The Charming Quirks of Others id-7

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “Christopher Dove,” he said. “Your friend.”

  “It was sent to me this morning by Professor Lettuce. Can you believe that?”

  Jamie shrugged. “I’ve never been able to tell them apart. Lettuce is the large, pompous one, isn’t he? And Dove’s the tall one with the creepy manner?”

  “You describe them very well,” said Isabel. “Yes, that’s them.”

  “Oh well,” said Jamie. “So Dove’s written this book. You don’t want me to read it, do you?”

  Isabel explained about Lettuce’s letter and his completely unwarranted assumptions. “He shows the most amazing brass neck,” she said. “And I really don’t know what to do. That’s what I wanted to discuss with you.”

  Jamie lowered himself into one of the easy chairs in Isabel’s study. “Say no. Send the book back and tell them that you decide which books are to be reviewed. Be polite, but firm.”

  She knew that was perfectly sound advice. Lettuce should not be left in any doubt as to the position; a fudge of any sort would simply mean that he would proceed to write the review regardless and it would then be difficult for her to turn it down. And yet, and yet … She looked at Jamie. She could not imagine his being involved in a fight of any sort—he was just too gentle for that. And too nice. He was also truthful: he said what he was thinking and rarely agonised—as she did—before coming up with a view.

  “You’re probably right,” she said. “But I’m afraid that I’m worried about something.”

  Jamie raised an eyebrow. “You’re not scared of Lettuce, are you?”

  “Of course not. No. But I’m worried about my reasons for turning him down. What will he conclude? Don’t you imagine that he’ll think me petty and vindictive? And others might think that too. If Dove goes around saying that I ignored his book for reasons of personal spite. And he could say that, you know.”

  “Yes, he could. But do you really have to worry about what Dove says? People won’t necessarily believe him.”

  She thought about this. She wanted it to be true, but she did not think it was. People were only too ready to believe things that were manifestly untrue. When it came to remarks that portrayed others in a bad light, people were happy to believe things that showed others to be weak or flawed in some way: we believed that of them because it made us feel better; it was as simple as that.

  “You see,” said Isabel, “Dove describes one of my papers as unreliable. He says so in the bibliography to this new book of his.”

  Jamie looked surprised. “Unreliable? Dove said that?”

  Isabel nodded. Her dislike of Dove was growing; the slowburning qualities of anger meant that she was only now beginning to feel the impact of that one dismissive word: unreliable. How dare he? And what did he mean by it?

  She closed her eyes. Anger disfigured. She told herself that, took a deep breath, and then told herself it once more. We are disfigured by anger and must avoid it. We must, no matter how much we seethe.

  “I think I should let him write it,” she said.

  “In spite of this unreliability business?”

  “If I show him that I am happy to publish criticisms of my own work, maybe that will make him think again.”

  “Think again about you?”

  “Yes. About me.”

  Jamie rose to his feet. He put Dove’s book down on the table and walked across the room to Isabel. He embraced her. He kissed her with a sudden, urgent passion. What have I done, she wondered, either to provoke this or to deserve this? She returned his kiss. It did not matter about Dove; it did not matter about Lettuce; they were nothing to her, now that she had this exquisite, gentle young man who had come so unexpectedly into her life. She had everything, while Dove and Lettuce had nothing. So she should forgive them and publish Lettuce’s review, even if it turned out to be—as she thought it would— a paean of praise to Dove and all his works. Let him do that; she had everything and could afford to be generous.

  She disengaged from their embrace. “I’ll publish it,” she said. “I’ve decided.”

  “If that’s what you want to do,” said Jamie. He looked at her tenderly. “You know, you’re a tremendously kind person. It’s one of the reasons I love you. Your kindness.”

  She was taken aback. “There are many people much kinder than I am.”

  He looked doubtful. “Name one.”

  “You,” she said.

  HE COOKED LUNCH—a light bowl of pasta with a few mushrooms; a salad. They ate in the kitchen, talking about a concert that he was due to be playing in the following week. She was beginning to know her way around the politics of music; she understood now the quirks of conductors, of concert hall managements, of temperamental, prickly administrators. Not enough effort, Jamie said, had been made to advertise this concert.

  “And then, when they get a disappointing turnout, they wonder why,” he said.

  “People can’t attend things they don’t know are happening,” said Isabel. And then laughed; it was such an obvious thing to say.

  Jamie agreed.

  She suddenly thought of something. “Have there been occasions when the players forgot to go?” said Isabel.

  Jamie’s smile disappeared. “Don’t,” he said.

  She looked at him inquisitively. “You?”

  He looked down at his plate. “I can’t even bring myself to think about it,” he said.

  She could see that he was distressed; what had started as a light-hearted conversation had become serious.

  “You mustn’t let it worry you,” she said quietly. “Who amongst us hasn’t inadvertently done something awful?” She thought of her review of the dying man’s book. “We have to forgive ourselves, you know.”

  He nodded. “They had to cancel. They had to refund the ticket money.”

  “Forgive yourself.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. People punish themselves—sometimes for years. But it’s not always necessary. Forgiveness allows everybody to start again, not to be burdened with a whole lot of old business.”

  She thought of those studies of conversion that showed how people turned to a new faith or a new ideology to get rid of the burden of the past. They became new people, they thought, and could forget about what they had done before. She was not sure whether that was self-forgiveness or self-invention; they were different things, really, and she could not help but feel that self-invention was an easy way out. Not me, it said. A different person did that. Which could be quite true. We did become different people as we grew; the child is not the same person as the man.

  She looked at Jamie thoughtfully. “What were you like as a little boy?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “A little boy,” he said. “You know … a little boy.”

  She tried to imagine him at the age of seven. “Your hair?”

  “Same. And you?”

  “I wore my hair in pigtails,” she said. “I had a doll called Baby Isabel and we had matching dresses. If I put on a gingham dress, then Baby Isabel wore the same.”

  Jamie smiled. “Baby Isabel! What a lovely name. You must have loved her. Did you?”

  Isabel looked away. “Baby Isabel was left on a bus,” she said. “I cried and cried. They tried to get me to pay attention to one of my other dolls, but it was Baby Isabel I wanted.”

  He was silent. Then Jamie spoke. “You know something, Isabel? I murdered my teddy. I threw him over the Dean Bridge—you know, right over the Water of Leith, where the suicides jump. I threw my teddy over the edge. I don’t know why I did it. I suppose I might have wanted to see him fall, but the parapet was too high and I couldn’t. That was the end of him. My mother said, ‘Now you’ve done it. That’s the end of Teddy.’ ” He paused. “I’ve never talked about it. Never.”

  She reached out to touch him. “I think you can forgive yourself for that too.”

  He rose to clear the lunch things away. “All right, I forgive myself.”

  “Good.”

  She went out into the h
all, where they had left Charlie to continue his sleep. She lifted him up gently; she would transfer him to his bed. She was aware that she and Jamie had experienced a moment of intimate disclosure in the kitchen, talking about their childhoods, about the little things that might seem inconsequential but that were obviously buried somewhere in the mind, where they could be far more powerful than one might imagine. The possessions of childhood are sometimes loved with astonishing intensity; precious to their owners in spite of their simplicity or raggedness. Baby Isabel was a cheap little doll, but adored with passion, as, no doubt, was that betrayed teddy.

  As she carried the still sleeping Charlie upstairs, Isabel found herself wondering why Jamie had thrown his teddy over the Dean Bridge. He was punishing him, no doubt—or perhaps he was punishing himself. And if he was punishing himself, what for? She would ask a psychotherapist friend who knew all about such things. This friend had once said to Isabel that we punished ourselves for all sorts of reasons, but, for the most part, we did not deserve it. “In fact,” Isabel had said, “I wonder who truly deserves punishment, anyway. What good does it do to punish a person? All that does is add to the pain of the world.”

  Her friend had stared at Isabel. “Yes,” she said. And then, after a further few minutes of thought, she had said yes again. “That sounds so right,” she said. “And yet I suspect, Isabel, that you are very wrong.” And Isabel thought: Yes, I am. She’s right; I’m wrong.

  CHAPTER THREE

  CAT HAD ASKED ISABEL to help out at the delicatessen the next morning, and Isabel, as she always did, agreed. She knew that her niece only asked for her assistance when she really needed it, and in this case it was the best of reasons: a medical appointment.

  Isabel could not help but sound anxious. The news that anybody has a medical appointment is often taken as a sign of the worst; that was entirely natural, even if people saw doctors for all sorts of innocent purposes. “Is everything all right?” she asked. And thought, I could not bear to lose you.

  “I’m seeing a dermatologist,” said Cat. “I have a spot and the GP said that …”

  “Oh, Cat …”

  “Listen, don’t panic. People have spots. She said that it looked absolutely fine to her but she suggested that I have it checked.”

  “I know, I know. It’s just that …” And here she almost said, I could not bear to lose you, but did not. “It’s just that I always worry when people have medical appointments.”

  “Well don’t,” said Cat. “Anyway, could you …”

  “I’ll be there,” said Isabel. “Do you need me to open up?”

  Eddie would do that, explained Cat, but it would be helpful if Isabel were able to arrive shortly thereafter. “He’s all right to begin with, but he gets really anxious if he’s in charge by himself for too long. You know how he is.”

  Isabel did know. She was fond of Eddie, whom she had known for some years now, and she was used to his vulnerability, even if she had never been able to understand it. It seemed strange to her that a young man who looked robust enough should be so lacking in confidence as to be incapable of being left in charge of a delicatessen. But she realised that this was what anxiety was like—it knew no rhyme or reason; just as a fear of the dark cannot be assuaged by the pointing out that there was nothing there, anxiety could be without foundation.

  Something had happened to Eddie—some dark thing—that Cat knew about, but that she would not explain to Isabel. Isabel had not pressed her; if Eddie had told her in confidence, then she would not want Cat to break that confidence. She could guess, though, and she assumed it was to do with sex, and with the shame that went with that. Her heart went out to Eddie; she wanted to wrap her arms about him and say to him that he should not feel ashamed, that whatever had happened to him was not his fault, it was no doing of his, and was no reflection on him. She wanted to say to him that such things happened to both men and women and that it did not mean he was less of a man for it. But she realised that there must have been people who had already said all these things to Eddie and it had made no difference. You did not erase horror and shame with a few words; it did not work that way.

  Eddie had made some progress, of course. There had been a girlfriend, and even if she was not what Isabel might have wished for Eddie—she was a Goth, a follower of a fashion for pallid looks and dark clothes—he seemed to grow while she was with him. She had gone, Isabel understood, and she did not think that she had been replaced.

  “Isabel?”

  “Sorry. I was lost in thought.”

  Cat was used to this. Isabel thought too much, she felt. “I said: Will Jamie be able to look after Charlie?”

  Isabel was moderately surprised by Cat’s question. Her niece had experienced great difficulty in coming to terms with the fact that it was her aunt—even if Isabel was a very young aunt—who had taken up with her former boyfriend, and there had been a time when she would have scrupulously avoided any mention of Jamie’s name. But that had seemed to become much easier, as this question revealed.

  “Yes,” she said. “Jamie will do it, or Grace can if Jamie is teaching. Either way, Charlie will be entertained.”

  Arrangements were made, and that morning shortly after nine Isabel made her way along Merchiston Crescent to the delicatessen on Bruntsfield Place. It was a warm morning—June had eased itself into July with a grudging rising of temperature—and the foliage in the gardens along her route was in riot. She dodged a particularly ebullient climbing rose that had sent tendrils into the path of pedestrians; indeed, on one of these tendrils, snagged on a vicious-looking thorn, was a small fragment of blue material. A passerby had been caught, Isabel decided, and had lost a bit of a blouse or a shirt. She stopped, and gingerly took the piece of cloth from the thorn. No, she decided, if the owner of the garden was not going to cut back this impediment to the safe use of the pavement, then she would, before anyone lost an eye on one of those thorns. Reaching up, she took hold of the rose where it crossed the iron railings of the fence and bent it sharply to one side. The plant gave, but not enough; now the tendril pointed down towards the ground, discouraged but not detached.

  “Excuse me!”

  Isabel gave a start as she heard the voice from the garden.

  “Excuse me, what do you think you’re doing?”

  A man came into view in the garden; a man somewhere in his fifties, she thought, holding a garden rake.

  “Your climbing rose had sent a shoot out over the pavement,” said Isabel. “It’s a bit dangerous, I’m afraid. I was just pruning it for you.”

  The man took a step forward. He was wearing a khaki shirt and there were large damp patches under the armpits. His complexion was florid, his face rather puffed. She thought that he looked as if he had suffered a stroke at some point, perhaps not all that long ago.

  “You can’t do that and that,” he said gruffly. “That’s my rose and rose. You can’t break its stems like that. Who do you think you are, are?”

  “It was over the pavement. It’s already caught somebody. Look—here’s a piece of cloth I’ve taken off one of the thorns. And it could cause real damage. Somebody could get poked in the eye.”

  The man took another step forward. She could hear his breathing now; it was shallow and rather fast. He was not healthy, she thought.

  “Rubbish,” he said, his voice rising. “Rubbish and rubbish. You can’t take other people’s and people’s roses and break and break them. You can’t and can’t.”

  Isabel said nothing. The curious repetition of words that marked his speech was strangely unsettling.

  “So, so just you leave my roses and roses alone,” said the man.

  Isabel took a step backwards. She looked at the garden rake in his hand. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Maybe you could prune them just a bit.”

  The man frowned. “Prune and prune,” he said. “Yes.”

  She walked away. She felt raw after the encounter; he was clearly suffering from a neural condition of some sort,
and she should not blame him for remonstrating with her, but it still left her feeling uneasy. The speech difficulties suggested that somewhere in his brain there were lesions or misplaced connections, or perhaps connections that were not there any more. She looked about her, at the stone buildings and the metal shapes of the cars parked along the road. All that was so solid and resilient, while our brains were such soft and living things. A few cells went out of order, forgot their function or died, and that marvellous gift of language went awry. A few more cells might go, and then a blood vessel, and that brought the hammer blows of death. Just a tiny membrane, the sides of a fragile vessel, stood between us and annihilation and disaster.

  When she reached the delicatessen, she found Eddie behind the counter. He smiled cheerfully.

  “Cat left a note,” he said. “Thanks for coming.”

  She told him about what had happened on the way in. “There was a rose that had grown across the pavement—sent out one of those long shoots. It was full of thorns, and so I tried to break it off. Its owner got very excited about it. He spoke rather strangely—repeated himself.”

  “Oh, I know him,” said Eddie. “He comes in here. He asks for cheese and cheese. And when I give him his change he says, ‘And thank you and thank you and you.’ It’s weird.”

  “Who is he?” asked Isabel.

  “He told me his name once,” said Eddie. “I just remember the first part. Gerald, I think. Something like that. He told me his life history, but there were people waiting to be served and they started looking impatient. He worked in Amsterdam for many years, he said. He was something to do with the bank.”

  “Which bank?” asked Isabel.

  Eddie shrugged. “Some bank. His wife is Dutch, he said. But I’ve never seen her.”

  “It’s a very strange speech disorder,” said Isabel. “Very curious.”

  “It’s like echolalia,” said Eddie.

  Isabel looked at him in surprise. “What’s that?”