Many years later, with Wee Fraser now fifteen or thereabouts, Dr Fairbairn had met him on a bus to Burdiehouse; Wee Fraser, dimly remembering the psychotherapist, but not to the extent of knowing who he was or how their paths had previously crossed, had, as a precautionary measure, head-butted him. Whereupon Dr Fairbairn had struck the boy, possibly dislocating his jaw, and run away. This, in guilt terms, had piled Pelion upon Ossa, or, in Scottish terms, Ben Nevis upon Ben Macdui. What could one do, in such circumstances, but flee? And in what direction to flee but north?

The choice of north was highly significant. Those who flee south flee to an imagined territory of forgiveness; they flee to Mother; to a place where whatever they did is no longer important; Mother forgives, she always has and always will.

Spain, Portugal, Italy – those countries where the Marian visions appear so unexpectedly in grottoes or olive groves – these are places to which those overburdened in the Protestant north go for solace or forgetfulness, to get away from the stern judgement of the north. Dr Fairbairn went north because he wished to appease reason.

He was replaced by Dr St Clair, who therefore became Bertie’s psychotherapist. He came without preconceptions and would have discharged his young patient more or less immediately, had there not been that unfortunate misunderstanding about wolves. This had made him decide to continue with treatment, and Bertie, as ever, acquiesced. What could he do?

One cannot divorce one’s mother, especially when one is only six. All one can do, really, is wait until one turns eighteen, that milestone at which adulthood and independence begin. But between six and eighteen is a gulf of years wider than an ocean, or a desert, or any of those features which, at the age of six, seem endless, seem infinite.

42. Life and Chance