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By Root 852 0

actually eat it. Probably because they knew no better, she decided. Ordinary people – as Irene called them – were remarkably in the dark, and often simply did not realise how in the dark they were. Fortunately, ordinary people were beginning to develop more sophisticated habits, brought about, in part, by overseas travel, not that Spain helped very much, thought Irene. Down at his eye-level, Bertie saw tinned fish and sea-food, Portuguese sardines and Sicilian octopus. The pictures on these tins were intriguing. The Portuguese sardines were portrayed as swimming contentedly in a small shoal near the surface of the sea, while in the background there was a wild coast with high cliffs and mountains behind. Bertie had been to Portugal, and some of it, he recalled, had looked just like that. They had eaten sardines there, too, every night, though the sardines had looked less happy than those portrayed on the tin.

176

A Meeting in Valvona and Crolla

After they had completed their shopping, they had gone through to the café and latte had been ordered.

“Well, Bertie,” said Irene cheerfully. “What did you think of Dr Fairbairn?”

Bertie appeared to think for a moment. “He was very kind,”

he said. “He didn’t smack me when he called me a naughty boy.”

Irene’s eyes widened. “He did not call you a naughty boy,” she protested. “He asked you whether you had been a naughty boy, that’s all. And I didn’t think that he meant it.”

“Why did he say it then?” asked Bertie. “Why did he call me a naughty boy?”

Irene drew in her breath. This would require very careful handling. It had been unwise of Dr Fairbairn to use the term

“naughty boy” in the first place, but then he probably had not realised just how bright Bertie was. Other boys would have seen this remark as a bit of harmless banter – a joke really – but Bertie was far too sensitive for that. Bertie had cried when he had seen a picture of the unfinished parliament building in the newspapers. That showed real sensitivity. “It’s so sad,” he had said. “All that building and building and it’s never finished. Can we not help them, Mummy?”

She would have to mention to Dr Fairbairn – very tactfully, of course – that he was sensitive to suggestion, unlike Wee Fraser perhaps. Wee Fraser had not been a sensitive boy, by all accounts, and even when his ego had been re-assembled at the end of the analysis, he had not seemed to have developed any particularly sensitive traits. He had stopped biting people, of course, which amounted to a slightly more sensitive approach to life, but in other respects one could probably not hope for much change.

“Bertie,” she began, “when Dr Fairbairn asked you – asked you, mind – whether you had been a naughty boy, he was referring to how other people might have reacted to your behaviour. This is different from saying that you had been a naughty boy. His tone was ironic. If he really thought that you had been naughty, then he wouldn’t have used those words. You do understand that, don’t you?”

Bertie said nothing. He had been naughty, he thought: he had A Meeting in Valvona and Crolla

177

written on the nursery walls. Surely that was quintessentially naughty. And he wanted to be naughty. That was the whole point. If they kept making him learn Italian and play the saxophone and all the other things, he would show them. He would punish them, and they would stop. That was how grown-ups, people like Mrs Klein, whose book he had read, thought. And this Doctor Fairbairn person, who had hardly talked to him at all and who hadn’t even been interested in his joke – the only way to make him take any notice would be to do something really naughty. Perhaps I should bite him, thought Bertie. Then he will really take notice and tell them to drop the Italian and the saxophone. They might even be persuaded not to send me to the Steiner School and send me to Watson’s instead, where there are uniforms and rugby and things like that. And secret societies too, Bertie thought, although those might only be for after you’ve left. Irene looked at her son. There was so much promise