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.

5. Pre-Natal Classroom – for Babies

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.’