35
23 or the 27. And there’s also the number 10 to be thought about.”
Stuart shrugged. “Which goes closer to the school?” he asked.
“The 27,” said Irene. “Both the 23 and the 27 go up Dundas Street and on to Tollcross. Then the 23 carries on up to Morningside, whereas the 27 turns right at the King’s Theatre and goes along Gilmore Place to Polwarth.”
“Oh,” said Stuart.
Irene looked out of the window, staring, while she spoke, at a window on the other side of the street. A woman stood at this window, brushing her hair. “If he took the 23,” Irene went on,
“he would get off in Bruntsfield and then walk along Merchiston Crescent and down Spylaw Road. It would take him about ten minutes to reach the school gate. Alternatively, if he took the 27, he would have a walk of about four minutes from a stop on Polwarth Terrace.”
“And the 10?”
“The number 10 is a different proposition,” said Irene. “That bus goes along Princes Street and ends up on Leith Walk. If he took that, he would have to walk along London Street and then up to the top of Leith Walk. It’s a slightly longer route, but there’s another factor involved there.”
Stuart raised an eyebrow. The ethics of statistical presentation seemed simple in comparison with the complexities of Edinburgh bus routes. “And this factor? What is it?”
“Going along London Street would remind him of the walk to the nursery school,” she said quietly. “That’s the route which I took him to that . . . that place.” She shuddered involuntarily, remembering her last confrontation with the nursery-school teacher, and that awful morning when Bertie had finally been suspended for writing graffiti, in Italian, in the children’s toilets.
That had been so unfair, so cruel. It was entirely natural for small boys to explore their environment in this way and to seek to express themselves. If there were any fault involved, then surely it was that of the nursery itself, which had failed to provide adequate stimulation for him; not that that woman who ran the place would even begin to understand that.
36
A Bus for Bertie
“I don’t want Bertie to be reminded of his suspension,” she said firmly. “So that rules out the number 10.”
“Fine,” said Stuart. “And if the 27 involves a shorter walk, then shouldn’t we opt for that? Is there much else to be discussed?”
“There is a difference between a 27 bus and a 23 bus,” said Irene. “It’s not just a question of which bus goes where.”
Stuart smiled. “The Morningside factor?”
Irene nodded. “Yes,” she said. “You could refer to it as that.
The 23 bus is probably the most middle-class bus there is. It’s the archetypical Edinburgh bus, if one uses the word Edinburgh in its pejorative sense. Do we want Bertie to become part of that whole Edinburgh scene? Is this not the reason why we’re sending him to a less-stuffy school? To get him away from that whole tight Edinburgh attitude, that whole middle-class, Merchant Company view of the world?”
“Then why don’t we send him to the school round the corner?” asked Stuart.
Irene shook her head. “Impossible. It’s a question of music lessons. It’s not their fault, but many schools don’t have the resources. It’s society’s fault. We let this happen. We’ve starved the schools of resources.”
Stuart was silent. There was a sense in which his wife was right. We had allowed state education to decline because we had not been prepared to make the sacrifices needed to support the schools. But it went deeper than that in places like Edinburgh, where the middle classes – or a large part of the middle classes
– had developed a parallel world for their children. But they would reply that all that they were doing was paying for that which the state did not provide. And this might be countered with the argument that their lack of commitment perpetuated this state failure. And so the debate went on.
“I don’t think that it matters too much,” he said calmly. “And, anyway, it looks as if the 27 is the solution. Unless . . .”
Irene hesitated. “The 27 can get a bit rough sometimes,”
she said, almost apologetically. “There are some bits of Oxgangs . . .”
A Thin Summer
37
“Then it’s the 23,” said Stuart.
Irene hesitated for a moment, but only a moment. “Yes,” she said. “The 23.”
12. A Thin Summer
Bertie had not enjoyed a particularly good summer. It had seemed to him – as it seems to all small boys – that the months of summer would be endless, a long, hazy succession of days of adventure and excitement. But that was not how the summer had actually turned out.
To begin with, they had barely left the city in spite of his repeated requests that they go somewhere – anywhere. Even the Pentland Hills would have done. He had heard that there were lochs there in which you could catch trout. A boy who lived in Fettes Row had told Bertie that he went there with his father and they had both caught two trout. It was easy, said the boy; you put the fly in the water and the trout jumped out and ate it. “Even somebody like you could do it,” the boy went on.
“Can I go fishing in the Pentlands?” Bertie asked his mother.
“That boy who lives in Fettes Row went fishing with his dad and caught two trout. You like trout, Mummy. I could catch some for you. And I could catch some almonds to put on top of the trout.”
“If that’s a joke, Bertie,” said Irene severely, “then it’s not very funny. Fishing is cruel. Think of the poor trout swimming around in the loch and then some unkind boy from Fettes Row comes and howks them out of the water and that’s the end of the trout. Would you want to do that sort of thing? I’m sure you wouldn’t. Anyway, we couldn’t get out to the Pentlands.
Your father has parked the car somewhere and we’re going to have to find it. I just don’t have the time to look for it right now.”
Bertie thought for a moment. “But you eat trout, don’t you?
38
A Thin Summer
You and Daddy both eat trout. I’ve seen you. Isn’t it just as cruel to eat trout as to catch them? What’s the difference?”
“There’s an important difference,” said Irene. “I’ll explain it to you some time, but not at the moment.” She paused. “Bertie, you know that Mummy does her best for you, don’t you? You know that I love you very much and only want you to be happy?”
Bertie looked down at the floor. “Yes,” he said quietly. “It’s just that I don’t seem to have much fun. I want to have a bit more fun. That boy in Fettes Row has more fun than I do.”
“Oh, Bertie, you can’t say that! Look at all the fun you have!
There’s your saxophone – you love playing that. I bet that boy wouldn’t know how to play the saxophone, or anything for that matter. Anybody can fish – very few boys can play the saxophone. And then there’s your Italian lessons, and your yoga, and . . .” Irene was about to say “and your psychotherapy” but stopped. She was not sure if Bertie was enjoying that as much as she was, and it was best, perhaps, not to mention it in this particular conversation.
Bertie was certainly not enjoying his psychotherapy. It was not that he actively disliked Dr Fairbairn, the prominent psychotherapist and author of the seminal study on that three-year-old tyrant, Wee Fraser; no, it was not that he disliked him, it was more a question of finding Dr Fairbairn quite impene-trably odd. In fact, Bertie was convinced that Dr Fairbairn was mad, and that the only viable strategy was for him to humour him, hoping thereby to avoid becoming the target of Dr Fairbairn’s unpredictable wrath.
This strategy of humouring had produced the desired effect on the psychotherapist. He found Bertie increasingly co-operative and indeed felt that there were depths to the boy’s psyche that would repay very serious study. There was even the possibility of a paper there – something for the British Journal of Child Psychotherapy or Studia Kleinia perhaps. But that was a long-term goal; the more immediate task, in Dr Fairbairn’s view, was to discover what dynamics were operating in Bertie’s developing ego structure and to work out what blockages were preventing him from developing a more integrated personality.