The Charming Quirks of Others id-7

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “Anything else? Was there anything else in the letter?” she asked.

  Jillian shook her head. “No.”

  “Typed?”

  “No. Handwritten. In green ink.”

  Isabel smiled. “There’s a popular view that green ink is favoured by the insane. No truth to it, no doubt. But people say that. They say that real cranks like green ink.”

  Jillian reached for her cup again. She had said all she wished to say, it appeared, and she was waiting for Isabel’s reaction.

  “It must be rather worrying,” said Isabel. “I can see that. But I don’t know if I can say more than that.”

  “Would you look into it?” asked Jillian.

  “Well, I don’t really see what I can do. I really don’t.”

  Jillian leaned forward. “Please,” she said. “We have to make an appointment. But we just can’t risk appointing somebody who is going to come unstuck because of their past. We can’t afford scandal—you do see that, don’t you?”

  Isabel said that she understood that reputation was important. But this did not seem to satisfy Jillian, who returned to the theme. “I can’t stress enough how important it is to avoid scandal,” she said. “Education is competitive these days. Parents have a choice. A whiff of something not quite right and we would lose students—we really would.”

  “I understand. But, really, what do you expect me to do?”

  Jillian lowered her voice. A young couple had come into the delicatessen and had taken a seat at a neighbouring table. The woman was looking at them in a way that suggested more than casual interest. “We need a very discreet person—and I gather that you are just that. We need somebody to make enquiries and find out which of these three has … well, has a past.”

  “We all have a past.”

  Jillian brushed this aside. “There are pasts and pasts.” She paused. “Please help us. The last thing we could do is to get professional enquiry agents involved—imagine if that ever got out. So we need somebody like you—somebody who knows her way about Edinburgh, who understands the issues. You’d never be suspect. And I have done my homework on you—you have a reputation, you know, for helping people.”

  Isabel stared down at the table. She had more than enough to do over the next few weeks. And yet she had never turned down a direct plea for help. Jillian was not to know it, of course, but Isabel found it very difficult indeed—practically impossible—to say to somebody in need of help that they would get no assistance from her.

  “All right,” said Isabel.

  Jillian reached out and took Isabel’s hand and squeezed it. “You’re an angel.”

  I’m not, thought Isabel. I’m weak.

  “Look,” said Jillian. “I’m not sure how you do these things, but why don’t I send you a photocopy of each candidate’s application? There’s a curriculum vitae with each of them—that’ll tell you all you need to know.”

  “And more than I should know,” said Isabel.

  Jillian looked blank. “I don’t see …”

  “Confidentiality,” said Isabel.

  Jillian laughed dismissively. “Oh, we never bother with that.” She paused. “Do you?”

  Isabel looked at her in a bemused fashion. “But you yourself said that you wanted me to do this because you didn’t want it to get out. That suggests that you attach at least some importance to confidentiality.”

  Jillian was brisk. “Where necessary,” she said. “But not otherwise.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  JILLIAN MACKINLAY,” said Isabel from her chair at the kitchen table.

  Jamie barely looked up from the stove. He was cooking dinner that night, and with Charlie safely tucked up in bed and asleep by now—he had been tired out by five o’clock and had had been given an early supper and bath—the house seemed quiet. Any sudden absence of children, Isabel noted, made the normal silences of the evening seem more pronounced; a small child could be a centre of noise, like a cyclone moving across the weather map, until suddenly, at bedtime, the storm subsided and quiet returned.

  “Jillian who?”

  “Mackinlay,” said Isabel. “We met them at the Stevensons’. It was some time ago …” She thought quickly; in the lives of most of us, there is a time before our partner and a time after our partner: in her case, BJ (Before Jamie) and AJ (After Jamie), although AJ suggested that Jamie was in the past, which he was not, and so DJ (During Jamie) might be more appropriate. She was sure that this meeting at the Stevensons’ had been in the DJ years.

  “Can’t remember,” muttered Jamie.

  Of course he could not, thought Isabel; they met so many people on the social round—such as it was—and one could not be expected to remember every conversation at every drinks or dinner party. Most such conversations were instantly forgettable anyway, merging into one another, smoothed out by banality.

  “There’s no reason for you to remember her. I almost didn’t when I saw her this morning, but then she helpfully told me exactly who she was. People sense it when you haven’t got a clue who they are.”

  “Garlic,” said Jamie.

  She looked at him quizzically. “Garlic?”

  “Sorry. I’m trying to get this right. I haven’t put any garlic in and she said that I should. Or I think that she did.”

  “She being?”

  Jamie dipped a spoon into the contents of the pot and tasted the result. “Mary Contini.”

  “Check the recipe.”

  He put down the spoon, shaking his head. “I don’t know where I put the book. It’s somewhere, but I don’t know … Do you think garlic makes a difference?”

  Isabel smiled. “Yes, of course. Garlic in a dish makes it taste garlicky.” She paused; what was wrong with Jamie this evening? “Don’t you agree? Whereas dishes without garlic …”

  Jamie sighed. “Don’t taste of garlic.”

  She looked at him. The sigh was uncharacteristic; it suggested that he had found her comment tiresome, a weak attempt at humour.

  “Do you want me to take over?” She had not asked him to cook that evening—he had volunteered. He was a good cook, she had discovered, and unlike many men he seemed prepared to stick closely to the recipe—or most of the time, at least. Men, she had noticed, were inclined to be slapdash in their measuring of quantities and even choice of ingredients; her father, who belonged to a generation of males who rarely ventured into the kitchen, had occasionally cooked but had been gloriously cavalier in his methods, substituting mint for basil and, on one famous occasion, onions for potatoes.

  Jamie declined Isabel’s offer, but not very graciously, she thought. He was rarely irritable, and there seemed to be something on his mind this evening. Should she ask him? She watched him at the stove. Yes, his body language gave it away; there was something tense about his position, as if he were feeling hostility to the task he was performing, as if he were poised to move away. He was standing, she thought, in the way of an opera singer about to stride off the stage in a display of high dudgeon.

  “Should I …”

  He did not let her finish. “I’m fine. It’s just that I wish I had the recipe to hand … Garlic.”

  “Put it in. You can’t go wrong with garlic.” You could, of course.

  He mumbled something she did not catch. Then he gave the casserole dish a final stir, replaced the lid and turned to face her. “This woman, Jillian what’s-her-name—what about her?”

  “Jillian Mackinlay. I met her today at the delicatessen. She came to sit at my table.”

  Jamie walked over towards Isabel and pulled out a chair. “Oh? Did you mind? I find it a bit irritating when I want to read something or just sit and think and somebody comes up.”

  Isabel shook her head. “No, I didn’t mind.”

  “And?” He hesitated, watching her closely. “She didn’t …” He sighed. “She asked you to do something? Is that it?”

  Isabel did not reply for a moment. She knew exactly what Jamie would think—and say—about this. He ha
d advised her to stop what he called meddling—but it was not meddling, she felt. Meddling was interfering unasked; she was always asked. And there was another difference: a meddler did not necessarily interfere for the good of somebody else—meddlers as often as not had their own interests in mind, or were driven by vulgar curiosity. And what, she wondered, was the difference between vulgar curiosity and acceptable curiosity? Was it just that our own curiosity was perfectly understandable, whereas the curiosity of others was vulgar? She smiled at the thought; that sort of distinction lay at the heart of many of our acts of discrimination. What I like is art; what you like is kitsch. My old car has character; yours is a wreck.

  Jamie frowned. “What’s the joke?” He sounded peevish, and Isabel stopped smiling.

  “I was thinking of something,” she said evenly.

  “You haven’t answered my question.”

  She raised her glass to her lips, looking at him over the rim. “Yes, she did ask me to help her. And before you say anything, I don’t see why I shouldn’t say yes to requests of that sort. I am, after all, a moral philosopher by trade, and if I feel an obligation to help, then it’s difficult to stand back. You do see that, don’t you?”

  To her surprise, Jamie did not argue. He shrugged. “All right. Fine.”

  She waited. He was looking away from her now, out of the window, and she knew at that moment, she knew with a conviction and certainty that took her by surprise, that there was something wrong. She knew, too, that she had to ask him now.

  “There’s something wrong, isn’t there?”

  It was as if he had not heard her question, as he continued to look away fixedly, saying nothing.

  “Jamie?”

  He turned round and she saw that there were tears in his eyes. She rose to her feet and came round the table to be beside him. She fumbled; she knocked over her glass, but it was empty now, and it simply described a half-arc on the table and then came to rest unharmed.

  “Jamie, what’s wrong? My darling … What is it?”

  He took her hand. “It’s been a horrible day,” he said.

  “Why? Tell me about it. Go on.”

  She felt the tension in his hand; even there.

  He wiped ineffectively at his eyes. “You know that new group I’ve been playing with? The chamber group?”

  She nodded. He had told her a little about it. “The one that meets down in Stockbridge? In St. Stephen Street?”

  “Yes. Tom lives there. He runs it. We’ve got a concert in August, on the Fringe. We’ve been doing one or two other things too. A wedding reception. And there’s a possible engagement in Stirling …”

  “Yes? Isn’t it going well?”

  “No, it’s going fine. It’s just that there’s this girl in it, Prue. She’s a cellist.”

  Isabel tensed. “Yes?”

  “A couple of weeks ago she told me that she was ill. She said she had something that they could do nothing for. She said she had a few months left—that was all.”

  Isabel continued to hold his hand, and put her other arm around his shoulder. “Oh, Jamie!”

  “She has this condition, you see. I knew she wasn’t well because she had talked to me about going to see a doctor in Glasgow, a specialist of some sort. I had the impression that what she had was quite rare. Anyway, we were rehearsing today and she looked so ill—really pale and thin. I found it so … so upsetting. I walked with her down St. Stephen Street. She lives in Leslie Place, just over the bridge, and she asked me whether I would come back with her to her flat. She said that she needed to talk to somebody and there was nobody in the flat. So I went with her and she made me some tea and … and I just found it so difficult.”

  Isabel did not say anything. There was nothing to be said. She felt that in the face of something like this, words of comfort could be platitudinous and even inflammatory. She had once lost a friend at school in a car accident and her father, in an awkward attempt to comfort her, had said something like At least she didn’t suffer. His words had been well meant, but they were inappropriate and had merely served to make her angry with him. The absence of suffering was not the point; the point was the untimely loss.

  But she could say that she was sorry to hear this, and she did. Jamie acknowledged her with a squeeze of his hand. He said “Thanks” and then he rose to his feet; the casserole needed attending to, and it was getting late. She watched him as he served the potatoes that would go with the main dish. He put two on his plate and two on hers; then, like a server in a school kitchen determined to be scrupulously fair, he placed a further one and a half on her plate and the same number on his.

  She watched him, and the thought came to her: The actions of the beautiful could be strangely fascinating, could assume an almost sacramental nature. Any one of us might do something simple, like tying a shoelace or combing our hair, or, as now, putting potatoes on a plate, and our acts would seem unexceptional. But when Jamie, or somebody like him, did such things, the act became something more than its mundane essentials. Artists sensed this, she thought, and captured the significance. Through Vermeer’s eyes we could look for hours at a young woman reading a letter. We knew that it was simply a young girl reading a letter—but it was more than that, far more.

  Jamie sat down, and they ate in a silence that was punctuated only with desultory exchanges. Halfway through the meal, she reached out and touched him on the arm. He paused, and looked at her, and briefly closed his eyes. She touched him again, lightly, and they resumed their meal.

  He spoke with lowered eyes. “I’m sorry, I’m just not myself.”

  “I understand.” She did. She imagined, too, how he felt; there would be the rawness that came with the hearing of bad news, the feeling of hopelessness that comes from the knowledge that we all must die, and some sooner than others. The only time this did not hurt was when we still had about us the immortality of youth, and Jamie would be far beyond that now.

  She told him at the end of the meal that he should not bother to help with the clearing of the table and the stacking of the dishes.

  He offered. “No, I will.”

  “No. Go and play the piano. Leave the door open. I’ll listen.”

  He did not insist, and left the room. She heard him open the door of the living room and a few moments later there came the sound of the first notes. Schubert.

  Jamie played for half an hour or so. Isabel finished in the kitchen and went into her study, where she picked up an article she had been reading earlier and had abandoned. It was tough going, and she knew that she could not accept it for the Review. Yet there was something dogged about the author’s argument, and in spite of herself she found herself reading it to the end. There the author concluded: “Ultimately we act for the good because we see it to be there—like the sun. We cannot judge the sun, and there is no point in trying to do that. The sun is there. We are here. We cannot either explain or deny these facts.”

  She set the paper aside. She was not convinced. The suggestion that we acted for the good because it was there was no answer, except, perhaps, in an intuitive system of ethics. How did we know that what we thought of as the good was, in fact, good? That was the job of the moral philosopher, and it did not help merely to say that the good was there, like the sun. She felt her irritation growing, but then, quite suddenly, she thought: Unless … unless the good was indeed something like the sun, something that we felt, just as we feel the sun upon our skin. Goodness would be a glow, a source of energy, a radiating force that we might never understand but which was still there. Gravity was there, and we felt it, but did anybody, other than theoretical physicists, actually understand it? What if goodness were the same sort of force: something that was there, could not be seen or tasted, but was still capable of drawing us into its orbit?

  She felt almost dizzy at the thought. Perhaps there was a force of moral goodness, every bit as powerful, in its way, as any of the physical forces that kept electrons in circulation about the nucleus of an atom. Perhaps
we understood that, even if we acted against it, even if we denied it. And that force could be called anything, God being one name that people gave to it. And we knew that it was there because we felt its presence, as the religious believer may be convinced in his very bones of the presence of God, even if we could not describe the nature of it.

  Or was it just a brain state—something within us rather than outside us, a trick of biochemistry? The feeling of recognition experienced on encountering this force of goodness might merely be an entirely subjective state brought about because some region of our brain was stimulated by something we saw—or even thought we saw. The perception of goodness as a force, then, might be nothing more significant than the warm feelings brought about by alcohol, or by a mood-enhancing drug. Those insights, it was generally agreed, were unimportant and solipsistic—a chemical illusion that signified nothing.

  The moment passed. She thought she had come to some understanding of goodness, but it had been illusory, a quicksilver flash of vision, nothing more. Perhaps that is how goodness—or God—visited us: so quickly and without warning that we might easily miss it, but perceptible none the less, and transforming beyond the transformative power of anything else we have known.

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING, while Isabel was in her study, Jillian Mackinlay walked up the front path of her house, an envelope in her hand. Grace, who was entertaining Charlie in the garden, intercepted her as she approached the front door. “Yes?” she said. “Good morning.”

  Jillian gave a start. “Oh, sorry, you gave me a bit of a fright. I hadn’t expected to find anybody lurking …”

  Grace’s nostrils flared. “I was not lurking. Charlie and I …”

  The visitor blushed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. I was just a bit surprised.” She paused to smile at Charlie, who was looking up at her with unblinking eyes. “This is Isabel Dalhousie’s house, isn’t it?”

  Grace reached for the large envelope that Jillian was clearly in the act of delivering. “It is. I’m the housekeeper.”