The Charming Quirks of Others

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “And what does he do?” This was a more difficult question, and she realised that Cat might resent it. After the rise and (not only metaphorical) fall of Bruno—who had been a tightrope walker—the issue of the occupation of Cat’s boyfriends had become potentially awkward. She would not want Cat to think that she was going to draw any conclusions as to suitability based on what they did.

  The answer surprised her. “He’s a teacher,” said Cat.

  “Oh. Where?”

  Cat hesitated. “He’s always taught in boys’ schools. It’s Firth College.” She named a school with a particularly good reputation and a headmaster whom Isabel had met on several occasions and liked.

  Isabel nodded. She knew the school, which was only a mile or two away, on the brow of a hill that looked down across the city towards the Firth of Forth and the hills of Fife beyond. Her father’s cousin had been there, as had his two sons, and she had dutifully been to see them in the school’s production of The Pirates of Penzance, put on with the help of girls imported from St. George’s School for Girls.

  “You remember Cousin Fraser’s two boys?” she said. “They were there. They enjoyed it. A very good school. Nice staff.”

  “Gordon likes working there,” said Cat. “The boys are all sons of prosperous farmers and so on, I’m afraid. They play a lot of rugby. There are no discipline problems.” There was a slight note of sarcasm in her voice.

  Isabel considered this. There was nothing wrong with playing rugby. There was nothing wrong with being the son of a prosperous farmer. There was nothing wrong with being the son of anybody, she felt. And yet Cat had made it sound like an apology. So was she apologising for Gordon being middle class; for working in a conventional institution with conventional values? “I don’t see anything wrong with that,” she said.

  “Maybe,” said Cat. “It’s just that this city is so bourgeois. It really is. Everybody’s so respectable.”

  Again Isabel thought: What was wrong with being respectable? And what, she wondered, was the opposite of respectability? It became important to answer that if Cat was suggesting that one should not be respectable. Bohemian? Dissolute? Unconventional? The problem with that was that if everybody was unconventional, then they became conventional. So wild, bohemian, laid-back places, filled with free spirits, would have conventions of their own, which would soon make conventionalists of their inhabitants.

  She began to feel irritated. “But, Cat, you yourself are bourgeois,” she said. “Sorry to have to say this, but it’s the truth. You’re ineluctably bourgeois. You own a business. You employ Eddie. You don’t even have a mortgage on your flat. Doesn’t that make you bourgeois?”

  There was a silence at the other end of the line, and Isabel quickly continued, “Of course, I mustn’t throw the first stone. I’m bourgeois myself, I suppose—and frankly I don’t see anything wrong with that. I’m very fortunate in this life, I know that, I know that … and I try to help …” She trailed off. One should never boast about what one gave away—and Isabel gave a lot. Yet Cat’s assumption of superiority had irked her, and she almost felt like asking her niece what she gave, which she did not think was very much. And come to think of it, Isabel said to herself, am I all that bourgeois, when I live with a younger man, I don’t engage in trade, when philosophy is my job? This was not the normal pattern of a bourgeois life, whatever that might be.

  She decided to move away from the subject. “Those two boys I mentioned,” she said. “Fraser’s boys. Gavin and …”

  “Steve.”

  “Yes, Gavin and Steve. They went off to university, didn’t they? They must be almost finished by now. Gavin was the older one, wasn’t he? He went off for a gap year in Argentina, didn’t he? He got a job as a gaucho, I think. You must remember that. One knows so few gauchos, I find.”

  “Gauchos?” said Cat. “I don’t know any. And what have they got to do with it?”

  Isabel laughed. “Don’t make the mistake of underestimating gauchos,” she said.

  Jamie would have liked that; Cat did not. “I have to go,” she said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  They discussed the time when she and Jamie would have to leave for Grace’s Psychic Centre, and then rang off. Isabel walked from her study, where she had made the call, to the kitchen, where she was going to make a cup of tea. As she did so, the thought that had been hovering around at the edge of her mind, crystallised: Yes, yes.

  She returned to her desk and picked up the envelope she had received from Jillian. She took out one of the papers—the front page of one of the curricula vitae. She hardly had to read it, as she knew what it would say. Gordon Leafers. Place of birth: Kelso. Current position: Senior Mathematics Teacher.

  She put down the piece of paper and then picked it up again. She looked at the date of birth. He would be thirty-eight. She smiled. Cat was in her late twenties, which made a gap of about ten years between them. There was nothing unusual in that, but what was interesting here was that Gordon was younger than the other two candidates. And thirty-eight was on the young side for appointment as a principal, which suggested that Gordon was a high-flyer in career terms. That interested her: Cat had chosen respectability.

  She went to the window and stared out. She wondered whether she should be astonished at the coincidence, but she realised that she felt no real surprise. As she and Guy had decided over lunch, Scotland was a village, and a very small one at that. She looked up at the sky, and felt appalled. She had been asked, and had agreed, to look at these three candidates, and it transpired that one of them was Cat’s new boyfriend. She now had an interest in the matter and would have to declare it. She could not start investigating somebody who was the boyfriend of a relative, which would go against all the rules, if there were any. But that, of course, was the problem with life. We were often unsure what the rules were or where one found them, even if we knew that they existed. It would be so useful to have a large book that one could put on the table—a book entitled, quite unambiguously, The Rules. Life would be so simple if that were the case; but it never was, and even when one paged through The Rules, one would find areas of ambiguity and doubt, and one’s uncertainty would return. That’s why, she thought, we have judges and lawyers and courts—in other words, as a Freudian might perhaps suggest, that’s why we have Father. But what if Father went away, or said that he really didn’t know about the rules and did not want to start enforcing them? The loss of good authority, she thought; that’s what happened then.

  JAMIE LOOKED AT ISABEL and smiled. “You’re behaving as if you’re going on a first date,” he said. “Calm down. It’s just another of Cat’s boyfriends, after all.”

  She was aware of being nervous, and when she was nervous she felt fidgety. “You’re right,” she said. “I just have a feeling about this one. I think that somehow he’s going to be different from the others.” She blushed, and corrected herself. As a former boyfriend of Cat, Jamie was one of the others himself. “By that, I mean people like Bruno.”

  He reached out and touched her arm gently. “I know you don’t mean me. Don’t worry.”

  “I didn’t. You were different. Although I must say that I’m glad that things didn’t work out between you and Cat. Otherwise—no me, no Charlie.”

  “I’m glad too.”

  There was something else she wanted to ask him, and she decided that this was the time. “How do you feel about her now? Is there still any awkwardness … any difficulty?”

  He took time to weigh his reply. “I don’t think so.” He hesitated. “There used to be, yes. Not now.”

  “So in your eyes she’s just like anybody else?” Isabel was interested in this. She was not sure that she understood how people could feel indifferent to former lovers. She understood lingering love for somebody who had rejected one, intense love perhaps; reproach; she could even understand hate and detestation; she did not understand indifference.

  Yes,” said Jamie. “She’s just like anybody else now.” He paused.
“Mostly, that is. If I start thinking about her, then … well, then I get all confused, I suppose.” He looked at Isabel almost apologetically. “That’s the way it is. I’m sorry—it just is. So I don’t think about her in that way. I just don’t.”

  “You put the past out of your mind?”

  “Yes, I suppose I do.”

  Her gaze dwelled upon him, upon the face that seemed to her so perfect. How was it, she wondered, that character could reveal itself so clearly in the structure of human flesh and bone? Jamie looked kind, and intelligent, and gentle, and that was what he was. Could it be otherwise? Could the faces of the wicked look like this, have this light behind them? Perhaps there could be a book of photographs exploring face and character. Goebbels and Mussolini—they could be there to illustrate the proposition at the beginning: Goebbels with his pinched, rat-like features; Mussolini with his thuggish bully’s face; both perfect illustrations of the proposition that character shines through. And from the other end of the spectrum? She wondered about that. Nelson Mandela, perhaps, would be a good candidate: his face was suffused with kindness, with a sort of joy that was unmistakable; or Mother Teresa of Calcutta, whose lined, careworn features were so transformed when she smiled. She could look severe sometimes, but that was the effect of suffering and the day-to-day toll of caring for those for whom nobody else would care. And then there were the politicians, some of whom so neatly illustrated pride, ambition and cunning; the various types of bullies; soldiers whose faces often seemed trained into hard, wooden expressions; sleek bankers to remind us of the face of human greed; gentle doctors … It would be a book of clichés, she decided, demonstrating that stereotypes—for all that they be derided—are so often true. The eye is the window to the soul. Of course it is.

  “Isabel?”

  “Sorry, I was thinking.”

  And then the bell sounded and Jamie raised an eyebrow. “Do you want me to let them in?”

  “No,” she said. “I’ll do that.”

  She walked to the front door and opened it. The self-closing lock was stiff—it behaved like that in certain weathers—and she had to tug. But then it swung open and she saw Cat standing in front of her with Gordon a pace behind on the front step. Cat had half turned when Isabel opened the door and was addressing a remark to Gordon. What is said about ourselves on our own doorsteps, thought Isabel, is probably as revealing a judgement as we are likely to hear.

  “Well,” said Isabel. “Here you are.”

  Cat moved to one side to effect the introduction. “I don’t think you’ve met Gordon.”

  Gordon stepped forward and offered his hand. Isabel glanced at him quickly and then back at Cat. She’s reverted to type, she thought. Bruno, with his elevator shoes, was an exception: Gordon was tall, with the easy confidence of the good-looking. She resisted the temptation to look at his legs—Cat had views on men’s legs, she was sure of it. In fact, Cat herself in an unguarded moment had said something about how important legs were. She liked legs to be strong; Toby, the skier, several boyfriends ago, had well-muscled legs, Isabel seemed to remember. Stop it, she told herself. Don’t think this way. Stop it.

  She invited them into the house, feeling as she did so a stab of guilt over the advantage she enjoyed. This was their first meeting, and yet she knew Gordon’s age from the documents in the study, and the university where he had done his first degree: Aberdeen. President of the Students’ Union. Scottish Universities’ rugby team (captain, tour of South America). In respect of all of this he looked the part; but there was something else—something that she had noticed immediately. Presence.

  Jamie was in the kitchen, and she took them there. I feel like a spy, she thought. I feel like one of those people who does the positive vetting of applicants for posts in the secret services; who know everything about the people they meet because they have pored through their records beforehand; absorbed the intimate secrets of a life, stripping away the armour that privacy affords, rendering the other naked.

  “We’ve left the eggs out for your supper,” said Isabel. “Jamie and I were thinking of going out for a bite to eat after this talk we’re going to. Would that be all right?”

  Cat glanced at Gordon, as if for confirmation. “Fine,” she said. “Take as long as you like.”

  Isabel wondered what they would do. Babysitters usually watched television, or that is what householders assumed. But when they came in pairs … She recalled reading somewhere about a babysitter who was found taking a bath when the parents returned. Why not? Student flats, in which many babysitters lived, had uncomfortable baths and not enough hot water. Visiting a house with a good supply of hot water and clean towels might be just too much of a temptation. And yet there was an element of trust involved: one did not imagine that a person left in one’s house would open drawers, for example, or read one’s correspondence, or even run a bath. That was what the story of Goldilocks and the three bears was all about: breach of trust.

  She would have to look at this for the Review. What were the limits of trust in everyday life? What liberties could we legitimately take when we were entrusted with the property of others? Could you read a book you were looking after for somebody? Yes, she thought, you could. Drink from their bottle of water? No. Germs dictated that. Take fruit from a bowl? No. A nut from a dish of nuts? Yes. Sit in their chairs? Of course: chairs are public, and one only needs to seek permission to sit in another’s chair if the owner of the room is present; once you were by yourself, any chair was fair game. Except the chairs of really important people—one should not sit on a throne when left unattended in a monarch’s throne room; that really was going too far. And yet who would miss such an opportunity? There could surely be little doubt but that visitors to Her Majesty sat down on the nearest throne when Her Majesty went out to fetch something. And, indeed, polite American presidents actually engineered excuses to leave the Oval Office for a few moments so that their guests could run round and sit in the President’s chair for a few seconds. The only occasion when this had led to embarrassment was when President de Gaulle had visited the White House and had momentarily dropped off to sleep while seated in the President’s chair.

  Isabel smiled. Cat glanced at her suspiciously.

  “Parapsychology,” said Gordon. “Cat tells me that you’re going to a lecture on parapsychology.”

  Isabel laughed. “I know that sounds a bit odd,” she said. “It’s rather complicated. My housekeeper, you see, is a great enthusiast for these things and keen that we should go. I’m not a believer in parapsychology myself. But …” She knew that she was telling only half the truth. The full truth, she thought, is that I’m trying to find out about three people, of whom you, Gordon, are one.

  “Well, plenty of people take it seriously enough,” said Gordon. “And isn’t there evidence for the existence of telepathy?”

  “No,” said Isabel. “Not as far as I know.”

  “I knew you were going to say that,” said Jamie, and laughed.

  Cat looked at him sideways. What was so funny?

  Isabel changed the subject, asking Gordon about the school he was currently teaching at, Firth College.

  Gordon nodded. “I’ve been there for five years now. I like the place.” He paused. “Although I’m currently in for another job.”

  Isabel found herself warming to him. He need not have said that—a more … more closed person would have said nothing. She looked at his face; his expression was frank.

  “A promotion?” she asked.

  “Yes. A headship.” He looked at Cat, and at that moment Isabel realised that as far as Gordon was concerned, his plans included her niece.

  “Well, good luck,” said Isabel. “I have the luxury, I suppose, of being self-employed. But I know what it’s like to apply for jobs.”

  She thought of the last time she had applied for a job, which involved being interviewed by Professor Lettuce for the position of editor of the Review. The interview panel had consisted of three people: Lettuce
, who had been in the chair; a woman from King’s College London, who had gazed out of the window throughout the interview; and a slight, rather thin-faced man, who had been a fellow of a Cambridge college but who had looked, in Isabel’s view, like a bookmaker from Newmarket Racecourse. Lettuce had barely bothered to look up from the table when Isabel had come in, and the nature of their subsequent relationship had been dictated from that morning. Yet she had been given the job, presumably because nobody else had been prepared to do it for the salary offered, which was virtually nothing.

  “Thanks,” said Gordon. “But I really don’t think that I stand much of a chance.”

  “Don’t assume anything,” said Isabel under her breath. She wanted him to get the job now—and that complicated matters immensely: How could she be objective in her enquiry if she started off wanting one of the candidates to emerge unsullied and papabile? Life’s goalposts, and hurdles too, are never in the right place, she told herself; and they have the unfortunate habit of shifting within seconds. One sees them, and then suddenly they are no longer there, where they should be, but somewhere altogether elsewhere.

  CHAPTER SIX

  AFTER THE DANISH LECTURE, Isabel and Jamie said goodbye to Grace, who was going to have tea with a fellow member of her spiritualist circle in Stockbridge. They had seen this woman at the lecture, and had both noticed her eyes, which were grey and cloudy, as if in the advanced stages of some occluding condition, cataracts perhaps. But no, explained Grace, she saw perfectly well: “She sees more than we do—far more, I assure you.” Isabel had avoided catching Jamie’s eye when this was said, but she saw him discreetly mouth the word “Strange!” She shook her head in warning; this was not meant to be funny, and he was not to laugh. “Don’t even think of laughing,” she whispered as they walked away up the street. “These people have ways of telling.”