The World According to Bertie - Alexander Hanchett Smith [40]
Irene was looking at her fingernails. ‘Bertie,’ she said. ‘There are some questions we never ask, and that is one of them. You never ask if somebody is a baby’s real daddy! That’s very rude indeed! It’s the person whom the baby calls Daddy who is the daddy. We just have to accept that, even if sometimes we wonder whether it’s not true. And of course it’s not true in this case – I mean, it’s not true that there’s another daddy. Daddy is Ulysses’ daddy. And that’s that.’
Bertie listened attentively. He wondered if there was a chance that Irene was not his real mother, and he would have loved to have asked about that, but this was not the right time, Bertie sensed.
27. It’s Never Rude to Say Things to a Doctor
Now, sitting in Dr Fairbairn’s waiting room, Bertie paged though an old issue of Scottish Field. His mother was closeted in the consulting room with the psychotherapist, and Bertie knew that they were discussing him, as they always did at the beginning of one of his sessions. He did not like this, but he knew that there was nothing he could do about it. It was hard enough to tackle his mother by herself; when she teamed up with Dr Fairbairn, it seemed to Bertie that he was up against impossible odds.
Bertie liked reading Scottish Field, and his regular encounters with the magazine helped to make the visits to Dr Fairbairn at least bearable. He wondered if it would be possible to take the magazine in with him to read during the psychotherapy session itself, as it seemed to him that Dr Fairbairn was quite content to do all the talking and it would make no difference if he was reading at the time. But he decided that this request would have little hope of being met; adults were so difficult over things like that.
He turned to the back of the magazine. After looking at the advertisements for fishing jackets and Aga cookers, which he liked, he turned to the social pages, which were his particular favourite. There were photographs there of people all over Scotland going to parties and events, and in every photograph everybody seemed to be smiling. Bertie had not been to many children’s parties, but at those to which he had been there had always been one or two people who burst into tears over something or other. It seemed that this did not happen at grown-ups’ parties, where there was just all this smiling. Bertie thought that this might have something to do with the fact that many of the people in the photographs were holding glasses of wine and were therefore probably drunk. If you were drunk, he had heard, you smiled and laughed.
He examined the photographs of a party which had been held at a very couthie place called Ramsay Garden. Somebody who lived there, it said, was giving drinks to his friends, who were all standing around laughing. That’s nice, thought Bertie. One or two of the friends looked a bit drunk, in Bertie’s view, but at least they were still standing, which was also nice. And there was a photograph of a man playing the kind-looking host’s piano. His hands were raised over the keyboard and he was smiling at the camera, which Bertie thought was very clever, as it was hard to get your fingers on the right notes if you were not looking. Underneath the photograph there was a line which said: Eric von Ibler accompanies the singing, while David Todd turns the pages. Bertie wondered what the guests had been singing. He had once walked with his father past a pub where everybody was singing ‘Cod Liver Oil and the Orange Juice’, which was a very strange song, thought Bertie. Was that what they were singing at the Ramsay Garden party? he wondered. Perhaps.
Bertie sighed, and turned the page. There was a lot of fun being had in Scotland, mostly by grown-ups, and he wondered if he would ever be able to join in. He looked at the new spread of photographs and his eye was caught by some familiar faces. Yes, there was Mr Roddy