He imagined her sitting in a chair in the kitchen, looking out at the nasturtiums.
“Has something happened?”
“Yes,” she said. And then, after a momentary hesitation, “I’ve lost my job. Or rather, I’m about to lose my job.”
Matthew gasped.
“Yes,” Elspeth went on. “There was an incident at the school yesterday and . . . and, well, I’m afraid that I’ve been suspended, pending an inquiry. But they think that it might be best for me to go before then. I’m rather upset by this. Teaching, you see, has been my life . . .”
She broke off, and Matthew for a moment thought that she had begun to cry.
“I’d like to come and see you,” he said firmly. “If I get a taxi now, I’ll be at your place in ten, fifteen minutes.”
She sounded tearful. “I don’t know. I really don’t . . .”
“No, I’ll be there,” said Matthew. “Ten minutes. Just wait for me.”
He put down the receiver and went into his bedroom to change into a new ultramarine shirt. But then he stopped. He looked at the shirt that he had laid on the bed. No, that shirt was not him, that was Pat’s idea of what she thought he should be. The real Matthew, the one that wanted to go and help Elspeth Harmony in whatever distress she was suffering, was not the Matthew of ultramarine shirts and charcoal trousers; it was the Matthew of distressed-oatmeal sweaters and crushed-strawberry trousers; that was who he was, and that was the person whom he wished Elspeth Harmony to know.
The taxi arrived promptly, and Matthew gave the driver instructions. They travelled in silence and, in the light traffic, they were there in little more than ten minutes.
“Number eighteen?” asked the driver, as they entered the small cul-de-sac. “I had an aunt who lived at number eight.
Dead now, of course, but she used to make terrific scones. We The Matthew He Wanted Her to Know 283
used to go there for tea as children. There were always scones.
And she made us kids eat up. Come on now, plenty more scones.
Come on!”
Matthew smiled. There used to always be scones. The taxi driver was much older, but even Matthew’s Scotland had changed since his own childhood, not all that many years ago. Things like that were less common – aunts who made scones. There were career aunts now, who had no time to bake scones.
They stopped outside number 18 and he looked up towards the third floor, where Elspeth Harmony lived. There were window boxes at two of the windows and a small splash of red.
Nasturtiums. He smiled.
She let him in, and he could tell that she had been crying.
He moved forward and put an arm around her shoulder.
“You mustn’t cry,” he said. “You mustn’t.”
“I feel so stupid,” she said. “I feel that I’ve let everyone down.”
“Tell me exactly what happened,” said Matthew.
She told him, and he listened carefully. When she had finished, he shook his head in astonishment. “So all you did was give her a little pinch on the ear?”
Elspeth nodded. “There was really no excuse,” she said. “But there are one or two of the children who are seriously provocative. There’s a boy called Tofu, who really tries my patience.
And then there’s Olive, whose ear . . . whose ear I pinched.”
“It’s entirely understandable,” said Matthew. “Teaching is so demanding, and you get so little support. That pinch will have done Olive no harm – probably a lot of good.”
“Do you really think so?”
“Yes,” said Matthew. But then he went on, rather sadly, “But I suppose that’s not the world we live in, with all these regula-tions and busybodies about.” He paused. “I think you’ve struck a blow for sanity. Or rather, pinched one.”
She thought this very funny and laughed.
“I’m rather fed up with teaching anyway,” Elspeth said.
Matthew thought: if you married me, then you’d never have to work again. Unless you wanted to, of course.
84. A Tattooed Man Stirs Up a Painful Past Dr Hugo Fairbairn, author of that seminal work of child psychotherapy, Shattered to Pieces: Ego Dissolution in a Three-Year-Old Tyrant, was walking in from his flat in Sciennes, on the south side of Edinburgh, to his consulting rooms in Queen Street. It was as fine a day as Edinburgh had enjoyed for some weeks, with the temperature being sufficiently high to encourage shirt-sleeves, but not so high as to provoke some men to remove their shirts altogether. A few more degrees and that would, of course, happen, and many men who should, out of consideration for others, remain shirted, would strip to the waist, treating passers-by to expanses of flesh that was far from Mediterranean in its appearance, but was pallid and perhaps somewhat less than firm. After all, thought Dr Fairbairn, this was what Auden had described as a beer and potato culture – in contrast to the culture of the Mezzogiorno, which he had then been enjoying; and beer and potatoes led to heaviness, both of the spirit and of the flesh.
Of course, it was not every male who felt inclined to strip down in the better weather; lawyers did not, and for a moment Dr Fairbairn imagined the scene if lawyers, striding up the Mound on their way to court, were to take off their white shirts in the same way as did building workers; such a ridiculous notion, but it did show, he thought, just how firmly we are embedded in social and professional roles. He, naturally A Tattooed Man Stirs Up a Painful Past 285
enough, did not dress in a manner which in any way showed an acceptance of imposed roles. His blue linen jacket, with matching tie, could have been worn by anybody; it was class-less garb of the sort that said nothing about him other than that he liked blue and linen. And that was exactly as Dr Fairbairn wanted it.
He had been looking down at the pavement; now he looked up, to see a young man approaching him, without his shirt. The psychotherapist suppressed a smile: never believe that you will not see something, he thought – because you will. This does not mean that the thing that you think you will not see will crop up – what it does mean is that you may think that you have seen something which you actually have not.
But this young man, walking along the pavement in the slanting morning sun, was real enough, as was the large tattoo on his left shoulder. It was an aggressive-looking tattoo, depicting what appeared to be a mountain lion engaged in mortal combat with what appeared to be a buffalo. Or was it a wildebeest? Dr Fairbairn imagined himself stopping and asking the young man if he could clarify the situation. Is that a wildebeest? One might ask, but such questions could be misinterpreted. As Dr Fairbairn knew, men could not look too closely at the tattoos of others, without risking misunderstandings. But it was a mistake, he knew, to assume that somebody who provided the canvas for such a scene of combat would have an aggressive personality. This was not the case; a real softie might have a tattoo of a mountain lion for that very reason – he was a real softie.
These reflections made him remember that Wee Fraser, the boy whose analysis he had written about in Shattered to Pieces, had a tattoo, even though he was only three years old. He had had inscribed in capital letters across the back of his neck Made in Scotland, just below the hairline. When he had first noticed it, Dr Fairbairn had been astonished, and had wondered if somebody had written this in ballpoint ink on the boy’s skin, as some form of joke. But closer examination had revealed that it was a real tattoo.
286 A Tattooed Man Stirs Up a Painful Past
“You have something written on the back of your neck, Fraser,”
he had said gently. “What is it?”