Alexander Smith - Unbearable Lightness of Scones

And now I’ve come back, he thought, just like a salmon that remembers where it was spawned. But do I really belong to this place? He had driven down to Kelso shortly after his arrival, as an act of homage induced entirely by guilt, and had looked for the house that his father had talked about. He found it, and had stood outside and gazed at its modest façade, at the windows giving immediately onto the street, and had thought how mean and small can be our holy places.

He stared at the fading map and at the place where Toowoomba would have been. Then he closed his eyes and saw a block of the boys’ boarding school where he had been sent, together with the sons of the owners of the big cattle stations, and where he had been so unhappy. He saw the place near the door where he had been pushed to the ground hard by a large muscular boy from the Cape York Peninsula who had then sat on him and winded him so thoroughly that he thought that he would die. And he saw his mother, the pillar of the Anglican Bridge Club, drinking endless cups of weak tea with her friend on the front veranda and saying to her, “I’m dying of boredom, you know, Lill. A slow death. Pure boredom.”

He, at least, had escaped to Melbourne, and to university, and had discovered psychology, against the will of his father, who had wanted him to follow him into business. He had left home on the understanding that he was to register for a bachelor of commerce degree at Monash, and had done so. But a week after registration, and after attending the first three orientation lectures, he had changed his registration to psychology.

He did well, although he never told his parents of the change in his course. His mother would hardly have been concerned; her mind was on the affairs of the Anglican Bridge Club, and the difference between a bachelor of commerce degree and a degree in psychology would not have struck her as being very great. Anyway, she was proud of him, and of anything he did; his father was the problem.

When he graduated, his parents came down to Melbourne for the ceremony.

His father was bemused. “Look, Rog,” he said. “They’ve made a mistake on the programme. They’ve put you under psychology rather than commerce. Better get that sorted out!”

“No, I don’t think we should make a fuss, Dad. I’ll just go through with it. We can sort it all out later.”

His father had been appalled. “You can’t do that, Rog! You can’t go and get the wrong bit of paper. Heavens no. I’ll speak to them myself, if you like.”

He swallowed. “Actually, Dad. I changed courses. I meant to tell you, seeing how you were paying for the whole thing, but you know how it is… I kind of forgot. It’s a very good degree, and they’ve accepted me for a master’s in analytical child psychology. That’s quite a thing, you know. The competition is very stiff.”

His father had looked at him in wide-eyed horror. “You forgot to tell me…”

And Roger thought: All my life you’ve wanted me to be just like you, to do the things you like to do, to be a smaller version of you. You thought I wasn’t tough enough. You sent me to that school. You said that I should stand up for myself, be a man, be an ordinary Aussie bloke, just like you. But that’s not who I am.

His father looked at him, and then looked at his mother. She looked away. This was male business, father and son business. She did not want them to fight. She wanted them to be friends, just as the husbands and sons of the other women at the Anglican Bridge Club were friends.

Bertie sat in the waiting room while his mother was inside, talking to Dr. Sinclair. They had been ten minutes already and, with any luck, it would be another ten before Dr. Sinclair called him through. Sometimes, in the days when he came to see Dr. Fairbairn, the two adults had talked for forty-five minutes before Bertie was admitted, which meant that he had only fifteen minutes of the psychotherapist’s bizarre questions. In Bertie’s mind, Dr. Sinclair, or Roger as he had asked to be called, was not nearly so bad, but, even so, it would be nice if their sessions were shortened by his mother’s interventions.

He searched the pile of magazines on the waiting room table to see if there was a new copy of Scottish Field . There was, and he seized it eagerly. There was an eagle on the cover this time, and Bertie studied the plumage and claws with some interest. Tofu had said that he had seen an eagle in a tree in his garden, but Bertie doubted this.

Tofu lied about most things when it suited him, and it usually suited him to impress other people. He lied about his father, saying that he was a private detective, when Bertie knew that he was really a writer of books on vegetarian matters. He lied about his mother, whom he claimed had been eaten by a lion while on safari in Africa, but who was, according to Olive, locked up in prison. Olive herself, of course, was not above lying. She had misled Akela with entirely false claims of previous scouting experience, but much more importantly she had deceived everybody at school with claims that Bertie was her boyfriend, which, as far as he was concerned, was most certainly not the case.

He opened Scottish Field and turned the pages. There was an article on a man who had turned an old byre into a house. There was an article about a man who restored old cars, and one about wolves and whether they should be reintroduced into Scotland. Bertie thought this would be a good idea, but that it would be best to reintroduce them into Glasgow first before they started to reintroduce them into Edinburgh. If the wolves did well in Glasgow, and didn’t bite too many people, then they could start by reintroducing them into Queen Street Gardens before they allowed them to make their lairs elsewhere.

He paused, and looked up at the ceiling. What would happen, he wondered, if they reintroduced wolves into Queen Street Gardens but did not tell his mother? And what would happen if he, Bertie, read about this in Scottish Field ? Would he have to warn his mother if she told him that she was taking Ulysses for a walk in the gardens – as she sometimes did? If the wolves ate his mother, of course, they might take pity on Ulysses and raise him as one of them. Bertie had read about this happening, about feral children being brought up by wolves and such creatures, and he thought it would be fun to have a brother who lived with wolves, like Romulus and Remus.

Bertie skimmed through the article on wolves and reached the pages at the back where there were pictures of the latest parties and dances. This was the part of the magazine that he liked the most, as he now recognised some of the people in the pictures, and it made him feel part of everything to see them enjoying themselves.

He would go to these parties and dances himself when he was eighteen; he was sure of that; he would go without his mother. He looked at the pictures. There had been a dinner at Prestonfield House, he read, and there had been hundreds of people there. He scrutinised the pictures and saw some faces he knew: Mr. Charlie Maclean, in a kilt, talking to Mr. Humphrey Holmes; Mr. Roddy Martine talking to a lady in a white dress with a tartan shawl about her shoulders. Bertie’s eye moved over the captions. Annabel Goldie talking to Mr. Alex Salmond, and both smiling. He had read about them in the papers and he knew who they were. He was telling her a joke, Bertie thought, and it must have been very funny, because she was laughing a lot. And there were pictures of a band. Mr. David Todd playing the fiddle in his tartan trousers while a group of people danced. Bertie sighed; he had only ever been to one party, and that was Tofu’s, at the bowling alley in Fountainbridge. There were never any photographs of parties like that in Scottish Field .