The Importance of Being Seven (4 page)

It was Bertie who first noticed that Ulysses bore a striking resemblance to Dr Hugo Fairbairn, the noted child psychotherapist and
author of
Shattered to Pieces: Ego Dissolution in a Three-Year-Old Tyrant
. Initially he had not been able to make much of Ulysses’s face, and could detect no similarities to anybody, such was the formlessness – fluidity, even – of his brother’s physiognomy. This impression was shared by Tofu. A few days after he had paid a visit to the Pollock flat in Scotland Street and seen Ulysses for the first time, Bertie’s friend had passed him a note in the classroom, saying:
Your little brother is really ugly, Bertie, don’t you think? You know what his face reminds me of? A bottom!
Bertie had torn the note up and pointedly ignored Tofu for the rest of the lesson. But at the end of the class, Tofu had approached him and asked, ‘Did you read my note, Bertie? Did you?’

‘It was very rude,’ said Bertie. ‘You should never say that anybody else looks like a bottom. It’s rude.’

‘Even if he does?’ asked Tofu.

Bertie thought about this. He was an extremely truthful boy – indeed, the only truthful boy in his class, as all the rest of the children (as Bertie could not help but notice) appeared to lie whenever it suited them to do so. Tofu, of course, lied about most things, more or less as a matter of course, and Olive, although more circumspect, always twisted the facts to suit her, while vigorously claiming to be an occupant of the moral high ground. The occupation of that high ground was useful in disputes – as Olive well knew – as it enabled her to invoke threats of divine intervention should anybody thwart her.

Olive was always warning others of the consequences of dis agreeing with her version of events. Bertie, for example, who was said by Olive to have promised to marry her once they both turned twenty, was warned severely as to the fate that lay ahead of him should he renege on this alleged promise.

‘It’s not just that you won’t be able to look at yourself in the mirror,’ said Olive. ‘It’s not just that, Bertie. You’ll also be struck by lightning.’

Bertie was silent for a moment. ‘I’m not calling you a liar,’ he said mildly. ‘Sometimes people misunderstand what they hear. Sometimes they hear things that nobody actually said. That doesn’t make them liars.’

Olive fixed him with an intense stare. ‘Oh yes? And sometimes they hear things exactly as the other person said them. So when somebody says, I promise to marry you when I’m twenty, they hear that and they remember it. What about that, Bertie?’

‘I really don’t think I ever said that, Olive,’ protested Bertie.

‘Well, you did,’ said Olive. ‘You said it and I wrote it down on a piece of paper. Then you signed it.’

Bertie was shocked at this claim, which was outrageous even by Olive’s standards. ‘I didn’t, Olive! And, anyway, where’s the paper? Show it to me.’

Olive was ready for this. ‘You’re not going to trick me that easily, Bertie Pollock. If I gave you the paper, you’d tear it up. I’ve seen that sort of thing happen before.’ She paused, and then uttered a final warning. ‘And if you carry on lying like this, you know, your pants are going to go on fire. I’m warning you, Bertie!’

It seemed to Bertie that truth for people such as Tofu and Olive was an entirely flexible concept, and that what determined truth for such people was the vigour with which a proposition was asserted, even in the face of all the evidence. He, of course, knew differently, but he was still unsure as to whether there were circumstances in which one should refrain from revealing a truth because of the effect that this might have on others. Some observations, it
appeared, were just too hurtful or troublesome to make, even if they were completely true. It was hurtful of Tofu to be so rude about Ulysses, and it was evidently very troublesome that Ulysses bore such a close resemblance to Dr Fairbairn.

Certainly when Bertie had first mentioned this to his mother, he had been surprised by her reaction. There had been silence at first – as if Irene had somehow been put into a state of shock by Bertie’s remark – and this had been followed by a strained retort to the effect that one did not comment on any resemblances that babies had to anybody.

‘Just don’t do it, Bertie,’ warned his mother. ‘Mummies, in particular, don’t like that sort of remark.’

‘But I thought that a mummy might be interested to know that her baby looks like one of her friends,’ said Bertie. ‘There’s not much you can say about babies, but you can say that.’

Irene’s voice now rose slightly. ‘No, Bertie. We can’t say that sort of thing. Rest assured – Mummy knows. You don’t tell a mummy that a baby looks like another … another daddy. You don’t. Did you hear me? You don’t! So let’s not have any more of this.
Capisce
?’

Bertie had left the matter at that. He was still sure that Ulysses looked extraordinarily like the psychotherapist – they had exactly the same, rather unusual shape of ear, and there was something in the eyes, too, which strongly suggested this. He pointed this out to Dr Fairbairn himself during one of his sessions, but the psychotherapist had said nothing, and had then gone off to Aberdeen, to a chair. Bertie could not understand why Dr Fairbairn should find it necessary to go to Aberdeen for the sake of a chair, of all things. But the ways of adults were strange, and the ways of Dr Fairbairn were particularly so.

And now there was an additional thing for his mother to worry about. Ulysses, who was not an easy baby and was given to girning, had started to be sick whenever Irene picked him up to feed him. Indeed, more or less every time Irene picked him up, he brought up over her shoulder. It was very trying for everybody – for Irene, for Stuart, and for Bertie himself, who did not like the smell.

‘We’ll have to move out of the house if Ulysses carries on being so smelly,’ he said to his mother. ‘We’ll have to go and live in a hotel.’

Bertie yearned to live in a hotel, or possibly a club. He had read that there were people who lived permanently in hotels and clubs, which seemed to him to be an impossibly wonderful existence. If only a boy could live there, all by himself, in his own room, away from his mother; if only.

The flat immediately above the Pollocks’ flat in Scotland Street belonged to Domenica Macdonald, briefly Varghese and now Macdonald again. Varghese had been the name of her Indian husband, a man who showed patient, dogged devotion to Domenica, but had been accidentally electrocuted in his small private electricity generating station in Kerala. Widowhood, though, had suited Domenica, and she had returned to Scotland with some gratitude, ready to pursue her interests as a private scholar. This role – that of the private scholar – was one that very few people still claimed, although there had been a time when it was a fairly common one for people in whom both means and scholarly interest happily coincided.

The contribution of private scholars to knowledge was, of course, immense. In the past, virtually all scholars were private: Galileo was, as was Hume, and Darwin too. They could be: science then was on a scale that did not preclude private experiments in one’s kitchen and did not require a particle accelerator several miles long. Philosophy and anthropology – and a whole lot else besides – could be pursued without the assistance of public grants, forms, and the approval of research ethics committees.

The description of private scholar was one that Domenica had resurrected for herself and that enabled her to feel that she was doing something useful after she had left her small academic
position in the department of anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. She had enjoyed that post, but it had been funded by grants that had eventually dried up. Anthropology was vaguely exotic, and spoke little of the everyday social reality with which the bureaucrats felt the social sciences should concern themselves. So while investigations into familial structures among the Nuer might be all very interesting – though not necessarily for the Nuer themselves, to whom all this was just the way they did things – in the eyes of those who dispensed academic largesse it was not quite as compelling as a study of job centre accessibility in Airdrie. The Nuer and the residents of Airdrie are indeed quite different – both groups have considerable merits, and rich traditions – but for Domenica the Nuer had the slight edge in terms of anthropological interest.

This was a result of the lure of the distant and the different – she knew that very well. And she knew, too, that the days of anthropological condescension from the West towards everybody else were over, and rightly so, a matter that she had discussed with Angus Lordie on more than one occasion.

‘Do they send anthropologists to Scotland?’ Angus once asked.

‘Of course they do,’ replied Domenica. ‘The notion that it’s we who study them is quite abandoned now. We are all the object of anthropological interest – potentially. All of us. Even you and that malodorous dog of yours, although strictly speaking he’s nothing to do with anthropos.’

Angus ignored the gibe at Cyril but thought about Domenica’s broader point. ‘So would you get anthropologists going to, say, Saltcoats?’ He paused, and then added, ‘Not that I’m suggesting that there’s anything wrong with Saltcoats. It’s a great place, of course.’

Domenica nodded. ‘I knew an American anthropologist who went to do field work in Glasgow,’ she said.

There was something about the tone with which she said this that interested Angus. Had something untoward occurred? ‘How did he get on?’ he asked.

Domenica looked out of the window. They were having tea in her kitchen in Scotland Street and she was staring at the view of the chimney pots on the other side of the road. We did not need
these chimney pots any more, now that we no longer used our fires, but how bare, she thought, would rooftops seem without them.

‘How did he get on?’ She repeated Angus’s question. ‘Not too badly, to begin with.’

‘And then?’

‘Well, there was an incident. He was head-butted.’

Angus felt a momentary shame; a shame for Scotland. There was so much we had to be ashamed of: too much drinking, too much aggressive swearing, too much head-butting … And what did people do about it? Nothing, he thought. Because it was unfashionable, uncool, to protest the values of civilisation, those discarded, despised notions that actually made life in society less like Hobbes’s nightmare.

‘I’m very sorry to hear that,’ he said.

Domenica nodded. ‘He was a very agreeable man,’ she said. ‘He came from Chicago, I seem to recall, and he had that typical mid-Western politeness about him. He wrote to me for a few years after his return to the United States, always referring to what he described as his very happy memories of Scotland. He never talked about the head-butting.’

‘They are very considerate people, Americans like that,’ said Angus.

They were both silent, as there was nothing more to be said. Did anybody actually apologise, Angus asked himself.

For her part, although she recognised the merits of work in one’s own back yard, Domenica continued to be attracted by radically different societies and by not-too-prosaic projects. Her last piece of research, which she had then written up in several well-received scholarly articles, had taken place in the Malacca Straits. She had gone there to investigate the domestic life of contemporary pirates, and she still remembered with affection the welcome that the pirate households gave her. Some of the pirate women still wrote to her occasionally, giving her news of their families; and she always responded, sending books to the children and the annual
Scotsman
calendar to the pirates themselves.

But after that there had been nothing, and she wondered whether it would be more truthful to describe herself as a sometime private
scholar. She liked the word sometime, which people still used occasionally to refer to a previous position or status. There remained a few scholars – institutionalised, not private ones – who described themselves on the title pages of their books as sometime Fellow of this or that Oxbridge college. There was nothing wrong with that – if you once were something, then it was understandable to remind people of the fact, if it was relevant. But one should not cling too doggedly to these scraps of past dignity, as was being done, Domenica feared, by a friend of hers whose hall cupboard she had once inadvertently opened, thinking that it was the bathroom. And had seen, hanging on a rail, an old coat belonging to her friend, with, pinned to its lapel, a familiar old badge bearing the legend
Captain of Hockey
. She had wanted to laugh at the discovery, but had stopped herself. The thought occurred that this was all that her friend had; this was the summit of her achievement, and that life for her thereafter had been a matter of disappointment. Small things may be important to us; to be a sometime anything is sometimes something.