The Charming Quirks of Others id-7

by Alexander McCall Smith

  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 suppose 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.

  Iain nodded. “Lovely island. Chris likes … liked to go there, even recently.”

  Isabel noticed the transition from present to past tense and thought that it must be one of the most difficult of all adjustments to make when one loses somebody. Or even when a love affair comes to an end: the present is abolished and at the same time there is no future tense.

  “I knew the dangers,” Iain continued. “But I told myself that there were plenty of other much more dangerous sports. So I tried to persuade myself that Chris was level-headed and very cautious and that it was only people who became impatient or sloppy who got into trouble. But that’s not true, is it? Anybody—even the most skilled climber—can make a mistake. Or can simply put his foot in the wrong place and find himself falling into a crevasse. There are hundreds of things that can go wrong without any human error being responsible.”

  Isabel waited for him to continue, but he was silent, staring into the small sherry glass that he was now turning in his right hand.

  “What exactly happened?” she asked. “He was climbing with John Fraser, wasn’t he?”

  Iain nodded. He was still looking down into the sherry glass. “He and John were on Everest. It was his great dream to go there—I suppose every climber’s great dream. They were a day or two away from the summit, just below the final camp, or whatever they call it. They were walking over an ice field and apparently Chris stumbled and fell. John came back for him and they returned to the camp below. He helped Chris all the way—John and the Sherpa did that, taking it in turns to support him. But when he got down to the camp he was delirious and he only lived another couple of hours, apparently. Altitude sickness, complicated by … oh, I forget the exact terms of the medical report.”

  Isabel listened, transfixed. In her mind’s eye she saw a high ice field, white in brilliant sun, and two men helping a third across a ladder bridge, below them a cavern of blue ice.

  “John Fraser was a real hero,” said Iain. “I gather that there are many climbers these days who wouldn’t even bother to take somebody back—they’d just tuck them up in an ice hole somehow and leave a flag to mark the spot in case they were still alive when they came down again. Can you believe that? Can you really? Is this what we’ve come to?”

  Isabel did not answer his question; she was thinking about how wrong her assumptions could be. She was not surprised by her wrongness; she often misunderstood a situation or reached entirely the wrong conclusion.

  But then Iain said, “It’s such a pity about the other one, though.”

  Isabel became alert. “What other one? Was there somebody else on that expedition who didn’t make it?”

  He shook his head. “No, that other climb. The one in Scotland. Up north.”

  Isabel spoke quietly. “Another tragedy?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Chris told me about it. It happened a few years before they went to Everest.”

  She enquired whether Chris had been present, and Iain confirmed that he had. “He didn’t see what happened, but he had a very good idea what took place.”

  “Which was?”

  “I don’t like to pass on rumours,” he said. “I have no proof. All that I have is hearsay.”

  “I shall take that into account,” said Isabel. “Please tell me.”

  He looked pained. She had just been immensely generous to him, and here he was, denying her a scrap of information. Well, even if he could not be absolutely sure about it, he could at least pass on what he had heard. “I’ve heard it said that John Fraser cut somebody’s rope,” he said. “He was climbing with a man called Cameron, who had been a friend of Chris’s, although he was a bit older. Cameron slipped, or fell, or whatever, and John Fraser cut his rope in order to save himself.”

  He did not say anything more. He looked ashamed, as if he regretted crossing some imaginary line between simple narration and scandal.

  “But if it’s a choice between two people,” asked Isabel, “then surely it’s understandable if one prefers oneself. And is there any sense at all in two people rather than one being carried down to their deaths?”

  Iain weighed this for a moment. “I am not suggesting that he should not have done it. And I’m not even saying that he did it. All I’m saying is that this is what I was told. He cut a fellow climber’s rope in order to save his own skin. That’s all.”

  Isabel was silent. Would she have cut another’s rope? How many people could honestly say that they would not? But then what if Jamie were on the other end of the rope? Or Charlie?

  “Where did that take place?” she asked.

  Iain seemed sunk in thought. “I’m not sure. It was in Glencoe, I think. One of those mountains that loom over you as you drive through the pass. One with a lot of gullies.”

  The conversation went on for a short time more before Isabel, looking at her watch, said that she had to go.

  “Do you still intend to …” Iain looked towards the painting.

  Isabel reached out to take his hand. “Enjoy it,” she said. “It stays exactly where it is. I’ll get Simon Mackintosh to write to you. He’s my lawyer.”

  “I know him,” said Iain. “I also knew Aeneas, his father.”

  “Well, there you are,” said Isabel. “All arranged.”

  “Isn’t Edinburgh marvellous?” he suddenly remarked. “That we can do all this on … trust.”

  Isabel smiled. “It works very well,” she said. She wondered, as she left the house, whether that sounded smug. It might, she thought, but on the other hand every city had its way of working; every city, no matter how large, relied on the fact that people would know one another and act well towards their fellow citizens. What was wrong with that? Only those who believed in chaos would want it otherwise; or those who believed that we should have no sense of who we are, of where we are placed, and of what we owe to those with whom we have bonds of fellow feeling. There were of course many such people: many who hated the local, who hated the sense of identity that people had, who wanted us all reduced to the servitude of anonymity, living in vast impersonal states, governed from a distance by people whose faces we never saw, whose names we would never find out. They thought this somehow better. Let them think that; she would not. She would not be ashamed of loving her place, her city, and of doing her utmost to ensure that the things that gave it a sense of itself, the small, personal things that bound its people together, would survive. No, she would not.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE FOLLOWING DAY, a Saturday, was a delicatessen day. It had been planned some weeks before and although Isabel had other things to do, she did not feel that she could ask Cat to change the arrangement. Cat was going to London for the day, leaving on the six o’clock train from Waverley Station and coming back on Sunday morning. The occasion was a lunch for a school friend who was getting married to an army officer.

  They had discussed this couple a few weeks earlier, when Cat had first said that she hoped to go to the wedding. “He’s drop-dead gorgeous,” said Cat. “He’s called Jon, without an aitch.”

  “Dropped his aitch?” asked Isabel. “Or born without one?”

  Cat did not think this funny. “Who cares?”

  “I don’t,” said Isabel. “But you did mention it. You said that he didn’t have an aitch. Usually Johns do.”

  “I think it’s sexier not to,” said Cat. “Jon’s a really sexy name.”

  Isabel said nothing. John Liamo
r spelled his name with an h and he was … well, he was sexy, which was why she had married him. That had been her conclusion; after all that soul-searching and wondering where she had gone wrong, she had come to the conclusion that she had been seduced by his looks.

  “I don’t think that one should concern oneself with the sexiness—or otherwise—of a person’s name,” she said. “And I don’t think that you should marry somebody because they’re drop-dead gorgeous.” She paused. Cat was turning red.

  “I didn’t say—”

  Isabel tried to calm her. “No, I didn’t say you did. I’m sure that your friend is marrying Jon for a whole lot of other reasons. All that I’m saying is that in general it’s a bad idea. Don’t go for a good-looking man just because he’s good-looking. Men make that mistake all the time. They go for looks and they end up with a woman they can’t stand, or who bores them rigid.”

  Cat stared at her. “And you?” she said.

  “What about me?”

  “You’re hardly one to talk, are you?”

  Isabel opened her mouth—wordlessly.

  “Well, you aren’t, are you?” Cat went on. “Jamie. Look at him.”

  Isabel gasped; Cat, though, was adamant. “I’m sorry, but you can’t criticise others for something you yourself do.”

  “Are you suggesting that I have taken up with Jamie because of his looks? Are you really accusing me of that?”

  Cat looked down at the floor. “I’m not accusing you of anything. However … forgive me for wondering whether you and Jamie would have got together if he had been … well, podgy and shorter than you. Or had halitosis and terminal dandruff. Do you think you would have? Do you really think so?”

  “Looks are nothing to do with it.” Isabel spat the words out.

  “People tell themselves that. But who really believes it?”

  “I do. People love others who are not at all prepossessing. Are you saying they don’t?”

  Cat shook her head. She was not saying that; what she was saying, she explained, was that people made do with what they could get. Of course an unattractive person can be loved, but it is harder and they have to earn it. Whereas an attractive person is loved immediately and by any number of others. It was obvious, she said; obvious. Just look at couples. The beautiful fell for the beautiful, and got them; everybody else made do.