The Charming Quirks of Others

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “You see.”

  “Yes,” said Eddie. “That’s the idea.”

  “Strange,” said Isabel.

  “Strange,” echoed Eddie, and then laughed. “He wasn’t unhappy. I don’t think he knew that he was doing it.”

  Isabel wondered whether the man with the garden rake was unhappy; she thought that he probably was. But there was no time to speculate about that, as two customers had walked in the door and both, it seemed, wanted attention.

  CAT ARRIVED at half past eleven. The early part of the morning had been busy, but it had slackened off and the delicatessen was now quieter. Isabel looked at her niece, hoping to see some sign of how the medical consultation had gone.

  “Is everything all right?” she asked, lowering her voice so that Eddie should not hear.

  Cat shrugged. “Yes, fine.”

  Isabel smiled with relief. “So they were not worried about the spot?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Cat. “They sliced it out—it was pretty small. He injected novocaine so I felt nothing.”

  “And everything was fine?”

  “They’ve sent it off to the pathology lab,” said Cat.

  Isabel’s heart gave a lurch. “Oh …”

  “It’s standard procedure, Isabel,” said Cat. “You mustn’t worry. They have to do that if they take anything off. Just to be sure. He said that it looked fine to him but they just make sure.”

  “Of course.”

  Cat began to undo the strings of Isabel’s apron. “So why don’t you give me this and you go and sit down. I’ll bring you coffee. There’s yesterday’s Repubblica on the rack over there. You can practise your Italian.” Cat was given the newspaper by one of the staff from the Italian Consulate, who called in every day on the way back from work. She did not read it herself, but quite a number of the customers who dropped in for coffee read it, or pretended to read it. “One or two of them can’t read Italian,” Cat had said. “They’d like to, but they can’t. So they sit there pretending to read—it makes them look sophisticated, I suppose. Or so they hope.”

  Isabel did read Italian; if she had any difficulty with La Repubblica, it was with understanding the complexities of Italian politics. But that, she suspected, was the case with everybody’s politics. And it was not just a linguistic difference; she could never understand how American politics worked. It appeared that the Americans went to the polls every four years to elect a President who had wide powers. But then, once he was in office, he might find himself unable to do any of the things he had promised to do because he was blocked by other politicians who could veto his legislation. What was the point, then, of having an election in the first place? Did people not resent the fact that they spoke on a subject and then nothing could be done about it? But politics had always seemed an impenetrable mystery to her in her youth. She remembered what her mother had once said to her about some American politician to whom they were distantly related. “I don’t greatly care for him,” she said. “Pork barrel.”

  Isabel had thought, as a child, that this was a bit unkind. Presumably he could not help looking like a pork barrel. But then, much later, she had come to realise that this was how politics worked. The problem was, though, that politics might work, but government did not.

  She picked up La Repubblica and went to sit at the far table. A few minutes later, Eddie brought her a large cup of milky coffee. “Just as you like it,” he said.

  She thanked him and continued to read the newspaper. A magistrate in Naples had been found floating in the sea; the government in Rome announced that it took a very serious view of this and would be dispatching further judicial resources. “We are not going to be intimidated by the Mafia,” a spokesman said. And also in Naples, an unidentified source close to “powerful interests” was quoted as saying that this unfortunate event had nothing to do with anybody in the city and merely underlined the need for swimmers to take great care when entering the sea. Isabel winced at the cynicism. And yet such people—such powerful interests—were everywhere getting closer and closer to the seats of power. There was corruption at every turn, and those who stood for honesty and integrity were more and more vulnerable, more and more isolated amongst the hordes of people who simply had no moral sense. And it was not just Italy; it was everywhere, even here in Scotland, that the lines between integrity and compromise were being eroded. Even here in Scotland, with the moral capital of Presbyterian rectitude in the bank, there were rich businessmen who thought they could buy the attention of those in power, and who did so, sometimes quite openly. And then, when people queried this or protested, the politicians in question simply brushed off suggestions that there was anything improper in the arrangement. Perhaps they were simply being honest; money spoke in every dialect, in every language, and it was rare that anybody said that they could not hear it. All human affairs, Isabel thought, are rotten; perhaps political morality was just a question of trying to limit the rottenness.

  She put the paper down and reached for her coffee cup. Then she gave a start. There was a woman standing in front of her; she had not seen her from behind the paper, and it was a shock.

  “Isabel Dalhousie?”

  She racked her brains to remember where she had seen this woman.

  “Yes,” she said brightly. It was an unusual, rather angular face, not one that was easy to forget. “Hello.”

  She feared that her lack of recognition would show, and it did. “You may not remember me,” said the woman. “Do you mind if I join you?”

  Isabel indicated the empty seat on the other side of the table. “Please.”

  The woman lowered herself into the chair. She was well-dressed, Isabel observed, with an understatement suggestive of both good taste and funds: it was not ostentatious clothes that were really expensive, it was quiet clothes that exhausted the credit card.

  “Forgive me for interrupting,” the woman began. “Jillian Mackinlay. We met at …”

  It came back to Isabel. “At the Stevensons’. Yes, I remember. Sorry, I was having difficulty.” People could tell when you were having difficulty placing them; it was best, Isabel thought, to be frank and apologise. And apology was usually necessary; I can’t for the life of me recall who you are may have the virtue of honesty, but it was no balm to the injured feelings that a failure to be remembered may otherwise cause. If we remember somebody, then how can they forget us? Are we that forgettable?

  Jillian nodded. “I saw Susie the other day at a concert. She spoke about you, actually. She said something about how you had helped somebody she knew.”

  Isabel was uncertain what to say. She helped people occasionally, but it was not something she proposed to wear on her sleeve.

  “Yes,” Jillian continued. “And I wondered … well, I was going to get in touch with you. And then I saw you here and I thought that it might be easier to speak face-to-face rather than to telephone you.” She paused, and looked at Isabel as if she was waiting for encouragement.

  “It’s better to see the person you’re speaking to, I think,” said Isabel, adding, “as a general rule. So often today one is actually speaking to a machine somewhere—a very sympathetic machine, of course, but a machine none the less. Do you mind if I ask—are you in some sort of trouble?”

  Jillian blushed. “No, good heavens, no. Not me. Not personally.”

  Isabel felt relieved. It had crossed her mind that Jillian was about to make some sort of personal disclosure—of an errant husband, perhaps, or some other domestic difficulty, and she would have to explain that she would like to be able to help, but … Jamie’s words came back to her, “Listen, Isabel, I know that you feel you have to help, but don’t get involved—please don’t—in other people’s matrimonial problems. It rarely helps.” He was right. People with matrimonial difficulties usually wanted allies, not advisers.

  “Well,” said Isabel, “I don’t know whether I can do anything, and of course I don’t know what the problem is. If you’d care to tell me.” She smil
ed encouragingly at Jillian; there was awkwardness in the other woman’s manner and she wanted to reassure her. At the same time she thought, I have enough on my plate. I have Charlie. I have the Review. I have Jamie. Brother Fox …

  Jillian signalled to Eddie, who came to take her order for coffee. As Eddie left, she lowered her voice and said, “That young man—there’s something lost about him, don’t you think?”

  Isabel was cautious. “Eddie?”

  “Oh, you know him?”

  “Yes. My niece owns this place, you see. I occasionally work here.”

  Jillian blushed again. “I’ve been very tactless. Sorry.”

  “Not at all. You’re right about Eddie. But I think he’s making progress. He’s more confident. He’s a nice young man.”

  This seemed to please Jillian. “Good. I see so many young people because of my husband’s involvement with a school. Teenage boys. And I think we sometimes don’t realise just how hard it is for them these days. It’s much easier for girls, I think. Boys are more confused. They’ve lost the role they used to have—you know, being tough and so on. Brawn means nothing now.”

  “Quite.”

  “So you often come across boys who are quite lost. They retreat into themselves or their cults. Skateboarders are an example of that. Or at least some of them are.”

  Isabel thought about skateboarders. It was not an attractive group, with their lack of interest in anything much except their repetitive twirls and gymnastic tricks. They tended to be teenagers, though, and teenagers grew up, although sometimes one saw older skateboarders, almost into their thirties, overgrown boys stuck in the ways of youth. She shuddered. Certain groups of people made her shudder: extremists, with their ideologies of hate; the proud; the arrogant; the narcissistic socialites of celebrity culture. And yet all of these were people, and one should love people, or try to …

  “Skateboarders are typical of the refuge cult,” said Jillian. “They retreat into the group and don’t really talk to anybody else.”

  Isabel said that she thought that many teenagers did that, and not just skateboarders. Yes, that was true, Jillian said, but skateboarders were an extreme example. “They block out the rest of the world, you know. They think that there are skaters and then there are the rest. It’s that bad.” She waited a moment, and then added: “I know about this, you see. Our son became one. He didn’t talk to us for two and a half years. Just a few grunts. That was all.”

  “But he came back?”

  “Yes. He came back. But he had wasted those precious years of youth. Think what he might have seen and done, instead of spending his time on streets, skating aimlessly. Just think.”

  “We all have our ways of wasting time,” said Isabel. “Think of golf … What’s your son doing now?”

  “He works for a hedge fund.”

  She could not help but smile. “Oh.”

  “Yes, it sounds ridiculous,” said Jillian. “But one’s children don’t always turn out exactly as one hoped. Do you …”

  “I have a son. Still very young. He has yet to … to disclose his hand.”

  Eddie returned. He had made Isabel another cup of coffee too. On the top of the foam he had traced in chocolate powder the shape of a four-leaf clover. She studied the clover design and then looked up at him. “It’s good luck,” he said, and winked.

  “Sweet,” said Jillian, after he had left them. She dipped a spoon into the top of her coffee and licked it. “Do you mind if I call you Isabel?”

  Isabel did not, although she was not sure about this woman. There was something imperious about her, something highhanded that made her doubt whether they could ever be close. If there was a clear division between friend and acquaintance, then Jillian, she decided, would remain an acquaintance.

  “My husband, Alex, is on any number of committees,” Jillian said. “He was a businessman before we retreated to a farm near Biggar, and he’s been co-opted on to virtually every public body in Lanarkshire. I put up with it, and he seems to like it. He’s pretty busy, as you can imagine.”

  “What’s the popular saying?” asked Isabel. “If you want something done, ask a busy person.”

  “True. And he gets things done. He’s really good at that.” Jillian paused to take a sip of her coffee. “One of the things he does is serve on the board of governors of Bishop Forbes School. You know it? It’s just outside West Linton.”

  “Of course I do,” said Isabel. “I was at school in Edinburgh. We used to get the boys from Bishop Forbes shipped in for school dances.”

  “They still do that,” said Jillian. “They send them in to dance with girls. Being a boys’ school, they try to arrange some female contact for the boys. Not that the boys need much help in that respect.”

  Isabel looked out of the window. She was remembering a school dance where one of the girls had claimed to have seduced a boy in the chemistry lab, having slipped away from the hall with him. They had not believed her, and had pressed her for details. She had burst into tears and accused them of ruining a beautiful experience for her. “You’re such a liar,” said one of the girls. And “Wishful thinking,” said another. The cruelty of children.

  Isabel brought herself back to what Jillian was now saying.

  “Alex is the chairman of the board of governors, as it happens. It’s his second term; I tried to get him to hand over to somebody else after he had done three years, but you know how some people are—they think they’re indispensable. That, and a sense of duty.”

  Isabel was trying to remember Jillian’s husband. There had been a dozen or so people at the Stevensons’ house that night, and she found it difficult. There had been a tall, rather distinguished-looking man who could well have been the chairman of a board of governors. He had talked to her about art, she thought; about Cowie. Yes, they had talked about a Cowie retrospective that the Dean Gallery had put on.

  “Not that I would want him to give everything up,” Jillian went on. “I can imagine nothing worse than having one’s husband underfoot all day. So he carries on with my blessing, and I fulfil the role of chairman’s wife as best as I can, although frankly I find school politics pretty stultifying. It’s the pettiness. Any institution is like that, I suppose.

  “The principal is a very good man—Harold Slade. Maybe you know him. He rowed for Scotland in the Olympics years ago. Rather like that politician—what’s his name?—Ming Campbell. He was an Olympic runner, wasn’t he? Well, Harold announced that he wanted to take up the headship of an international school in Singapore. He wasn’t going for the money—I think he was just ready for a change, which was fair enough. He had been principal for twelve years, which is quite a long time for one person to hold the job. So we advertised, and Alex was the chairman of the appointment committee—naturally enough.”

  Jillian sipped again at her coffee. “We had rather more applications than we expected. Some of them were very good. One or two withdrew for various reasons, but eventually they put together a rather strong shortlist of three candidates, all of them from Scotland. We had expected to get some impressive applicants from England, but for some reason the English candidates were rather weak. So it’s pretty much a local list, which makes it easier to get in references and so on. Alex likes to talk to referees face-to-face if he possibly can, and he’s been able to do that since all three are Scottish.”

  Isabel nodded. “I suppose it’s important to talk to people,” she said. “It’s hard to be honest in a written reference. You expect that the candidate will get hold of it one way or another. And then, if you’ve written something damning, there’s all sorts of trouble. It’s rather like doctors’ notes. They can’t write what they really think any more—the patient can see what’s there.”

  Jillian had views on this. “And a good thing too,” she said. “Doctors used to write terrible things in the past. I had a friend who found out that she was described in her medical notes as a ‘dreadful woman.’ ”

  “And was she?” asked Isabel.
She spoke quickly; it slipped out, and she immediately apologised. “No, I don’t really mean that. I mean …” She trailed off. There were dreadful people, and doctors had to deal with them.

  “Not at all,” said Jillian. “Maybe she’s a bit demanding, but that’s not the same as being dreadful.”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Anyway,” Jillian continued, “it looked as if we’d find no difficulty in getting a very good person to take over, but then my husband received an anonymous letter. Normally he would throw such a thing straight into the wastepaper basket, but in this case there was something that stopped him from doing so.”

  “It was about the candidates?”

  “Yes. Well, yes and no. It was about one of the candidates. Unfortunately, it didn’t say which one. It merely said that there was something about one of them that would cause the school considerable embarrassment if he were to be appointed. But it gave no further details.”

  “A shot in the dark,” suggested Isabel. “The writer of this letter could be trying it on, surely. It could just be a spoiler. Perhaps from one of the unsuccessful candidates. People get pretty upset about these things.”

  “I thought that,” said Jillian. “But there was something significant about this letter. It gave the names of all the candidates. So the person who wrote it must have seen the shortlist. And I can’t imagine there were many of those. There were the members of the committee—and it’s hardly likely to have been one of them. And … well, the school secretary, Miss Carty. She’s one of those people you find in schools who never seem to have a first name, but it’s Janet in her case. A rather mousy woman, probably unhappy about something or other.”

  One might say that about most of us, thought Isabel. Most of us are unhappy about something or other.

  “Anything else? Was there anything else in the letter?” she asked.

  Jillian shook her head. “No.”

  “Typed?”

  “No. Handwritten. In green ink.”

  Isabel smiled. “There’s a popular view that green ink is favoured by the insane. No truth to it, no doubt. But people say that. They say that real cranks like green ink.”