Fraser had replied in very crude terms, indicating that it was no business of Dr Fairbairn’s, using language which nobody would expect so young a child to know; but then, Dr Fairbairn reflected, he would have heard these words on the BBC, and so perhaps it was inevitable. And some people had always wanted their children to speak BBC English and were now getting their wish fulfilled in this unusual way.
“You mustn’t talk like that, Fraser,” he said. “Those are bad words. Bad!”
At the end of the session, Fraser’s father, a fireman, had appeared to collect his son and Dr Fairbairn had taken the opportunity to ask why Fraser had Made in Scotland tattooed on the back of his neck.
“Because he was,” said the father simply, and had winked at the psychotherapist.
That encounter was never mentioned in Shattered to Pieces.
Nor was that fateful occasion on which Dr Fairbairn had smacked Wee Fraser after the boy had bitten him, an episode which Dr Fairbairn had attempted to forget, but which kept coming back to haunt him, reminding him of his weakness. Indeed, the memory came back to him now, as he walked past the tattooed man, but he put it out of his mind, muttering, “We do not go back to the painful past.”
Dr Fairbairn was looking forward to the day ahead. He had a few hours to himself at the beginning, which would provide an opportunity to deal with correspondence and to do some further work on a paper that he was preparing for a conference, in collaboration with a well-known child psychotherapist from Buenos Aires. The conference was to be held in Florence, and for a moment he reflected on how pleasant it would be to be in Florence again, enjoying the always very generous hospitality of the Italian Association for Child Psychotherapy, an association whose corpulent president placed great emphasis on the importance of elaborate conference dinners and a good A Dangerous Turn in the Conversation 287
cultural programme. At the last such conference, when Dr Fairbairn had given his paper on early manifestations of the Oedipus complex, the delegates had been taken to a restaurant on the banks of the Arno where, as the sun set, they had been treated to a chocolate pudding borne in on a trolley, the pudding being in the shape of Vesuvius (the chef was a Neapolitan). The pudding’s very shape had been enough to draw gasps of admiration from those present, which turned to exclamations of surprise when fireworks within the chocolate crater had erupted into incandescent flows of sparks, like bright jets of lava, like tiny exhalations of fiery gold.
85. A Dangerous Turn in the Conversation Dr Fairbairn was pleased with the amount of work he had got through by the time Irene arrived in his consulting rooms at eleven o’clock.
“I have had a very satisfactory morning, so far,” he said, as he ushered her into the room. Then he thought that the words
“so far” might suggest that the morning was about to change, which had not been the meaning he had intended to convey. So he quickly added: “Not that I’m suggesting the tenor of the day will change because of your arrival. Au contraire.”
Irene waved a hand airily. “I did not interpret it in that way at all,” she said. “Have you been seeing patients?”
Dr Fairbairn waited until Irene had sat herself down before he continued. “No, not at all. I’m working on a paper, long-distance, with Ettore Esteves Balado,” he said. “He’s an Argentine I met on the circuit, and we found ourselves interested in much the same area. We’re writing on the Lacanian perspective on transference.” He paused, smiling at Irene. “And it’s going very well. We’re practically finished.”
Irene looked at his blue linen jacket. Linen was such a difficult material, with its propensity to crumple. She had a white 288 A Dangerous Turn in the Conversation linen blouse with a matching skirt which she loved to wear, but which crumpled so quickly that after five or ten minutes she looked like, well, Stuart had put it rather tactlessly, like a handkerchief that had been left out in the rain. It was an odd analogy, that, and she wondered what the Lacanian interpretation might be. We did not choose our words simply for their expressive power; our words were the manifestation of the conflicts of our unconscious, indeed, they themselves formed the unconscious itself. Lacan had made that quite clear, and Irene was inclined to agree. She did not think that we could find a stable unconscious; our unconscious was really a stream of interactions between words that we used to express our desires and conflicts.
So when Stuart had made those remarks about a handkerchief in the rain, he did not mean that her linen outfit was a handkerchief left out in the rain, or indeed even looked like one.
What his words revealed was that he feared disorder (or rain) and that he wanted her, Irene, to be perfect, to be ironed. And that, of course, suggested that he looked to her for stability to control his sense of impermanence and flux, his confusion. No surprises there, she thought: of course he did. Stuart might have many good points, but in Irene’s view, strength – what people called backbone, or even bottom – was not Stuart’s strong suit.
Mind you, it was strange that people should use the word
“bottom” for strength or courage. What was the Lacanian significance of that?
Her eyes returned to Dr Fairbairn’s blue linen jacket. He had said something, she recalled, about the combination of fibres in the jacket, and that must be the reason it looked so uncrumpled. The question in her mind, though, was: at what point did the insertion of other fibres deprive the material of the qualities of real linen? If it was merely a treatment of the linen, then that was one thing; if, however, it involved polyester or something of that sort, could one still call it linen?
Dr Fairbairn, aware of her gaze, fingered the cuff of his A Dangerous Turn in the Conversation 289
sleeve self-consciously. “I’ll give you a copy of the paper,” he said. “When it’s finished. I know of your interest in these things.”
“Argentina?” said Irene.
“Yes, Buenos Aires. My friend Ettore is one of their best-known analysts there. He has a very extensive practice.”
Irene nodded. She had heard that there were more psycho-analysts in Buenos Aires than anywhere else in the world, but was not sure why this should be. It seemed strange to her that a country associated with gauchos and pampas should also have all those analysts. She asked Dr Fairbairn why.
“Ah!” he said. “That is the question for Argentine analysts.
They’re immensely fortunate, you know. Everyone, or virtually everyone, in Buenos Aires is undergoing analysis. It’s very common indeed.”
“Surprising,” said Irene. “Mind you, the Argentine psyche is perhaps a bit . . .”
“Fractured,” said Dr Fairbairn. “They’re a very charming people, but they have a somewhat confused history. They go in for dreams, the South Americans. Look at Peronism. What did it mean? Evita? Who was she?”
For a moment, they were both silent. Then he continued. “I think the reason Freud is so popular in Argentina is, like most of these things, explained by a series of coincidences. It just so happened that at the time that Freudian ideas were becoming popular in Europe, the Argentine public was in a receptive mood for scientific ideas. You must remember that Argentina in the twenties and thirties was a very fashionable place.”
“Oh yes,” said Irene. She was not going to let him think that she knew nothing about all that. “The tango . . .”
“Hah!” said Dr Fairbairn. “The tango was actually invented by a Uruguayan. The Argentines claimed him, but he was born in Uruguay.”
“Oh.”
“But no matter,” he went on. “The point is that La Jornada, one of the most popular newspapers in Buenos Aires, actually