The Geometry of Holding Hands

by Alexander McCall Smith

  SHE WALKED SLOWLY along Merchiston Crescent, stopping twice on the way—once to acknowledge a cat that appeared from a gateway, looked up at her and meowed a vocal greeting that quickly turned into a purr. The cat rubbed himself briefly against Isabel’s legs, uttered a further meow and then returned to its garden. The second stop was to help a woman who had dropped her shopping bag on her pavement. It had contained, amongst other things, eggs that were now broken. Yolk dripped out of the bag and onto the ground. “They’re organic,” said the woman. “The yolks of some of the eggs you get in the supermarket these days are dreadfully pale.” The woman’s newspaper, a copy of that morning’s Scotsman, was damp with egg white. The photograph of a well-known politician stared out from the front page. “He’s left with egg on his face,” said the woman, as she thanked Isabel for retrieving a couple of lemons that had rolled into the road.

  Arriving at the delicatessen, Isabel was greeted by Cat’s assistant, Eddie, who was serving a customer, filling a small tub with marinated artichoke hearts.

  “I could eat these all day,” Eddie was saying to the woman before the counter.

  “Me too,” said the woman. “These, and green olives stuffed with garlic. Heaven.”

  Eddie glanced at Isabel and smiled. “Hi,” he said. “She’s still back there.” He gave a toss of the head in the direction of Cat’s office.

  Isabel acknowledged the greeting, nodded to the woman and made her way into the office at the back of the store. There she found Cat at her desk, staring at a page of figures. She looked up and smiled as Isabel entered the room. “Can you understand this?” she asked, handing Isabel the piece of paper.

  Isabel looked at the printed heading: Porter and Daughter: Wholesale Cheese Merchants.

  “What a lovely title. A refreshing change from and Sons. There are so many and Sons in business; one wondered when the daughters would get a look-in.”

  Cat shrugged. “I’ve never met Mr. Porter. He does exist, though. I’ve spoken to him on the phone. They’re over in Glasgow. He has a very broad Glasgow accent.”

  “You don’t normally associate that with cheese, do you?” Isabel looked up from the columns of figures on the paper. She could not make head nor tail of them. Your order(s) Feb to June: Mull Traditional Farmhouse Cheddar 18 (6.9)? And Blue cheese (unspecified 43, 22, 11)? “I’d imagine a cheese merchant speaking with a French accent. With lots of creamy vowels, as in Camembert.” She thought of the daughter. What would it be like to be the daughter of Mr. Porter, cheese merchant? Had she always wanted to go into the business? Or had she yearned for something quite different—perhaps to be a doctor or a drama teacher or…

  “Can you picture her?” asked Isabel.

  “Picture her? Who?”

  “Mr. Porter’s daughter,” said Isabel, handing the sheet of paper back to her niece. “I was wondering what she’d be like. Fair hair done in plaits? Quite well built—to be able to carry the cheese around? A blue gingham blouse?”

  Cat ignored this. She was used to Isabel’s tendency to go off at a tangent. “But can you understand what they mean? I can’t. Is it weight they’re talking about, or number of pieces? Or the age of the cheese? Six months? Nine months?”

  “You could phone Mr. Porter…or his daughter…” Isabel wondered whether Mr. Porter’s daughter liked being thought of as Porter’s daughter. She would have a name, an identity of her own, and might resent people thinking of her as the daughter. And yet Mr. Porter would be proud of her: the title of the firm made that clear. He would be proud that his own daughter would be taking over the business in due course; proud that the name of Porter would continue to be associated with cheese. That was how the people who created these small businesses viewed the world, and understandably so.

  Cat put the piece of paper aside. The Porters could wait. If they chose to be so obscure in their invoicing, then they should not be surprised if people were slow to pay. She looked up at Isabel. “Thanks for coming, by the way. I know it wasn’t much notice.”

  Isabel had been wearing a scarf. She now hung this on a peg on the back of Cat’s door and took one of the two freshly laundered striped aprons from a neighbouring peg.

  “That’s all right. I wasn’t doing much.” She thought: Just editing the Review of Applied Ethics. That’s all.

  “I’ll be back by lunch,” said Cat. “Or maybe just after…if you didn’t mind doing lunchtime too.”

  “That’s fine,” said Isabel. Grace would be only too pleased to look after the boys after she fetched Charlie from school. There was a pile of clothing in the laundry that needed ironing, and Grace always liked to find an excuse not to tackle that. In Isabel’s study there was a pile of books ready to be sent out for review, with covering letters still unwritten, her equivalent of un-ironed laundry. They could wait too.

  Cat looked at her watch. “I’m going to have to head off in about ten minutes.” She paused. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Of course.”

  Cat hesitated before continuing. “You know the trust?”

  Isabel nodded. This would be a financial request. The trust to which Cat was referring was the one set up by Isabel’s maternal great-aunts from Alabama, from that ante-bellum house in Mobile that featured in all the old family photographs. The trust was funded, ultimately, by the Louisiana land and title company that had been in the family for some time, but its investments were now much more diverse, and were in twelve or more countries. Isabel was not sure how ethical they were: she encouraged her fellow trustees to be sensitive, to look at the social responsibility profile of the companies they financed, but she suspected that such credentials as they had in this respect went little further than window-dressing.

  The precise origin of the funds themselves was obscure, but it was this money that funded Isabel—the principal beneficiary—and, to a much lesser extent, Cat. Under the terms of the trust, Cat was entitled to discretionary payments of such a level as to complement “within reasonable boundaries” her principal income, which, as the trust deed stated, “should be derived from her own endeavours.” Isabel was a trustee, along with two Edinburgh lawyers, originally appointed by her father, who wore identical spectacles that made it difficult for her to distinguish between them: one was called MacGregor and the other was called MacGeorge, which made mistakes as to identity even more likely. In previous years the trust had helped Cat to purchase the delicatessen, to carry out various repairs to the premises, and to attend courses in food hygiene, culinary matters and business management. Some of these courses were in exotic places, and for this reason expensive, but the bills had been cheerfully footed for a ten-day course on charcuterie in Tuscany, a week-long wine sampling course in Bordeaux, and a private tour of the olive estates of Campania and Puglia.

  Isabel waited for Cat to continue.

  “Have you seen those two dusty characters recently? Hamish MacGregor and the other one?”

  Isabel corrected her. “Actually, it’s Hamish MacGeorge and Gordon MacGregor.”

  “I find it hard to tell the difference.”

  Isabel laughed. “So do I—they’re rather like Dupond and Dupont in the Tintin books. Anglice, Thomson and Thompson.”

  Cat looked puzzled. “Anglice?”

  Isabel was abashed. She realised she had used a word of medieval Latin origin to talk of the translation of French into English. Bluestocking, she thought. Bluestocking. And then she thought: No, the whole idea of bluestockings was insulting, and implied that women should not have intellectual interests. She objected to that, but, now that she thought about it, she was not so sure that Cat would feel the same. On such occasions that Cat had discussed Isabel’s work with her, her niece had wrinkled her nose at the mention of philosophy. And when she mentioned the word philosophy, Cat made a visual set of quotation marks with her fingers—a gesture that Isabel was wary of, especially when used like tha
t. One might as well put quotation marks around salami or olives. Philosophy was every bit as real as these things. But this was not the time. “Sorry,” she said. “In English. The English version of Tintin renames them.”

  Cat waited. “And?”

  “And, yes, we had a meeting about three months ago. It was to look at the state of the markets. It went on rather long, I’m afraid, and my tummy started to rumble. It’s very embarrassing, you know, when MacGeorge and MacGregor are going on about exposure to Greek government bonds and your stomach starts to growl.”

  Cat looked interested. “Do we…I mean the trust—have any Greek bonds?”

  Isabel said that she had been told that they did, and that Greek bonds could pay off rather well, provided you had nerves of steel and were prepared to take a seventy-five per cent risk of default.

  Cat was bemused. “That fusty twosome? They’re secret risk-takers?”

  “So it would seem. The trust deed actually authorises them to buy bonds issued by any government. That’s what it says. When it was written, I suppose nobody imagined that there would be governments as shaky as the Greek one. So they had a little flutter—and it paid off. Five-year bonds, apparently, and they yielded…oh, I can’t remember—eighty per cent in total? Something that impressive.” She paused. “Why do you ask?”

  Cat looked away. “I was just wondering.” There was a note of hesitation in her voice. “I was just wondering: If I wanted to apply for something for the business—would there be funds?”

  Isabel reassured her. “Of course there would be. That’s one of the reasons it exists.”

  Cat said, “Yes, that. And also to keep you and Jamie in the style in which…” She stopped herself. Isabel was looking at her with dismay.

  “I’m sorry,” said Cat. “I didn’t mean that.”

  Isabel brushed the remark aside, but she knew that they had strayed into an area that was fraught with difficulty. Jealousy. Isabel had all the money, and…and she had Jamie. Jamie used to belong to Cat, but now did not. Isabel had the money—and the man. One had to understand jealousy: there were some circumstances in which it would be surprising if it did not raise its head. “Write to Hamish MacGregor. Tell him what you need and what it’s for.”

  “Gordon MacGregor, you mean.”

  “Yes. Him.” Isabel frowned. “Or the other one. Hamish MacGeorge, or whatever. I don’t think it matters. They work in the same firm. I’m sure they read each other’s mail.”

  For a few moments, Isabel allowed her mind to wander. She imagined MacGregor and MacGeorge playing golf together and then having tea in the clubhouse, sharing a Dundee cake, allocating each piece with scrupulous fairness, as befitted the trustees of a family trust. She saw them sitting at a shared desk, counting Greek government bonds, a Greek dictionary at their side. She saw them doing a Zorba-type dance on the beach of a Greek island, still wearing their identical glasses, the sun on their pallid Scottish skin, with, in the background, a chorus of local fishermen and their wives clapping their hands in time to the music.

  Cat was staring at her. “What are you thinking of, Isabel? You were somewhere else.”

  Isabel brought herself back to reality. “I was thinking of MacGregor and MacGeorge, as it happens.”

  Cat crossed the room. She glanced in the mirror that she kept on the wall, near the filing cabinet.

  “Where are you off to?” asked Isabel.

  Cat clearly did not want to answer. “I’m going into town,” she replied. “George Street.” The detail was given reluctantly, in a tone that indicated that Cat felt Isabel had no business asking.

  Isabel reflected for a moment on Cat’s lack of grace. There was a quality we called grace; we all knew that it existed—there were people we described as gracious, but we rarely thought about what was required for somebody to deserve that description. Courtesy came into it, but there was more to it than that. A person might be polite, might treat another with consideration, but still fail to show grace. Was it an attitude, then, of wanting others to feel good about themselves? Was it simple kindness, or was it kindness allied with a concomitant denial of self? To act graciously was to say: This is what you want, and I want you to have it for that reason. It was to do something you might not want to do, but to do it in a way in which others would never know about your reservations. Whatever it was, not explaining where she was going demonstrated a lack of grace on Cat’s part. And that, thought Isabel, should be no surprise. Cat was not gracious. And yet, she went on to think, she is my niece, and whatever I might feel about her lack of grace, she is one for whom I must care.

  “I was just asking,” Isabel said mildly. “I was just asking because you asked me to come and relieve you and I…” She gave Cat a look that said, Come on, can’t you see?

  It did not work. Cat was ready to leave now, and she gave Isabel no reply. Instead, she said, “There’s a whole new Spanish ham in the storeroom if you need it. It might be an idea to bring it through before the lunchtime rush.”

  Isabel nodded. “All right. I’ll have a look.”

  “It needs tidying up,” said Cat as she reached the door. “There’s a layer of fat on part of it. I saw it. Eddie knows how to deal with it.”

  And with that, she left.

  Isabel thought: Jamie was right; Cat takes advantage of me, and you shouldn’t let people take advantage of you. You stood up to them. You said, “No, I can’t come and help you in your deli because I want to get on with my own things and you never pay me anyway, and you need to think about the way you treat me…”

  That advice, she told herself, was advice that should probably be widely offered. There were many who were in relationships in which a statement of that sort was long overdue. Tread on me no longer. That was what was needed to be said by the worm when it turned. She thought: Henry VI, Part 3: To whom do lions cast their gentle looks? Not to the beast that would usurp their den. The smallest worm will turn being trodden on. And doves will peck in safeguard of their brood.

  She stopped herself. She was not in any sense downtrodden. She helped Cat because she wanted to. Cat took it for granted, yes, but people did that, and being taken for granted was not, in itself, grounds for not doing what you freely undertook to do. The ungrateful took love for granted, but that did not mean that the love shown them should be withheld, or turned off, like a tap. And, anyway, you could not turn love off just like that. That was the whole point about love—it afflicted you; you had it in the same way as you had a cold. And you couldn’t turn colds off; you sat them out, you waited until you recovered. It was the same with love.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ISABEL JOINED EDDIE behind the counter. The customer he had been serving had left, and there was nobody else. Eddie took a handkerchief out of his pocket and blew his nose loudly. Isabel looked at him.

  “Eddie, are you going to wash your hands?”

  He stared back at her. “I did. Earlier on.”

  Isabel tried to make light of it. “I know your nose is really clean…”

  Eddie put his hands in the air. “No, you’re right. Honest, I usually do, but sometimes, you know, you’re not thinking, and…well, you know how it is.”

  She did. “I wasn’t criticising you. I’m the same. You stroke your chin and then you realise your hand has touched your lips and…”

  “And then you’ve got spit on them,” Eddie took up. “And you should see what’s in spit. Boy, you should see. That food hygiene course I went on at Stevenson College—you remember I told you about it—they showed us slides on that course. They asked members of the course to spit on these slides, you see, and then they put them under this microscope and, ugh, there were all these bugs crawling about. Serious bugs.”

  Isabel smiled. “Not in my mouth,” she muttered.

  Eddie did not fully understand irony. He looked serious. “Even yours, Isabel. Not that I
’m saying your mouth is more disgusting than anybody else’s—it’s probably just the same. Everybody has bugs. Everybody’s crawling.”

  “What a delightful conversation, Eddie.”

  “You started it,” he retorted. “You said my nose was full of bugs.”

  “Well, it is. I thought noses were famous for their fauna.”

  “It isn’t fauna,” Eddie objected. “It’s microbiota. Staphylococcus aureus.”

  She looked at Eddie with admiration. He appeared pleased. “I happen to know that. You didn’t think I’d know, did you? But I even know the Latin name. That’s what people have in their noses. You can get a really bad infection from that stuff—if it escapes from your nose, that is.”

  Isabel did not like the thought of a staphylococcal rampage. She pointed at the handkerchief in Eddie’s hand. “I think you should wash your hands. All this talk of bugs, and the bugs are standing around laughing at us.”

  Eddie went to the small sink at the back of the room and washed his hands. Then he applied hand sanitiser before returning to the counter. “Satisfied?” he asked.

  Isabel nodded. She raised the issue of the Spanish ham, and Eddie agreed that he would retrieve it from the storeroom later on. Isabel tidied up.

  Customers came and went, keeping them busy until the mid-morning lull.

  “You can have a coffee now,” said Eddie. “I’ll take ten minutes after you.”

  She prepared herself a latte and went to drink it, over a copy of that morning’s Scotsman, at one of the tables. She glanced at the headline: allegations of gross incompetence, lapping at the feet of a Scottish government minister, dominated the front page. Elsewhere in the paper, it was promised, there were revelations about the risk associated with intensive salmon farming. There was nothing good to report, it seemed.

  Isabel sighed. She did not believe in burying her head in the sand, but there were times when she longed for a paper that portrayed the world in something other than a state of crisis. She wanted the world to be peaceful, and it was not. That was what lay behind talk of peace “the world cannot give.” It cannot; much as we would like it to, it simply cannot. There were too many people—too many people arguing over scarce resources; too many people with differing ideas of what should be done with what we had; too many people who felt they had reasons to dislike others.