The Charming Quirks of Others

by Alexander McCall Smith

  They had reserved a table at the Café St. Honoré in Thistle Street Lane, a restaurant that they had been going to for some years now. It was Paris transplanted, but without the falsity that sometimes goes with transplantation. Jamie, in particular, disliked Irish pubs outside Ireland. “All these O’Connor’s Taverns and McGinty’s Bars and so on are completely bogus,” he had complained to Isabel. “I went into one with the band the other day and it was full of old Guinness signs. I looked closely at one of them and saw that it was made in China. And the barman, who had a name badge which said Paddy, was Russian, or sounded like it.”

  “People have their dreams,” said Isabel. “And it’s harmless enough. We go to French bistros and Italian restaurants. What’s the difference between them and Irish pubs? The intention in each case is to provide you with an illusion. Don’t look out of the windows and you could be in Paris or Naples. That’s what people want.”

  Jamie was not convinced. “It’s a Disneyland culture,” he said. “Insincere. Infantilised.”

  She looked at him sideways. “I’m not sure about insincerity. Disneyland may not be to your taste, but I don’t think it’s insincere. They mean to be syrupy.”

  “Mickey Mouse,” said Jamie dismissively.

  She raised an eyebrow. “Mickey Mouse? I don’t see anything wrong with Mickey.” She paused; one did not associate Auden with Disney characters, but she recalled an interview in the Paris Review in which the interviewer had asked the poet, for some reason, what he thought of Mickey Mouse. And Auden had replied, “He’s all right.” She mentioned this to Jamie, who said, enigmatically, “Is he?”

  “Yes, he is. Mickey’s decent. He represents the little person.”

  None of this stopped them from enjoying the French atmosphere of Café St. Honoré, nor from ordering coquilles St. Jacques and a bottle of Chablis.

  “Well,” said Isabel. “Danish psychics?”

  Jamie shrugged. “I’d like to see proof. Proof that stands up in the labs.”

  Isabel thought about this. She understood why Jamie should insist on sound evidence for any conclusion, and part of her agreed with that. But she often acted on hunches, on the prompting of her feelings or on simple intuition. And labs were not always the answer, she felt: there were things that were invisible and undetectable by any physical means but that were none the less real: sorrow, pain, hope, for instance; or an atmosphere of tension or distrust in a room. “It may be that labs have an inhibiting effect,” she said. “Have you thought of that?”

  Jamie reached for a piece of bread and dipped it into a small bowl of olive oil. The wine had arrived and was now being poured. “No. I hadn’t.” And she could be right, he decided. He had a friend who could not have his blood pressure taken accurately; every time the rubber cuff was placed around his arm, his heart began to thump and a misleadingly high reading resulted. Could it be the same with telepathy? Perhaps it worked only when the people present were in a receptive mood, in the same way that a composer or an artist may need peace and quiet before the Muse will speak.

  “Who was that woman you were talking to?” he asked. “Before the lecture—the woman with the ginger hair?”

  Isabel reached for her glass. “It’s to do with this school business.” She watched his reaction; she had not told him about her ulterior motive in accompanying Grace to the lecture. It was not that she wanted to mislead him; she just had not thought to do so. Some couples live in each other’s pockets, sharing every bit of their lives, every bit of information. That might suit some, but it was not what she—nor Jamie, for that matter—wanted. They both wanted room to lead independent lives, and that is why she did not tell him about everything that happened to do with the Review or with … this other side of her life. She could not bring herself to describe it as enquiries: that sounded far too arch, and investigations sounded downright hyperbolic. Isabel did not investigate things; she considered them.

  “These principals?”

  “Yes, or would-be principals.”

  He waited.

  “The woman with the ginger hair,” she continued, “is called Cathy. She’s the cousin of one of the candidates. Grace told me.”

  Jamie reached for another bit of bread. “The trouble with this French bread,” he said, “is that it’s too tasty. You could fill up on it before anything else arrived.” He dipped the bread into the olive oil, allowing a small drop to fall back into the bowl. “So? Did you find out anything?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I did. I managed to bring up her cousin’s name. I said, ‘Aren’t you John Fraser’s cousin?’ and before she had the chance to ask me whether I knew him, I said, ‘I haven’t seen him recently.’ That was absolutely true. I might have said, ‘I’ve never seen him,’ but at least I didn’t lie.”

  Jamie looked at her. He smiled. “You didn’t lie? No, I suppose you didn’t. Not technically.”

  “I didn’t lie,” she repeated firmly.

  “All right. And what did she say then?”

  Isabel told him that she had asked about John’s climbing. Did he climb as much in the summer as in the winter? Was he planning to go abroad?

  “She was clearly very proud of him,” Isabel said. “Just as Grace had told me. But then, just after she said something about how he had been talking for years about climbing in the Andes, her face clouded over. You know how that sometimes happens? It’s as if a dark shadow has come over somebody. She stopped mid-sentence, as if she’d remembered something.”

  Jamie was silent. They were sitting off to the side, away from the light, and for a moment it was as if they were completely alone in the room, rather than in a restaurant in which there were other diners, movement, warmth.

  Isabel continued. “Then she said something very strange. She said that he was troubled in spirit. Those were her exact words. Troubled in spirit. I asked her why this was, but she didn’t answer me. She said that he wanted to come to one of the meetings, but hadn’t got round to it. She said that it was a pity, because it helped to talk to the one on the other side. Again, those were her actual words. The one on the other side.”

  Jamie took a sip of his wine. “He’s lost somebody? Lots of the people at that meeting had lost somebody, I think. That’s why they go there.”

  Isabel nodded. She had seen it at the previous meeting. “But who? Somebody he’s wronged, do you think?”

  “Maybe.”

  Isabel looked over Jamie’s shoulder. The waiter was approaching their table, plates balanced expertly in either hand. “If you had let somebody down badly and then … before you made your peace, they crossed over to the other side, as Grace would say, wouldn’t you want to speak to him?”

  The waiter put the plates before them. The scallops, fresh and firm, had been arranged to make a peninsula across a shallow lake of sauce. Isabel sniffed at the steam rising from the plate. “If I had to give up everything,” she said, “seafood would be the last thing to go. I’d have a final scallop and say, ‘That’s it, that’s eating over.’ And then I’d cross over happy.”

  Jamie laughed. He raised his glass to Isabel. “May that never be necessary.”

  She had not been serious, of course, but the absurd, the fanciful, may bring grave thoughts in its wake. She and Jamie would not be together for eternity; one day one of them would leave or die—those were the only two certainties—and the other would be on his or her own. It was a thought that crossed the mind of everybody who ever entered into a relationship with another. It applied as much to friends as to lovers and spouses: one day somebody would see the other for the last time, and probably not know it. And there would be things left unsaid, little gestures—kindnesses—left undone, as there are in every part of life.

  Jamie tackled a scallop, and then dabbed at his mouth with the starched table napkin. Isabel watched him. Napery, she thought: the word for table linen. Napery—the word had such a solid ring to it, suggesting houses that had drawers and trunks full of tablecloths and the like, neatly pressed
and folded away, like old memories; napery and silver and plenishings—words that lawyers used when itemising the household effects of clients who had died and left such things behind them.

  “What are you thinking of?” asked Jamie, putting down the napkin.

  “Household effects,” she said. “That table napkin …” She pointed, and he looked at it in puzzlement.

  “Nothing wrong with it.”

  “No, of course not. I was just thinking of how we fill our houses with things. Rather too many things, in most cases.”

  Jamie shrugged. “I don’t. My flat’s uncluttered. Or was … when I last visited it.”

  She caught his smile, and returned it. Jamie only used his flat now to teach in, his pupils hauling their bassoon cases up the stone staircase to tug at his antiquated brass bell-pull and wipe their feet on the coir doormat with its Welcome legend and ingrained mud. He still used one room there as a bedroom, in the sense that there was a made-up bed in it, but he never stayed there now, and the flat had a cold, rather desolate feel to it. Charlie did not like it, and had fidgeted and fretted when Jamie had last taken him there.

  “Your flat …,” Isabel began, but did not finish the sentence. Space, she reminded herself.

  “Yes? My flat?”

  Isabel waved a hand in the air, carelessly. “Your flat is your flat,” she said. “You like it—that’s all that matters.”

  Jamie frowned. “But I don’t really like it,” he said.

  She was surprised; he had never said this before. She wondered whether he wanted to get rid of it; he could teach just as easily in the music room in her house, and they were engaged, after all, and would be getting married in due course.

  “Is there any point in keeping it, then? Do you want to sell it?”

  Jamie looked away. She saw how the light accentuated his high cheekbones. She wanted to reach out and touch him; to put her hand against his cheek, which felt so smooth, and which she had become accustomed to touching, briefly, when she awoke and he was there beside her, his head on the pillow. How long would this beauty last? Five more years? Ten? Or was it more fleeting than that, as human beauty inevitably is?

  She asked him again. “How about selling it? Wouldn’t you feel less … tied down?”

  “I might,” said Jamie thoughtfully. “Do you think I should?”

  She hesitated. “When we’re married, do we need it?” Space, she thought again.

  “No, I don’t see why we should keep it.” He looked back at her. “Can we get married soon? I mean, really soon.”

  She felt her heart beating within her. She closed her eyes, involuntarily. “Yes. I think we should.”

  “In two or three weeks’ time?”

  She felt her breath leave her; she had to force herself to breathe. “I think so.”

  “I don’t want a great big wedding,” he said. “Do you mind? Something more or less private. You, me, Charlie.”

  “If that’s what you want. Are you sure?”

  He nodded, and reached across the table to take her hand. “Yes, it is.”

  They had much to talk about. They would go to Old St. Paul’s, an Episcopal church where Isabel knew one of the clergy. There was a side chapel there—a tiny place—that would be suitable for a small wedding. The choir, though, might be asked to sing. Would Jamie object to that? He would love it, he said. They would be off to one side, out of sight, but it would be lovely hearing them in the background.

  “You choose the music,” said Isabel. “Naturally.”

  He agreed, but said that he wanted her to be happy with his choice.

  “No,” she said. “You’re the musician.”

  “Ireland,” he said. “Definitely Ireland, then. ‘Greater Love Hath No Man.’ Remember it?”

  She did. “Many waters cannot quench love,” she said.

  He sung, in response, barely above a whisper, “Neither can the floods drown it.”

  “And what else?”

  “Oh, I’ll think. We’ve got at least four centuries of music to choose from.”

  Towards the end of the meal, when they were drinking coffee, Isabel said, “You know, I have an awful feeling about John Fraser. I know it’s ridiculous, but I can’t get it out of my mind.”

  He looked at her with interest. “What do you feel?”

  She knew that she had no grounds for saying what she was about to say. It was ridiculous—a complete whimsy. But the thought had occurred to her and it would not go away. “That he’s killed somebody.” She regretted the words even as she uttered them. It was an accusation—a gross defamation, even if the victim would never hear what was said of him. You can defame people, she thought, even if you speak the words into a void, to be heard by nobody. The wrong in such cases was not that you lowered them in the eyes of others—you did not do this, because nobody heard what you said—but simply that you had thought it. It was a wrong done to truth and the cause of truth. And it was dirtying; one felt grubby after thinking unkind, uncharitable, or even lascivious thoughts—why? Because for a few moments one imagined that the thought was deed.

  She watched his reaction. At first he looked blank, and then he shook his head. “Surely not.”

  “I know, I know. I shouldn’t think that of him, but that’s what I feel. I know I haven’t a shred of evidence, other than that his cousin, who may well be over-imaginative—”

  Jamie interrupted her. “Over-imaginative? She believes in ghosts and … and spirits and all the rest. Of course she’s over-imaginative.”

  “Even so, she thinks that he wants to talk to somebody—through a medium. And if that’s true, then it’s possible that he’s killed somebody and wants forgiveness.”

  Jamie was silent as he thought about this. “Do you really think,” he said, “that murderers want to talk to their victims? Surely it’s exactly the opposite: they have no desire to hear from them again.”

  Isabel weighed this for a moment. It was probably true that most murderers had no desire to hear from their victims, but there were two objections to Jamie’s statement. One was that people could be killed by accident as much as intentionally: so not all of those who took another’s life were murderers. And secondly, not everybody who even intentionally caused the death of another would be without all conscience; people had their regrets, and lots of them.

  She was on the point of telling Jamie this when he leaned across the table and said to her, very slowly and clearly, “Isabel, listen to me. This is Edinburgh. Edinburgh. We haven’t got any murderers here. We just haven’t. At the most, people have little failings. That small.” He held up a hand, with barely a chink of light between his thumb and forefinger. “Mere quirks. So think of something else. Please.”

  She laughed. She knew that he did not mean this: Edinburgh was the same as anywhere else, and had the same range of people as other places did: the good, the bad, the morally indifferent. They had their quirks, of course; Jamie was right about that. But even their quirks were charming—at least in the eyes of a lover, who would forgive her city anything.

  THEY DECIDED TO WALK BACK from the Café St. Honoré because the night was a fine one and even at ten there was still light in the sky. Being as far north as Moscow, and only three degrees south of St. Petersburg, Edinburgh had summer nights almost as white as those of Russia. Soon the dying day would slip into half-darkness and that curious Scottish half-light, the gloaming, would mantle the city; for now, though, every architectural detail, every branch moving gently in the breeze from the west, was clearly visible.

  They walked up through Charlotte Square, past the well-appointed offices of the financiers. “Money,” said Isabel, “likes to clothe itself in respectability, doesn’t it? And yet why should we kowtow to financiers? All that these people do is lend money to people who actually do things.” She gestured towards the well-set façades of the classical square before continuing. “But they—these people in these offices—end up having far greater status than those who actually do things with
that money. Odd, isn’t it?”

  Jamie agreed. He had no interest in money. “We should be more like the Germans,” he said. “They show more respect for engineers than they do for accountants.”

  Isabel said that she was not sure that respect should be based on a person’s job alone. A good and conscientious emptier of rubbish bins, she suggested, was better in moral terms, surely, than a self-serving accountant. Yet a job might say something about a person’s character: a nurse was likely to be more sympathetic than a futures trader, although not inevitably so.

  What she had said clearly interested Jamie, who now made a remark about musicians and their position in society. “And nobody really respects musicians all that much,” he said. “We’re very far down the pecking order.”

  They were now within sight of the Caledonian Hotel, that great red-stone edifice at the end of Princes Street, a battleship made of gingerbread, Isabel thought. She remembered seeing a crowd outside the hotel one day when some rock star had been staying there and word had got out to the fans. Were musicians all that low in the pecking order? Did people wait outside hotels for accountants, or engineers, or architects?

  “Are you sure?”

  He half turned to her. There was a piper outside the Caledonian, welcoming somebody or sending them off; or possibly just standing there, playing the pipes. Isabel recognised the tune, “Mist-covered Mountains,” a tune that she always found evocative—of what? Of Morven, she thought, or Ardnamurchan, those wild, mountainous parts of western Scotland on the edge of the Atlantic, the last land before the Hebrides, and beyond them the cloud banks, the green cliffs of Newfoundland.

  She remembered how she had once been in the Old Town of Edinburgh, near the Canongate, when she had heard from somewhere in the vicinity, echoing through the small wynds and closes, the muffled thumping of a great drum. And she had turned the corner to find herself face-to-face with a pipe band, the pipers draped in dark-green tartan, on the point of striking up “Mist-covered Mountains.” And she had stood on the pavement, close to the wall to allow the band to get by, and watched them as they slow-marched past her. She had noticed the white spats that each kilted piper wore; she had seen the faces of the young men in the ranks of the band, clean-shaven, smartly turned out, like boy-soldiers. Which is what they were, she learned from a woman standing beside her on the pavement. “Just laddies,” said the woman, shaking her head as she spoke. “Just laddies. And now they’re away to the ermy.” She pronounced army in the Scots way, as mothers had done for generations, watching their sons going away.