“Thanks,” said Pat.
A silence then followed. Bruce raised himself up and sat on one of the surfaces, his legs dangling down over the edge. Pat looked at the kettle, which was slow to boil. She had to talk to him, of course, but she still felt slightly ill at ease in his presence. It was hard for things to be completely easy, she thought, after what she had once felt for him.
At last she broke the silence. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you, Bruce,” she said. “Those other rooms. Is anybody ever going to live in them? Those two–those people who went to Greece–are they ever going to come back?”
Bruce laughed. “They paid until the beginning of August,” he said. “It was their choice. They wanted to keep the rooms while they went travelling. I was expecting to have heard from them by now, but I haven’t. I suppose I’ll give them a month’s grace and then clear the rooms and get somebody else.” He paused. “Why do you ask? Do you know somebody who’s looking for somewhere to live?”
“No,” said Pat. “I just thought…Well, I suppose I thought that it might be easier for us to have somebody else staying here.”
Bruce smiled. “A bit crowded with just the two of us? Is that what you mean?”
Pat drew in her breath. It was exactly what she had meant–and why should she not feel this? It was perfectly reasonable to suggest that the presence of a couple of other people should make life in a communal flat a little easier.
Everybody who had ever shared a flat knew that two was more difficult than three, and three was more difficult than five. Bruce must know this too, and was being deliberately perverse in pretending not to.
“All right,” said Bruce. “I know what you mean. I’ll give them two weeks to get in touch and then I’ll move their stuff into the cupboard and we can get somebody else. What do you want? Boy or girl?”
Pat thought for a moment. The presence of another girl would be useful, as they could support one another in the face of Bruce. But what if this girl behaved as she had done and fell for Bruce? That would be very difficult. A boy would be simpler.
“Let’s get a boy,” she said. “Maybe you’ll meet somebody at work…” She stopped, realising the tactlessness of her remark. She had quickly guessed that Bruce had lost his job, rather than resigned, as he claimed.
“I wouldn’t have anybody from that place,” said Bruce quickly.
“Of course not,” said Pat. “What about Sally? Would she know anybody? Maybe an American student at the university. She must meet people like that who are looking for somewhere to live.”
Bruce was silent for a moment. He looked at Pat resentfully. “Sally’s history,” he muttered. “Since last night.”
Pat caught her breath. That was two tactless remarks in the space of one minute. Could she manage a third? So Sally was history? Well, that meant that she had got rid of Bruce, and that he was the one who was history! She wanted to say to him: So you’re history–again! But did not, of course. One never told people who were history that they were history. They knew it all right; there was no need to rub it in.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said. “What happened?”
Bruce slipped down off the surface and moved over to the toaster. He put two slices of bread into the slot and depressed the lever. Toast would make him feel better; it always did.
“Oh, she became a bit too clingy,” he said casually. “You know how it is. You’re getting on fine with somebody and then all of a sudden they want more and more of you. It just gets too much. So I gave her her freedom.”
Pat listened to this with interest. It was as if he was Gavin Maxwell talking about an otter, or Joy Adamson talking about a lioness. I gave her her freedom.
“You let her go?” she asked, trying to conceal her amusement.
“You could say that,” said Bruce.
“I see,” said Pat. “And where did she want to go? Back to America?”
“She would have stayed here to be with me,” said Bruce. “But I didn’t want to be selfish. I didn’t want to put her in a position where she had to choose between me and…”
“And the United States?” prompted Pat.
“Something like that,” said Bruce.
“Poor girl,” said Pat. “It must have been so hard for her.”
Bruce nodded. “I think it was.” His toast popped up and he reached for the butter. “But water under the bridge, as they say. Let’s not talk about it any more. Let’s look to the future. Plenty of other girls–know what I mean?”
“Of course there are,” said Pat. “And you’ve got a lot in your life as it is.”
Bruce looked at her. “Are you winding me up?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Pat. “Sorry. I couldn’t help it. You see, wouldn’t it be easier to tell the truth? Wouldn’t it be easier to admit that you’ve lost your job and your girlfriend? Then I could tell you how sorry I am and that might help a little, just a bit. Instead of which you stand there and spin a story about resigning and giving people their freedom and all the rest. It’s all a lie, isn’t it, Bruce?”
Bruce, who had been buttering the toast as he spoke, stopped what he was doing. He looked down at the plate, and moved the toast slowly to one side, putting down the knife. Then his shoulders began to heave and he turned and walked out of the room, leaving Pat in the kitchen, alone with her sudden guilt.
15. Domenica Advises
“I feel terrible,” said Pat to Domenica. “I could have stopped myself, but I didn’t. And then, suddenly, he seemed to crumple.”
“Crumple?” asked Domenica, taking a sip of her sherry. It was a lovely thought. “Deflate?”
“Yes,” said Pat. “And that was it. He left the kitchen–and I felt terribly guilty. After all, he’s lost his job and now he’s lost his girlfriend. I suppose he just felt a bit vulnerable–and I made it all the worse for him by crowing.”
Domenica shook her head. “You didn’t crow. You just told him a few truths about himself. I suspect that you did him a good turn.”
Pat thought about this. Perhaps it was time for Bruce to be deflated, and perhaps she was the person who had to do it. And yet it had not been easy and she had felt bad about it; so bad that she had come straight through to speak to Domenica.
“Not that your good turn will have much effect,” Domenica went on. “I don’t think that a few painful moments will have much long-term impact on that young man. Yes, he’s feeling miserable, and he might do a little bit of thinking as a result of what you said. But people don’t change all that radically on the basis of a few remarks made to them. It takes much more than that. In fact, there’s the view that people don’t change at all. I think that’s a bit extreme. But don’t expect too much change.”
Pat frowned. Surely people did change. They changed as they matured. She remembered herself at fourteen. She was a different person now. “People grow up, though,” she said. “They change as they grow up. We all do.”
Domenica waved a hand in the air. “Oh, we all grow up. But once the personality is formed, I don’t think that you get a great deal of change. Bruce is a narcissist, as we’ve all agreed. Do you see him becoming something different? Can you imagine him not looking in mirrors and worrying about his hair? Can you imagine him thinking that people don’t fancy him? I can’t. Not for the moment.” She put her glass down on the table and looked at Pat. “How old is Bruce, by the way?”
“He’s twenty-five,” said Pat. “Or just twenty-six. Somewhere around there.”
Domenica looked thoughtful. “Well, that’s rather interesting. Men are slower, you know. They mature rather later than we do. We get there in our early twenties, but they take rather longer than that. Indeed, I believe that there’s a school of psychology that holds that men are not fully responsible until they reach the age of twenty-eight.”
Pat thought this was rather late. And what did it mean to say that men were not fully responsible until that age? Could they not be blamed for what they did? “Isn’t tha
t a bit late?” she asked. “I thought that we were held responsible from…” From what age were we held responsible? Was it sixteen? Or eighteen? Young people ended up in court, did they not, and were held to account for what they had done? But at what age did all that start?
Domenica noticed Pat’s surprise. “Twenty-eight does seem a bit late,” she said. “But there’s at least something to it. If you look at the crime figures they seem to bear this out. Young men commit crimes–ones that get noticed–between seventeen and twenty-four, twenty-five. Then they stop.” She thought for a moment and smiled at some recollection. “I knew a fiscal,” she went on. “He spent his time prosecuting young men up in Dunfermline. Day in, day out. The same things. Assault. Theft. So on. And he said that he saw the same people, from the same families, all the time. Then he said something very funny, which I shall always remember. He said that the fiscals saw the same young men regularly between the age of seventeen and twenty-six, and then the next time they saw them was when they were forty-five and they had hit somebody at their daughter’s wedding! What a comment!”
“But probably true?”
“Undoubtedly true,” agreed Domenica. “On two counts. Weddings can be violent affairs, and everything runs in families. You’ve heard me on genetic determinism before, haven’t you? But that’s another topic. Let’s get back to excuses, and change, and Bruce. If you think that twenty-eight is a bit late for responsibility–true responsibility–to appear, then what would you say to forty?”
“Very late.”
Domenica laughed. “Yes, maybe. But again, if you ask people to describe how they’ve behaved over the years, you will often find that they say they’ve looked at it very differently, according to the stage of life that they’re at. Here I am, for example, sitting here with all the wisdom of my sixty years–what a thought, sixty!–and I can definitely see how I’ve looked at things differently after forty. I’m less tolerant of bad behaviour, I think, than I used to be. And why do you think that is?”
Pat shrugged. “You get a bit more set in your ways? You become more judgmental?”
“And what is wrong with being judgmental?” Domenica asked indignantly. “It drives me mad to hear people say: ‘Don’t be judgmental.’ That’s moral philosophy at the level of an Australian soap opera. If people weren’t judgmental, how could we possibly have a moral viewpoint in society? We wouldn’t have the first clue where we were. All rational discourse about what we should do would grind to a halt. No, whatever you do, don’t fall for that weak-minded nonsense about not being judgmental. Don’t be excessively judgmental, if you like, but always–always–be prepared to make a judgment. Otherwise you’ll go through life not really knowing what you mean.”
Pat was silent. She had not come to see Domenica to discuss developmental psychology. She had come to talk about Bruce, and, specifically, to ask what she should do.
“Very interesting,” she said quietly. “But what should I do? Do you think I should apologise to Bruce?”
“Nothing to apologise about,” snapped Domenica.
“I feel so sorry for him,” said Pat. “I feel…”
“Don’t,” interrupted Domenica. “Be judgmental. He told you a series of lies. And even if he isn’t quite twenty-eight yet, he should know better.”
“More judgmentalism?”
“Absolutely,” said Domenica. “Silly young man. What a waste of space!”
16. Bertie Goes to School Eventually
Irene would have liked to have driven Bertie to his first day at the Steiner School, but there was the issue of the location of their car and she was obliged to begin as she intended to continue–by catching the 23 bus as it laboured up the hill from Canonmills.
“It would be nice to be able to run Bertie to school,” she had remarked to Stuart the previous evening, “but not knowing exactly where the car is makes it somewhat difficult, would you not agree?”
“Don’t look at me,” said Stuart. “You were the last to use it. You parked it. You find it.”
Irene pursed her lips. “Excuse me,” she said. “I very rarely use that car, and I certainly was not the last one to drive it. You drove it when you went through to Glasgow for that meeting a couple of months ago. Remember? It was that meeting when you bumped into that person who used to live next to your parents in Dunoon. I distinctly remember your telling me that. And that was the last time the car was used. So you parked it–not me.”
Stuart was silent. Irene glanced at him with satisfaction. “Try to remember the journey back,” she said. “You would have come in on the Corstorphine Road, would you not, and driven back through Murrayfield? Did you turn off at the West End? Did you come along Queen Street? Try to remember.”
Stuart remained silent, looking up at the ceiling. Then he looked down at the floor.
“Well?” pressed Irene. “Did you come back that way?”
Stuart turned to her. “I came back by train,” he said quietly. “I remember it because I saw the Minister on the train, eating a banana muffin, and he said hello to me and I was impressed that he had remembered me. I remember thinking how nice it was of him to make the effort. He sees so many civil servants.”
“Yes, yes,” said Irene. “The Minister. Banana muffins. But the car. What about the car?”
“Are you sure that I drove there?” asked Stuart weakly, although he knew the answer even as he asked the question. Irene would remember exactly; she always did.
For a few moments there was complete silence. Then Irene spoke. “I saw you get into it,” she said. “You waved goodbye and drove off. So what does this mean?”
When Stuart replied his voice was barely audible. “Then it’s still in Glasgow,” he said. He waved a hand in a westerly direction. “Somewhere over there.”
Irene’s tone was icy. “You mean that you have left the car–our car–in Glasgow? That it’s been there for several months? And you completely forgot about it?”
“So it would appear,” said Stuart. He sounded wretched. He was in awe of Irene, and he hated to be the object of her scorn. “I must have caught the train without thinking.”
“Well, that’s just fine, then,” said Irene. “That’s the end of our car. It’ll be stripped bare by now. Or stolen.”
Stuart attempted to defend himself. “I’m sure that I parked it legally,” he said. “Which means that it’s probably still there. Perhaps the battery will be flat, but that may be all.”
Irene failed to respond to his optimism. “When you say it will still be there,” she said evenly, “what exactly do you mean by there? Where precisely is there?”
“Glasgow,” said Stuart.
“Where in Glasgow? Glasgow’s a big city.”
“Near the Dumbarton Road,” said Stuart. “Somewhere…somewhere there. That’s where my meeting was. Just off the Dumbarton Road.”
“Well, I suggest that you go and find it as soon as possible,” said Irene, adding: “If you can.”
Stuart nodded miserably. He would go through to Glasgow next weekend, by train, and take a taxi out to the Dumbarton Road. He had a vague recollection of where he might have parked, in a quiet cul-de-sac, and there was no reason why the car should not still be there. People left their cars for months at the roadside, and the cars survived. It was different, of course, if one had a fashionable or tempting car, like the car that Domenica Macdonald drove–that sort of car would be bound to attract the attention of joy-riders or vandals–but their car, an old Volvo estate, would be unlikely to catch anybody’s eye.
And then it occurred to him that when he made the trip over to Glasgow, he would take Bertie with him. He would take him away from whatever classes Irene had planned for him–Saturday was saxophone in the morning, if he remembered correctly, and junior life-drawing in the afternoon–and he would take him with him on the train. Bertie would love that. He had hardly ever been on a train before, Stuart realised, and yet that was exactly the sort of thing that a father should do with his son. He felt
a momentary pang. I’ve been a bad father, he thought. I’ve left the fathering to Irene. I’ve failed my son.
No more was said about the car that evening and the next morning Irene was too busy getting Bertie ready for school to talk to Stuart about cars, or anything else. She had awoken Bertie early and dressed him in his best OshKosh dungarees.
“Such smart dungarees,” said Irene.
Bertie looked doubtful. “Do other boys wear them?” he asked.
“Dungarees? Of course they do,” Irene reassured him. “Go down to Stockbridge and see all those boys in dungarees.”
“But theirs aren’t pink.”
“Nor are yours, Bertie,” scolded Irene. “These are crushed strawberry. They are not pink.” She looked at her watch. “And we don’t have the time to sit around and talk about dungarees. Look at the time. You’re going to have to get used to being in time for school. It’s not like…”
She was about to say “nursery school”, but stopped herself. In time, Bertie would forget about nursery school and the ignominy of his suspension. His psychotherapy would help–she knew that–but ultimately it was time, simple, old-fashioned time that was the healer.
They ate a quick breakfast and set off for Dundas Street. Irene noticed that Bertie avoided treading on the lines in the pavement, and sighed. There were definite signs of neurosis there, she thought; Dr Fairbairn must be informed. As she thought this, she pictured Dr Fairbairn in his consulting room, wearing that rather natty jacket that he liked to wear. He was such a sympathetic man, and so attuned to the feelings of others, just as one could expect. It would be wonderful to be married to a man like that, rather than to a statistician in the Scottish Executive. She glanced down at Bertie, as if afraid that he might read her disloyal thoughts, and he looked up at her.
“It’s all right, Mummy,” he said quietly. “I know what you’re thinking.”