The Charming Quirks of Others id-7

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “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.

  SHE STARTED TO TACKLE THE MAIL, beginning with the package from Utah. She knew who would have sent it: Mike Vause, a professor at a university there, had corresponded with her over the last few years, since she had published an article of his on the subject of mountaineering ethics. From time to time he sent her articles and books that he thought she might like, even though she had never met him. It was typical of Western generosity, she thought; that direct, helpful attitude that made her proud of her half-American ancestry. Her sainted American mother had had that quality too, she reflected; and I love her so much, although her memory is fading. Don’t leave me altogether; don’t leave me.

  Isabel took the book out of the package and saw on it a picture of a high mountain ridge, with climbers strung out along it, tiny figures like ants. Tucked into the jacket flap was a note from Mike:

  Isabel—I mentioned this book to you once. Now I’ve found a copy that I’d like you to have. This author really saw some of the things we talked about—it’s unbelievable. Or rather, it’s very believable. People can be pretty wicked, can’t they? Are you still disinclined to climb? One of these days I’ll come over to Scotland and show you how to climb Ben Nevis. You can do it, you know. Anybody can. And you never know: you might find that you have a good head for heights after all!Mike

  She looked at the description of the book. The author had decided to climb Everest. He had looked forward to an expedition in the company of high-minded people; instead he had found a mountain riddled with all sorts of unattractive characters: thieves, charlatans, ruthless exploiters of would-be summiteers. She frowned, remembering again her conversation with Willy. He had suggested that a criminal lived a few streets away—which should be no great surprise, as criminals, large and small, had to live somewhere, and that had to be next door to somebody; but should criminals infest Everest, of all places? Everest, like any mountain, should be a place of purity, of high driven snow, of clean—if somewhat thin—air.

  Isabel sat down in her chair and began to read. The rest of the mail remained ignored and unopened. An hour later, Jamie came in with a cup of coffee.

  “I didn’t want to disturb you,” he said. Glancing at the book, he asked whether she was reviewing it.

  “No.” She put the book down. “Tell me, Jamie, if you were climbing Everest …”

  He laughed. “Yes. Easily imagined. So I’m climbing Everest …”

  “And high up—not in the Death Zone yet, but still pretty high …”

  He asked her what the Death Zone was.

  “Where there’s so little oxygen that you’re likely to die quite quickly.”

  Jamie shuddered. “It must be like drowning,” he said. “Drowning in air, like fish taken out of the water.”

  “I suppose so. Anyway, there you are, making your way up the mountain, and you see another climber colla
psed in the snow. What would you do?”

  Jamie shrugged. “I’d stop and ask him how he was.”

  “And then?”

  “Give him a hand.”

  She had not expected anything else. “Help him down the mountain?”

  Jamie answered naturally. “If that was what was necessary. I suppose it wouldn’t be practical for me to go and get help, would it?”

  Isabel did not think it would.

  “In that case,” said Jamie, “I’d help him down to … base camp, isn’t it? There’d be a doctor there, no doubt.”

  Along with the thieves and extortionists, thought Isabel. “Yes, there’d probably be a doctor. But you’d probably be alone if you tried to help him, you know.”

  Jamie looked at her for explanation. “But I thought that Everest was quite busy. Aren’t there always several hundred people on the mountain—if you include the base camp—all the hangers-on?”

  Isabel put down the book. “Yes, so I gather. But very few of them sign up to the old ethic of mountaineering.”

  “Which was?”

  “One of fellow feeling for other mountaineers. If you came across somebody in need of help, you helped them.”

  Jamie was thoughtful. “Like the custom of the sea.”

  “I suppose so.”

  He remembered a yachtsman friend who had told him that one could not count on that any more. He had mentioned that there had been cases where ships ran down yachts and were suspected of not stopping. “It’s survival of the fittest,” he had said. “These large ships have places to get to and can’t be bothered to lose the time.”

  Jamie had been appalled, and Isabel too, as he told her. “So it’s like that on Everest?”

  Isabel gestured to the book. “So we are told. It’s a different sport today. Look.” She opened the book to show Jamie a photograph of a mountaineering expedition in the thirties. A group of three men stood on an ice field, roped together. They were wearing tweed jackets, with waistcoats and ties. “Ties!” exclaimed Jamie.

  Isabel smiled. “Yes. And plus fours. Look.”

  She turned to another picture, this time showing a mountaineer equipped for an assault on Everest. It was difficult to make out his features under the goggles and the breathing apparatus. In his hand he carried a satellite phone. In touch with headquarters six thousand miles away, said the caption. She turned the page to find another photograph, which she showed to Jamie. “That’s him,” she said. “That’s the young mountaineer who was passed by forty other climbers as he lay dying. Nobody helped him.”

  Jamie looked at the face. The photograph had been taken at the beginning of the expedition; the man was smiling, looked optimistic. It was the face of a healthy sportsman, but it had the poignancy of being the last photograph, or almost the last photograph. The camera catches somebody in the fullness of life, but the subject’s fate is already decided.

  “He could have been saved?”

  “It seems so. Or at least given a chance. But that would have meant that the rescuers would have lost their chance of getting to the top.” She reached out to touch the photograph; to put a finger on the mountaineer’s cheek. Live in high places, die in high places.

  She stopped. She did not know where that expression had come from. Had she made it up, or had she heard it somewhere? It was difficult to tell; was it just a reworking of Live by the sword, die by the sword?

  She touched the photograph again. Jamie was watching.

  “Why are you doing that?”

  She answered softly. “Because he’s dead.”

  Jamie moved to the window. “Those flowers,” he said. “The ones by the wall. What did you call them again?”

  She told him, giving the Scots vernacular name as well as the botanical one. But her mind was elsewhere. Guilt. “He walked past somebody,” she whispered.

  Jamie turned round. “Who did?”

  She closed the book. “I think I know what’s troubling John Fraser,” she said. “He walked past another climber, who was dying. He didn’t help him.”

  Jamie looked at her in astonishment. “Isabel! How do you know that? You haven’t got a shred—not a shred—of evidence.”

  She just felt it, and told him so. She did not need evidence for hunches—that was what hunches were all about.

  He shook his head. “You’re doing it again. Inventing things. Whole stories now. Making them up.”

  She got to her feet. “But that’s what the world is all about, Jamie. Stories. Stories explain everything, bring everything together.”

  Jamie walked towards the door. “How do you know that John Fraser ever went to Everest?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Well, it would have had to be somewhere like that,” he pointed out. “It wouldn’t be so dramatic in Scotland. If you left somebody, the mountain rescue people would be there within a couple of hours. Our mountains don’t have Death Zones, Isabel.”

  “Yet people die on them,” she pointed out. “Every year. One or two—sometimes more.”

  “That’s because they slip.” He paused. He was thinking of a boy he had known at school, a boy called Andrew—and he could not remember his surname. But he could picture him, and saw him now, with his untidy fair hair and his permanent smile. He had been a climber and had died in the Cairngorms when he tumbled headlong into a gully that had been disguised by a fall of snow.

  She noticed his expression; he had told her about this. “Your friend? You were thinking about him?”

  “Yes.”

  “How often do you think about him?” she asked.

  He looked surprised. “Why do you ask?”

  Because she was interested, she said. Death was such a strange event—simple enough in its essentials, of course, and final enough for the person who dies; but human personality had its echoes. Non omnis moriar, said Horace’s Odes—I shall not wholly die. Yes, and he was right. As long as people remembered, then death was not complete. Only if there were nobody at all left to remember would death be complete.

  “I sometimes think of him,” said Jamie. “We were quite close. In fact, we were very close.”

  He stopped. She reached out for his hand.

  “I think of him a lot,” said Jamie.

  Isabel squeezed his hand. “Loved him?”

  Jamie nodded. “I suppose so. You know how it is with boys. Those intense friendships you have when you’re young.”

  “I think so.”

  “I went to the place,” said Jamie. “I climbed up there a year or so later. Just by myself—in summer. It wasn’t a hard climb at all—more of a walk, even if the gully itself was quite deep. I looked over the edge and imagined what he had seen as he fell—he must have seen something, unless he was knocked out straightaway, which they thought had not happened. And then I just cried and cried. I went down the hill, cried all the way down.”

  She pressed his hand. “Of course.”

  “I think I understand why mountaineering involves such … such passion. Climbers do get passionate, you know. They’re very spiritual people.”

  Isabel glanced at the Everest book. “Some of them. Maybe not so much now. I think our world has become harder, you know.”

  She did not want that to be true, but she thought it probably was. What had happened? Had the human soul shrunk in some way, become meaner, like a garment that has been in the wash too long and become smaller, more constraining?

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  HAVE YOU EVER CLIMBED ANYTHING, Charlie?”

  It was at a party, a rather noisy one, in the Scotch Malt Whisky Society in Queen Street that Isabel was addressing Charlie Maclean, Master of the Quaich, and Scotland’s greatest expert on whisky. Charlie wore his learning lightly, but everybody in the room knew that if there was one man who could identify a glass of anonymous amber liquid and attribute it to any one of the country’s distilleries, name the man who blended it, and talk at length about the history of the glen from which it came, then it was Charlie.

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nbsp; They were standing at the window of one of the upstairs rooms, and beyond them, swaying in the summer-evening breeze, were the tops of the trees lining Queen Street Gardens. That wind was mild, and had on its breath the scent of the Firth, the river, and of the hills beyond. And of newly cut grass, too, for the gardens had been attended to that day and the smell of the grass was strong.

  While Isabel was talking to Charlie, a well-built man in a linen suit and sporting the only monocle still known to be worn in Scotland, Jamie was on the other side of the room, engaged in conversation with a tall man whom Isabel knew well. This was Roddy Martine, a well-liked recorder of social events who kept society, and its doings, in his head. Roddy knew who did what, with whom, and when. He knew, too, who knew what about whom, and why.

  Charlie raised his glass to his lips and looked at Isabel across the rim. “Climbed?” he said. “When I was very young I was at school in Dumfriesshire. Until about eleven. Pretty odd place. They used to take us climbing the hills down there—Kirkudbrightshire and so on. Nothing very big. And I climbed a bit when I was at St. Andrews. The occasional Munro. And you?”

  “Not really,” said Isabel.

  Charlie remembered something about the school. “Funny, I never really think about that place. It’s closed now. It was a pretty dubious institution. One of the masters …”

  Isabel imagined that she was about to hear some awful story of cruelty, of the sort that had been surfacing so much—ancient traumas exposed and scratched at, like sores. But no, Charlie’s memories were benign.

  “He was called Mr. MacDavid,” Charlie went on. “He was the most unusual teacher. All he ever taught us—for years—was the Boer War. He knew a lot about that. So by the time I was eleven, I knew everything there was to know about the Boer War, but was pretty ignorant about everything else.”

  Isabel laughed. “The relief of Ladysmith,” she said. “The siege of Mafeking.”

  “Don’t start on that,” said Charlie. “But why did you ask me about climbing?”