The Charming Quirks of Other

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Isabel looked fondly at Charlie. There was so much that she wanted to protect him from in life--as every parent does. Cactuses were on that list somewhere, she supposed.

  "I don't think so," she said. "There'll be time enough to find out about cactuses in the future. Cactuses, alcohol, the breaking of the heart: lots of time to learn about all that."

  She had her own plans for the day. The previous day, before going down to Abbotsford, she had telephoned Charlie Maclean with a request to meet the father of the man who had been lost on Everest. Charlie had mentioned that he knew him, and she wondered whether she could have a word with him. Charlie was obliging, and came up with a telephone number. "He's retired now," he said. "He actually lives not far away from us. He still does some nosing for one or two of the distilleries. He was very good." He paused. "Apparently he never really recovered from what happened. He was an only son--the climber. There's a daughter, but she's not quite right, I believe. Unfortunately she's a bit glaikit." He used the Scots word for mental handicap. It was not a word that many used any more, preferring learning difficulties, the modern euphemism. But there was nothing unkind about glaikit, which survived because the policing of language had not extended to the Scots lexicon.

  She had telephoned the father and he had said that he was prepared to see her. He asked her what it was about and she explained. "I want to know more about what happened on that expedition," she said.

  He sounded weary. "You're writing something?"

  "Not exactly."

  "You really want to talk to me?" he asked. "I wasn't there, you know."

  "If you don't mind."

  There was a short silence. He does mind, she thought, and understandably so. But this is not what he said. "Very well. If it's important to you."

  He spoke with resignation, but it was not his tone of voice that struck her: it was the phrase If it's important to you. That phrase, she observed, was the foundation of so much of our moral dealing with others. We recognise what is important to them; we take it into account. And if we did that, then so much else followed: recognition of rights, the practice of courtesy--everything, really, that made for peaceable relations between people. Gay marriage, she thought: some people might not like the idea, but if they thought If it's important to you, the case for their recognising it became so much stronger, so much more obvious. Unless, of course, one applied the same question to the objectors, in which case one was back where one started--trying to reconcile two mutually antipathetic positions, which was about as easy as ensuring that olive oil and balsamic vinegar remain mixed after shaking.

  Isabel closed her eyes; one could not construct a moral position based on analogies of balsamic vinegar.

  "Are you there?"

  The voice on the line brought her back from her philosophical wandering.

  "I am. Sorry. I was thinking about something else." She apologised again and then made the arrangement. He would see her at his house at ten-thirty. He gave her the address, which was just outside Edinburgh, near Roslin Chapel, on the edge of the Pentland Hills. He lived off a road that ran between Roslin and the village of Temple; a strange slice of landscape, caught between narrow, twisting glens and the more rolling terrain that became the Border hills.

  "You can't miss our house," he said. "It's ochre. You won't see any other ochre houses. You can't go wrong."

  As he had anticipated, she found the house easily. It was larger than she had imagined: somewhere between a functional farmhouse and a house that would in the past have been called a laird's house--a house that at the time of its building would not have been grand enough for a family with real aspirations, but which would have been perfect for one that wanted to be comfortable.

  The house was served by a short drive, on which gravel had been freshly laid, making a satisfactory crunching noise under the tyres of her car; a noise like the crashing of waves on the shore; a good sound, she thought. She parked, and then, getting out of the car, looked at the house before her. It was a fortunate house, she decided, as it must have been built just before Georgian became Victorian. The shadow of Victoria was there, but had not quite fallen on this building, which still had the scale and pleasing proportions of Georgian architecture. An easy house. A house that was comfortable in its skin, or mortar perhaps.

  The ochre came from the harling, that roughcast coating of tiny pebbles and lime that was applied to the outside of Scottish houses. This had been painted in the warm shade that one found occasionally in eastern Scotland, brought from somewhere else, from the Netherlands, perhaps, in the days of trade between the Scottish ports and their Dutch neighbours over the North Sea.

  He had seen her and opened the front door as she stood before the house, looking up at its facade. "Miss Dalhousie?"

  Iain Alexander looked somewhere in his early seventies, perhaps, but well groomed and with the clear, slightly ruddy skin of the Scottish countryman. Wind and rain were the foundations of that complexion; wind and rain and the cloud-scudded skies.

  They shook hands. She gestured to the front wall of the house. "You're very lucky living here," she said.

  "I know that. Yes, we are fortunate. Ochre is such a warm colour." He spoke simply, with an accent that was redolent of old-fashioned Edinburgh. "My late wife was particularly fond of this place." He pointed vaguely at the grounds. "She created a marvellous garden, which I'm afraid I've rather let run to seed. But one can't do everything--or anything, sometimes."

  He invited her in, leading her down a book-lined corridor into a large drawing room that faced, unusually, the rear garden. There were paintings on the walls, all of them conventional: landscapes, a study of birds in flight, a small classical study, an old framed map of the county of Midlothian. And there, above the white marble fireplace, was her Raeburn, the one that she had examined with Guy Peploe and that she thought he would be bidding for on her behalf next month. She stood still for a moment, wondering whether she was mistaken. Was it a copy? Or was it another painting altogether, one that looked uncannily like the real Raeburn?

  "Is that ..." She broke off. It was her painting; it had to be.

  "Raeburn," said Iain. "My pride and joy. Or it is at the moment ..." He, too, trailed off, before adding, "It has to be consigned to the auction house soon. I shall miss it."

  Isabel moved forward to examine the painting more closely. At the bottom of the frame there was a small gilt lozenge on which she now read the inscription: Sir Henry Raeburn: Mrs. Alexander and Her Granddaughter.

  Mine, she thought. My painting of my four-times great-grandmother. She turned to him. "Why are you selling it?" It was a tactless question, and she realised this immediately after asking it. People sold things because they did not like them or because they needed the money. There were hardly any other explanations. And he liked this painting.

  "Needs must," he said. "I'm reluctant to part with something that has family associations, but ..." He shrugged. "Financial necessity." He spoke with an air of embarrassment, and she understood: he belonged to a generation that viewed any discussion of money as in bad taste. Indigence was borne with fortitude; solvency with modesty.

  She blushed, and thought: I have made him admit to poverty. She looked again at the picture. "I know about this portrait," she said.

  He did not seem surprised. "Raeburn is well known."

  She turned to look at him again. "I know who this woman is."

  "It's on the frame," he said simply. "Mrs. Alexander. A distant relative of mine."

  "And of mine," said Isabel softly. "Except not-so-distant, in my case. My four-times great-grandmother."

  For a few moments he said nothing. They looked at one another rather sheepishly, both aware that the nature of their encounter had suddenly and subtly changed. They had begun as strangers; now they were relatives, even if distant ones.

  He looked out of the window momentarily and then back into the room. "Is this really why you've come to speak to me? Is it to do with this painting?"

&n
bsp; She shook her head. "No, not at all. I had no idea that you and I were connected." She paused. "And I must say I'm delighted to discover a new distant cousin."

  He seemed to relax. "Extraordinary. But then we're not a large population in Scotland, are we? I read somewhere that the DNA people say that an awful lot of us are related. More than we think."

  "The Alexander connection should have occurred to me when I saw your name. I wasn't thinking."

  Iain gestured to a chair, inviting her to sit down. "I have a family tree somewhere," he said. "We had a cousin from New Zealand who turned up and burrowed away in Register House for months. He came up with this great long chart that he unravelled on the kitchen table. Rather like the book of Genesis: so-and-so begat so-and-so, unto the nth generation. A lot of pretty boring detail."

  She knew what he meant. She understood why people did such things, but she could herself never summon up interest in the details of who had married whom and who had which children; unless of course, there was an interesting historical anecdote. She was related, through her mother, to the first man to land an aircraft in Mobile, Alabama, and to a woman who became a nun after being cleared of murdering her lover, the owner of a disreputable nightclub in New Orleans. That was interesting, but only mildly so. The fact that one had landed an early aircraft in Mobile meant that one had an aircraft in a day when very few people did; it also meant that one was brave, perhaps, or foolhardy. And as for the nun ... She must have done it, thought Isabel, and the jury must have reckoned that the man deserved it; juries regularly acquitted the flagrantly guilty as long as they thought the victim was sufficiently deserving of his fate. All owners of nightclubs were disreputable, she thought; it was not a profession that attracted fine, upstanding people. Not generally.

  She sat down and there followed a conversation about how she and Iain were connected. It was not complicated, but it was very distant, following lines that had diverged almost two centuries before. And yet it was something--this knowledge of association; it could not be ignored. It was a form of connectedness, the one with the other, that people looked for instinctively when they met somebody. This was why people searched for mutual acquaintances when they were introduced to strangers, trying to find if the other person knew the people they knew. It was as common as conversation about the weather; and as reassuring, in its way. Weather bound us together: remarks about rain, or cold, or whatever the isobars were doing to confound our hopes reminded us that even if we did not know somebody, they felt the same as we did and had to put up with, or, more rarely, to celebrate the same weather as we did.

  Isabel glanced again at the painting. "I'm sorry that you're having to sell her," she said.

  His lips curled into a smile. "It is better, of course, to sell the grandmother of another than one's own. She is your grandmother--great-great, whatever it is--rather than mine."

  Isabel appreciated the dry humour. Why did we use the expression to sell one's own grandmother? Was that really the worst thing one could do?

  "I must confess to something," she said.

  He looked at her expectantly.

  "I saw the painting in the Christie's catalogue," she said. "And I was planning to bid for it."

  If he was surprised by this disclosure, he did not show it. "Well, I do hope you get it. It would be nice to know that it had gone to an appropriate home. Much better than going abroad--or whatever happens to Raeburns these days."

  She was about to say something about how at least some Raeburns returned to Scotland--she had seen one offered by an Edinburgh gallery, a striking portrait of a Scottish doctor. But she stopped herself, and within not much more than a few seconds she had made her decision; it was an unusual idea, but these were unusual circumstances.

  "What if I bought it?" she said.

  He raised an eyebrow. "It will be a public auction. If you want to, then you can bid." He seemed embarrassed as he continued. "It won't be cheap, you know."

  "I know that," she said. "But what if I bought it from you--directly? You could withdraw it from auction."

  His embarrassment became acute. "I'm very sorry. I don't want to seem grasping, but I'll get a higher price in the saleroom. And I need the money, I'm afraid. I have a daughter, you see, who has a difficult condition. I need the money for her care."

  Of course, she thought: the daughter whom Charlie Maclean had mentioned.

  "I'll offer you as good a price as you can reasonably expect," she said. "Above the estimate. And I know what that figure is, as it happens."

  He seemed confused. "I don't know ..."

  Now she made the offer that she had been thinking about as they spoke. She wanted to put a hand on his shoulder; she wanted to embrace this dignified, courteous man in his pride. "And there's something else. I'd be quite happy for you to enjoy this picture for, let's say, the next five years. You can keep it. I'll buy it, but you can keep it here. I'm quite happy to wait five years, and it'll give me pleasure to know that you're enjoying it."

  He stared at her. "Are you serious?"

  "Very," she said.

  "But why? Why should you do this astonishingly generous thing for me?" He paused. "Which I can hardly accept, of course."

  She was dismayed by his rejection. "But why not? We are, after all, related." She smiled. "If only very slightly. But a gift between relatives ..."

  He shook his head. "You make too much of that."

  "No, I don't. But may I tell you something? Would you mind?"

  He frowned. "If you wish."

  "Doing this will give me pleasure. It will also suit me. I will get a painting I want, and you will have the advantage of being able to keep it for a while. You're giving me something, and I'm giving something to you. I know I don't have to. I could go and buy it at the same price at the auction, but I would like you to keep this painting for a time. Please allow me to do it."

  He was listening carefully, his expression grave. She thought: It sounds as if I'm giving him a lecture. "Sorry," she said. "I don't mean to lecture you."

  He raised a hand. "No, I'm the one who should apologise. You offered me a gift, and I immediately said that I could not accept it. That is churlishness--sheer churlishness."

  "So you accept?"

  He shook his head, as if to clear his growing confusion. "This is really rather strange. You telephoned me and asked to speak to me about Chris's accident. I said yes, although I couldn't imagine what I would have to say about it that would be of interest to you. And then you turn up and claim to be a relative and offer to buy my Raeburn but not really buy it ..."

  She agreed that it all sounded rather odd. "But life is like that, Mr. Alexander. It really is. Odd things--unexpected things--occur all the time. I think we should let them happen." She crossed the room. He was still seated, and she reached down and took his hand. He was surprised, but allowed her to hold it, and there was created a sudden moment of intimacy between them. It was not embarrassing in any way; it was reassuring.

  "I take it that you had a valuation from Christie's?"

  He nodded. "Yes. They gave me a figure."

  "I shall give you that," she said. "Withdraw it from the auction. You can explain, quite truthfully, that you want it to remain in the family."

  "The auctioneers might not like it," he objected. "They may ask for their premium. They do that, you know, if you sell it privately to somebody who's seen it in their catalogue."

  She was not bothered by this. "Fair enough. I'll pay their premium. They won't lose anything."

  Iain seemed to be having difficulty in grasping what was on offer. "And so the painting really will stay here? But you'll be the owner?"

  "Yes. But there will be what my father--he was a lawyer--used to call a back letter. It will say that the painting is to remain in your possession for the next five years. Would that be all right with you?"

  He laughed. "How could I possibly object?" Then he added: "This really is unbelievable."

  Isabel grinned back at him. "I su
ppose that it's not the sort of offer you could refuse."

  "You aren't the Mafia?" he asked in mock alarm.

  "I don't think they allow women," said Isabel. "And that's another reason for closing them down."

  He stood up. "I know it's rather early, but I always have a small sherry before lunch. May I tempt you, or would you prefer something soft? Lime cordial?"

  "That would suit me very well," said Isabel. "You have your sherry and I'll have a glass of lime. And then, perhaps we could ..."

  "Talk, yes, I know that's what you want to do. We can talk about Chris."

  He left the room and Isabel went to stand once more in front of the Raeburn. Mrs. Alexander, her forebear, looked down on her from the other end of almost two centuries, her look one of complete approbation; not that Isabel saw this. Modesty would have prevented her from thinking in such a self-congratulatory way. She had simply done what was right; in most circumstances this is not expensive--the right thing is easily and cheaply done. Sometimes, though, it can be costly, and this was one such an occasion. But it was still the right thing to do, and when Iain returned to the room, Isabel showed no regret at all. An Edith Piaf moment, she thought. Non, je ne regrette rien--even thirty-six thousand pounds, tied up for five years in a Raeburn that she would own but not possess.

  THEY SAT NEAR THE WINDOW. Outside, the sky was light, with only thin streaks of cloud striated across the cold, empty blue. He said: "I never liked Chris's mountaineering, but I knew that it was hopeless trying to stop him from doing the one thing that he wanted above all else to do. It was more important to him even than his rugby. Did you know he played for Scotland? Even as a small boy he was always climbing up things, you know. We had to get him down off the roof on more than one occasion, and when we went to Jura one summer he shot up one of the Paps without telling us. He was twelve at the time, or thereabouts. We thought that he had gone off to see a friend who was also staying on the island, but he hadn't. He'd gone climbing."

  "I went to Jura," said Isabel, remembering the visit with Jamie.