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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.

7. Anthropological Issues
     
    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 academicposition in the department of anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. She had