A Distant View of Everything

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “You liked him, didn’t you, Charlie?” volunteered Jamie.

  “No,” said Charlie.

  Jamie caught Grace’s eye. “The tune seems to have changed,” he said. “Earlier on, I thought we were making progress.”

  Grace put a finger to her lips. “Later,” she said. “It’s time for the afternoon nap.”

  —

  WITH CHARLIE UPSTAIRS and asleep, the conversation in the kitchen was able to resume. The casserole of Irish mud was now ready, and had been safely stored in the fridge along with several small dishes of accompanying vegetables.

  “You can heat it up for Charlie at six,” Grace told Jamie. “And then you can have yours later. Eight o’clock maybe.”

  Jamie looked out of the window. He felt as if he were being spoken to as if he were not much older than Charlie. It was no business of Grace’s when he had his dinner; if he wanted to eat at nine, he would do so, and now, in the face of Grace’s bossiness, he decided that was what he would do.

  “No,” he said. “Nine o’clock.”

  Grace seemed puzzled. “Nine’s too late. You’ll be awfully hungry.”

  Jamie drew in his breath. It was quite foreign to his nature to be sharp with anybody, but this really was too much. “I’ll decide when I want to have dinner,” he muttered.

  Grace glanced at him quickly, and then looked away. He realised that he had hurt her feelings and he immediately apologised. Grace could be difficult, but there was something that Isabel had said that always stuck in his mind. Remember what you have and the other person doesn’t. It was simple—almost too simple—advice and yet, like all such homely advice, it expressed a profound truth. When he had pressed her for an explanation, she had said, “Many of our dealings with others are unequal. We have an advantage because we are the customer or the client, or the one with the money, or the one who’s paying somebody else. Or we may have somebody in our lives and the other person may not have anybody. Or we may be taller than them, or stronger, or older and more worldly-wise, or whatever it is. There are all these things that need to be borne in mind.” And then she had added, with a laugh, “Not that I’m lecturing you.”

  But she was right, and now, after his assertion of his right to choose when he had dinner—not an unreasonable thing for him to do—he felt that he should make some ameliorative remark.

  “No,” he said. “I’m sorry; you’re right. Nine is very late. Perhaps eight-thirty.”

  The compromise was enough.

  “That’s more sensible,” she said. “And I hope you enjoy it. There’ll be enough for tomorrow too, so Isabel needn’t worry about cooking the moment she gets back.”

  Jamie thought: But I’ll be here. He said nothing, though, and they returned to the subject of Charlie.

  “He was very stand-offish in the hospital,” said Jamie. “At least to begin with. He refused to acknowledge that he had a brother. Then suddenly—”

  “They’re as changeable as the weather at that age,” interjected Grace. “One moment it’s this, and then the next it’s that.”

  “After being pretty awful, he suddenly perked up and said that we should bring Magnus home right away. Prior to that he’d even suggested leaving him in the hospital.”

  Grace shook her head. “Jealousy,” she said.

  “Of course.”

  “It’s everywhere,” Grace went on. “And it’s not just children—adults are every bit as bad.”

  “Some of them, maybe,” said Jamie. “But most of us grow out of it, surely…”

  Grace disagreed. “Lots don’t. And do you know, it can carry on—even on the other side.”

  Grace was an enthusiastic spiritualist. Every week she attended a spiritualist meeting where a medium would contact what she called the other side, usually with messages of one sort or another for some of those present. She took it entirely seriously, and was also a regular borrower of spiritualist literature from the psychic library in the city’s West End.

  Jamie was intrigued by this twist. He had great difficulty keeping a straight face when Grace expounded on spiritualist matters, but this was a fresh dimension of the matter. Did the grudges and battles of…this side—if that was what one called it—run over onto the other side? It was a depressing thought, as it implied the existence of arguments and feuds lasting for all eternity, with petty disputes stretching out over the centuries, waged from whatever trenches people could dig for themselves in such firmament as the other side afforded.

  “Oh yes,” Grace continued. “We had an example of this the other week. It was a visiting medium—a man from Inverness, actually, who has always been rather good. He had somebody coming through from the other side who said that she still resented the fact that her sister had been more successful than she had.”

  Jamie sought clarification. “More successful on this side?” he asked. “Or on the other side?”

  Grace frowned. “No, this side. Once you’re on the other side, you don’t have to be successful at anything.”

  “Because there’s nothing to do?”

  Grace was quick to dispel the heresy. “Oh, there’s plenty to do on the other side,” she said.

  Jamie found himself wondering whether there were offices, perhaps, or even factories. Did one have to work on the other side, or was there a full social welfare system? He decided not to ask.

  “The point is,” said Grace, “that jealousy persists. It doesn’t go away.”

  Jamie contemplated this. “So we’re in it for the long haul with Charlie?”

  “Maybe,” said Grace. “People can dig in. And children do that as much as anybody else. But you never know. My cousin’s daughter ignored her little sister for the first ten months and then suddenly saw the possibilities. That changed everything. She started to dress her up in all sorts of outfits—ballet tutus and the like. She treated her like a doll, and even told her friends that she ran on batteries.”

  Jamie smiled. “We assume so much, don’t we? We assume that our children are going to be reasonable. We assume they’re going to see things as we see them. And then suddenly we discover that they can look at things quite differently.”

  “Yes,” said Grace. “And maybe we’re bound to be disappointed because we want our children to see things in the same way as we do, and they may not.”

  Jamie made a gesture of resignation.

  “But,” said Grace, brightening, “I don’t think it’ll last.” She looked at her watch. “I’ll be off then,” she said. “You’ll be all right, I hope.”

  Jamie assured her that he would. “Thanks for the Irish m…” He stopped himself in time. “Irish stew.”

  He saw her to the front door. Closing it behind her, he turned back into the hall, stopped and stared up at the ceiling. Grace’s tactless words came back to him: This is no time for you to be attempting to cook. He smarted at the thought. I can cook—I can cook just as well, if not better, than she can. My potatoes Dauphinoise…He stopped himself, aware of how ridiculous it was to remind oneself of one’s potatoes Dauphinoise. He might have been feeling slighted, but then women had put up with this sort of condescension from men forever, and it was only very recently that anything had been done to stop it. So if men now experienced something of that themselves, should they be too surprised?

  Something that Isabel had said came back to him. She had remarked, he seemed to recall, about how in this life we were allocated people by chance. These were the people we knew or came across, the people who might be in our lives for no particular reason. In a sense they were allocated, rather than deliberately chosen, a concomitant of what philosophers called moral luck. Grace came with the house—so to speak. She had looked after Isabel’s father and had simply stayed on. She could be opinionated, and that could be trying, but she had never let them down, not once, and…Jamie paused. He had never really thought about it, but it was probably the case that Grace loved them—him, Isabel, Charlie. He had never thought of it that way, because we tend not to use the wo
rd love when talking about how we feel about our friends and acquaintances—and how they might feel about us. We talk about affection or fondness, but rarely love. But it could be love—and of course in this case it was love, and to use a lesser word was to diminish the thing that was there. Now it came to him that the fact of this love was in no sense a burden—rather, it was a privilege.

  He made his way back into the kitchen. As he did so, he thought, I’m beginning to think like Isabel. And then, as if in confirmation of this unexpected self-assessment, he said to himself: We become the people we live with. Imperceptibly at first, but with a certain inevitability, we become the other. He smiled as he imagined the composite Jamie/Isabel, who would play the bassoon, read philosophy, interfere in other people’s affairs rather too much, drive a green Swedish car and make legendary potatoes Dauphinoise.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “WE NEED TO REMIND OURSELVES,” Isabel said, “of our latitude.”

  They were lying in bed, and Jamie, who had just woken up, was unprepared for conversation.

  “Why?” he asked drowsily.

  “Plenty of people don’t know their latitude.”

  Jamie rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. Isabel was like this in the morning; he took a few minutes to come to, but she was the opposite, being at her most alert in the first few hours of the day.

  “I’m sure you know exactly where you are,” Isabel continued.

  He came up with a bemused guess. “Fifty-something degrees, I suppose.”

  “Not bad. But if you were lost, that wouldn’t be good enough to be rescued.”

  Jamie stared up at the ceiling above their bed. The light fitting, a Victorian rise and fall, threw a blurred shadow across the expanse of white. “I know we’re not sixty-something, because that’s the Arctic Circle.”

  “Fifty-six,” she said. “Edinburgh is at fifty-six degrees, which is pretty far north. We’re on the same latitude as Moscow and Copenhagen. But…”

  “Yes?”

  “But Stockholm and Helsinki are to the north of us. And St. Petersburg too.”

  “Oh, I see.” What could he say, he wondered, to this early-morning geographical onslaught? Perhaps “Oh” was as good a response as any.

  It was a few months after Isabel’s return from hospital, and they were just getting to the point of enjoying a night’s sleep once more. Magnus had cried briefly at eleven the previous evening, and then again at one, but on both occasions after a brief feed he had dropped off to sleep quickly enough. Now, just after six, they had both been woken up in response to an early beam of sunlight rather than a child’s crying. The shutters in their bedroom, slightly twisted by age, succeeded in keeping out the light, but not all of it. In the winter that did not matter too much, but in the Scottish summer, when the sky was light at four in the morning, and even before, it made a difference. It was this that had prompted the early—perhaps slightly too early—discussion of relative latitude.

  Jamie was wide awake now. “What about New York?” he asked.

  “Low forties,” said Isabel. “At least, I think it is. The United States is more southerly than you’d expect. New Orleans must be—and as for Key West…”

  “Deep south. South of south.”

  “Yes,” said Isabel. She was thinking of Mobile, where her mother—her “sainted American mother,” as she called her—had spent her childhood. That was a place of shady streets; of moss that hung from the boughs of trees, as if draped there for adornment by some enthusiastic exterior decorator; of sultry, velvet evenings. Things moved slowly in Mobile, as they did, traditionally, throughout the South. And why should they not? If you walked quickly, then all you did was to reach your destination early; nothing had been gained. And if you spoke quickly, you got more words out, but were those words any better for that?

  She sat up in bed, preparing herself to get up and check on Magnus. “Latitude and attitude.”

  “Oh?”

  “Have you ever thought about it? About how latitude determines attitude? There are northerly attitudes and there are southerly attitudes.” She paused. “Southern places are meant to be…”

  “Friendly and laid back?”

  “Yes,” she said, adding, “and corrupt too, I suppose.”

  Jamie raised an eyebrow. “Is there more corruption in the south than the north?”

  Isabel thought for a moment. “Some would say there is.”

  “So what makes Naples more corrupt than, say, Amsterdam?” Jamie paused. “I assume Naples is more corrupt than Amsterdam.”

  “I think it is,” said Isabel. She spoke with authority, but asked herself whether she really knew. Or was it something so obvious that concrete evidence was simply not required—such as a statement that it was warmer in summer than in winter or that dogs were more loyal than cats? Everybody—even, perhaps, the Neapolitans themselves—would surely agree that corruption thrived in the Italian south; of course it did, what with the Mafia and the Camorra. Did the writ of any of these criminal gangs run that far north? And what would a Dutch Camorra boss look like? Tall and ruddy-faced, big-boned as the Dutch so often are, but ruthless when it came to rackets in tulips and cheese…

  “So?”

  Isabel was still thinking of the Dutch Camorra. “So?” she echoed.

  Jamie was interested. “And where does religion come into it? Are Protestant countries inherently less corrupt?”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t think it’s that simple. The issue, I suppose, is whether a culture stresses telling the truth. That’s the real point. It’s not religion.” She paused, thinking through the implications of what she was saying almost as she said it. She was not unsympathetic to religious belief—we needed the spiritual, she felt—but a tradition of obfuscation and dependence on ritual did not encourage individual soul-searching. Christianity had unfortunately taken wrong turnings, she felt, at various points in its history. For a time, at least, a lovely message of love and redemption had become one of threats, fear and institutional self-preservation—almost to the extent of being swallowed up by all of these.

  “It’s perfectly possible to accept the tenets of a religion and still be honest,” she continued. “It depends on whether the religion is compatible with honesty. Some aren’t.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they ask you to believe in things that are patently impossible. And that’s the same as asking people to believe in lies, to say that lies don’t matter.”

  Jamie wondered whether all religions might not have a lie at their very heart—some article of faith that simply beggared belief.

  Isabel hesitated. Was a belief in God that central, impossible kernel? She did not want to say yes, because that left so little. And she felt that there was something there—some force, some principle, that lay beyond our understanding but that we sensed and that, crucially, we needed. The identity one gave to that did not matter too much, although the clutter with which we surrounded it did. Some of that clutter was downright poisonous, insisting that there was only one way of recognising the divine, that all other views of it were simply wrong.

  Jamie thought of something. “Russia?” he asked suddenly. “Very northern. Yet very corrupt. All those oligarchs.”

  “Nothing to do with religion,” said Isabel. “Everything to do with the destruction of civil society under the Communists. Everything to do with a regime of lies and fear that held sway there for…what? Seventy years. So the poor Russians, that great, much put-upon people, came to the end of the twentieth century with the moral fabric of their society in complete tatters. Hence the gangsters and the spivs who infest the place today.”

  “Is it that bad?”

  “Yes—and worse.”

  “I see.”

  “Yes,” said Isabel. She looked at her watch. It was only six-fifteen, and they had already discussed religion, politics and at least some twentieth-century history. “I must get ready to feed Magnus,” she said. “He’ll be waking up any moment.”

&
nbsp; “Grub first, then ethics,” said Jamie. “Who said that again?”

  “Bertolt Brecht,” said Isabel. “Although I suspect that he rather regretted it. Anybody who coins an aphorism tends to regret it—because it gets quoted back at him ad infinitum and is inevitably misunderstood.”

  “But surely to have said something memorable must be very satisfying.”

  “Possibly.” Isabel slipped out of bed and took her dressing gown off its hook. “Groucho Marx never withdrew his wonderful remark about membership of clubs.”

  “About not wanting to be a member of any club that would admit people like him?”

  Isabel nodded. “Yes. Nor did Winston Churchill revise what he said about beaches…Imagine if he said, ‘I never actually meant beaches; I meant to say that we’d fight on the bit above, you know, the bit where they park cars, not the actual beach…’ ”

  Jamie was amused. He loved Churchill’s growl; so few people really knew how to growl. “Can you imagine one of our politicians today making a speech like Churchill’s? People would fall about laughing.”

  Isabel thought he was right. “Auden, of course, had a bit of difficulty with ‘We must love one another or die.’ People, including no less a person than Lyndon Johnson, have loved quoting that line, but Auden hated it. He said that it was self-congratulatory and insincere.”

  “I don’t think it sounds that way,” said Jamie.

  “Well, he did. He tried to change it to ‘We must love one another and die.’ He failed because people really liked the original.”

  “Of course people could see the truth of both versions.”

  Isabel would concede that, but it was not the point; if the poet himself thought it insincere, he must know; after all, he was the one who wrote it in the first place. “So he suppressed the whole poem,” she said. “But people refused to let it go.”

  “Hasn’t the author the right to call something in, so to speak?”

  Isabel looked dubious. “No. It’s like giving somebody a present. You can’t take it back. If you present the world with your poem, then that’s it. It’s no longer yours.” She remembered Virgil. “We almost didn’t have the Aeneid, you know. Virgil wanted it burned—and tried to set fire to it himself, but failed.”