just like Peter’s. Had Pedro, the doll, been interested in girl dolls, or did he prefer the company of other boy dolls? As a girl, she had thought that Pedro had loved only her, but that might have been a mistake. Pedro might have wished for something else altogether but had been obliged all his woolly life to be with her, like the captive he was. Such a ridiculous thought, and she smiled involuntarily at the thinking of it.
Peter smiled back.
They both began to speak at that same time.
“I . . .” said Pat.
And he said, “I . . .” and then, laughing, “You go ahead.”
“No, you go,” she said. “Go on.”
“What do you do? I suppose that’s what I was going to ask you.”
Pat explained that she was a student, or almost a student.
“I’ve had a couple of years off,” she said. “I went to . . .” She paused, and he watched her expectantly. “To Australia, actually.”
He nodded. “So did I. Where were you?”
She could not bring herself to speak about Western Australia, although she knew that she would have to do so sooner or later.
So she mentioned Queensland and New South Wales, and Peter replied that he had been in both of those places. “I picked fruit,”
he said. “And I worked in a bar in Sydney, down in that old part near the harbour bridge. I did all sorts of things. Then I went travelling with somebody I met there. We had a great time. Two months of travelling.”
“Where was he from?” asked Pat.
“She,” said Peter. “She was Canadian. She came from somewhere near Winnipeg.”
Of course she was probably just a friend, thought Pat. She had travelled in Thailand with a boy who was no more than a friend; it protected one from all sorts of dangers. And of course if she had been with somebody in Western Australia, then she would not have ended up in that plight in the first place.
“I had some pretty strange jobs in Australia,” Peter went on. “I spent a month on a sheep station, looking after the Australian Memories
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owner, who was ancient. He couldn’t walk very far and so they had made him a sort of trolley which he put a chair on. It had bike wheels, front and back, and I had to push him around the garden and down to the edge of the river. He was doing a correspondence course in history and I had to help him with that.”
Pat laughed. She had taken peculiar jobs too, and none more peculiar than that job in Western Australia; but she did not feel like talking about that.
Peter looked thoughtful. “I miss Australia, you know. I miss the place. Those wide plains. The eucalyptus forests and the noise of the screeching birds. Remember that? The galahs? And the people, too. That friendliness. I miss all that a lot.”
She felt his gaze upon her, a quizzical, slightly bemused look, and she wondered what it meant. It was as if he was sounding her out, determining whether she could respond to those images of Australia, that evocation of atmosphere. And she could, of course, and was about to say something herself about the Australian countryside and the effect it had wrought upon her when there was a knock at the door. He looked away, the spell broken, and answered.
The door half-opened and a head appeared. It was a young woman, of about Pat’s age, or a year or two older. The young woman looked briefly at Peter and then at Pat. “Sorry to interrupt,” she said. “The thermostat on the hot water has stuck again. Can you fiddle with it like you did last time?”
Peter put down his coffee cup and rose from the bed. “Of course,” he said. Then, half-turning to Pat, he said: “By the way, this is Joe.”
Pat nodded a greeting, which Joe returned with a cheerful wave. Then, while Peter and Joe were out of the room, Pat looked up at the ceiling and smiled. Josephine and Fergus: rather a different picture from the one she had imagined. And this meant that Peter was quite possible now, although there was still the question of T. Who was T and did she (or he) take the photograph of the skinny-dipping in Greece? She could always ask Peter directly, but then that would reveal that she had 164 A Trip to Glasgow in the Offing sneaked a look at the photograph, which was none of her business. Unless, of course, she were to place her coffee cup on the table and inadvertently cause the books and photographs to fall onto the floor . . . just like this.
50. A Trip to Glasgow in the Offing Sitting at the breakfast table, her single piece of toast on her plate, Irene said to Stuart: “When you go through to Glasgow on Saturday, you may take Bertie with you, but . . .”
Stuart interrupted her. “Thank you. I’m sure that he’d like the train ride. You know how he feels about trains. Little boys . . .”
Irene nodded impatiently. “Yes, yes,” she said, buttering her toast. She knew how little boys – or some of them – felt about trains, but that was no reason to encourage them. Little boys felt that way about trains because they were socially encouraged to do so – and she was sure that it was Stuart who had brought trains into the picture; she certainly had not. There was nothing inherent in the make-up of boys that attracted them to trains.
Boys and girls were genetically indistinguishable, in her view (apart from the odd chromosome), and it was social conditioning that produced interests such as trains, in the case of boys, and, quite appallingly, dolls in the case of girls. Irene had never played with dolls, but had Stuart played with trains as a boy? They had never discussed the matter, but she had a good idea as to what the answer would be.
“Don’t spend more time in Glasgow than you have to,” she said. “Bertie’s going to miss his yoga class as it is, and I don’t want him to miss his saxophone lesson as well.”
“It would be nice to take him down to Gourock or somewhere like that,” Stuart ventured. “He would probably like to see the ferries. We could even pick up some fish and chips.”
Irene laughed ominously. “And a deep-fried Mars Bar while you’re about it?”
Stuart thought that Bertie would probably rather enjoy that, A Trip to Glasgow in the Offing
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but had the good sense not to say it. He was looking forward to the outing and he did not want to provoke Irene into offering to accompany them. It was good to be going off alone with his son – as a father should do from time to time. Bertie hardly spoke to him these days; he seemed to have withdrawn into a world from which he, Stuart, was excluded, and this was worrying. Yet Stuart found it difficult to know what to say to Bertie, or to anybody else for that matter. He was a naturally quiet man, and throughout his marriage to Irene, whom he admired for her strength of character and her intellectual vision, he had left it to her to do the talking. She had always been in charge of what she called the Bertie project, and he had left it to her to make the decisions about the little boy. But beneath this acceptance there was a vague unease on his part that he was not much of a father to Bertie, and Bertie’s distance from him had fuelled this unease. And when that dreadful incident had occurred and Bertie had set fire to his copy of the Guardian he had done nothing; a real father would have remonstrated with his son and punished him – for his own good. He had done nothing, and it had been left to Irene to arrange a psychotherapeutic response.
For his part, Bertie was fond enough of his father, but he wished that he would be somewhat less passive. It seemed to him that his father led a very dull life, with his daily journey to the Scottish Executive and all those statistics. Bertie was good at mathematics, and had absorbed the basic principles of calculus, but did not think that it would be very satisfying to do mathematics all day, as his father did. And what did the Scottish Executive need all those statistics for in the first place? Bertie wondered. Surely there was a limit to the number of statistics one needed.