Alexander McCall Smith - The Dog Who Came In From The Cold

Caroline hesitated. One did not accept invitations from complete strangers, and yet surely that rule did not apply to invitations from middle-aged women whose bags contained nothing more sinister than Brussels sprouts. No, this was not a “Have some Madeira, my dear” invitation; this was one neighbour inviting another in for a cup of tea after she had helped her pick up dropped Brussels sprouts. What could be more innocent than that?

Caroline accepted, and began to retrace her steps with Berthea Snark.

“Tell me about your boyfriend,” Berthea said as they walked along. “Does he worry about germs all the time?”

Caroline laughed. “Of course not. In fact, I think I may have given you the wrong impression. He uses hand steriliser, you see, and is worried about handling coins, but I wouldn’t say he’s obsessed.”

Berthea raised an eyebrow. “Some degree of concern about germs is quite natural,” she said. “But, if you’ll forgive my saying so, your young man seems to be rather too concerned.” She hesitated for a moment before continuing. “You see, perhaps I should explain. I’m a psychotherapist. I’m professionally interested in these matters.”

Caroline attempted to make light of the situation. “I assure you, James is quite normal.” Is he? she asked herself. Is he really?

They were now at the entrance to the mews, and Berthea Snark was pointing to a red-painted door halfway along the row of houses. “My place,” she said. “Let’s talk further once we’re inside. You can tell me all about your James.” Then she added, “And his fears.”

Caroline frowned. Perhaps she should not have accepted this invitation after all. Hansel and Gretel, she thought.

“ A cup of tea?” asked Berthea Snark. “Or would you prefer coffee?”

Caroline chose tea, explaining that she could not drink coffee in the afternoon or early evening. “It’s the wrong taste,” she said.

“I couldn’t agree more,” said Berthea. “Coffee is possible between seven-thirty in the morning and eleven-twenty. And then again after eight-thirty at night.”

Caroline laughed. “That’s very precise,” she said.

“I’m not entirely serious,” said Berthea. “And I’m quite happy to bend the rules I set for myself. But we do need some rules in our lives, you know. As a psychotherapist, I can assure you that we need rituals and rules to anchor ourselves.” She paused. They were standing in the entrance hall to her mews house and she now directed Caroline along the small corridor, which led to a room at the back. “You know, we did ourselves a great deal of damage in the sixties and seventies. Which was before you were born, of course, but which will be affecting your world every bit as much as anybody else’s.”

Caroline looked about her. They were in a comfortable sitting room, neatly furnished in a surprisingly contemporary style, with one wall entirely taken up by shelves. A row of CDs stacked two deep, occupied one of the shelves, the rest being filled with books.

“What did we do?” she asked.

Berthea gestured to a chair. “Please sit down. What did we do? Well, I suppose I should have said something was done to us. We, in the sense of the mass of the people, the men and the women in the street, so to speak, didn’t do it. It was done by people who considered themselves opinion-formers. Social change tends to come from the moulders and manipulators of opinion, does it not? So people who may be dismissed as theorists are actually immensely important. Mrs Thatcher made the great mistake of thinking that the academic talking heads did not count. They did.”

Caroline raised an eyebrow. Was this woman mad? Was she one of those people who had some grand theory that they would thrust upon anybody they met, even somebody who had helped them retrieve their Brussels sprouts from the pavement? She waited for Berthea to continue.

“There was a body of opinion in this country that set out to remodel the fabric of our society,” Berthea continued. “They weakened the common sense of the people; they intimidated them. They decried that which people – ordinary people – actually believed in. They spoke in the language of liberation, but what did they liberate people to? To a new servitude – a servitude of shallowness and impermanence, of loneliness and alienation.

“They destroyed the familiar – they preached against it, ridiculed it. And in doing this they weakened the notion of order in people’s lives. People used to have a sense of what their lives meant because they belonged to things, and observed certain rules. You belonged to a union, or a church for that matter, which gave you a sense of who you were. It made you proud of your craft or your trade, or of being Catholic or Church of England or whatever. It gave structure. You also knew where you came from – you had a body of which you were a member. You shared a culture.”

Berthea continued to talk as she moved into the little kitchen off the sitting room. Caroline watched her as she filled the kettle and plugged it in. This woman was mad. She would drink her tea, then look pointedly at her watch and make her excuses.

“Half my professional time,” said Berthea over her shoulder, “is spent trying to help people who simply don’t have any purpose in their lives. They come to me because they are unhappy – they think that therapy will help. But what are they trying to heal? The wound in their psyche or the wound in society? They’re actually perfectly all right in themselves – it’s society that has done the damage because it’s the one who’s sick.”

Berthea came back into the sitting room carrying a tray on which there stood a teapot and two mugs. She sat the tray down on a side table and poured for both of them.

“These observations,” she said, “make me sound rather like some unreconstructed Marxist – saying that society’s to blame for everything. I’m not a Marxist, but I can’t help noting the insights that many Marxists have offered in that respect. I think they’re right, you know. They’re right in their analysis of how the human self is largely defined by social and economic factors. Of course it is. And they’re right when they insist that recalcitrant social problems – crime, for instance – have a social foundation. I would go further: I’d say that a very great deal of personal unhappiness stems from those roots.”

Caroline sipped at her tea. It had an unfamiliar flavour.

“Malawian Lost Tea,” said Berthea. “A little discovery of mine. Do you like it?”

Caroline nodded.

“I give tea to my patients,” said Berthea. “I find that it calms them. But it’s also a little ritual, isn’t it? The pouring and the serving, the sharing. And tthat’s what these poor people who come to me need so desperately: a sense of belonging. And what’s better than inducing a sense of belonging than shared ritual?”

Caroline was about to say something, but Berthea was now in full flow. “Eating together,” she went on. “That’s one of the oldest, most basic rituals. If we eat together we join one another in an experience that declares and reinforces our shared humanity. If you eat with another you are, for the duration of the meal, joined with that person. The proud cannot be proud when they are eating with others because all are on an equal footing – creatures in need of sustenance. And yet what are we doing to mealtimes? Destroying them. Do schools teach children to eat together? They do not. Snatch a meal from a cafeteria, eat in isolation, huddled over a tray. Where’s the bonding in that?’

To her surprise, Caroline found herself agreeing. Her attitude towards her hostess was changing rapidly; the suspicion she had felt earlier was being replaced by a feeling that this was a woman who was really rather wise. And this made her ask herself whether she belonged? And if she belonged, what did she belong to? To Cheltenham? To the world of her parents? She had sought to distance herself from all that – from the world of the haute bourgeoisie, with its preoccupation with possessions and class – but had she found anything to replace it? Berthea had mentioned rituals, and her parents certainly had plenty of those, with their Sunday lunches and golf club dinners (they certainly ate together) and bridge evenings, and all the rest. Were they happy as a result? In a moment of sudden understanding, Caroline realised that they were. Her parents were perfectly happy.