She sat down, facing Matthew. She was puzzled. “Why are you asking about all this?”
“It’s because my father seems to have found a girlfriend,” he said glumly. “And I don’t know what she sees in him.”
Pat had met Matthew’s father on a previous visit he had paid to the gallery. “But your father’s very nice,” she said. She paused, before adding: “And tremendously rich.”
22. Chow
“Now tell me, Bertie,” said Dr Fairbairn, straightening the crease of his trousers as he crossed his knees. “Tell me: have you written your dreams down in that little notebook I gave you?” Bertie did not cross his legs. He was unsure about Dr Fairbairn, and he wanted to be ready to leap to his feet if the psychotherapist became more than usually bizarre in his state-ments. The best escape route, Bertie had decided, would be to dart round the side of his desk, leap over the psychotherapist’s leather-padded couch, and burst through the door that led into Chow
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the waiting room. From there he could launch himself down the stairs, sliding down the banister, if need be, and run out into the safety of the street. No doubt somebody would call the police and Dr Fairbairn would be led off to Carstairs, which Bertie understood to be the place where people of this sort sometimes ended up. They would take good care of him there, as the doctors would all be friends of his and would perhaps allow him to play golf in the hospital grounds while he was getting better.
He looked at Dr Fairbairn. He noticed that the tie which the psychotherapist frequently wore – the one with the teddy-bear motif – was missing, and that in its place there was a dark silk tie with a question-mark motif. Why would Dr Fairbairn have a question-mark on his tie? Bertie was intrigued.
“Yes, I’ve written down my dreams,” said Bertie. “But can you tell me, Dr Fairbairn: why have you got those question-marks on your tie?”
Dr Fairbairn laughed. “You’re always very observant about what I’m wearing, Bertie. Why do you think this is?”
“Because I can see your tie,” said Bertie. “I have to look at you when I talk to you and I see what you’re wearing.”
Dr Fairbairn stared at Bertie. “You’re not jealous, are you, Bertie? You’re not jealous of my tie, are you?”
Bertie drew a deep breath. Why should he think that he should be jealous, when he already had a tie at home? “No, I’m not jealous,” he said. “I just wondered.”
Dr Fairbairn nodded. “You wouldn’t by any chance have thought of cutting my tie off ? Have you thought that about your father’s ties?”
Bertie’s eyes narrowed. Would they let Dr Fairbairn wear a tie in Carstairs? he wondered. Or would they take it away from him? Would they cut if off ? Dr Fairbairn was always going on about other people’s anxieties that things would be cut off; well, it would teach him a lesson if somebody came and cut his own tie off. That would serve him right.
“I’ve never wanted to do that,” he said quietly. “I like Daddy’s ties. He’s a got a tartan one that he sometimes wears with his kilt.”
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Chow
The mention of a kilt seemed to interest Dr Fairbairn, who wrote something down on his pad of paper. The psychotherapist opened his mouth to speak, but Bertie was too quick for him. “My dream,” he said, fishing into his pocket for the notebook he had been given. “We mustn’t forget my dream.”
Dr Fairbairn smiled. “Of course,” he said. “Why don’t you tell me all about it? I’m very interested in your dreams, Bertie.
Dreams are very important, you know.”
Bertie opened the notebook. He did not think that dreams were important. In fact, he thought that dreams were silly, and hardly worth remembering at all. Indeed, he had been quite unable to remember many dreams recently and had been obliged to resort to a dream he had experienced some months ago, so as to humour Dr Fairbairn.
Dr Fairbairn stared at Bertie. What a strange little boy this was – only six years old, and how determined, how astonishingly determined he was to suppress the Oedipal urge. It would come out, of course, but it might take some time, and dream analysis could help. All would be revealed. There would be father figures galore in this dream; just wait and see!
“I was on a train,” read Bertie. “I was on a train and the train was going through the countryside. There were fields on either side of it and there were people standing in the fields waving to us as we went past.”
“Were these people men or women?” asked Dr Fairbairn gently, his pencil moving quickly across the paper. They would be men, of course: fathers . . . watching, scrutinising.
“Girls,” said Bertie. “Girls with wide-brimmed hats. All of them were girls.”
Dr Fairbairn nodded. “I see,” he said. “Girls.” Waving goodbye to girls? To mother, of course; that was mother in the field, being left behind by the masculine train.
“Yes,” said Bertie. “Should I go on, Dr Fairbairn?”
“Of course.”
“I looked out of the window of the train and then I went back into the compartment. It was an old train, and there were separate compartments, with wood panels on the walls. I sat Chow
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there for a while, and then I got up and went out into the corridor. It was a long corridor and I began to walk down it, looking into the other compartments as I went along.”
“And who was in the compartments?” asked Dr Fairbairn.
“Was your father there?”
“No,” said Bertie. “I did not see my father. He must have been in his office – at the Scottish Executive. No, I did not recognise anybody on the train. They were all strangers.
Strangers and dogs.”
“Dogs?” interrupted Dr Fairbairn. “How interesting!”
“One of the dogs was a big furry dog. He looked at me and barked.”
Bertie looked at Dr Fairbairn, who had stopped writing when he mentioned the dog and who was staring at him in a very strange way. He wondered whether the time had come to make his escape, but the psychotherapist did not move. Dr Fairbairn was thinking about the dog. A large furry dog could only be one thing . . . a chow. And that, as every follower of Vienna was only too aware, was precisely the breed of dog owned by Sigmund Freud. Already the title of a paper was forming in his mind: Echoes of the Freudian Chow: nocturnal symbols and a six-year-old boy.
“Chow,” said Dr Fairbairn quietly.
Bertie looked up sharply. This must be a signal.
“Ciao,” he said quickly, and rose to his feet.
For a moment, Dr Fairbairn looked puzzled, but then he glanced at his watch and nodded to Bertie. He wanted to speak to Irene, and there would be ten minutes or so before his next patient arrived.
“Ask Mummy to come in for a moment,” he said to Bertie.
“You don’t mind waiting in the waiting room, do you?”
Bertie did, but did not say it. There was no point. There was nothing he could do to make his life more as he wanted it to be. His life was so limited, so small in its room. Waiting.
Listening. Being lectured to. Told to write his dreams down.
Taken to the floatarium. Forced to learn Italian. And there were years of this ahead of him – year upon endless year.
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Chapter title
23. An Astonishing Revelation Is Almost Made Bertie sat quietly in the waiting room, paging through a magazine. He hated it when his mother went in for what she described as her “few quick words” with Dr Fairbairn. To begin with, it would be more than a few words, and they were never quick –