The Geometry of Holding Hands

by Alexander McCall Smith

  She sighed, and picked up the book on the top of the pile. This came from Princeton University Press and was a small volume on the subject of insincerity. That interested her. Princeton liked to publish pithy treatments of things that concerned people in their real lives, and insincerity was surely one such problem. She glanced at the author’s name: it was a woman she had met at a conference the previous year. She remembered the meeting, as the author had said how pleased she was to have the chance to meet Isabel. Now it occurred to Isabel: Had she been sincere? She decided that she probably had, and, anyway, politeness did not amount to insincerity…except sometimes. We said, “How nice to see you,” which was polite, even when we did not welcome the encounter. Surely there must be a category of justifiable insincerity, covering those social anodynes that people exchange simply to oil the wheels of daily life.

  She decided that she would send Insincerity Re-examined out for review. But to whom? The thought occurred to her that it could go to Professor Lettuce. He was substantially insincere, Isabel thought, and it would be interesting to see what he made of the book. It would be a direct challenge to him—an affront, even. But then she thought: No, I can’t do that because Robert Lettuce might write a biased review, and she would therefore be denying the author the chance of a fair hearing. She would have to rethink that.

  She looked at the next book on the pile, and her heart sank. Ukrainian Women Writers in Western Canada: The Philosophical Underpinning of the Prairie Imagination. Accompanying this book was a gushing letter from the publishers, an obscure university press that Isabel had not encountered before. It would be a university that was a long way from anywhere, she thought, and for a moment she imagined a white wood-board building on a quiet street in somewhere like Saskatoon, although it was not the University of Saskatoon itself, but somewhere else. And they would be so proud of this book, and of its author, who had trusted them to put it out into the world rather than go to one of the great presses in Toronto or Montreal. And just as well that she had taken that book there, because those great presses would have sighed and said that books on Ukrainian women writers did not sell particularly well these days—or ever, for that matter—and that much as they would have liked to be able to take this title on…And the author, this worthy, perhaps rather dull associate professor, would have gone home disappointed and reflected on how sad it was that people would not pay a modest price—thirty-seven Canadian dollars—for something that shed a whole new light on the Prairie Imagination.

  She looked at the picture of the author on the book’s back flap, and she caught her breath. There was a handsome-looking woman, with very fair hair, sitting bolt upright in a chair behind a desk. She had a strong face—a face that had seen suffering, Isabel thought, and the reason for that was immediately obvious. The professor was wearing glasses with heavily tinted lenses and beside her, propped up against a bookcase, was a white stick of the sort used by blind people.

  Isabel looked more closely at the photograph, and noticed something else. The woman was an albino. That, she decided, would explain the problem with her sight. Restricted sight was a complication of albinism. So this professor had very poor sight.

  She stared at the book. She would review this book. She had to. And she would do it herself, because she had no idea how she could possibly find somebody who knew anything about Ukrainian women writers in western Canada. She could find somebody, she imagined, by doing an internet trawl—there was always someone who knew something about any subject, somewhere, and you could find them with a simple enough search, but how would she be able to guarantee that this reviewer, whoever he or she turned out to be, would write a generous and encouraging review of the book? No, she could not, and so she would have to do it herself, and she would not stint in her praise. She would be as insincere as she needed to be, so that this woman in her distant prairie town might feel some delight at the fact that her book had been so well received by the Review of Applied Ethics. She would do that; she would write a good review because there were more important things than sincerity. And then it occurred to her that she could do more. Not only would she write a good review of Ukrainian Women Writers, but she would send to the professor the Princeton University Press book on insincerity and ask her to review that—only if she wanted to, of course—yet she could imagine that the professor would leap at the chance of a publication, even just a book review, in as prestigious a journal as the Review of Applied Ethics. Academics were always looking for opportunities to publish, and somebody who was still an associate professor might well have one eye on the cursus honorum along which she was expected to progress.

  The doorbell rang and Isabel glanced at her watch. Iain Melrose had been invited to arrive at three o’clock, and that was precisely what the time now was.

  She showed him into her study.

  “Please forgive the mess,” she said, gesturing to her desk. “It’s not always like this.”

  He laughed. “But I find mess comfortable. Piles of papers are…well, really rather human.”

  “Perhaps,” said Isabel. “But then I find that if I go into somebody’s office or study and find it all just so—nothing out of place, you know—I think: This is a sign of an organised mind. Papers all filed away. No clutter.”

  “Yes, but…,” said Iain, gesturing to the pile of books, “how uninteresting, don’t you think? Isn’t there such a thing as a creative mess?”

  “Possibly,” said Isabel. She thought of a conversation she had had with Edward Mendelson when he and Cheryl had been in Edinburgh last, and they had talked about the general messiness in Auden’s domestic life. Edward, who acted as Auden’s literary executor, had first met the poet when he lived in New York, in a flat on St. Marks Place.

  “It was very insalubrious,” Edward had said. “All his living quarters were like that. The apartment in New York, the house in Austria. There were always great piles of books and papers all over the place—on the floor, on sofas, in corridors. And ashtrays full of cigarette stubs and letters and envelopes and so on.”

  He had paused. “And you’ve heard of Mrs. Stravinsky and the chocolate pudding?”

  Isabel shook her head.

  “Vera Stravinsky,” Edward explained, “came to dinner with her husband when he and Auden were working on The Rake’s Progress. She was dreading the lack of hygiene that she knew she would encounter in the flat. She went into the bathroom, which like everywhere in the flat was a terrible mess, and found a bowl of congealed substance on the cistern. Appalled, she put it into the toilet and flushed it away. It was, in fact, the chocolate pudding that Chester had made for the dinner and had put in the bathroom as that was the coldest place in the flat. Presumably the fridge was full or was too much of a mess.”

  Now, surveying her study through the eyes of her visitor, it occurred to her that, yes, even if it was untidy, it was creatively untidy. “Perhaps,” she said. “But I’m still a bit ashamed of myself for not being tidier.”

  She invited Iain to sit down beside her on the sofa near the window. It was warm there, and a square of afternoon sun illuminated the cushion at one end of the sofa. It was a cushion featuring a reproduction of a hunting scene—a deer prancing through a forest, pursued by those elegant hunting dogs one sees in Flemish tapestries. She was not sure where the cushion had come from—it had belonged to her father, she thought, but she had no idea how he’d come by it or why he had wanted to have a hunting scene on his sofa.

  Iain seemed relaxed. “It’s good of you to see me,” he said. “After all, not that many people would be prepared to hear out a perfect stranger coming up to them in a shop and making what is, after all, a somewhat unusual request.”

  Isabel smiled. “It’s curiosity on my part,” she said, adding, “Possibly.”

  “Not that I’m really a complete stranger,” Iain went on. “I know we have a mutual friend in Guy Peploe, but there’s something el
se. I actually knew your father—not very well, I’m afraid, but I met him on more than one occasion.”

  Isabel waited for him to continue.

  “We fished together once,” he said. “I had a friend who took a beat on the Tweed—down near Selkirk. He invited me to go down there once and there were two other rods. Your father was one of them. I remember that he caught a salmon—a large one. I caught nothing, as did my host.

  “And then your father was friendly with an old friend of mine, the Honorary Polish Consul. No longer, of course, but you may remember him, I think.”

  Isabel did. “Angus?”

  “Yes. Him. He was all sorts of things in town. Master of the Edinburgh Company of Merchants, I think. That sort of thing. And your father was his lawyer.”

  “I see.”

  “And then,” Iain continued, “I discovered that my wife—my late wife—was a distant cousin of your father’s. I only discovered this quite recently. I had heard about you, of course, although we had never met. And I thought that I should try to meet you at some point.”

  Isabel was silent. Iain had no idea of what he was doing in telling her all this: he was making it impossible for her to say no to the request he was about to make. Isabel had a theory of moral proximity that governed her decisions as to when she was obliged to act. Friendship between this man and her father would have been quite enough to trigger that responsibility, even without the addition of relatedness. Now this connection put it beyond any doubt. She was duty-bound to assist her visitor. Iain Melrose was within the sphere of moral proximity, and there was now a strong presumption that she would have to do what he asked of her, unless there was a very good reason to suggest otherwise.

  Leaving him in the study, she fetched a tea tray with a teapot of freshly made Assam tea and a couple of mugs. She poured tea for both of them, and listened as he told her about himself.

  “I should give you a bit of background,” he said. “Just so that you know who I am.”

  She nodded. “I’d be interested.”

  “Actually, I’ve had a fairly uneventful life,” he said. “I’m sixty-eight now.”

  “The years have been good to you,” said Isabel. “No, I mean it. You don’t look your age.”

  “Sixty-eight? Maybe—maybe not. I still go to the gym a lot. That helps.”

  “I must go,” said Isabel. “I have a membership, but…”

  “No need to give excuses. You look fine.”

  She took a sip of her tea. She glanced discreetly at her watch; she wondered how long this was going to take, but did not want to appear rude.

  “I was a doctor,” Iain continued. “I studied medicine at Aberdeen, although we came from Edinburgh—the family, that is. I was at school at Loretto, and then on to Aberdeen for medicine, as I’ve said. Then I came back to Edinburgh and worked here as a dermatologist. That was my career.

  “I was married for forty years. We were very happy. And then I lost her. That was last year.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Isabel.

  “You get over it. Not entirely, perhaps, but mostly.” He paused. “I had a lot to keep me busy—and I still do, in fact. I’ve stopped practising, of course, but there’s a family business that requires a bit of looking after. It’s a woollen mill, actually—down in the Borders. We make a lot of cloth for kilts. I’m still the chairman.”

  Isabel said that she thought she might have visited the mill. “I bought some bolts of cloth, meaning to do something with them, but…”

  Iain laughed. “A lot of people do that. It’s the same with exercise bikes. I know an awful lot of people who have bought exercise bicycles that then, like them, gather dust.”

  “Good intentions,” said Isabel. “And perhaps it’s better to have good intentions that you don’t act on than not have any good intentions at all.”

  Iain looked at her with admiration. “The fact that you say that sort of thing tells me that I’ve approached the right person,” he said.

  Isabel made a self-deprecatory gesture. “It’s not hard to coin an aphorism,” she said. “Anybody can do it. Putting them into effect is the difficult part.”

  “You see,” he said, smiling. “Another aphorism—and a rather good one, if I may say so.”

  She steered the conversation back to him. “You said you were a dermatologist—why did you choose that specialty?”

  “It’s fascinating,” he said. “The skin is an extraordinary substance—it really is. So, there’s the technical challenge, and then there’s the sheer pleasure of being able to offer most of your patients some relief. There are some branches of medicine where you can’t do all that much—or where it takes a long time to get anywhere. Neurology, for example. There may not be all that much you can do in the case of some of the more devastating neurological conditions—and that’s always hard for a doctor. Oncology used to be a bit like that, but now, of course, it’s a very different story.”

  Isabel nodded. She knew a paediatric oncologist who said that his job had changed beyond all recognition from when he first started it. “I could do next to nothing then,” he said, “but now…”

  “Of course,” Iain continued, “that’s largely thanks to the much-maligned pharmaceutical companies. You’ll know the issue there, I imagine.”

  Isabel did. She had devoted an entire issue of the Review to the ethics of the pharmaceutical industry. She had taken what she considered an even-handed approach, but even so she had received more critical mail than on any other topic the Review had covered.

  “There’s a reason why they are much maligned,” she said. “Their profits are much higher than in many other sectors. They argue they have to spend much more on research and development than other industries, but when you look closely at that…” She raised an eyebrow, wondering how her argument was being received. People had firm positions on this issue, and she was not in the mood to start a complicated technical argument over research-spending as a proportion of turnover. At the end of the day, the issue became one of simple compassion. Did you make a life-saving drug available to a person who could not afford it? Did you give it to them, or did you let them die?

  It became apparent where Iain’s sympathies lay. “Oh, I agree,” he said. “I was looking at something the other day that cost eighty thousand pounds a year. Eighty thousand. It doesn’t cost that to produce, of course: the actual cost per pill must be pennies.”

  “But they have to get the research money back,” said Isabel.

  “Fair enough. But that should be recovered across the board. Standard non-life-saving drugs can do that. Painkillers, decongestants and so on.” He paused. “Look, they can do their expensive research—and it is expensive—but they can cut their margins. They don’t need to make twenty per cent. Very few firms can do that. And look at how much they spend on advertising and marketing. Billions and billions, at least in the case of the American pharma firms. Encouraging people to nag their doctors into giving them all sorts of drugs they probably shouldn’t have.”

  Isabel sighed. There were some very imperfect corners of the world, and this, she thought, was one of them. Was it all the fault of capitalism, because capitalism was not so much concerned with need, or social responsibility, as profit? But if you went down that road in this particular case, then how did you answer the question of how many new drugs the planned economies of communism had produced? She did not know the answer, but she suspected it was very small. Profit motivated people; human need was less powerful a motivator. And freedom of research, of course, was another factor to be taken into account. The universities of communism were dull places on the best of days—havens for petty bureaucrats and ideologues, ready to go on for hours about how the principles of Marxism–Leninism should inform the work of scientists, but not too good at doing anything very constructive with a test tube.

  It was Iain who ended the
discussion. “Anyway, I didn’t come here to burden you with my hobby horses,” he said.

  Isabel smiled. “I could give as good as I get,” she said. “Don’t ask me about restrictions on freedom of speech.”

  He laughed. “You do realise that what you’ve just said is oxymoronic, do you? Don’t speak to me about not being allowed to speak about something.”

  Isabel shared the joke. “Sorry. But you know what I mean.”

  “And I won’t,” he said. “May I tell you a bit more about myself?”

  She inclined her head. Her interest had been piqued, and she was keen to find out more.

  “Helen—that’s my wife—and I lived up near the Hermitage of Braid. I’m still in the house up there. It’s far too big for me, but I’ve no desire to move. And we had an estate up in Argyll. I still have that.” He hesitated. “That sounds a bit boastful, I know. Listing one’s possessions, so to speak.”

  “Not necessarily,” said Isabel. But she knew what he meant: there was a fairly strong convention that you did not make too much of what you had. It was regarded as being tactless when there were people who had so little. Don’t show off was ancient advice that parents gave to children, but it was perfectly sound. Of course, there were cultural variations: in Sweden it was the height of bad taste to disclose how much money you had; in Russia of the old Soviet Union it was not in the slightest bit rude to ask somebody what their salary was. Perhaps that had survived the end of the Soviet era; perhaps that was why the Russian oligarch she had been reading about in a newspaper feature should not be embarrassed by having such a showy private yacht.

  She remembered what she had been told about the entry of this yacht into the waters of the west coast of Scotland. The owners had anchored in a bay and then sent a member of the crew ashore to engage children to play with their children. Isabel had been struck by the poignancy of this; by the image of the small Russian children, socially isolated because they lived and travelled in such splendour, nonetheless wanting to play with ordinary children. And she imagined what might have happened; how the Russian children had joined in a game proposed by one of the Scottish children, but had expected to win it. And the Scottish child had resisted this and had insisted on his deserved victory, to find himself being seized by the Russian children’s bodyguards and taken off the boat. Perhaps it had not been like that at all; the rich are no different from anybody else, as Mary Colum told Hemingway—they just have more money.