Espresso Tales - Alexander Hanchett Smith [79]
She felt his gaze upon her, a quizzical, slightly bemused look, and she wondered what it meant. It was as if he was sounding her out, determining whether she could respond to those images of Australia, that evocation of atmosphere. And she could, of course, and was about to say something herself about the Australian countryside and the effect it had wrought upon her when there was a knock at the door. He looked away, the spell broken, and answered.
The door half-opened and a head appeared. It was a young woman, of about Pat’s age, or a year or two older. The young woman looked briefly at Peter and then at Pat. “Sorry to interrupt,” she said. “The thermostat on the hot water has stuck again. Can you fiddle with it like you did last time?”
Peter put down his coffee cup and rose from the bed. “Of course,” he said. Then, half-turning to Pat, he said: “By the way, this is Joe.”
Pat nodded a greeting, which Joe returned with a cheerful wave. Then, while Peter and Joe were out of the room, Pat looked up at the ceiling and smiled. Josephine and Fergus: rather a different picture from the one she had imagined. And this meant that Peter was quite possible now, although there was still the question of T. Who was T and did she (or he) take the photograph of the skinny-dipping in Greece? She could always ask Peter directly, but then that would reveal that she had 164 A Trip to Glasgow in the Offing
sneaked a look at the photograph, which was none of her business. Unless, of course, she were to place her coffee cup on the table and inadvertently cause the books and photographs to fall onto the floor . . . just like this.
50. A Trip to Glasgow in the Offing
Sitting at the breakfast table, her single piece of toast on her plate, Irene said to Stuart: “When you go through to Glasgow on Saturday, you may take Bertie with you, but . . .”
Stuart interrupted her. “Thank you. I’m sure that he’d like the train ride. You know how he feels about trains. Little boys . . .”
Irene nodded impatiently. “Yes, yes,” she said, buttering her toast. She knew how little boys – or some of them – felt about trains, but that was no reason to encourage them. Little boys felt that way about trains because they were socially encouraged to do so – and she was sure that it was Stuart who had brought trains into the picture; she certainly had not. There was nothing inherent in the make-up of boys that attracted them to trains. Boys and girls were genetically indistinguishable, in her view (apart from the odd chromosome), and it was social conditioning that produced interests such as trains, in the case of boys, and, quite appallingly, dolls in the case of girls. Irene had never played with dolls, but had Stuart played with trains as a boy? They had never discussed the matter, but she had a good idea as to what the answer would be.
“Don’t spend more time in Glasgow than you have to,” she said. “Bertie’s going to miss his yoga class as it is, and I don’t want him to miss his saxophone lesson as well.”
“It would be nice to take him down to Gourock or somewhere like that,” Stuart ventured. “He would probably like to see the ferries. We could even pick up some fish and chips.”
Irene laughed ominously. “And a deep-fried Mars Bar while you’re about it?”
Stuart thought that Bertie would probably rather enjoy that, A Trip to Glasgow in the Offing
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but had the good sense not to say it. He was looking forward to the outing and he did not want to provoke Irene into offering to accompany them. It was good to be going off alone with his son – as a father should do from time to time. Bertie hardly spoke to him these days; he seemed to have withdrawn into a world from which he, Stuart, was excluded, and this was worrying. Yet Stuart found it difficult to know what to say to Bertie, or to anybody else for that matter. He was a naturally quiet man, and throughout his marriage to Irene, whom he admired for her strength of character and her intellectual vision, he had left it to her to do the talking. She had always been in charge of what she called