The Charming Quirks of Others

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Charlie, swallowing another tiny haggis, looked interested. “No idea about all those goings-on?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I do,” said Charlie, licking his fingers. “I know somebody who went there a couple of years ago. I met him through Pete Burgess. He went up Everest, but didn’t get to the top. Something went wrong. They’re always dying—once you get past a certain point. Apparently the mountain has got hundreds of bodies on it—they can’t get them down.”

  Isabel was thinking. Edinburgh was not a large city. How many people living there would have climbed Everest? One or two, if that. “I think I may know him,” she said. “Or rather, I don’t actually know him, but I know who he is. John Fraser.” And then she added, “I think.”

  Charlie was looking across the room as Isabel spoke. She thought at first that he had not heard her, as he started to say something about a woman who stood in the doorway. “I’ve seen her somewhere,” he said. “She’s an actress, I think, and the trouble with actresses is that you think you know them because you’ve seen them …” And then he stopped. “Fraser? Yes. John Fraser. Tall chap. He’s a teacher, I think.”

  Isabel felt her heart beat faster. “You said that something went wrong. What?”

  “One of them fell. They weren’t all that far up, I gather. This chap fell. I think he was …” He looked away again. The actress was talking to a small, rather neat man; she was taller than him by at least a head.

  “Who was he—the one who fell?”

  Charlie looked at Isabel again. She found herself studying his moustache—a handlebar affair that seemed to suit him so well. It must have taken years, she thought, to reach that stage of perfection; a generous act, undertaken for the benefit of others, as any act of personal enhancement was, since one did not see it very much oneself.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But I do know that he played rugby for Scotland. They had a minute’s silence for him at Murrayfield Stadium. He was one of the wings.” Then he remembered. “Chris Alexander. That was his name. I recall it now because his father was a director of a distillery I had dealings with. Nice chap. I met him. He was also a good amateur nose. He sometimes nosed for one of the distilleries on Islay. I forget which one.”

  Isabel had heard Charlie refer to “noses” before. They were the people who remembered just how to achieve the taste of a particular whisky. He was a nose himself.

  “Are you interested in all this?” Charlie said. “You’ve never talked about it before.”

  She could not tell him, of course, and so she changed the subject. What she had heard confirmed her conviction that something had happened on the mountain to torment John Fraser. And she was already beginning to imagine what it was: Chris Alexander had fallen and John Fraser had left him to die. That was what John Fraser sought to expunge from his conscience, and that, she imagined, was what the anonymous letter-writer had somehow found out. This was quite possible, even if she had not a shred of evidence to support it. But would this hypothesis—for that was all it was—be enough to justify going to the chairman of the board of governors of Bishop Forbes and suggesting that this was what lay in one of the candidates’ past? He might say—and he would be justified in doing so—that she had jumped to conclusions. But if he did not, and if he proved to be willing to listen, then what did all this reveal? Simple cowardice—or something worse than that? Was it murder to leave somebody to die? No, it was not, but it could still be criminal, if you had an obligation to do something to help somebody and you did not. That was called culpable homicide, she believed, and it was not what one would expect to find in the background of the principal of a school.

  So if all this proved to be true, then John Fraser was out of the running for the post, and that meant that Cat’s new boyfriend, Gordon, would have a much higher chance of appointment, particularly if Isabel found something questionable in the background of the third candidate. And that, she reflected, was exactly the way she should not be thinking. If you play a part in a competition for a public job—and a principal’s post was a public job—you should not favour your friends, or the friends of your friends, or the friend of your niece. That was what she reminded herself, but then it occurred to her: Why not? The overwhelming majority of people would without question favour a friend or a relative, if they had the chance, and not think twice about it. Were all these people wrong? Yes, thought Isabel; but then she thought, No. Morality could not be a matter of counting heads; but counting heads was sometimes a useful way of seeing whether a system of morality suited human nature as it actually was. Moral rules should not be devised for saints, but should be within the grasp of ordinary people; and ordinary people preferred those they knew to those they did not know; everyone knew that, but most of all, ordinary people knew it.

  THE NEXT MORNING, Isabel took Charlie out in his pram to go shopping in Bruntsfield. It was an outing that he particularly enjoyed, as it inevitably culminated in a visit to Cat’s delicatessen, where Cat would give him a marzipan pig from a small box she kept on a shelf behind the counter. He knew exactly what lay in store and would shout “Pig! Pig!” as they entered. Then, with the treat grasped firmly in his hands, he would bite off the pig’s head, watched in astonishment by Eddie and Cat.

  “It’s almost indecent,” said Cat. “He has no sympathy for the pig.”

  Isabel felt that she had to defend her son. “But it’s just sugar to him. It’s not a living pig.”

  “Does he like bacon?” asked Eddie. “Would he eat it if he knew?”

  Isabel sighed. It was the right question. If he knew that bacon had once been a pig, then he would probably not eat it. There were pigs in a book she read him; three of them, two feckless and one wise, and he clearly loved them. Yet how different were we humans from the wolf who persecuted the three pigs?

  Pigs give us bacon. This was the way it had been put to her in a book she had herself possessed as a child: Farmer John. Farmer John, a bucolic character in blue overalls, took the reader round the farmyard and explained what was what. Hens give us eggs—we steal them, thought Isabel. Cows give us milk—ditto. And then, in an act of astonishing self-sacrifice, Pigs give us bacon.

  Eddie was good with Charlie, and Charlie seemed fascinated with the young man, who lifted him high in the air and then pretended to drop him, to squeals of excitement. While this was going on, Cat made coffee for herself and Isabel and carried the cups across to one of the tables.

  They talked briefly about the delicatessen. The mozzarella cheese was late, Cat complained; she was thinking of changing their supplier. And the Parmesan too, although that was never delayed for more than a few days. Isabel listened politely; she wanted to hear about Gordon. Had he heard anything further about the job? she wanted to ask, but it was difficult with Cat going on about mozzarella and Parmesan.

  Cat paused, and Isabel seized her chance. “I like him a lot, you know.”

  “Who?”

  “Your new boyfriend, Gordon.”

  Cat was cagey. “So do I.”

  “But of course you do,” said Isabel quickly. “One would not dislike a boyfriend, surely.” As she spoke, she thought of Bruno, the stunt man with elevator shoes. Had Cat actually liked him, or had Bruno been more of a perverse fashion statement? A boyfriend or girlfriend could easily be thought of in those terms, she realised. Or Cat might be making another point altogether, showing that she was her own person; sometimes people needed to find somebody the diametrical opposite of their parents just to make a point about independence. That happened often. A boy with dreadlocks, or a hard rock musician, a member—in good standing—of a biker gang, perhaps; a girl with multiple piercings in the nose and tongue; how easy with such a choice to remind parents that one’s tastes, one’s attitude and one’s voting intentions were not to be taken for granted.

  Cat tensed. “Of course not.” She hesitated, but then, relaxing, said, “Gordon is very popular.”

  Isabel said that she was pleased to hear that. There wa
s always some reason for popularity.

  “Oh yes?”

  “Yes,” said Isabel. “Have you ever met somebody who’s popular but unpleasant?”

  Cat thought about this. “No, not really.”

  “Well, there you are.” She took a sip of her coffee. “So he has no faults—as far as you know?”

  Cat shrugged. “Everybody has faults.”

  “So they do,” said Isabel. “We all have our quirks.”

  Cat looked at her with interest. “And yours are? Your faults, I mean: What are they?”

  “We don’t always see our own faults with crystal clarity,” said Isabel. “But since you put me on the spot, I suppose I would have to say that I tend to over-complicate matters—it’s my training. And I can be nosy—so Jamie tells me.” She noticed that Cat was nodding in agreement, and felt slightly irritated. What she wanted was for Cat to say, ‘You over-complicate things? You nosy? Surely not.’ ”

  Isabel was about to ask Cat about her own faults, but Cat suddenly said, “He’s too generous with his time. That’s one of his faults. It can be misinterpreted.”

  Isabel was careful not to appear too interested in this. “A nice fault to have,” she said. “And it’s better, surely, than being grudging with one’s time.”

  “He’ll listen to anybody,” said Cat. “He lets them go on about things, and then they think that he’s more interested in them than he really is.”

  Isabel said that she saw how this could be awkward: expectations could be raised, hopes dashed. While she said this, her heart sank. Gordon was not going to prove to be the flawless candidate she had hoped. Affairs: that was what Cat was alluding to.

  “Tell me,” she said. “Was he … with somebody before you met him?”

  Cat took the spoon from her saucer and retrieved a residue of milky foam from the bottom of her cup. “There was somebody.” She paused, as if uncertain whether to go on. “Not that it amounted to anything on his side. One of these one-sided things.”

  Isabel looked out of the window. A one-sided thing. She saw a man waiting at the bus stop on the other side of the road; a young woman passed by and his head turned. She thought he said something; the woman stopped, half turned, and then walked on. A one-sided thing.

  “You mean somebody fell for him, but not the other way round?”

  Cat nodded.

  “Well, that can be difficult,” said Isabel. “Yes, I see that. But all that needs to be done, presumably, is to indicate that it’s not on.”

  “She was rather unstable,” said Cat. “And married.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s not a big thing,” said Cat. “Women get infatuated. Remember what’s-her-name? Madame …”

  “Bovary.” Isabel sighed. “Married. And there was a betrayed husband, I suppose.”

  Cat’s answer was spirited. “It wasn’t his idea. I’ve been trying to tell you that. It was her.”

  “How far did it go?” asked Isabel. The question seemed prurient and she was not sure whether she wanted to know; but it was too late now. Cat looked at her angrily. “It didn’t go anywhere. I told you that.”

  Perhaps it was not as bad as Isabel had feared. “Well, so no harm was done.” She wanted to change the subject because she did not want Cat to begin to ask why she was so interested. She looked over to the other side of the room, where Eddie was feeding Charlie small pieces of black olive. “He must be the only child in Scotland who likes olives,” she said.

  Cat rose from the table. “I must get on with things.”

  Isabel reached out. “I meant what I said. I really like him.”

  Cat softened. “Well, thank you. I’m glad about that.”

  She wants to share him, thought Isabel. It was a lover’s pride. A lover wants others to see the beloved in exactly the same light as she does. And that was true of how Isabel felt about Jamie; she assumed that others would see him as she saw him. Yet she knew that this was an illusion: the light that surrounds the one we love is not always as bright to others. Indeed, they were often unaware that it was there at all.

  ISABEL FINISHED THE LAST of her coffee and then crossed the room to relieve Eddie of Charlie. The marzipan pig, slightly bigger than usual this time, had been produced and was being flourished enthusiastically by Charlie. “Pig! Pig!” he shouted. And then, exactly as anticipated, he bit off its head.

  Eddie laughed. “Olives and pigs. His two big things.”

  “And the fox in our garden,” said Isabel. “He loves him.”

  Eddie bent down and ruffled Charlie’s hair. “Their hair is always so soft,” he said. “Like an owl’s feathers. Have you ever felt an owl’s feathers, Isabel?”

  Isabel said that she had not.

  “I have,” said Eddie. “There was a guy who had a little barn owl on a sort of string. The string was tied around its leg. He was a falconer, and he brought it to the Meadows Festival.”

  Isabel smiled encouragingly. Increasingly, Eddie spoke of things he remembered, whereas in the past he had been largely silent about his life outside the delicatessen. It seemed to her that he was reclaiming something, piece by piece, assembling a life.

  “He let me stroke the feathers on the top of its head,” he continued. “I had never felt anything so soft. It was like … like Charlie’s hair. Even softer, maybe.”

  Eddie touched Charlie’s hair again, and the little boy looked up appreciatively.

  “He likes you,” said Isabel. “I think you’re one of his favourite people.”

  The compliment had a marked effect, and it seemed to Isabel that Eddie grew in stature before her, swelling with pride. He straightened up; his head moved back. Like a soldier on parade, thought Isabel; but how strange that mere words should do that to people—inflate them, deflate them too.

  Eddie looked at his watch. “I’d better get on with things,” he said. “I have to slice some Parma ham and people will be coming in soon. It’s always busy around lunchtime—as you know.”

  Isabel picked up Charlie to put him back in his pushchair. “Of course. And Charlie will need his sleep, won’t you, darling?”

  “Pig,” said Charlie, examining the marzipan animal.

  “Insults won’t help,” said Isabel.

  Eddie laughed. “He said pig and you thought …” He looked at his watch again. Then he seemed to remember something, and turned to Isabel. “Did you enjoy the film?”

  Isabel looked blank. She had not been to the cinema in two months, and she could not remember what it was that she and Jamie had seen last—something at the Dominion, she thought. But what was it? It had not been memorable. “What film?”

  “That Italian film,” said Eddie, reaching for a large Parma ham. “The Parma ham made me think of it. Remember that scene where …”

  Isabel frowned. “Italian film?” She could not remember when she had last seen an Italian film.

  “La Famiglia,” said Eddie. “Remember? Last Wednesday. I saw Jamie when I went out to get something to drink. Weren’t you there too?”

  Isabel was fastening the straps that held Charlie in the pushchair. She did so very slowly, listening carefully to what Eddie was saying. His voice seemed to echo, for some reason. It was loud in her ears.

  “Where was it?” she asked. “The Dominion?”

  “Never go there,” said Eddie. “No, it was at the Filmhouse in Lothian Road. I love going there. My friend used to work there. He sometimes gave me tickets. Maybe he shouldn’t have—I don’t know.”

  Isabel would normally have said that he should not, but her mind was preoccupied. Eddie had seen Jamie at the cinema. Jamie had not said anything about seeing a film. Why?

  “Are you sure it was Jamie?”

  “Yes. Of course. It’s not as if I don’t know Jamie.” He paused. “We said hello. He said ‘Hello, Eddie’ and then he went back in.”

  “Oh … Oh. Well.”

  She finished securing Charlie and turned to go. She said goodbye to Eddie, and he made a cheerful remark
about keeping another marzipan pig for Charlie. “It’s not that I want to ruin his teeth. It’s just that …”

  Isabel did not hear the rest of the remark. She had pushed Charlie out on to the pavement and now, for a moment, she had no idea which way to turn. Was she going to walk back to the house—in which case she would turn left—or was she going to go back into Bruntsfield—in which case she would turn right? She felt completely lost. She felt empty, scoured out; as if somebody had taken a great knife and hollowed her.

  She turned left, and began to walk back along Merchiston Crescent. A woman was approaching her on the pavement, going the other way. It was a woman she recognised but did not know—one of those nodding acquaintances that one builds up in a city even if in many cases one never finds out who they are or where they live. She was a small, bird-like woman who wore a scarf over her head, like an old-fashioned French farmer’s wife. Isabel did know a little bit about her. She lived in a flat in Merchiston Crescent and Grace, who knew her too, had been told that she was a singing teacher. “I saw somebody going to her place,” Grace once said. “He was standing outside her front door, about to ring the bell. A very round man with slicked-down hair and highly polished shoes. He must be learning to sing.”

  The singing teacher drew level with Isabel and, seeing Charlie, slowed her pace.

  “Such a beautiful little boy,” she said. “Do you mind my asking: what’s he called?”

  This was the first time that Isabel had heard her voice; it was high, with a West Highland lilt to it.

  “Charlie.”

  “Bonnie Charlie,” said the woman, bending down to examine Charlie more closely.

  Isabel took a deep breath. I am not going to cry, she told herself. I am not. But when the woman looked up, she saw the tears in Isabel’s eyes.

  “My dear …”

  Isabel reached in her pocket for a handkerchief. “It’s nothing. I’m all right.” She realised, as she spoke, how trite the words were. People said things like that without thinking, but it helped neither them nor the people trying to comfort them.