The Importance of Being Seven (3 page)

Irene Pollock stood at the window of her flat at 44 Scotland Street and thought about identity. She had recently walked past a sign outside a church that read:
Consider your Life; Think of who you are
. Irene had little time for churches, which she regarded as hotbeds of reaction – if reaction can have hotbeds – but she found this message curiously affecting. Yes, perhaps it was something that we all should do from time to time – examine our lives. And now, back in her flat, with Bertie at school and little Ulysses halfway through his morning sleep, her thoughts focused on who she was.

I am, first and foremost, she thought, Irene Pollock, a person to whom the first name Irene had been given, who had then married a man called Stuart Pollock. That made her Irene Pollock, although she had always had her reservations about women adopting their husbands’ surnames. That was changing, of course, and more women were retaining their maiden names, but it would be a little bit complicated now to do that because Bertie was Bertie Pollock
and Ulysses was Ulysses Pollock. She had her reservations, too, about the term maiden name. What a ridiculous notion that one was a maiden of all things before one got married. It would be far better, she felt, to use the term woman’s name, or possibly birth name, rather than maiden name. Or possibly authentic name; that had a good ring to it. You would have your authentic name, and then you would have your secondary name, another good term.

She knew of the old Scottish habit of calling women by their maiden names – or authentic names – first, and then writing
or
and giving their married, or secondary, name. This was the way legal documents had always been worded. So she was Irene Burgess or Pollock, which was better than being Irene Pollock née Burgess, because this form put the authentic name after the secondary name, which gave the wrong message. That implied that the state of being married – the state of being a Pollock – was more important than the state of being a person with an authentic identity – that of a Burgess. And then there was always the problem of people being unable to spell, which would mean that she might be described as Irene Pollock, nay Burgess. Of course, that at least had the merit of suggesting that Pollock was the less important identity, the nay negating its pretensions.

Had she retained her authentic name, of course, there would have been a question of what Bertie and Ulysses were called. Bertie’s full name was Bertie Wystan Pollock, but in a more egalitarian, less patriarchal society, he could as easily be called Bertie Wystan Burgess. Bertie Burgess, however, was rather too alliterative, and she had been determined not to burden her children with awkward or embarrassing names. What was that girl at school called? She cast her mind back to the roll call at the Mary Erskine School for Girls: Lorna Anderson, present, Nicola Ross, present, Mhairi Smellie, present … Poor Mhairi Smellie. Her first name, a Scots Gaelic name, was pronounced ‘vary’, which sounded close to very. The name Smellie was common enough in Scotland, but to be called something which sounded like ‘very smelly’ was a singular misfortune, and indicative, surely, of a lack of parental foresight.

The Wystan in Bertie’s name was, of course, after Wystan Hugh Auden, or W. H. Auden as he was usually known. Irene admired
Auden’s work and liked the name. Bertie did not. She had introduced him to Auden, of course, concentrating on the more accessible poems, but Bertie had not responded as warmly as she might have wished. She had read him ‘If I Could Tell You’, and he had listened intently, but then he had shown by his questions that he had clearly missed the point.

‘Why does Mr Auden,’ he asked, ‘say that all the brooks and soldiers will run away, Mummy? How can brooks run away if they haven’t got legs?’

‘Auden used something called personalisation, Bertie,’ Irene explained. ‘He makes inanimate things talk, or have attitudes. It’s very clever.’

Bertie thought about this. ‘And then he says that perhaps the roses really want to grow. How can roses want to do anything, Mummy? They haven’t got brains, have they?’

‘Mr Auden is very clever,’ said Irene patiently. ‘He makes us think about the world by making the world think. That’s frightfully clever, Bertie.’

Bertie looked thoughtful. ‘We learned some poems at school,’ he said. ‘There was one about some daffodils. It was when Miss Harmony was still there. She told us to close our eyes while she read it and try to think of daffodils. And then she taught us some Burns.’

Irene was silent for a moment. ‘Burns is a folk poet, Bertie. He really isn’t very deep.’

‘She read us a poem about two dogs,’ Bertie went on. ‘There was this very grand dog, you see, and this other dog …’

Irene looked pained. ‘I know all about that one, Bertie. It’s very sentimental, you know. A lot of Burns is.’

Bertie remembered something that his friend, Tofu, had said. ‘Tofu asked Miss Harmony whether she could read something from another of Mr Burns’s books. He said that there was a book called
The Merry Muses of Caledonia
and the poems were very rude. Miss Harmony said no and went very red.’

Irene glared at Bertie. ‘That boy, Tofu, is …’ She did not complete her sentence. She disapproved of Tofu and would have preferred it if Bertie had chosen some other friend: Olive, for example, to whom she had given every encouragement, and whose mother was a member of her Melanie Klein Reading Group. But Bertie seemed to have set his face against Olive, and even went so far as to say that he hated her. Children were always saying such things, of course, and then deciding the next moment that the hated person is their best friend.

If Bertie disliked Olive, he also did not particularly like Tofu, who was always getting him into trouble. Bertie was a kind boy, though, and he felt that he could not really abandon the other boy, particularly since Tofu had lost his mother, a prominent vegan, who had unfortunately died of starvation. Bertie felt that Tofu needed him, and was loyal, in spite of the other boy’s selfish and sometimes alarming behaviour. Bertie, for instance, did not approve of Tofu’s spitting at people, but when he had raised the subject with him, Tofu’s response had been to laugh, and then to spit at him. So the subject was dropped and not taken up again.

Irene’s process of self-examination – her stocktaking – now proceeded from names to relationships. She had married Stuart Pollock because he was the first man who had ever paid any attention to her. She liked him, and was so moved by his crestfallen look after she had
initially turned him down that she subsequently relented and agreed. Bertie had arrived a few years later, when Irene was just about to embark on a master’s course in social theory at the University of Edinburgh. The pregnancy had not been an easy one – Bertie had been unusually active
in utero
, kicking with some force, ‘as if he wanted to get away from me’, as Irene put it to her doctor.

‘Oh?’ said the doctor. ‘I’m sure he’s not doing that!’ And then he had paused, and asked Irene whether she was doing anything that might be making the baby uncomfortable. ‘You aren’t drinking too much, are you?’

‘Certainly not,’ said Irene. ‘I know the risks.’

‘When does this tend to occur?’ asked the doctor.

Irene thought for a moment. ‘It happens most frequently in the late afternoon.’

The doctor looked thoughtful. He had learned his diagnostic skills at the feet of a particularly acerbic professor of medicine, but one who was much admired by his students for his deductive ability. In this respect he was a later version, perhaps, of the great Dr Joseph Bell, a surgeon at the Royal Infirmary who had taught Conan Doyle, and from whom no secrets could be hidden, either by patients or by students. Now he remembered what this professor had told him about asking what the patient was doing when, or immediately before, the symptoms first manifested themselves.

‘What do you tend to do in the late afternoons?’ he asked. ‘Rest? Read? Do the housework?’

Irene gave him a withering look. ‘In our house, housework is shared. Stuart does his share. More than his share much of the time.’

The doctor looked abashed. ‘Of course. Quite right. But could you tell me what you tend to be doing when this kicking starts?’

Irene waved a hand in the air. ‘This and that. I’m usually in the flat then. And I take the opportunity to play Bertie some music.’

The doctor, who had been staring at his notes, looked up sharply. ‘Bertie?’

Irene smiled, and pointed to her stomach.

‘You play the baby music?’

Irene nodded. ‘Yes. I take it that you’ve read about the benefits
of
in utero
musical training?’ She waited for an answer, but the doctor said nothing. ‘Well,’ she resumed, ‘there is plenty of evidence that the unborn child can hear music and will react accordingly.’

The doctor stared at Irene wide-eyed. ‘So Bertie, if I may call him that, may not be kicking – he may be conducting?’

Irene pursed her mouth. This was not a subject for humour – particularly heavy-handed medical humour. ‘There’s a very interesting book,’ she continued. ‘It’s called
Your Own Pre-Natal Classroom
and it has a great deal about how the foetus reacts and how the baby can be given a head start. The man who wrote that book said that he witnessed a thirty-three-week foetus synchronise its breathing with the beat of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Can you believe that?’

The doctor wanted to say no, but did not.

‘Yes,’ said Irene. ‘Quite astonishing. But perfectly credible, if you begin to think about it. So I have introduced an educational hour for Bertie each afternoon. We listen to music together and then I play him a tape of a reading of Dante’s
Divine Comedy
. In Italian.’

The doctor picked up a pencil and played with it. ‘I wonder if Bertie appreciates this. You don’t think that perhaps he’s a little young …’

‘No,’ said Irene. ‘I do not.’

The doctor was silent. He was remembering something else that his professor had told him about how patients often themselves provide the answer to the questions they raise. Irene had told him exactly why Bertie kicked so much; he objected, as any unborn child might be expected to do, to this early
in utero
education. If there were school refusers – children who objected to being sent to school – then why should there not be unborn babies who objected to attempts at pre-natal education? But even as he reached this conclusion, the doctor thought it highly unlikely that Irene could be persuaded to leave Bertie alone to enjoy his last few months in the womb without a programme.

‘You don’t think that he might be …’ the doctor began, but stopped. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Just a thought.’

Irene had now reached her own conclusions. ‘I’m rather coming round to the view that this child is very keen to get started,’ she
mused. ‘Yes, that’s probably it. He wants to get on with it. He must have a natural curiosity about the world.’

‘Very possibly,’ said the doctor. ‘Let’s wait and see. Some babies kick, and some babies don’t. Perhaps we shouldn’t read too much into the situation.’

Bertie continued to kick, but then he arrived and proved to be a very good-natured baby. He seldom cried, even if he had a slightly puzzled expression from an early age, his eyes following his mother around the room as if he was in some way wary of her. Irene was thrilled with him; every day was a new challenge in which Bertie could be taught something new – the Italian word for something, or the composer of the opera he was being played, or the name, and Köchel number, of the piece of Mozart to which they were listening.

And then, a short while after Bertie’s sixth birthday, Irene’s second son arrived. Ulysses was not planned; in some respects, in fact, he was extremely unplanned, but once his existence was established, Irene put a brave face on it.

‘Did we mean to get pregnant?’ asked Stuart, mildly. ‘I thought that …’

‘These things happen,’ said Irene briskly.

‘But …’

Irene cut him short. ‘There is one thing we must never do, Stuart,’ she warned. ‘And that is to do so much as breathe a word that this child is unwanted. It is so easy to communicate that to a child inadvertently, even if one actually says nothing – one has to be really, really careful.
Capisce
?’

‘
Si
,’ said Stuart. ‘
Però
…’

‘
Allora
,’ said Irene. ‘Enough.
Silenzio
.’