The World According to Bertie - Alexander Hanchett Smith [128]
She sounded tearful. ‘I don’t know. I really don’t . . .’
‘No, I’ll be there,’ said Matthew. ‘Ten minutes. Just wait for me.’
He put down the receiver and went into his bedroom to change into a new ultramarine shirt. But then he stopped. He looked at the shirt that he had laid on the bed. No, that shirt was not him; that was Pat’s idea of what she thought he should be. The real Matthew, the one that wanted to go and help Elspeth Harmony in whatever distress she was suffering, was not the Matthew of ultramarine shirts and charcoal trousers; it was the Matthew of distressed-oatmeal sweaters and crushed-strawberry trousers; that was who he was, and that was the person whom he wished Elspeth Harmony to know.
The taxi arrived promptly, and Matthew gave the driver instructions. They travelled in silence and, in the light traffic, they were there in little more than ten minutes.
‘Number 18?’ asked the driver as they entered the small cul-de-sac. ‘I had an aunt who lived at number 8. Dead now, of course, but she used to make terrific scones. We used to go there for tea as children. There were always scones. And she made us kids eat up. Come on now, plenty more scones. Come on!’
Matthew smiled. There used always to be scones. The taxi driver was much older, but even Matthew’s Scotland had changed since his own childhood, not all that many years ago. Things like that were less common – aunts who made scones. There were career aunts now, who had no time to bake scones.
They stopped outside number 18 and he looked up towards the third floor, where Elspeth Harmony lived. There were window-boxes at two of the windows and a small splash of red. Nasturtiums. He smiled again.
She let him in, and he could tell that she had been crying. He moved forward and put an arm around her shoulder.
‘You mustn’t cry,’ he said. ‘You mustn’t.’
‘I feel so stupid,’ she said. ‘I feel that I’ve let everyone down.’
‘Tell me exactly what happened,’ said Matthew.
She told him, and he listened carefully. When she had finished, he shook his head in astonishment. ‘So all you did was give her a little pinch on the ear?’
Elspeth nodded. ‘There was really no excuse,’ she said. ‘But there are one or two of the children who are seriously provocative. There’s a boy called Tofu, who really tries my patience. And then there’s Olive, whose ear . . . whose ear I pinched.’
‘It’s entirely understandable,’ said Matthew. ‘Teaching is so demanding, and you get so little support. That pinch will have done Olive no harm – probably a lot of good.’
‘Do you really think so?’
‘Yes,’ said Matthew. But then he went on, rather sadly: ‘But I suppose that’s not the world we live in, with all these regulations and busybodies about.’ He paused. ‘I think you’ve struck a blow for sanity. Or rather, pinched one.’
Elspeth thought this very funny, and laughed.
‘I’m rather fed up with teaching anyway,’ she said.
Matthew thought: if you married me, then you’d never have to work again. Unless you wanted to, of course.
84. A Tattooed Man
Dr Hugo Fairbairn, author of that seminal work of child psychotherapy, Shattered to Pieces: Ego Dissolution in a Three-Year-Old Tyrant, was walking in from his flat in Sciennes, on the south side of Edinburgh, to his consulting rooms in Queen Street. It was as fine a day as Edinburgh had enjoyed for some weeks, with the temperature being sufficiently high to encourage shirt-sleeves, but not so high as to provoke some men to remove their shirts altogether. A few more degrees and that would, of course, happen, and many men who should, out of consideration for others, remain shirted would strip to the waist, treating passers-by to expanses of flesh that was far from Mediterranean in its appearance, but was pallid and perhaps somewhat less than firm. After all, thought Dr Fairbairn, this was what Auden had described as a beer and potato culture – in contrast to the culture of the Mezzogiorno, which he had then been enjoying; and beer and potatoes led to heaviness, both of the spirit