Pat lowered her voice. “I feel very awkward about this,” she said. “But I think that I know you well enough to talk about it.”
Matthew said nothing. It was all so predictable.
Pat reached out and took his hand. “I’m rather keen on Babs,”
she said.
Matthew remained quite immobile. He opened his mouth, and then closed it. His mouth felt dry.
“Only joking,” said Pat. “But the point is this, Matthew. I know that you want to find somebody. I know that you want to find a girlfriend. But you don’t seem to be able to do it, do you?”
Matthew looked down at his feet. He said nothing.
“Well, why don’t you let me help you?” said Pat quietly. “Let me help you find somebody.”
83. Mothercraft
With Bertie away in Paris, Irene felt at something of a loose end. She had enjoyed her recent visit to Dr Fairbairn, and they had agreed to meet again for coffee later that week. She felt slightly guilty about this, because she had not mentioned to Stuart that she was seeing the psychotherapist in this way, but on subsequent reflection she concluded that it was perfectly appropriate for the two of them to meet, on the grounds that Bertie almost always cropped up in their conversation. Her meetings with Dr Fairbairn could therefore be justified as directly related to the therapy that Bertie so clearly needed.
And Bertie really did need therapy – at least in his mother’s view. The original incident which triggered the first visit to Dr Fairbairn – Bertie’s setting fire to his father’s copy of The Guardian (while he was reading it) – had not been followed by any acts of quite so dramatic a nature. But even if that was so, it was obvious that Bertie was still puzzled by life and uncertain about himself and who he was. And there was also an outstanding question about his dreams. Bertie had vivid dreams, and it was 260 Mothercraft
not uncommon for Irene to go into his bedroom early in the morning and find Bertie lying in his little bed with a puzzled frown on his face. That, thought Irene, was an indication of a confusing or threatening dream.
If she could visit Dr Fairbairn, then there was at least something to take her mind off her situation. And that situation was this: she was pregnant, she had very little to do, and she found the behaviour of her husband increasingly irritating. The only salience in this otherwise dull existence was the Bertie Project, and for a large part of the day Bertie was away at school or, as now, in Paris.
But then there arose an interesting possibility. Irene’s first pregnancy had gone very smoothly and uneventfully. She had felt very little discomfort. There had been virtually no nausea and she had experienced no cravings of the sort that many women feel in pregnancy. So in her case there had been no furtive snacking on chocolate bars, nor gnawing on raw artichokes, nor anything of that sort. Irene had simply sailed through the whole process and, more or less exactly on the day predicted by her doctor, given birth to Bertie in the Simpson Maternity Unit.
Of course it had been an enhanced pregnancy. She had read of the importance of playing music to the baby in utero, and had placed headphones against her stomach each afternoon while resting and played Mozart through them. She was convinced that Bertie had responded, as he had kicked vigorously each time she turned up the volume of ‘ Soave sia il vento’
from Così fan Tutte, and, indeed, after his birth whenever this piece of music was played a strange expression would come over Bertie’s face.
There were other enhancements. Irene had changed her diet during pregnancy and had embarked on courses of vitamin pills and nutritional supplements that would ensure good brain development. Although she had previously scorned what she had considered to be the old-wives’ tale that fish was good for the brain, she had been won round by recent scientific evidence to this precise effect and had consequently eaten a great deal of fish in the later months. There had also been an intensive beet-Mothercraft 261
root programme in the final weeks before Bertie’s birth, and Stuart had remarked on the fact that Bertie as a very young baby had a fairly strong beetroot complexion – a remark which had not been well received by Irene.
This second pregnancy was, if anything, less stressful than the first and Irene actually found herself rather bored by it.
That was until she saw a notice in the local health centre advertising special birth and mothercraft classes at a hall in St Stephen Street. Had Irene been more fully occupied she would not have bothered with these, but in her current state she thought that it might be interesting to see what these classes entailed – not that she had anything to learn, of course, about bringing up children. Indeed, it was she who should be imparting knowledge in this area, not receiving it. But the barricades in this life are never in the right place, and so she duly enrolled in a class that was scheduled to run for six weeks, with meetings on Tuesday and Thursday mornings and on the evenings of the same days for those mothers-to-be who were still at work.
The classes were to be run by somebody called Nurse Forbes, and there was a picture of Nurse Forbes on the poster.
Irene peered at her. She had a rather bovine face, Irene decided; the sort of face that one used to see in advertisements for butter. In fact, thought Irene, she looked a bit Dutch. The Dutch, she felt, had that rather milky look about them, as if they had eaten too many dairy products. And they probably had, she reflected.
Irene smiled. Poor Nurse Forbes! She probably had not the slightest idea who Melanie Klein was; for her, babies were a matter of bottles of milk and injections and nappy rash and all the rest. Hers would be a life filled with unguent creams and immunisations and breast-milk issues. Poor woman.
And then, shortly after she had seen the poster and studied the picture of Nurse Forbes, Irene had the chance to meet her.
It happened after a routine check-up that Irene had with her doctor. This doctor for some reason did not appear to like Irene
– a feeling which Irene decided was based on his fundamental 262 No More Nonsense, Nurse Knows Best insecurity and his inability to engage in a non-paternalistic way with an informed patient.
“I’d like you to have a chat with Nurse Forbes,” said the doctor. “If you don’t mind, that is. She runs a class, you know.
Not that you would need a class, of course. Not in your case.”
“On the contrary,” said Irene coldly. “I have already decided to sign up for it.”
“In that case,” said the doctor, “you can see Nurse Forbes straightaway. She’s in the building. Speak to the receptionists first. I’m sure that the two of you will get on very well.”
Irene had not bothered about the receptionists. She had left the consulting room and walked down the corridor to the door marked Nurse Forbes. She had knocked on the door and, a moment later, a voice had called out: “Come in!”
It was a milky-sounding voice, Irene thought.
84. No More Nonsense, Nurse Knows Best Nurse Forbes was a woman in her early forties. She had been brought up in Haddington, the youngest of three girls, all of whom became nurses. Her mother had been a nurse, as had her grandmother.
That she should become a nurse too had been accepted from the very beginning, and when the time came for her to leave Knox Academy, she had enrolled on a nursing course at Queen Margaret College in Clermiston. In due course she had graduated with distinction, as her two sisters had done. She completed her training in the Royal Infirmary and in that classic of Caledonian-Stalinist architecture, the Simpson Memorial Maternity Pavilion.
Marriage came next – to a man who worked as an accountant in a brewery – and then there had been public service: she had served for a short time on the Newington Community Council, and had been appointed by the Secretary of State to the Departmental Committee on Maternity Services and the Healthy No More Nonsense, Nurse Knows Best 263