Love Over Scotland (5 page)

11. The Bears of Sicily

If there had been change on the top floor of 44 Scotland Street, with the departure of Domenica and the arrival of Antonia, then there had been change, too, elsewhere in the building.

On the top landing, opposite Domenica’s flat, was the flat which had been owned by Bruce Anderson, who had now left Edinburgh to live in London, in the hope that Chelsea or Fulham might provide that which he felt to be missing from his life in Edinburgh. Pat had been his tenant, but had left when Bruce had placed the flat on the market and eventually sold it to a young architect turned property developer. On the floor below, Irene and Stuart Pollock had not moved, thus providing the continuity required if a building is to have a collective memory. That was one of the features which made those Edinburgh streets so special; in contrast with so many other cities, where people may come and go and leave no memory, the streets and houses of the Edinburgh New Town bore an oral history that might survive, thirty, forty, even fifty years. People remembered who lived where, what they did, and where they went. People wanted to belong. They wanted to be part of something that had a local feel, a local face.

Irene Pollock was the mother of that most talented of six-year-olds, Bertie Pollock, now of the Steiner School in Merchiston and sometime pupil (suspended) at the East New Town Advanced Nursery. Bertie was still in therapy with Dr Hugo Fairbairn, author of that seminal work on child analysis,
Shattered to Pieces: Ego Dissolution in a Three-Year-Old Tyrant
. He had been referred to Dr Fairbairn after he had set fire to his father’s copy of
The Guardian
, while his father was reading it. This act of fire-raising might have alerted one familiar with the literature on juvenile psychopathology to that well-known but still puzzling triangular syndrome in which an interest in setting fire to things is accompanied by a tendency to be cruel to animals and to suffer from late bed-wetting. The literature in forensic psychiatry contains several reports on this curious combination of behaviours and symptoms, and any well-informed child psychiatrist encountering a youthful fire-raiser would do well to inquire along these lines. Dr Fairbairn, however, ruled this out immediately. Unlike Frederick in the
Struwelpeter
, who so persecuted the good dog Tray, Bertie was not a cruel little boy. He was not unkind to animals, nor did he suffer from nocturnal enuresis, having been dry and out of nappies (and into dungarees) at the remarkably early age of eight months. His mother, indeed, had been so proud of his achievements in that department that she had contacted the newspapers to find out whether they were interested in interviewing her (and possibly having a few words with Bertie too) about this, and had been surprised, and hurt, by their indifference.

Bertie had accomplished a great deal since his early and distinguished toilet training. He had become reasonably fluent in Italian and a more than competent saxophonist. Both of these were skills which had been forced upon him by his mother, who, in the case of Italian lessons, had started these shortly after his third birthday. While other children listened to tapes of nursery rhymes–almost all of which were, in Irene’s view, patriarchal nonsense–Bertie listened to the complete set of
Buongiorno Italia!
tapes, playing and replaying the recorded conversations these featured. By the age of four, he was quite capable of asking the way to the railway station in faultless Italian, or engaging in a conversation with an Italian waiter about the most typical dishes of the various Italian regions. After this, he graduated to listening with perfect understanding to Buzzati’s story of the invasion of Sicily by bears, a vaguely sinister story which was later to surface in his concerns over the possibility of encountering bears in the streets of Edinburgh.
Ma, Bertie, non ci sono orsi a Edimborgo!
Irene had said to him (But, Bertie, there are no bears in Edinburgh!) To which Bertie had replied:
Non ci sono orsi in Sicilia, Mama, ma ecco qui la storia di Buzzati in cui incontriamo orsi!
(There are no bears in Sicily, Mother, but here is this story of Buzzati’s in which we meet bears!)

His progress in music was equally meteoric. At the age of four, he was playing the soprano recorder with some facility, and had made a start on rudimentary music theory. By five, he had embarked–or been embarked, perhaps–on the study of the saxophone, and on this instrument he made particularly rapid progress. He showed an early propensity for the playing of jazz, although Irene was slightly uneasy about this, as she was not convinced that jazz encouraged the same musical rigour as did classical music. Bertie’s rendition of ‘As Time Goes By’, although hardly jazz, was easy on the ear, and indeed had been much appreciated by Pat, whose bedroom in 44 Scotland Street lay immediately above the room in which Bertie practised.

But all this hot-housing produced precisely that reaction which any reasonable parent might have foreseen: Bertie rebelled, first by minor acts of non-cooperation (occasionally refusing to talk Italian) and then by major gestures (burning his father’s copy of
The Guardian
). Irene had responded by placing her trust in psychotherapy, but had gradually been persuaded to allow Bertie more freedom, and in particular, to do things with his father. This had improved the situation, but if leopards do not change their spots, neither does the
Weltanschauung
of people such as Irene change in the space of a few days. And pregnancy–the condition in which she now found herself–had a strange effect: it led to renewed vigour in her desire to impose her views on others. This was probably a result of the loss of control she felt of her body and world: as the sheer brute fact of carrying another life within her resulted in a diminution of her sense of personal autonomy, so her need to assert herself in other respects grew.

This manifested itself in a variety of ways, but most remarkably in an increase in the number of altercations in which she became involved. There was the famous campaign against Nurse Forbes of the National Childbirth Trust, and then there was the terrible row over the Pollock car, which once again had gone missing. It was Bertie who had precipitated the row over the car when he made an apparently innocent observation. “Mummy,” he said. “You know how you left our car at the top of Scotland Street, outside Mr Demarco’s house? Well, it’s not there anymore.”

12. Quality Time with Irene

“Nonsense!” expostulated Irene. “Of course it’s there.” She was replying to the question which Bertie had posed about the disappearance of the Pollock car. Of course the car was parked in Scotland Street–she herself had parked it there only two days earlier, when she had driven to Valvona and Crolla to stock up on sun-dried tomatoes and olives. She distinctly remembered parking it because she had almost run over one of the cats which sauntered about the street and which had narrowly escaped being crushed by the back wheels of Irene’s reversing Volvo. For a moment or two, she thought that she had actually crushed the cat, as she felt a slight bump, which proved to be nothing more than a folded up newspaper which somebody had dropped and which had become a sodden mound in the gutter.

“You must have been looking in the wrong place, Bertie,” she said. “Maybe you were looking at the other side of the street. Our car is on the left as you go up the hill. Did you look on the right?”

“No,” said Bertie. “I looked on the left. And it wasn’t there, Mummy. I promise you.”

Irene frowned. Bertie was a very observant little boy and would normally not make a mistake about this sort of thing. But it was impossible that she had inadvertently parked the car somewhere else and forgotten about it. That was the sort of thing that Stuart was always doing; indeed, on one occasion he had parked the car in Glasgow and then returned to Edinburgh by train. That had been disastrous, as the car had sat across there for weeks, if not months. Perhaps Stuart had used the car since she had parked it. That would provide a rational explanation for its absence from the street, if it was absent; but then had Stuart driven the car over the past few days? He had not said anything about it, and he had hardly had the time to do much driving, as he and his colleagues were all working against a looming deadline on a report at his office in the Scottish Executive and he was not coming back home until after ten at night. It was unlikely, then, that such a simple explanation would be found.

“I tell you what, Bertie,” she said. “We’ll take a little walk and see whether the car is there or not. I need to take more exercise now that I’m pregnant.”

“Is it good for the baby?” asked Bertie, reaching out to lay a hand against his mother’s stomach.

“I’m sure it is,” said Irene. “Babies thrive if the maternal circulation is good. And a healthy mother means a healthy baby, Bertie!”

Bertie looked up at his mother. There was so much he wanted to say to her, but his conversations with her never seemed to go the way he wanted them to go. What he wanted to ask about was whether the arrival of the baby would change things for him.

He decided to try. “When the new baby arrives, Mummy,” he began, “will things be different?”

Irene smiled. “Oh yes,” she said. “Oh yes, they will! Babies make a terrible noise, I’m afraid, Bertie–even well-behaved Edinburgh babies! So we must expect a few disturbed nights until the baby settles. But you shouldn’t hear him at your end of the corridor. I’m sure you won’t be woken up.”

Bertie thought for a moment. “But what I was wondering about was whether you’ll be very busy. Will you be very busy, Mummy?”

“Of course,” said Irene. “New babies are very demanding creatures. Even you were demanding, Bertie. You sometimes became quite niggly for some reason. I used to play you Mozart to calm you down. It always worked. You loved ‘
Soave sia il vento
’, you know. You loved that.
Così fan tutte
, as you’ll recall. You adored Mozart when you were a baby. And you still do, of course.”

“But if you’re busy,” said Bertie carefully, “then you might have less time for me, Mummy. Is that right? You’ll have less time for me?”

Irene thought quickly. Poor little boy! Of course he was threatened; of course he felt insecure. He must be dreading the day when the new baby arrives and takes all my attention away from him. Oh poor Bertie!

“Bertie,
carissimo
,” she said, leaning down to enfold him in her arms. “You mustn’t think that for one moment. Not for one moment! Mummy will spend just as much time with you as before. Even more. I promise you that. Look, I’m crossing my heart. That’s how serious I am. I really mean it. You will have just as much time with me as you do now.”

Bertie struggled to release himself from his mother’s embrace, but it proved impossible, and he became limp. Perhaps if I go all floppy and stop breathing she will think that she’s smothered me, he thought. Then she’ll let me go.

Irene did release him, but only to adjust her hair, which had fallen over her face. “So, no more worries about that, Bertie,” she said, standing up.

Bertie nodded glumly. His real hope had been that the arrival of the new baby would so distract Irene that she would leave him, Bertie, alone. He wanted to spend less time with his mother, not more, and here she was telling him that the baby would make no difference. It was all very disappointing; a very bleak prospect indeed.

Irene went out of the room briefly to fetch her coat. Then they left the flat and began to walk up the street towards Drummond Place. It was a fine afternoon, with a gentle wind from the south-west. Although it was early autumn, the air was still warm, and there were still leaves on the trees in Drummond Place Gardens, even if many of them were now tinged with gold.

They reached the top of the road in complete silence.

“You see,” said Bertie. “No car.”

Irene shook her head. “I don’t know what to think,” she said.

“I do,” said Bertie. “It’s been stolen.”

13. An Average Scottish Face

When Stuart returned home that evening, Irene was in the sitting room with Bertie, playing a complicated card game of Bertie’s own invention, Running Dentist. The rules, which Bertie had explained at extreme length, and with great patience, seemed excessively complex to Irene and appeared to favour Bertie in an indefinable way, but the game was quick, and surprisingly enjoyable.

“Ah,” said Stuart, as he put down his briefcase. “Running Dentist! I take it that you’re winning, Bertie.”

“Mummy is doing her best,” said Bertie. “She’s really trying.”

Stuart glanced at Irene. He knew that she was a bad loser, and that it was hard for her when Bertie won a game, as he so often did.

“It’s a very difficult game to win,” observed Irene, “unless you happen to be the person who invented the rules.”

She laid her cards down on the table and looked up at Stuart. She had been thinking for some time of what she might say to him about the car. Although it was not Stuart’s fault that the car had been stolen–she could hardly blame him for that–in some inexpressible way she felt that he was responsible for this situation. He had, after all, brought the car back from Glasgow after its long sojourn there, and had brought home the wrong car. She had every right to feel aggrieved, she told herself.

“The car,” she said simply.

Stuart gave a start. She noticed his face cloud over;
guilt
, she thought.
Guilt.

“What about it?” he said. He tried to sound unconcerned, but she could sense that he was worried.

“It’s been stolen,” chipped in Bertie. “Mummy left it at the top of the street, and it isn’t there now. We checked.”

“Yes,” said Irene. “Bertie’s probably right–it’s been stolen.”

Stuart shrugged. “These things happen. But there we are.” He hesitated for a moment. “I’m not at all sure why anybody would want to steal a car like that, but I suppose an opportunistic thief…”

“Be that as it may,” interrupted Irene, “the fact of the matter is that this puts us in a very tricky position.” She paused. “I’m surprised that you don’t realise what it is.”

“I don’t see what the problem is,” Stuart countered. “The car is hardly worth anything. And we very rarely use it.”

Bertie looked at his father in dismay. He was proud of their car, in the way all small boys are of their family cars, and he could not understand why his father should be so dismissive of it.

Irene sighed. It was a pointed sigh, as sighs sometimes are, not one cast into the air to evaporate, but one calculated to descend, precisely and with great effect, on a target.

“The problem,” she said quietly, “is that the car had already been stolen. When you went through to Glasgow and found that the car was not where you had so carelessly left it–I shall pass over that, of course–your new friend, Fatty O’Whatever…”

“Lard O’Connor,” interjected Stuart. “He’s called Lard O’Connor, and I wish you wouldn’t keep referring to him as Fatty.”

“That may be,” said Irene in a steely tone, “but the fact is that this Lard character then arranged for a similar car to be stolen to order. You brought back a stolen car–one masquerading under our Edinburgh number plates, but at heart a stolen Glasgow car! Now the stolen car has been stolen again. And that means that we can hardly go to the police and report that our car has been re-stolen.”

“But we don’t have to tell them that we suspect it’s a stolen car,” he said. “As far as we’re concerned, that’s the car I left in Glasgow. The fact that it has only four gears rather than five is neither here nor there.”

Irene stared at him. “I can’t believe what I’m hearing,” she said. “I really can’t believe it…” She paused and threw a glance at Bertie. “Bertie, it’s time for you to go to your space and finish your Italian exercises.”

Bertie looked at his father, as if for confirmation of the order, but there was no support for him in that quarter and he picked up his playing cards and left.

“Now,” said Irene. “Now we can get down to brass tacks. I can’t believe that you openly encouraged deception in front of Bertie. Are you out of your mind, Stuart? Here I am, doing my utmost to bring Bertie up with the right set of values, and you go and torpedo the whole thing by suggesting that we lie to the police.”

Stuart hesitated. The first few faltering steps he had taken to assert himself–steps which followed his successful completion of an assertiveness training workshop at the office–had somewhat petered out. Now, faced with Irene’s accusations of delinquent behaviour, he was silenced. Sensing this, Irene continued.

“We are, unfortunately, in a position where we can do nothing at all,” she said. “We can’t go to the police. We can’t claim the insurance. In fact, we have to forget that our car ever existed.”

Stuart blinked. Forget you ever had a car. It sounded like the sort of thing that gangsters said when they threatened one another. And yet here was his wife saying it to him–and he had no answer. He turned away without saying anything to Irene and made his way into the bathroom. He took off his jacket. He took off his tie. Then he filled the basin with tepid water and washed his face. He looked up, into the mirror, and muttered to himself: “Statistician, middle-ranking, married, one son, one mortgage.” He looked more closely at his face. “Average Scottish face,” he continued. “Small lines beginning to appear around the eyes.” He stopped, and thought. Who was having fun? Other people in the office were having fun. They went to bars and held parties. They went off on weekends to Paris and Amsterdam. He never went anywhere. They had girlfriends and boyfriends. The girlfriends and boyfriends went with them to Paris and Amsterdam. They all had fun there.

“It’s about time you had some fun yourself,” he murmured, almost mournfully. Then he brightened and said: “Well, it’s possible, isn’t it?”