Sweet, Thoughtful Valentine

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Eddie offered to make the tea and bring it to the table. He had just returned from the dentist and was beaming with pleasure. “He put this thing in my mouth,” he said to Isabel. “It sprayed water all the over place. And then he used an air drill. He said that it had no moving parts. I didn’t feel anything.”

  “There you are,” said Isabel. “Just as we told you.”

  “And then I had a session with the dental hygienist,” Eddie continued. “She took thin strips of sandpaper and put them between my teeth. She said my teeth were very strong—some of the strongest teeth she’s ever seen. She said that I should always floss in case I got gum disease. She says that just about everybody gets gum disease if they’re not careful.”

  He was staring at Isabel’s mouth as he said this, and she pressed her lips firmly together. “I do not have gum disease, Eddie.”

  He looked abashed. “I didn’t say that you did.”

  “Then don’t look at me like that. Just make the tea.”

  She rejoined Ruth at the table.

  “And how’s Jamie?”

  Isabel told her of Jamie’s recent concert tour with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. “They were in Amsterdam,” she said. “Amsterdam and Berlin. They had good audiences.”

  “And little…forgive me, I can’t remember what your wee boy’s called?”

  “Charlie. Thriving. A pillar of the local playgroup.”

  Isabel enquired after Ruth’s mother.

  “She’s doing well for her ninety-two years,” said Ruth. “She’s in St. Gregory’s. You know the place? They look after her very well. She has a sitting room and a bedroom and can have her own things there. But…” Ruth looked out of the window, as if debating whether to reveal something. “But it’s extremely expensive. Have you ever had to pay nursing home fees?”

  Isabel shook her head. Her mother—her sainted American mother—had died when Isabel was twelve; and her father had suffered the coronary that ended his life while he was still living in the house that she now occupied with Jamie. Neither had needed to be nursed in their final years.

  “I don’t know how people manage,” Ruth went on.

  “They sell their house,” said Isabel.

  “The children’s inheritance.”

  Isabel agreed. “Yes, but children aren’t entitled to their parents’ money—or not when the parents can use it for their own purposes.”

  “No, possibly not.” Ruth hesitated. “St. Gregory’s is almost forty thousand a year. I sold my mother’s house about ten years ago, but the proceeds have all been eaten up by keeping her there. Not that I resent it—not for a moment. She’s very comfortable.”

  “It’s a good use of it,” said Isabel.

  “Yes, but now I have to find another source, and so I’ve decided to downsize. I’m putting my house on the market.”

  Eddie arrived with the tea. He placed the teapot in front of Ruth and nodded to Isabel. He was still clearly euphoric after his dental visit.

  “That young man seems cheerful,” said Ruth.

  Isabel glanced at Eddie, who had now returned to the counter. “He’s been to the dentist,” she said. “He was dreading it and now it’s over.”

  “Ah, that feeling. Profound relief at still being alive after some dreaded threat.”

  “Yes. That feeling.” Isabel poured Ruth’s tea for her. She was concerned by what Ruth had begun to say about selling her house. “Do you have to sell?” she asked.

  Ruth nodded. “Effectively, yes. The doctor says that Mother will be with us for a little while yet. She has cancer, you see, that they’re not treating aggressively, but they think that she’s got another two years at the most—maybe a little less. She’s in no discomfort.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Well, we all have to go sooner or later. And she’s had a pretty good time of it. So all I want to do is to make sure that these final two years—if that’s what it’s going to be—are lived in comfort in the place that she’s familiar with, and where she’s looked after by the people she knows and likes. But that costs money. I have to think in terms of up to one hundred thousand pounds.”

  “And you’ll get that by downsizing?”

  “Not all of it. I can raise about fifty if I moved to a two-bedroom flat. My own place is quite small but I’d certainly come away with a spare fifty if I sold it now and bought this smaller place I have my eye on.”

  “And the other fifty?”

  “I have my own savings. I can use them.”

  Isabel reached out to touch her friend lightly on the arm. “Your mother’s lucky she has you.”

  Ruth was airily dismissive. “Heavens no! I’m the one who’s fortunate to have had her. Anyway, I’m raising a bit here and there. Mother had a few bits and bobs that I’m selling. I have a power of attorney and can manage her estate, you see. She had a car that we never got rid of—it’s been sitting in my garage and it transpires that it’s so old that it’s actually appreciating. Can you believe that? It’s been valued at twenty thousand. And there are a few paintings that she owned—nothing special. I’ve put them up for auction at Hamilton’s.”

  Isabel drew in her breath. “Hamilton’s?”

  “That place down in the New Town. You must know it.”

  Isabel nodded. “I do.” She paused. “And these paintings—what are they?”

  “A couple of landscapes—nothing special. And a rather nice watercolour—a big one—that Mother always liked. She described it as her picture of her young men. It’s rather effective—a Spitfire and some young men waiting to go up. Battle of Britain, I imagine.”

  Isabel felt a cold hand clutch at her heart. “Not worth much?” she asked.

  “Apparently not. The auctioneers said it might fetch a couple of hundred—maybe a tiny bit more. But every little bit helps, doesn’t it?”

  Isabel struggled to answer. “Yes, I suppose it does.”

  She looked down at the floor. She had given her word to Roz. She had promised not to say anything about the painting to anybody. Truth. She looked up, straight into the eyes of her friend. Ruth smiled back at her. It was a look of complete trust, of the sort that proceeds from friendship; a trust that assumes that a friend will not conceal from you that which you might wish to know—truths palatable as well as unpalatable.

  Chapter Six

  Jamie listened as he cooked dinner. Seated at the kitchen table, a glass of New Zealand white wine before her, Isabel told him of her conversation with Ruth in Cat’s delicatessen that morning and of the revelation that Ruth’s aged mother was the owner of the Ravilious.

  He put down his wooden spoon and wiped his hands on his apron.

  “That’s it?” he asked. “Nothing more?”

  She looked at him across the room. He was a good cook, but a messy one, never washing up as he went along. That evening a trail of bowls and pans bore witness to his creation of a complex Rajasthan dish he had learned from the Indian cookbook Isabel had given him for his last birthday.

  “No, nothing more,” she said. “And I would have thought that’s quite enough.”

  He assured her he was not making light of her dilemma. “No, I agree, it’s a very difficult position to be in. Whatever you do—”

  “…or don’t do,” interjected Isabel.

  “Whatever you do or don’t do, you’re going to let somebody down.”

  Isabel took a sip of her wine. It came from a vineyard she had visited years ago—a place on the South Island, not far from the Marlborough Sounds. She remembered standing by a row of vines and looking towards the ocean—a field of blue ploughed by a single ship; the white furrow of the ship’s wake, brief, impermanent, a straight line that was soon rubbed out by the waves. She sighed. Somehow New Zealand seemed a more innocent, less convoluted place, an attractive alternative to the complicated world in which she seemed to live her life—a world of dilemmas and conundrums, a world of nuanced decisions that, however carefully reached and however scrupulously justified,
would make some people feel they had somehow been betrayed or wronged.

  Jamie picked up his spoon and dipped it into the pot. “You need to break that promise,” he said. “It’s the promise that makes the situation difficult for you. If you hadn’t made that promise, you could do what you like.”

  “But I did make it.”

  He looked into the pot. “We don’t have to keep every single promise we make. We can’t.”

  Isabel frowned. “Can’t we?”

  “No, we can’t.” He turned to face her. He seemed concerned that she simply did not understand. “I’m not saying that you can break promises just like that. All I’m saying is that there may come a time when we have to say that we’re no longer bound by our promises.”

  She asked him for an example.

  “Marriage,” he said quickly. Then he repeated himself. “Yes, marriage. You promise to stay with somebody for the rest of your life. You even say until death do us part. But what if you go off somebody? What if you go off the person you marry to such an extent that you can’t bear to be in the same room? Are you still bound by the promise you made?”

  She did not answer immediately. Some might still argue that you were—some Catholics and some Kantians, but did they do so with any degree of conviction?

  She looked past him, out of the kitchen window, into a garden bathed in the soft golden light of a Scottish evening; it was June, not far off the longest day, and it would barely get dark that night. White nights—the privilege of the far northern summer. She was blissfully happy with Jamie, but she had friends who were not so fortunate. She suddenly thought of one, of a friend who had confessed to her that she found it impossible to be in the presence of her husband without feeling a visceral revulsion. “Everything about him appals me,” this friend had said. “I hate the way he eats—he slurps things. I hate the way he cleans his ears with the top of a pencil. I hate the rancid smell of his breath. I hate the things he says, the thoughts he thinks, the music he listens to.”

  How could a promise survive such antipathy?

  “Yes,” she said to Jamie. “You’re right. There are some promises you can break.”

  “Well, there you are. That’s your answer.”

  It was not going to be that simple. “But you have to have good grounds for breaking them,” she added quickly. “Really good grounds.”

  Jamie thought she had them now. “Compare the claims,” he said. “On the one hand you have this woman, Roz, who’s hoping to make a profit at the expense of somebody’s mistake. Does she need the money?”

  “Yes, she does, actually.”

  “Because her husband’s gone off with another woman?”

  “Yes.”

  Jamie shrugged. “Plenty of people are in that situation. You said he was a doctor?”

  “Yes.”

  “She’ll get a reasonable settlement. She won’t be on the bread line.”

  Isabel remembered what Roz had said about the shortfall in their mortgage. “No, but she’s going to have to struggle to get a decent flat.”

  “But she’ll have a roof over her head?”

  Isabel conceded that Roz probably would not be homeless. “She’ll have to come down a bit in the world, I suppose. But no, she won’t be out on the street.”

  “So her need is not all that pressing,” said Jamie. “It would be nice for her to have a bit more money, but she’ll get by without it.”

  Isabel nodded.

  “Right,” said Jamie. “So that’s her case, so to speak. Now, what about this other woman, Ruth—what about her? What’s at stake there? Her mother needs the money to stay in the nursing home. If she doesn’t get it, she’ll have to go somewhere she doesn’t know. It would be very upsetting for her.”

  Isabel corrected him. She pointed out that Ruth had savings and these could be used to make up the sums required. “Ruth’s mother wouldn’t be moved even if Ruth didn’t get the money from the painting.”

  “But that money’s her mother’s. The painting belongs to her. She’s morally entitled to it.”

  Isabel sighed. “I’m not sure if that’s the way our economic system works. We don’t always have what we deserve to have; we get what the system allows us to have.”

  Jamie returned to his cooking. “I just don’t like the idea that you can’t break a promise. What if somebody comes to you and says: I’m going to tell you something but you must promise not to tell anybody. And you promise. Then the person says that he’s killed somebody. What then?”

  “You inform the authorities.”

  Jamie stirred the pot vigorously. “What’s the difference then? Roz is planning to rip off this poor ninety-year-old. Inform the authorities—or, rather, tell the auction house they’ve got it wrong.”

  “I wish it were that simple.”

  “It is that simple,” said Jamie.

  She sensed his irritation. Was she being unreasonable? For a few moments she vacillated, but then she made up her mind. She could not break the explicit promise she had made to Roz, much as she would have liked to have done so. Promises were not sacrosanct, but this was not a situation in which breach of promise was justified. She wished that it were, but it was not. The barriers in this life, she thought, were very rarely in the places in which one wanted them to be.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t. I just can’t do it.”

  It seemed to her for a moment that Jamie would continue with his argument, but he did not. He placed a lid on the pot and turned the heat down. Undoing his apron, he joined her at the table and poured himself a glass of wine.

  “You know something?” he said.

  She was wary; she dreaded his criticism. “What?”

  “I’d hate it if you stopped thinking about things.”

  She relaxed. “I see. Well, sometimes I wish I didn’t.”

  “No,” he said. “You must. There are more than enough people to act badly in this world—but hardly any who do the right thing—like you.”

  He reached across the table to take her hand. He squeezed it. “My amusing Valentine,” he half-sang, grinning. “Sweet, thoughtful Valentine…”

  She returned the squeeze. “My favourite musician,” she said. “By far.”

  * * *

  Isabel tried to put the auction out of her mind, but its time and date loomed stubbornly large in her consciousness: Friday, 10 a.m. On Thursday night, sleepless, she made her way downstairs after she and Jamie had gone to bed. Sitting at her desk, she began to write. What is the exact status of a promise given rashly and without full awareness of the surrounding circumstances? This problem, familiar enough to philosophy undergraduates, is nonetheless more complex and difficult than it appears at first blush. Philosophers have always viewed promises as creating a very particular form of moral obligation…

  An hour or so later she printed out what she had written and sat back and read it. It did not help; it made her feel no better simply to have explored the contours of the issue. She laid aside the four typed pages, switched out the light, and went to stand at the window. It took her eyes some time to get accustomed to the darkness, but slowly the garden landscape became clearer: the shape of the rhododendron bushes, the outline of the trees, the pattern of the shadows thrown by the moonlight. The quiet and waiting world…

  She became aware of movement. At first she thought it was the wind causing a branch to sway, but then she saw the shape of the fox’s head, raised slightly, as he moved across a stretch of lawn and then stopped to sniff at the air. She saw the tail, a dark brush, and for a moment the glint of the moon in the animal’s eyes.

  “Brother Fox,” she whispered.

  He hesitated, looking about him as if somehow aware that he was being watched. Then he moved and in seconds was gone. Isabel stood where she was for a minute or two, unwilling to bring to an end the moment of one-sided contact. Then she returned to bed, not turning on the bedside light, but slipping back between the sheets in darkness. It was shortly after midnight,
and she thought, Ten hours to the auction. She had not imagined going, but now she knew that she would. She would not intervene, but she felt she had to know what consequences her silence would have. In a strange way, she felt responsible for what was happening. She had the power to change what would happen at the auction—she had chosen not to use that power. Yet that did not distance her from the likely outcome; rather it made her central to it, its determinant, its author. And the least she could do, she decided, was to be there to see how events would unfold.

  Sleep came upon her slowly, as her mind was active. As she drifted off, odd thoughts intruded: the Pitlochry Theatre, for some reason, came to mind, and then she thought, for a completely unconnected reason, of Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet. And then Martin Fortstone—and she saw him, standing before her in Dundas Street, and she suddenly realised why he had thanked her for her discretion. He had imagined—incorrectly—that she was somebody else, some friend of Hatty’s, who had become aware of their affair and who had kept silent. That must be it. So now Martin Fortstone was relying on her to continue to be discreet, and that added one more complication. Did we owe people things they thought we owed them, even if we did not really owe anything at all? Balzac intruded again, inconsequentially, and then, in dozy confusion, sleep came.

  Chapter Seven

  Isabel watched as the auction house began to fill up. She had been one of the first to arrive, and had taken a seat off to one side so that she would get a good view of proceedings. Busying herself with the catalogue, she did not notice Roz coming in and only saw her just before the auction was about to begin. Shortly thereafter she noticed that Ruth was there too, sitting at the back, engaged in conversation with a bespectacled thin man whom Isabel recognised as a lawyer with an interest in art. Roz saw her and waved cheerfully; Ruth, deep in conversation with the lawyer, did not appear to see her.

  The auctioneer was a smartly dressed woman with a quick, businesslike manner. Once she had ascended the rostrum, she flipped open a book she was carrying and welcomed everybody to the auction. There were one or two withdrawn lots, and an announcement about the renumbering of a handful of others. Then the sale began.