Christabel Macfadzean put down the towel and looked at Irene in triumph. This was a sweet moment for her, and she prolonged it for a few seconds before she answered.
“Two things compel that conclusion,” she said solemnly. “Firstly, he’s the only one who can write.” She paused, allowing just the right interval to heighten the dramatic effect of her revelation. “And then it happens to be in Italian.”
36. Bertie in Disgrace
Irene, somewhat deflated, followed Christabel Macfadzean down the corridor, with its colourful examples of juvenile art pinned on the walls. An open doorway led to a room with a row of tiny washbasins and small stalls, and there, across the facing wall, was the graffiti, in foot-high letters.
Irene gasped as she saw what Bertie had written. LA MACFADZEAN È UNA VACCA!
“You see!” said Christabel Macfadzean. “That is what your son has done.”
Irene nodded. “A very silly thing to do,” she said quickly. “But I’m sure that it will wash off easily enough. It’s probably washable marker pen.”
Christabel Macfadzean bristled. “That’s not the point,” she said. “The real offence lies in the fact that he has written it at all. And, may I ask – since presumably you know Italian – may I ask what it means?”
Irene blinked. It was going to be extremely difficult to explain. The word vacca had two meanings, of course: cow (the common meaning) and woman of ill repute (the rude meaning). She assumed that Bertie had intended the more innocuous of these, but even that one could hardly be admitted. Then an idea came to her, and at a stroke she was rescued.
“It means La Macfadzean –that’s you, of course – is a … vacuum cleaner. What a silly, childish thing for him to write, but not insulting, of course.”
Christabel Macfadzean looked puzzled. “A vacuum cleaner?”
“Yes,” said Irene. “Isn’t that ridiculous? It’s just a piece of childish nonsense. A vacuum cleaner, indeed! Innocent nonsense. Almost a term of endearment. In fact, in Italy it probably is. I shall look it up in the Grande Sansoni.”
“But why would he call me a vacuum cleaner?”
Irene frowned. “Do you use a vacuum cleaner here? Have the children seen you vacuuming? Could that be it?”
“No,” said Christabel Macfadzean. “I never vacuum.”
“Perhaps you should. Perhaps the children should see you doing these ordinary tasks, dignifying them …”
“Well, may I suggest that we return to the subject of this … this incident. We cannot tolerate this sort of thing, even if the insult is a piece of childish nonsense. What will the other children think?”
Irene sighed. “I’m sorry that you’re taking this so seriously,” she said. “I thought that all that would be required would be for Bertie to be told not to do this sort of thing. There’s no need to over-react.”
Christabel Macfadzean turned to Irene. “Over-reaction, did you say? Is it over-reaction to nip juvenile vandalism in the bud? Is it over-reaction to object to being called a vacuum cleaner? Is that an over-reaction?”
“But nobody will have understood it,” said Irene. “If the other children can’t read – nobody yet having taught them – then they won’t have understood. None of the children will know the first thing about it. They’ll assume that the writing is just another notice. No real harm’s been done.”
Christabel Macfadzean led the way back to the small office that she had at the front of the building. Gesturing for Irene to take the uncomfortable straight-backed chair before her desk, she herself sat down and rested her folded arms on a large white blotter.
“I very much regret this,” she said evenly, “but I’m going to have to suspend Bertie for a few days. It seems to me that the only way in which we can bring home to him the seriousness of what he has done is to suspend him. It’s the only way.”
Irene’s eyes opened wide. “Suspension? Bertie? Suspend Bertie?”
“Yes,” said Christabel Macfadzean. “If he’s as advanced as you claim he is, then he will need to be punished in an advanced way. It’s for his own good.”
Irene swayed slightly. The idea that Bertie – who was effectively doing the nursery a favour by attending it – the idea that he should be suspended was quite inconceivable. And that this pedestrian woman, with her clearly limited understanding of developmental psychology, should be sitting in judgment on Bertie – why, that was quite intolerable. It would be better to withdraw Bertie, thought Irene, than to leave him here. On the other hand, this nursery was convenient …
Irene closed her eyes and mentally counted from one to ten. Then she opened her eyes again and stared at Christabel Macfadzean. “I was proposing to take him out of nursery for a few days anyway,” she said. “He needs a bit of stimulation, you know, and I thought that I might take him to the museum and the zoo. He doesn’t appear to get much stimulation here, and that, incidentally, may be why he called you a vacuum cleaner. It’s his way of signalling his boredom and frustration.”
“You can call it taking him out of school,” said Christabel Macfadzean. “I’ll call it a suspension.”
Irene did not wish to continue with the exchange. Fetching Bertie from the corner where he was playing with the train set, she retrieved his jacket and half-marched him out of the room.
“Bertie,” she said, as they walked back along London Street, “Mummy is very, very cross with you for writing that Miss Macfadzean is a cow. You should not have said it. It’s not nice to call somebody a vacca.”
“You do,” said Bertie.
37. At the Floatarium
The curious thought occurred to Irene, as she lay in her supporting Epsom salts solution, that they were both suspended. Bertie was suspended from nursery over that ridiculous graffiti incident, and she was suspended, almost weightless, in her flotation chamber. Her suspension was for no more than an hour, though, whereas Bertie was to be suspended for three days.
They had walked directly to the Floatarium from the nursery school. Little had been said, but Bertie had been left in no doubt that he was in disgrace. By the time they reached their destination, though, Bertie had been half-forgiven. Indeed, Irene had begun to smile – discreetly – over what had happened. It must have been an act of great self-liberation for him to climb onto one of the little chairs and write that message across the wall. And of course what he had written was accurate; indeed, it showed a real understanding of what was what to write an observation like that.
He had to learn, though, that some things are best kept to oneself. This was a difficult thing for children to master, she thought, as they were naturally frank. Duplicity and hypocrisy came later, instilled by adults; thus we learn to hide, to say one thing and mean another, to clad ourselves with false colours.
Irene reflected on these things as she lay in the darkness of the tank. Bertie had been left in the tank room with her, but not in a tank. He was seated on a chair with a colouring book which the proprietor of the Floatarium had thoughtfully provided for him. Of course, this would not be capable of diverting him, and he had rapidly abandoned it in favour of a magazine. Bertie had never seen the sense of colouring things in. Why bother?
Irene’s mind wandered. It was completely quiet within the tank, and the absence of sensory distraction induced a profound sense of calm. One did not feel confined by the walls of the tank; rather, one felt weightless and without boundary, independent of any physical constraint, freed of the attachment that came with gravity. I could lie here forever, thought Irene, and forget about the world and its trials.
Her sense of detachment was suddenly interrupted by a knocking on the side of the tank.
“Bertie?”
A muffled voice came from outwith. “Irene?”
“Yes, I’m here, Bertie. In the tank, as you know. I’m relaxing. You can have a little go at the end.”
“I don’t want to float. I’ll drown.”
“Nonsense, darling. The specific gravity of the water is such that you can’t s
ink. You’ll like it.”
“I hate floating.”
Irene moved her hands gently in the water, making a slight splashing sound. This was rather irritating. Bertie was ruining the floating experience.
“Let Mummy float in peace a little longer, Bertie,” she called out. “Then we’ll go and have a latte. You can float some other time, if you want to. Nobody’s forced to float.”
There was silence for a moment and then a sudden shout that made Irene start.
“Non mi piace parlare Italiano!”
“Bertie?” called out Irene. “What was that you said?”
“Non mi piace parlare Italiano! Non mi piace il sasofono! No! No!”
Irene sat up, banging her head on the top of the chamber. Pushing open the lid, she looked out, to see Bertie standing defiantly in the middle of the room, a ripped-up magazine on the floor before him.
“Bertie!” she exclaimed. “What is this? You’re behaving like a little boy! What on earth is wrong with you?”
“Non mi piace parlare Italiano!” shouted Bertie again. “I don’t like speaking Italian!”
Irene climbed out of the chamber and reached for her towel.
“This is complete nonsense,” she said. “You’re upset – quite understandably – about what happened. That’s all. You’ll feel better once we’ve had a nice latte. Italian’s got nothing to do with it. And I can’t understand why you should say you don’t like the saxophone. You love your saxophone.”
“No! No!” shouted Bertie, stamping his feet on the ground. His face was red with rage now, and his fists were clenching and unclenching.
“Bertie, just calm down,” said Irene. “If you want to talk, we can do so over latte. You mustn’t make a noise here in the Floatarium. There are other people floating.”
“I hope they sink!” shouted Bertie.
Irene took a deep breath. “That’s a very, very nasty thing to say. What if somebody did sink? How would you feel then? You’d feel very bad, wouldn’t you?”
Bertie did not reply. He was looking down at the ground now, and Irene noticed that his shoulders were heaving. Bertie was sobbing, but in silence.
She reached forward and embraced him, hugging the little boy to her.
“You’ll feel better soon, Bertie,” she said. “That smelly nursery must be very boring for you. We’ll send you somewhere better. Perhaps St Mary’s Music School. You like their Saturday mornings, don’t you? There are some nice boys and girls there. And you might even get into the choir and dress up, like the rest of the Episcopalians. That would be nice, wouldn’t it?”
“No,” sobbed Bertie. “No.”
38. Mother/Daughter Issues
Barely a mile from the Floatarium, where Bertie was protesting, Sasha Todd, wife of Raeburn Todd ,was sitting down for morning coffee with her daughter, Lizzie. Sasha had chosen Jenners’ tea-room for this meeting, because Jenners made her feel secure, and had always done so. Other shops might come and go, and one or two parvenus had indeed recently set up in the city, but she, quite rightly, remained loyal to Jenners. There was nothing unsettling about Jenners, as she had cause to reflect whenever she approached Edinburgh on a train from the west and saw the satisfying sign Jenners Depository. This signalled to the world that whatever one might find on the shelves of Jenners itself, there was more in the depository, round the back. This was reassuring in the most fundamental way.
There was nothing reassuring about Lizzie. She was twenty-three now, and had done very little with her life. At school she had been unexceptional; she had never attracted negative attention, but nor had she attracted any praise or distinction. Her reports had been solid – “might get a B at Higher level, provided she puts in more work”; “almost made it to the second team this year – a solid effort” and so on. And then there had been three years at a college which gave her a vague, unspecified qualification. This qualification had so far produced no proper job, and she had moved from temporary post to temporary post, none of which seemed to suit her.
Both Sasha and Todd thought that marriage was the only solution.
“We can’t support her indefinitely,” said Todd to his wife. “Somebody else is going to have to take on the burden.”
“She’s not a burden,” said Sasha. “All she’s doing is looking for herself.”
“She should be looking for a husband,” retorted Todd.
“Possibly,” said Sasha. “But then, it’s not easy these days. These young men one meets don’t seem to be thinking of marriage.”
Todd shook his head. “Yet marriages take place. Look at the back of Scottish Field. What do you see? Wedding photographs. Nice fellows in their kilts getting married in places like Stirling and Balfron.”
Sasha sighed. What her husband said was true. Such a world existed – it had certainly existed in their time – but their own daughter seemed not to be part of it. Was there anything wrong with her, she wondered. There had been no signs of anything like that – no unsuitable friends with short-cropped hair and a tendency to wear rather inelegant jackets – so at least that was not the problem. Thank heavens they did not have to face the problem faced by friends in the Braids whose daughter, an otherwise reasonable girl, had brought home a female welder. What did one talk to a female welder about, Sasha wondered. Presumably there was something one could say, but she had no idea what it might be.
Now, in the tea-room at Jenners, scene, over so many years, of such rich exchanges of gossip, Sasha fixed Lizzie with the maternal gaze to which her daughter was so accustomed.
“You’re looking thin,” Sasha said. “You’re not on one of those faddish diets, are you? Really, the damage those people do! Doctor what’s-his-name, and people like that. I’m not suggesting that one should over-eat, but one wants to have something to cover one’s poor skeleton.”
She pushed the plate of iced cakes over the table towards her daughter.
Lizzie pushed them away. “No thanks. And I don’t think I’m looking particularly thin. In fact, I’d say I’m about the right weight for my height.”
Sasha raised an eyebrow. Lizzie was flat-chested in her view, and a judicious coating of plumpness might help in that respect. But of course she could never raise the issue with her daughter, just as she could say nothing about the dowdy clothes and the lack of make-up.
Taking a cake, Sasha cut it in half. Marzipan: her favourite. Battenberg cakes were hard to beat, particularly when dissected along the squares; she had little time for chocolate cake – sticky, amorphous, and over-sweet substance that it was.
“You know,” she said, discreetly licking at her fingers, “you could do rather more with yourself than you do. I’m not being critical, of course. Not at all. I just think that if you paid a little bit more attention to your clothes …”
“And my face,” interjected Lizzie. “Maybe I should do something about my face.”
“There’s nothing wrong with your face,” said Sasha. “I said nothing about your face. You have a very nice face. I’ve got nothing against your face.”
“In fact,” said Lizzie, “people say that I look quite like you. In the face, that is.”
Sasha picked up the second half of her cake and examined it closely. “Do they?” she said. “Well, isn’t that nice? Not that I see it myself, but perhaps others do. Surprising, though.”
“You don’t sound very enthusiastic,” said Lizzie.
Sasha laughed lightly. “Now,” she said, “that’s enough about faces. I’ve got something much more important to talk to you about.”
39. The Facts of Life
“Something important?” asked Lizzie. There was doubt in her voice: what was important to her mother was usually rather unimportant to her.
“Very,” said Sasha, glancing about her, as if those at neighbouring tables might eavesdrop on some great disclosure. “You will have heard that the ball is coming up. Soon.”
“The ball?”
“You know,” said Sasha. “The Conserva
tive ball. The South Edinburgh Conservative Ball.”
Lizzie looked bored. “Oh, that one. That’s nice. You’ll be going, I take it. I hope that you enjoy yourselves.”
“We shall,” said Sasha, firmly. “And we’d very much appreciate it if you would come in our party. Both Daddy and I. We’d both appreciate it. Very much.” She fixed her daughter with a stare as she spoke. A message was being communicated.
Lizzie looked at her mother. She was so sad, she thought. Imagine living a life in which the highlight of one’s existence was a political ball. How sad. “Depends,” she said. “Depends when it is.”
“Next week,” said Sasha. “I know I haven’t given you much notice, but it’s next Friday, at the Braid Hills Hotel. It’s such a nice place for it.”
Lizzie pursed her lips. She was in a difficult situation. She did not want to go to the ball, but she was realistic enough to understand her position. Her parents paid her rent and gave her an allowance. She accepted this, in spite of her pride, and she understood that in return there were a few duties that she had to discharge. Attendance at the Conservative Ball had always been one of these. This was what her mother’s look meant.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll come.”
Sasha looked relieved. “That will be very nice.” She picked up her table napkin – paper! – and removed a crumb of marzipan from the edge of her lower lip. She would have liked to have licked her lips, and would have done so at home, but she couldn’t in town. “We’ll make up a small party. Daddy’s arranged that.”
Lizzie, who had been looking out of the window, turned to face her mother. “A party?”
Sasha smiled. “Yes, of course. A small party. Just the three of us and …”
“That’s fine. The three of us. That’s fine.”
“And a fourth.”
Lizzie said nothing. She tried to meet her mother’s gaze, but Sasha looked away.
“A young man,” said Sasha. “A very charming young man from the office. He’s called Bruce. We thought it would be a good idea to ask him to join us.”