The Charming Quirks of Others id-7

by Alexander McCall Smith

  She did—even if she had not given it a second thought after the telling of it. Something about a tattooed man who had a tattooed wife and was proud of his child, the tattooed baby; it was a snippet of nonsense; a haiku-like bit of nothing. It was surprising that he remembered it, she thought, but he sometimes tucked her words away and came up with them later.

  “Make up something about the sun coming out again.”

  “Do you really want me to?”

  He said that he did. “It will show that you forgive me.”

  She thought for a moment. Then she whispered to him, “Gentle as love itself is Scottish rain / Before the healing sun will shine again.”

  Jamie said nothing at first, and then asked why the rain was gentle as love.

  “It just is,” Isabel said.

  They stood together, arms about one another, quite still. She wondered, What do I have to forgive him for? For being too kind? Or for something else? Undisclosed failings, she thought; that great weight we all carry around with us, some of us for all our lives, unable to speak about them, unable—involuntary Atlases all—to share the burden.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  IT WAS A RAW FEELING—that feeling of emptiness, of bruising, that sometimes descends after the witnessing of an act of human cruelty or folly. But even if Isabel felt this way after confronting Jamie, it was not to last: a vacuum in the soul, like an area of low pressure on the weather map, attracts repairing winds: and these came.

  They made it up, in the way in which a couple may make it up: tenderness, expressions of concern for the feelings of the other, solicitude, acts of gentle touching. If unforgivable things had been said, then these words seemed soon to be forgotten. Charlie distracted them, of course, and reminded them that they were bound together not just by love and affection but also by the life of this small boy. So Isabel tried to put out of her mind what she had said, even if she could not help but ask herself how she could have said it. And what, she wondered, if Jamie had taken her seriously: Would he have repaid her with the same coin? The tendons of love could snap very easily, and when they did, they frequently failed to heal. Falling out of love, after all, was just that: a fall.

  It would not happen again, thought Isabel; she would never again distrust Jamie. And even thinking this made her blush with shame that she could have suspected him of an affair, like some insecure teenager worrying about an errant boyfriend. That would not happen again—ever.

  They were both busy: Isabel continued with the final preparations of the next issue of the Review and with sending out the piles of books that publishers hoped would be mentioned in the Books Received column. There were reviewers to be contacted, some of whom required something perilously close to flattery, or even cajoling, before they agreed to write the reviews. There were ambitions and enmities to be considered: she had once sent a book out to a reviewer in Australia who had rapidly accepted the commission—too rapidly, perhaps, as she later discovered that the author under review had seduced the reviewer’s wife, a scandal that was well known in Australian philosophical circles; the seduction had taken place at a weekend conference of the Australasian Association of Philosophy, on, as it happened, loyalty—but there was no way in which she could have been aware of that. The reviewer, now spending a lonely retirement in an echoing house in the Blue Mountains, must have fallen upon her request to write a review as one coming upon manna in the desert. “I shall be delighted to do this for you,” he wrote back. “Do not bother to send the book: I have recently purchased the work and will work with my own copy, so I can start immediately. Thank you again.”

  She should have been warned by the effusiveness of the response, but she was not. And when the review came in—there was nothing to make her suspicious, except perhaps the final sentence. This read: The author needs to reflect on what he has done. The general tone of the review was highly critical, with reference being made to “egregious errors” and “sloppy scholarship.” But such remarks, although discourteous, were within the range of what might be expected in the cut and thrust of academic debate. A few weeks after publication, though, when the background was pointed out to Isabel, she had read the final sentence, and indeed the entire review, in a very different light. It was an act of revenge.

  While Isabel worked on the Review, Jamie had a week of rehearsals in Glasgow; he was standing in for a woman bassoonist who had gone off to have twins and would be away for at least six months. It was regular work and he liked the conductor; he was happy. He knew most of the orchestral players already and he enjoyed playing for opera, especially for the Italian repertoire that Scottish Opera was working on. “It always makes me want to cry,” he said. “ ‘Una furtiva lagrima,’ in fact. Donizetti does that to me. Brings out the furtive tears.”

  “But of course music should do that,” she said. “I’m never dry-eyed when I hear ‘Soave sia il vento.’ I can’t help myself.”

  “Mimi’s death did it for me,” said Jamie. “I first saw Bohème when I was thirteen. We went to the Theatre Royal in Glasgow, with the school, and her death scene had me in floods. I didn’t want the other boys to see, and so I looked down at the floor, which meant that I really didn’t see much of her actual demise. But I think the others noticed and one of them kicked me on the shin.”

  “Boys,” said Isabel. They were always hitting each other, kicking things; that lay ahead with Charlie, who was gentle, like his father, but who would no doubt go through the phase of testing the fragility of the world. Yesterday he had thrown a toy wooden train at a door and been thrilled by the experience; there would be more to come.

  Jamie inclined his head in agreement. “Yes, boys. But then years later I saw Bohème done in a modern setting—an artist’s warehouse in New York rather than a garret in Paris. Everything on the stage was very minimalist: acres of white, even minimalist white, if that’s a colour. Mimi was still dying of consumption, though, and it suddenly occurred to me that there was a real problem here. If it was meant to be contemporary New York, then Mimi wouldn’t have died. She would have been given antibiotics …”

  Isabel burst out laughing. “I’m not sure that antibiotics help opera,” she said. “They could change so much.”

  “And they would have meant so much more Mozart,” mused Jamie, for whom the death of Mozart had been the big tragedy. He had once said to Isabel: “Mozart’s dying so young, Isabel: was that, do you think, a bigger loss for the world than the wiping out of the dinosaurs?” She had been about to say “A silly question, Jamie,” but had realised that it was not so silly at all; in fact it was profound, whichever way one looked at it. Was a refined statement of truth and beauty—some great artistic creation, perhaps—better in its essence than a destructive and brutish life-form? Better for whom? And if the dinosaurs had continued to exist, would we—or Mozart—have come into existence? Perhaps we had progressed enough in our understanding of the world to abandon our claims to being that special. If the choice were between dinosaurs and Homo sapiens, then did it really matter one way or the other, except to the species involved? Ultimately, of course, if we were the ones passing the judgement, then it was infinitely better that it was people rather than dinosaurs. But that was a conclusion simply begging for objections because it meant that we could despoil the world at will, as long as we judged what we did to be in our best interests. The dinosaurs had gone: next might be the tigers, if we wanted their forests or if we thought that they might eat a few too many of us; or the whales, if we wanted to eat them, or make them into watch oil or some other product. No, the moment one began to deny any value other than that conferred by humans, the moral game was up. There could be no morality beyond the limited world of what we did to each other.

  But now Jamie continued: “Just think, if Mozart had been given another thirty-five years. Just imagine.”

  Isabel wondered whether the composer had said everything he wanted to say by the time he died, as had happened with Auden, who had said less and less in his later years
, and much of it rather cantankerous. Perhaps there was a time for an artist to die, or at least to become silent, before he said something that contradicted everything he had said before. She had thought this recently when a distinguished philosopher—a long-professed atheist—began in his final years to write articles that took a different view. Those who had applauded his earlier works were dismayed and put the change of view down to senility. She had mentioned this to Jamie—read it out from a letter published in the newspaper—and he had said, “Yes, but he still believed what he said when he wrote those articles. He may have been losing the place, but he still believed what he said.”

  “Undoubtedly. But the belief might have been based on a physical change in the brain.”

  Jamie looked unimpressed. “But still his brain.”

  “His brain at … whatever age he was. Let’s say eighty-something.”

  “But a man aged twenty is the same person as the same man at eighty-something, isn’t he?”

  She said that the answer to this was yes and no. “The same physical person, yes, but we can be quite different persons in other respects.” She looked at him thoughtfully. How would he change? she wondered. “And perhaps we shouldn’t judge people in the same way throughout their lifetimes. We can become different people, don’t you think?”

  He looked doubtful, and so she carried on: “All we need to do is to make it clear that we’re talking about people at a particular point in their lives. Look at those people who were communists in the thirties and then changed their minds when they saw what communism could do. What do we say of them when we sum them up at the end of their lives? That they were communists? That they condoned the Gulag?”

  Jamie shook his head. “No. We look at what they became. That’s their …” He paused, searching for the right expression.

  “Their final position?”

  “Yes. That’s what counts.”

  She considered this charitable—and she approved of that. There was not enough charity. There was plenty of readiness to blame and to punish; there was never enough generosity of spirit.

  She thought: We do not need to look for reasons for love—it is simply there; it comes upon us without invitation, without reason sometimes; it surprises us when we are least expecting it, when we think that our hearts are closed or that we are not ready, or we imagine it will never happen to us because it has not happened before. But if I were to ask myself why I love you, or perhaps try to find what is the main cause of my being in love with you, perhaps it is because you are generous of spirit. It is not because you are beautiful; not because I see perfection in your features, in your smile, in your litheness—all of which I do, of course I do, and have done since the moment I first met you. It is because you are generous in spirit; and may I be like that; may I become like you—which unrealistic wish, to become the other, is such a true and revealing symptom of love, its most obvious clue, its unmistakable calling card.

  THE ENERGETIC SUBSTITUTION of one task for another, more awkward task may make one forget for a while, but only for a while. Isabel knew that, and even as she buried herself over the next few days in performing the admittedly pressing work of putting the Review to bed—delicious term, she thought—at the back of her mind was the knowledge that there were other things she should be doing: thinking of how to deal with Professor Lettuce and his unsolicited review; speaking to Prue; finding out more about the candidates for the principal’s post; and, of course, getting married. That made her smile; an impending marriage should occupy one’s mind almost entirely, but here she was merely adding it to a list of things to do. There were people, she knew, who simply never got round to getting married; they might have decided to marry, but for some reason the timing might never seem quite right, or sheer inertia might take over. She had read of one engagement in the Highlands of Scotland that had lasted for twenty-eight years before the couple got round to holding a wedding. The groom had bought a wedding suit that had remained in the cupboard during all that time, as had the bride’s dress; the spread of middle age had made both too small.

  Of course Isabel knew that things moved more slowly in the remote communities of the Scottish Highlands, where there is no need to rush things; and as she thought this, she remembered that suits became too small there for other reasons. In her student days, on a camping trip with friends, Isabel had passed a small farmhouse—a croft—in Wester Ross and seen a man’s suit hanging out to dry on a line. People did not wash men’s suits, but they did here, where there was no alternative; and there it was, hanging on the line, dark against the green grass, gesticulating in gusts that came in from the sea, arms filled with wind. The picture remained in her mind, so vivid after all these years that she could smell again the grass and the iodine scent of the drying kelp on the seashore and the wind that came in from the rolling Atlantic.

  They would talk about marriage again, and soon. She would suggest that they give themselves a little more time—a few months—to make their plans. If they were to go away on honeymoon, then there would be the Review to think about: one could not simply leave a philosophical journal to look after itself. And there were Jamie’s commitments to consider: his programme of rehearsals and short-notice session work meant that he would have to make arrangements too. And then there was Charlie: he would come with them, of course, but that would rule out some of the places that Jamie had said he would like to visit. One could not easily take a small child to uninhabited islands off the coast of Scotland, for example.

  Isabel had agreed to a Scottish honeymoon, but, had she been given a completely free choice, she would have chosen something like trekking in the Himalayas. But such a choice was definitely not a good one for a child under two. Himalayan tracks were steep enough for an adult; for a toddler they might as well be vertical, unless, of course, Charlie were to be carried all the way, perhaps by one of the Sherpas who hired themselves out as porters. Charlie could be well wrapped up and strapped to one of those impossibly large packs of luggage the Sherpas shouldered; but what fun would such a honeymoon be for him? And there were those narrow mountain paths where one false step might send one sliding hundreds of feet down a side of scree or over some dizzy precipice. No, a better honeymoon from Charlie’s point of view would be somewhere with a beach and a friendly, barely tidal sea at just the right temperature. That sort of place was, of course, hardly romantic, but then a honeymoon with a small child could not be expected to be a conventional honeymoon.

  She would sit Jamie down and talk to him about all this. They would identify a date and plan accordingly, but for now they would get on with the immediate tasks of life, one of which, for Isabel, was to attend a dinner party. She would be going by herself, as Jamie was playing in a concert in Dundee that night; and her attendance would bring back into focus at least one of the matters that she had been shelving: the shortlist.

  “PEOPLE IN EDINBURGH forget about us,” said Jillian Mackinlay, as they looked out over the lawns at Abbotsford.

  Isabel took the glass of wine that a young man offered her on a small silver tray. He was dressed in the uniform of a waiter or steward—black trousers and white shirt—but she could tell from his hands that he was really a gardener, or tractor man perhaps, inveigled into household duties. She thanked him, and he broke into a broad smile. “You work here?” she asked.

  “No. I’m a shepherd.” He nodded towards a man standing at the other end of the room. “His shepherd.”

  Isabel took a sip of her wine as the young man moved away. “An Ettrick shepherd,” she muttered.

  Jillian looked puzzled.

  “James Hogg,” said Isabel. “The Ettrick Shepherd. The essayist.”

  Jillian looked flustered. “Of course.”

  “You were saying that people in Edinburgh forget something …”

  Jillian returned to her theme. “Us. They forget us. They think everything of any consequence happens in Edinburgh. They think that nothing happens down here, out in the country. They really do
. Take this place. They forget that this is the greatest literary shrine in Scotland—Sir Walter Scott’s house, no less, and we’ve had terrible trouble interesting them in it.”

  “Oh, but I think they are interested,” said Isabel. “I am. I love Scott. And I think he’s still pretty widely read, isn’t he?”

  “I’m not sure how many people still read him,” Jillian said. “Rob Roy, perhaps, but beyond that, well …”

  Isabel thought that the problem was time. Who had time for the great historical novels? “Some of it might seem a little … heavy these days. People have so many claims on their time.”

  “Well, they’ll come in their droves once the trustees sort this place out,” said Jillian, looking up at the ceiling. “This gorgeous ceiling, for example, and all this … all this stuff.” She gestured at the collection of ancient weapons adorning the wall. It was a romantic’s dream.

  “Scott must have been a bit of a magpie,” said Isabel. “So many things.”

  “He was fascinated by the past. His life was a great big jumble of romantic history. Mists, glens, castles and so on. He suited his time absolutely perfectly. And just think—this is where he actually lived, where he wrote. We can take a look at his writing room after dinner. His desk is still there.”

  The dinner at Abbotsford was Jillian’s husband’s idea. As a supporter of the project to restore Scott’s house, he had invited a group of likely donors for dinner and Jillian had suggested that Isabel join them. “I’d like you to meet Alex,” she explained. “And we’re not asking you for money. You’re here as …”

  Isabel waited.

  “As a friend,” Jillian continued. “And you’ll have the chance to meet Harold and Christine. He’s the outgoing head of Bishop Forbes. I wanted you to meet them socially rather than formally.” She lowered her voice conspiratorially. “He doesn’t know that you’re looking into this whole thing for us. But it could be useful for you to meet them.”