The Charming Quirks of Other

by Alexander McCall Smith

  "Perfect," said Isabel.

  Jamie reeled off a litany of island names. "Coll, Tiree, Rhum, Colonsay. They're full of poetry, aren't they?"

  She thought of Michael Longley, and of his poem to the blues singer Bessie Smith. The lines were haunting, and came back to her whenever she heard somebody mention the Hebrides: I think of Tra-na-Rossan, Inisheer / Of Harris drenched by horizontal rain. She was not sure where Tra-na-Rossan and Inisheer were; Ireland, she assumed. And they had enough rain of their own there, not to be drawing attention to the rain that fell on Scotland. But yes, the poet was right: Harris and the other islands were often drenched by rain, even if not always horizontal. It was more a drifting rain, she thought, a curtain, a veil that came in from the Atlantic, white and smoky as an attenuated cloud.

  "Yes. And the Treshnish Islands," said Isabel. "I've always loved the sound of the Treshnish Islands."

  "Uninhabited," said Jamie.

  "Therefore ideal for a honeymoon."

  "I'd like to take you on a slow boat somewhere," said Jamie.

  She smiled. "Would you?"

  "Yes. Isn't that what everybody wants to do with the person they really love?"

  She opened her mouth to reply, but said nothing. He had uttered a declaration of love that was indirect, but was all the more powerful for that. She did not want to spoil the moment. It was perfect. This young man, this perfect man, had said that she was the one that he really loved. She closed her eyes for a moment, and saw herself in a cabin on what must be, she assumed, a slow boat to China. It was hot, and they were half unclothed, wearing only underwear, for the heat. Through the porthole there was an oily sea stretching out to a hazy horizon, a languid swell. She looked into his eyes; she held his hand; he leaned forward and kissed her. She felt his lips, the warmth of his breath.

  When she opened her eyes she wanted to kiss him back immediately, to embrace, unheeding of the people in the street, of the passing traffic. But she saw where they now were, on the pavement outside a large office building at Tollcross. It was the block in which her lawyers had their offices, and that fact alone seemed to inhibit her. But she smiled at the thought. Why should the idea of one's lawyers prevent one from kissing anybody? Could one kiss with enthusiasm if one was thinking of ... Who would have the maximum inhibiting effect? The answer came to her immediately, and she smiled again. It was a public figure she pictured; a man whom she had seen interviewed on the television the previous night, labouring a political point with his interviewer. He was very inhibiting. Very. Poor man. Did anybody ever kiss him?

  Jamie looked at her and again bent to kiss her on the lips. "There," he said.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE NEXT MORNING Charlie woke at exactly the hour at which he always awoke, and drew himself to their attention by kicking the high sides of his cot. Rattling the bars of his cage, as Jamie put it; which made Isabel think how like imprisonment was the world of the small child. There were barriers everywhere; meals at set times; watchful eyes; long periods of restriction and restraint; supervised exercise. The prison of childhood.

  She left Jamie to lie in while she attended to Charlie. He was a sunny child, particularly in the morning, when his delight at the world brimmed over into peals of laughter at the smallest thing. She usually carried him to the window so that they could look out together over the garden, and she did that now, standing with him in her arms, watching the morning sun struggle up over the high wall that separated their house from their neighbour's. Occasionally, if they were lucky, they saw Brother Fox trotting along the top of the garden wall, his raised highway, or sneaking into the clump of rhododendrons that was his refuge, his low bower.

  "Fo!" exclaimed Charlie, pointing wildly into the garden; x defeated him. He's algebraically challenged, Isabel had remarked to Jamie, who looked puzzled; Our son has no x's, she explained.

  "No fo," she said to Charlie. "Not today, at least." Words have power for you, Charlie, she thought; the uttering of a word will make something come to you. And it was the same for adults; what was prayer but that?

  She took Charlie into the kitchen and prepared his breakfast. She turned on the radio and listened to the news and the beginning of the morning current-affairs programme. The world had not improved from yesterday; there was conflict and disagreement, selfishness, the varying types of hatred, and, to top it all, accelerating ecological disaster. People now talked about saving the planet and nobody batted an eyelid. Only a few years ago such language would have been deemed to be wildly alarmist, even risible. But now there was a real threat, and people spoke about it in the same tones as they spoke about the old, well-established threats of drought and floods and the like. Locusts ... how friendly a threat they now seemed; but presumably the locusts themselves were suffering and found it difficult to plague people in quite the same way as they had in the past.

  She looked at Charlie, whom she had placed in his high chair, ready for his breakfast of porridge and strips of bread on which she would spread runny boiled egg, his soldiers. Was this the first time, she wondered, that parents might think, with good reason, that the world would run out on their children; that it might not see out their natural span? She only had to think for a moment before she realised that it was not the first time; there had been many points at which people had thought that their world was ending, and some of these not very long ago. In the sixties and seventies many people thought just that as they watched two bristling superpowers staring one another down, fingers on the triggers of vast nuclear arsenals. One of Isabel's aunts had told her about those days during the Cuban Missile Crisis when she had thought that nuclear war was inevitable. She had found herself feeling oddly calm, and had been determined to spend what she imagined were their last days in peace. "I sat and looked at pictures," she said. "Photographs of college friends. Of our old family house in Mobile. Pictures of the world. I took out our old copies of National Geographic and paged through them, just looking at the world in all its variety; saying goodbye to it, I suppose."

  "And you weren't frightened?" Isabel had asked.

  "Oddly, no. I should have been, perhaps, but I wasn't. I thought that it would be so quick, you see, and that we wouldn't really have time to feel the pain. And if there's no pain, then what is there to fear? I felt regret, yes, but no fear."

  Returning his mother's stare, Charlie broke into a grin. "Solds," he demanded.

  She reassured him. The egg was ready for spreading on the fingers of bread. "Here. Soldiers. You see--patience is rewarded."

  She helped him with the food. There was no point in thinking about what sort of future Charlie would have, because there was nothing she could do to protect him from it. She could do her best, of course, not to add to the burden we placed on the earth, but she suspected that this would never be enough. Humanity, it seemed, was too irresolute, too greedy, to save itself from destruction.

  Charlie opened his mouth to laugh, showering crumbs over his mother. She laughed too. Children had a way of reminding us of the immediate, and that, she felt, was exactly what she needed. She abandoned her morbid thoughts and concentrated on breakfast. Grub first, then ethics. Brecht? Which in her case meant breakfast first, then the Review of Applied Ethics.

  Jamie came downstairs and into the kitchen. His hair was uncombed, tousled from the night, and he was still rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

  "You could have stayed in bed," she said.

  Charlie looked up from his breakfast, shrieked with pleasure, and waved his arms about. It pleased Isabel to see her son's love for his father, every bit as much as it pleased her to see Jamie's love for Charlie.

  "I'm de trop," she said, offering Jamie the plate with its two remaining boiled-egg soldiers. "Here you go."

  Jamie took the plate. "He loves you just as much. It's just that ..."

  "A boy loves his father," said Isabel. "Naturally."

  Jamie bent down and kissed Charlie on the top of his head. The little boy gave another squeal of delight
.

  "You go and have a shower," said Jamie. "I'll take over." He looked at the clock on the wall. He had nothing to do, he explained, until noon and would look after Charlie until then if Isabel wanted him to.

  Isabel sighed. "I've got a whole pile of things on my desk. Grace said that she wanted to take him to the Botanical Gardens this afternoon. I could get my work out of the way ..."

  "You do that," said Jamie. "Go on."

  She nodded. I could give up working, she thought. I could spend all my time with Charlie, which is what I would love to do. But would I be any happier? And would it make much difference to Charlie? She looked at her son, who was now tackling one of the soldiers given him by Jamie. Being a parent was such a gift, and everybody said that it was a fleeting one. So precious, those years, hang on to them, Isabel. That had been Cousin Mimi from Dallas. They had been talking about what it meant to have children, and Mimi had warned her of how quickly the childhood years went past--not for the child, but for the parent.

  It was true. Already she found it hard to remember what Charlie was like as a tiny baby. Again, that was something that people had warned her about: Take photographs and look at them regularly, just to remind yourself. There was a popular song, was there not? She turned to Jamie; he knew about these things and could reel off the lines of the most obscure songs. How do you do it? I don't know, I just do. I remember songs. I forget lots of other things--the capital of Paraguay, for example--but I remember songs.

  She asked him, "Isn't there a song about it?"

  He looked up, and smiled. "About what? Boiled egg?"

  "About how children grow up so quickly."

  He thought for a moment. "Fiddler on the Roof. I think the song's called 'Sunrise, Sunset.' It asks how it all happened so quickly, how they grow up, become so tall, while nobody's watching."

  She remembered. "It's true, I think."

  Jamie shrugged. "I suppose so. But I don't think we should worry about it. We've got years ahead of us. He's not all that tall just yet, are you?" He pinched Charlie gently on the cheek and the little boy burst out laughing, as if sharing in some vastly amusing joke.

  "The years shall run like rabbits," she said, remembering what Auden had said, but refraining from telling Jamie, who sometimes sighed when she mentioned WHA.

  "Like rabbits?"

  Charlie chuckled. "Abbits," he spluttered.

  Hearing this, Isabel thought of its crossword potential. Cockney customs? Abbits. Senior members of monasteries? Abbits. Not the right thing to do? Bad abbits.

  She smiled. "What's the joke?" asked Jamie.

  "The loss of a letter changes everything," she said.

  Jamie reflected. The years did run like rabbits, he supposed. Rabbits ran quickly, shot off, and then disappeared, which is what the years did. He dealt with a final piece of egg-smeared bread and then looked up to see that Isabel herself had disappeared ...

  ... INTO HER STUDY. She had a number of letters to deal with, some opened, some still in their envelopes, lying accusingly on her desk. The postman tended to the apologetic, particularly in respect of large parcels, which he knew contained manuscripts or books for review--work, in other words. He had arrived very early that day and had said, "This one's really heavy," as he passed her a large padded envelope franked in Utah. He glanced at the customs declaration stuck on the front of the package. "A book," he said. And then, rather quickly, "I'm sorry, we're not meant to read anything but the address. It's just that ..."

  "Willy," she said, "you're the model of discretion. I couldn't do your job. I'd die of curiosity as to what was in the letters I was delivering."

  Willy looked sheepish. "Yes, it's tempting, isn't it? I never look at letters, even if the envelope has been torn and some of the inside is showing. I look the other way."

  "And postcards?" asked Isabel, innocently.

  He blushed. "You can't help but see," he said. "You have to read the name and address and the message is right there--sometimes just a few words. How can you not see them?"

  "You can't," agreed Isabel. "And that's fine. If people write things that are meant to be confidential on a postcard, then it's their own fault if somebody else reads it. Caveat scriptor--let the writer beware."

  Willy handed her a sheaf of other letters from his bag. "I've seen some pretty odd postcards," he said.

  Isabel's curiosity was piqued. "Such as?"

  Willy hesitated. "You won't tell anybody?"

  "Of course not. Except Jamie. Do you mind if I tell Jamie?"

  "That's all right," said Willy. "Well, I had to deliver this postcard, see. I won't tell you where. Not far from here--not your street, though. Anyway, it was a plain postcard--no picture--and on the message bit the sender had written, clear as day, 'I didn't do it--you've got to believe me. It was Tom. I saw him. And he knows I know. So if anything happens to me, make sure to tell Freddie that Tom's the one they should blame.' "

  Isabel smiled. "Well, well! So now we know too. Except ..."

  "Except we don't know who Tom is."

  "Yes," she said. "How frustrating. He could be getting away with ... with murder, I suppose. It could be, you know."

  Willy nodded. "I thought of that. But what could I do? It could all be about something very ordinary. Something like cheating."

  Isabel considered this. There was an obvious inference that it was not something inconsequential; one did not fear for one's safety if one knew about something minor. So it had to be something that Tom would go to some lengths to conceal, even to the extent of removing the writer of the message. She pointed this out to Willy, who thought about it for a few moments, and then said that he agreed.

  "There is something you could do," she said. "Do you know the person to whom you delivered the postcard?"

  "Of course. I've been delivering his mail for years."

  Isabel looked away. She liked Willy, who was an old-fashioned postman: she had nothing to teach him about life, she thought, nor about the obligations we encounter along the way. And yet she was a philosopher, and philosophers should not feel awkward about telling people what to do.

  "You could have a word with him," she ventured. "You could say something about not being able to help but see what was written on that card. You could say that you had been losing sleep over it and could he set your mind at rest."

  Willy started to shake his head even before she had finished speaking. "Sorry," he said. "Sorry, but no."

  Isabel raised an eyebrow. "It wouldn't cost you anything."

  Willy's head started to shake again. "Dangerous," he said. "He would then know that I know. And what if he told Tom? Then something could happen to me."

  Isabel thought this rather fanciful. "Come on, Willy. This is Edinburgh, not ..." She waved a hand in a vaguely southeasterly direction. "Not Palermo."

  "I mean it," said Willy. "I could be in real danger."

  "Surely not. This person--the person to whom the card was delivered--surely he's perfectly respectable ..." It sounded odd. What was respectability these days? But what other expression was there? she wondered. Law-abiding? That said what she wanted to say, but somehow sounded equally old-fashioned.

  Willy smiled. "He's not, you know. He's ... he's a criminal."

  At first, Isabel did not know what to say. But then she wondered how Willy knew. One had to have proof to make that sort of allegation, and what proof would he have? She looked at his bag. He carried secrets; he carried people's lives about in his bag. He knew.

  "See?" said Willy. "So I can't really do anything. Not where I live."

  Isabel understood, and the thought depressed her. She had often speculated on what it must be like to live in a rotten state, where those in power and authority were corrupt and evil. Stalinist Russia must have been like that; the Third Reich; and countless lesser examples of tinpot dictatorships. How trapped one must feel; how dispirited that there was nobody to assert the good. There were courts and investigative journalists and public-spirited politicians who
could be turned to, but what if one were powerless or without much of a voice? One needed grammar, and volume, to be heard. What if one lived in an area where the writ that ran in the streets was that of a local gang leader? Or where, if one incurred the disfavour of somebody powerful, a nod could arrange a nasty accident? For many people, that was a reality: the police, the state, could not give them real protection.

  "We can't put everything right," she said. It was a shameful admission, and contrary to much of what she believed. But it was true, at least for Willy, who sighed and said yes, she was right. We could not put right even a tiny part of what was wrong.

  "Compromise," he said, making ready to leave.

  Isabel watched him walk down the path. He was right about compromise; and who amongst us, she thought, did not make compromises, all the time? The answer came without prompting: Charlie. He lived in a world of absolutes, but would learn to compromise soon enough so that he could live in a world that was far, very far, from the peaceable kingdom of our aspiration, of our imagining. Nor had Charlie yet learned to lie; what he said was what he thought. And yet at some stage he would learn to lie and at that point, Isabel thought, would his moral life really begin. The struggle with lies was for many of us the first, most difficult, and most long-lasting battle of our lives. It was not surprising, perhaps, that so many people gave in at an early stage. Only Kant, with his categorical imperative, and George Washington, with his chopped-down and possibly apocryphal cherry tree, and a few others, formed the company of those who were constitutionally incapable of telling a lie. The rest of humanity was, she feared, fairly mendacious.

  She imagined, for a moment, Charlie, a few years hence and able to wield an axe, even if a tiny one, cutting down her cherry tree--and there was a small cherry tree in her garden--and then saying, "Didn't." That's what children said: Didn't. They knew it was not true, and that in most cases they should have said did. But no turkey, when asked the time of year, if speech were possible for turkeys, would say Late November or December 24.