changing tent is over there. The men are in that one.”
Pat made her way to the tent and drew aside the flap. Inside, a middle-aged woman was in the process of buttoning up the front of her mackintosh.
“This rain is such a pest,” said the woman. “But we shall have our picnic come hell or high water.”
Pat nodded. She slipped out of her clothes and donned her mackintosh. She did not feel at all exposed in this new garb; and indeed she was not.
“You’ll need a bag for those clothes of yours,” said the woman helpfully. “Here’s a Jenners bag for you.”
The sight of the plastic bag, stamped with the familiar Jenners sign, was a reassurance to Pat in these unfamiliar and challenging circumstances. There was something about the name Jenners that provided the comfort one needed in dubious situations. An occasion on which you were asked to take off your clothes and put them in a Jenners bag was inherently less threatening than an occasion in which one was asked to put them in any other bag.
Pat thanked the woman and stuffed her clothing into the bag.
Then, leaving the bag in the tent, alongside a number of other bags (mostly from Jenners), she went out into the rain. On the grass ahead of her, in a cluster around a small portable table, a group of respectably-covered, mackintosh-clad picnickers were sipping on glasses of fruit punch. Pat was offered a glass and joined the group.
“Your first time at one of our little gatherings?” asked a man on Pat’s left.
She looked at him. He was wearing a large brown raincoat, In Moray Place Gardens
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the collar of which was turned up around his neck. He had a small moustache which was now wet through. Little streams of water ran off the edges of the moustache and onto his cheeks.
“Yes,” she replied. “I came here with a friend. I’m not really . . .”
The man cut her short. “We have such tremendous fun,” he said. “Last month we went to Tantallon and had a picnic in the dunes. Unfortunately, there was a terrible biting wind and we all ended up wearing sou’westers, but we did our best. On most occasions we at least manage to go about bare-footed, even if that’s about it. That’s the way nudism is in Scotland, I suppose.
We can’t actually remove our clothes. But everybody is very understanding about that.”
Pat was about to ask what the point was, but the man continued. “Are you interested in stamps?” he asked.
Pat shook her head. “Not really,” she said.
“Pity,” he said. “I find stamps absolutely fascinating. I have a very fine collection. Do you not collect anything?”
“Not really,” said Pat.
“I used to collect birds’ eggs when I was a boy,” he went on.
“But then that became rather a bad thing to do and I gave up.
So many people were raiding nests that some species were becoming a bit threatened. So I moved on to playing-cards and then to share certificates. That’s my current enthusiasm.
Scriptology. I go for South American railway bonds – that sort of thing. They have beautiful designs. Quite beautiful.”
Pat looked into her fruit punch. Drops of rain were falling into it, creating tiny circles. Underfoot, the grass was becoming sodden; and now, from the east, a wind had started to blow. She looked about her. Peter was nowhere to be seen. But that did not matter, because she did not want to see him any more. She felt nothing for him, no interest, no antipathy, nothing.
She turned to the man beside her. “I have to go home,” she said impulsively. “Goodbye.”
276 Chapter title
84. The Memory of Pigs
Dr Fairbairn was grateful to Irene for making him face up to the guilt that had been plaguing him for so many years. He had suppressed the memory of his professional breach, and had done so effectively. Or so he told himself. The problem was that he knew full well that repression of that sort merely allowed the uncomfortable memory to do its work at another level. And it was inevitable that this would become apparent at a later stage, creating tension between the external Dr Fairbairn, the one the world saw, and the internal Dr Fairbairn, the one hidden from the world by that blue linen jacket with its special crumple-resistant qualities.
On the day that Irene had forced him to admit to himself, and to her, that he had actually struck his celebrated patient, Wee Fraser, Dr Fairbairn returned to his flat in Sciennes in the late afternoon and prepared himself a round of tomato sandwiches and a pot of tea. The flat was empty when he went in as his wife worked long hours and tended not to come home until well after seven. For this reason, they usually dined late –
sometimes not until after nine – and Dr Fairbairn found it necessary to have a snack to keep hunger at bay.
Dr Fairbairn did the cooking. He had done this throughout their marriage, not only to show that he was a “new man”, but also because he found cooking a relaxing and creative activity.
Indeed, as he stood above his saucepan, adding cream to scallops or delicately re-inflating porcini mushrooms with a judicious measure of boiling water, all sorts of thoughts would go through his mind. This, he felt, was the time in which his unconscious could order the experiences of the day, before dreams took over that function slightly later on. This theory, that one should think through things before the dreaming mind began to function, was one which he hoped to develop in a book. It would be called, he had decided, Pre-Dream Dreaming, and he anticipated that it would be every bit as successful as his well-known book on Wee Fraser. Of course there were other books to write, and these were jockeying for position in his already busy schedule. One The Memory of Pigs
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of these was Eat Your Way to Mental Health, a title which had come to him during one of his sessions at the stove. He remembered exactly how it had happened. He had been lightly sautéing garlic in olive oil when it occurred to him that our attitudes towards food were often affected by our view of what other people would think about our eating the food in question. He stopped, and stared at the garlic. He liked the taste of garlic, as did his wife. And yet people, even garlic enthusiasts, were so cautious, almost apologetic about its use. Who – other than the French, of course – would even contemplate putting a clove of garlic in the oven, its head neatly chopped off and a drop of oil dribbled very gently onto the top, and then a few minutes later taking it out and eating it? With nothing to accompany it?
And yet why should one not do that? The answer, of course, lay not in any culinary realm, but in a social one. Garlic smelled.
People who ate garlic smelled. And nobody wants to smell.
Now, most people would leave it at that. Dr Fairbairn, however, felt that social inhibitions of that sort – the desire not to smell – were probably much more harmful and limiting than people generally thought they were. A person who did not worry about how he appeared to others, or what others thought of him, would enjoy far more resolution, more inner tranquillity, than one who did. And one way of encouraging this resolution would be to get people to eat what they wanted to eat. If self-expression could be encouraged at the table, then self-expression would follow in other parts of a person’s life.
On this particular insight, Dr Fairbairn had sketched out an entire theory of how inhibitions and anxieties could be addressed both in the kitchen and at the table. It would be called food therapy and it would become immensely popular.
Other books would be written on the subject. There would be courses. There would be lecture tours. And he and Estelle, his wife, could leave Sciennes – charming though it undoubtedly was – and go and live somewhere like Palm Beach. That was a very pleasant prospect, and indeed gave rise to a new idea, 278 Encounter, Catharsis, Flight