need for you to see him. He has not done that yet.”

Bertie looked down at his shoes, thinking of how the answer was always no. Well, if his mother wanted to talk about Dr Fairbairn, then there was something that had been preying on his mind.

“Mummy,” he began. “Don’t you think that Ulysses looks a lot like Dr Fairbairn? Haven’t you noticed?”

Irene was quite still. “Oh?” she said. “What do you mean by that, Bertie?”

Bertie Plucks Up Courage and Asks the Big Question 87

“I mean that Ulysses has the same sort of face as Dr Fairbairn.

You know how they both look. This bit here . . .” He gestured to his forehead.

Irene laughed. “But everybody has a forehead, Bertie! And I suspect if you compared Ulysses’s forehead with lots of other people’s, then you would reach the same conclusion.”

“And his ears,” went on Bertie. “Dr Fairbairn’s ears go like that – and so do Ulysses’s.”

“Nonsense,” said Irene abruptly.

“Do you think that Dr Fairbairn could be Ulysses’s daddy?”

asked Bertie.

He waited for his mother to respond. It had just occurred to Bertie that if Ulysses were to be Dr Fairbairn’s son, then that could mean that he would go and live with him, and Bertie would no longer have the inconvenience of having a smaller brother in the house. He was not sure how Ulysses could be the psychotherapist’s son, but it was, he assumed, possible. Bertie had only the haziest idea of how babies came about, but he did know that it was something to do with adults having a conversation with one another. His mother and Dr Fairbairn had certainly talked to one another enough – enough to result in a baby, Bertie thought.

Irene was looking at her fingernails. “Bertie,” she said. “There are some questions we never ask, and that is one of them. You never ask if somebody is a baby’s real daddy! That’s very rude indeed! It’s the person whom the baby calls Daddy who is the daddy. We just have to accept that, even if sometimes we wonder whether it’s not true. And of course it’s not true in this case –

I mean, it’s not true that there’s another daddy. Daddy is Ulysses’s daddy. And that’s that.”

Bertie listened attentively. He wondered if there was a chance that Irene was not his real mother, and he would have loved to have asked about that, but this was not the right time, Bertie sensed.

27. It’s Never Rude to Say Things to a Doctor Now, sitting in Dr Fairbairn’s waiting room, Bertie paged though an old issue of Scottish Field. His mother was closeted in the consulting room with the psychotherapist, and Bertie knew that they were discussing him, as they always did at the beginning of one of his sessions. He did not like this, but he knew that there was nothing he could do about it. It was hard enough to tackle his mother by herself; when she teamed up with Dr Fairbairn, it seemed to Bertie that he was up against impossible odds.

Bertie liked reading Scottish Field, and his regular encounters with the magazine helped to make the visits to Dr Fairbairn at least bearable. He wondered if it would be possible to take the magazine in with him to read during the psychotherapy session itself, as it seemed to him that Dr Fairbairn was quite content to do all the talking and it would make no difference if he was reading at the time. But he decided that this request would have little hope of being met; adults were so difficult over things like that.

He turned to the back of the magazine. After looking at the advertisements for fishing jackets and Aga cookers, which he liked, he turned to the social pages, which were his particular favourite. There were photographs there of people all over Scotland going to parties and events, and in every photograph everybody seemed to be smiling. Bertie had not been to many children’s parties, but at those to which he had been there had always been one or two people who burst into tears over something or other. It seemed that this did not happen at grown-ups’ parties, where there was just all this smiling. Bertie thought that this might have something to do with the fact that many of the people in the photographs were holding glasses of wine and were therefore probably drunk. If you were drunk, he had heard, you smiled and laughed.

He examined the photographs of a party which had been held at a very couthie place called Ramsay Garden. Somebody who It’s Never Rude to Say Things to a Doctor 89

lived there, it said, was giving drinks to his friends, who were all standing around laughing. That’s nice, thought Bertie. One or two of the friends looked a bit drunk, in Bertie’s view, but at least they were still standing, which was also nice. And there was a photograph of a man playing the kind-looking host’s piano.

His hands were raised over the keyboard and he was smiling at the camera, which Bertie thought was very clever, as it was hard to get your fingers on the right notes if you were not looking.

Underneath the photograph there was a line which said: Eric von Ibler accompanies the singing, while David Todd turns the pages.

Bertie wondered what the guests had been singing. He had once walked with his father past a pub where everybody was singing

“Cod Liver Oil and the Orange Juice,” which was a very strange song, thought Bertie. Was that what they were singing at the Ramsay Garden party? he wondered. Perhaps.

Bertie sighed and turned the page. There was a lot of fun being had in Scotland, mostly by grown-ups, and he