The Comfort of Saturdays

by Alexander McCall Smith

  She took a deep breath to calm herself. ‘Doesn’t it offend you,’ she asked, ‘that an innocent man should have his career brought to an end over something he did not do? You’re a lawyer, aren’t you? Doesn’t that offend everything your profession stands for?’

  David McLean seemed slightly taken aback by her question, and for a few moments he did not reply. Then, ‘Of course it would offend me. But we’re not talking about an innocent man here. We’re talking about a man who was grossly negligent, a man who should have known much better.’

  ‘Unless he wasn’t careless at all,’ said Isabel quickly. ‘Unless somebody else changed the figures, later on, in order to make it look as if he had been careless.’

  David McLean was quite still. ‘What do you mean by that?’

  Isabel felt her courage come flooding back. ‘I mean exactly what I said. What if somebody else, encouraged, shall we say, by another, falsified the figures to make it look as if the drug had been administered in far greater quantities than it actually had been? Do you see what I mean?’

  This last question came out as a challenge, although she had not intended it to sound that way. I have virtually accused his clients, she thought. I could hardly make it more obvious.

  David McLean must have reached the same conclusion. He glanced out of the window, briefly, then let his gaze return to Isabel. She felt uneasy, but she was angry now and would not be intimidated.

  ‘I shall do exactly as I please, Mr McLean,’ she said, rising to her feet to indicate that their conversation was over.

  He was thrown off balance. ‘Be careful,’ he said quietly. ‘Just be careful.’

  Isabel, who had started to walk back to the counter, spun round to face him. ‘Are you threatening me?’

  He looked anxiously in the direction of a customer who was examining a packet of dried pasta which he had taken off a shelf. The customer looked up, surprised, and then quickly went back to studying the packet. Edinburgh was not a place where one showed a reaction to that which one overheard. ‘Of course not,’ David McLean said. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I’m just telling you to be careful.’

  Eddie was watching her from the counter. He had just finished serving a customer, and when she joined him he was wiping his hands on a piece of paper towel. ‘Are you all right?’ he whispered.

  She felt a sudden fondness for Eddie, in spite of the five hundred pounds. He was concerned for her, and she found his anxiety touching: this mixed-up, damaged boy was actually concerned for her. She reached out and touched Eddie on the forearm. ‘I’m fine, Eddie. I’m fine.’

  Eddie glowered at David McLean, who was now leaving the shop. ‘What did he want?’

  ‘He wanted me to . . .’ Isabel trailed off. It was too complicated, and she was wrestling with a question. He seemed to know about Jamie; he knew his name and that he was a musician. She wondered whether Jamie had told him this, or whether he had found it out. And if he had found it out, then he must have gone to some lengths to do so, which meant that he was taking a close interest in her affairs. He had said that he was not threatening her, but why else, she wondered, would he tell her to be careful? A warning? You simply did not walk up to somebody you had never met, reveal that you knew all about her, and then say, Watch out. That happened in novels, perhaps, but not in real life. And I am real, thought Isabel, and this life, this delicatessen, this problematic young man beside me, are all real and immediate – part of the brief, sparkling privilege that I have of consciousness in a universe where, as far as we could tell, there were few signs of consciousness. Looked at in this way, a few words of threat from a man in highly polished brogues and wearing a Scottish clan ring were nothing.

  She turned to Eddie. ‘We don’t have to worry about him,’ she said. ‘But thank you, anyway. We’re on the same side, aren’t we, Eddie? You and me.’

  And then she leaned forward and planted a kiss on his cheek. He gave a start, as if he had suddenly had a jolt of electricity, and Isabel wondered: did that girl with the piercings not kiss him?

  Eddie looked at her. ‘I wanted to say sorry properly,’ he muttered. ‘So . . . I’m sorry. I’m useless at telling people things.’

  She put an arm around his shoulder. She wanted to. ‘You’re not useless.’

  Eddie fumbled in his pocket. ‘And here’s the money I owe you. I gave it to my dad for his hip operation.’ He lowered his eyes. He was ashamed. ‘And he spent some of it. That’s why it’s taken time to pay you back.’

  Isabel was appalled, and in her abhorrence could say nothing. Two wrongs had been done to this wronged young man: she had written him off as a liar and his father had misused the money he had given him – gambling, drink, it did not really matter how. She stared at him.

  ‘Anyway,’ Eddie said to her, ‘he’s been given a date for his hip now. It’s in two months. So he’s in a better temper.’

  ‘Pain is an odd thing,’ said Isabel. ‘It makes people do things they wouldn’t otherwise do. You know that, don’t you?’

  Eddie nodded. He knew.

  15

  She was in the garden the next morning, Sunday, with Charlie when she made her decision about Christopher Dove’s paper on the Trolley Problem. It was nothing that Charlie had said – he had several sounds at his command, one of which could have been ‘Dove’, but was more likely the precursor of ‘Daddy’; certainly a d came into it. And there was another sound, n-ish in tone, which could have been an incipient no; a useful word for a baby resisting the plans that the world, in the shape of mother, had for him. There was definitely an n sound, and had the d sound been combined with it, then there would have been no doubt that Charlie had said: Dove? No! But he had been silent, sitting on a blanket spread out on the lawn, wearing a small, rather ridiculous hat and his McPherson tartan rompers, gazing thoughtfully at a nearby lavender bush about which a couple of bees were circling. He has seen the bees, thought Isabel, and one day – not just yet – he will have to learn the lesson that we all learn about bees. And hot things; and loss, perhaps; and the fact that not all stories have happy endings. But there was time enough for that; for the moment these bees were entirely innocent sources of noise for him, enough to keep him busy while Isabel, from her corner of the blanket, contemplated her response to Dove.

  The previous day she had received the second report on Dove’s article from a professor of philosophy in Glasgow. ‘Not the best paper I have ever read,’ wrote the professor. ‘The author tries his best to extract further mileage from a trolley ride that is, in my view, already far too complicated. How that trolley, burdened as it is with such a weight of philosophical commentary, even manages to leave its depot, defeats me. Its journey should be terminated.’ The verdict was put politely, but it was clearly a negative one. Two-nil against Dove, thought Isabel.

  She would have to reject Dove’s paper. She had reached this position by asking herself what she would have done had the paper been from somebody whom she did not know. Her procedure in such a case would be to follow the recommendations of the reviewers, and she had now had two votes for rejection. If she ignored these – with a view to avoiding recriminations from Dove – then by that very act she would be doing an injustice to all those others whom she had rejected on the basis of bad reports. Every one of them would have dealt with her on an implicit understanding that there were procedures for the acceptance of papers that were consistently applied. She would be breaking faith with them if she did anything but that; it was simply not an option.

  Now she mentally composed the letter she would write. The first hurdle was the second word. Dear Christopher was one option; Dear Professor Dove was another; the difference between the two was obvious, and represented the difference between friendship and acquaintance. Another option altogether was Dear Dove; an old-fashioned mode of address that had virtually died out but which was still used here and there by older scholars. In Isabel’s mouth the surname on its own would sound strange, and she could not bring herself to call him Chr
istopher. So it was Dear Professor Dove, and with that resolved, the rest proved easy:

  It was most thoughtful of you to offer me this excellent piece on the Trolley Problem. How these old problems still provide us with fresh food for thought! That is what I thought, at least, but then quot homines tot sententiae! (as I’m sure you will agree), and my view was not shared, alas, by the reviewers (two of them) who felt that your piece was not sufficiently original or insightful to merit publication. I was astonished, but I felt that I really had to abide by their decision, as not to do so would be unfair to those other authors (of similarly eminently publishable pieces) who have been turned down on the grounds of referees’ reports. Of course, these things are subjective, as is shown by the fact that you have had other offers to publish this piece. I believe that you should take those, and that is why I am writing to you so soon after receiving the unfavourable reports. I would not wish to hold you back from anxious publishers elsewhere. I shall certainly look out for the article’s appearance in the United States – you forgot to tell me, by the way, exactly who has offered for it; I assume that it’s the American Philosophical Quarterly or Ethics – somebody of that order. But wherever it ends up, I am sure that it will attract the attention it deserves.

  Yours sincerely,

  Isabel Dalhousie

  The plotting of the letter was a delicious pleasure, particularly the phrase it will attract the attention it deserves. That meant everything, or nothing, the implication in this case, if Dove was capable of reading between the lines, being nothing. She looked at Charlie, who was still staring at the bees, and then reprimanded herself; the contemplation of Dove’s discomfiture gave pleasure, but it was not a pleasure that she could allow herself. We have a moral duty to forgive; she knew that. To forgive Christopher Dove, who had attempted to engineer a coup against her at the Review, to throw her out of her editorial chair? Who blatantly lied to her about his article being accepted for publication elsewhere? Yes. Even Dove.

  So she decided the letter would be brief and to the point.

  Dear Christopher Dove (a compromise),

  I’m so sorry that we shall not be able to publish your paper. I have taken two referees’ opinions – in accordance with normal practice – and I’m afraid that both were against publication. I’m sure that the paper has many merits and will find a home elsewhere.

  Yours sincerely,

  Isabel Dalhousie

  ‘Letters with moral merit,’ she said to Charlie, ‘are often very dull. Humour, Charlie, usually needs a victim.’

  Charlie, hearing this gurgling sound from his mother, turned and looked at her briefly before returning to his scrutiny of the bees.

  ‘You’re very wise, Charlie,’ Isabel continued. ‘Bees are such interesting creatures, with all their intense activity. They have so few doubts. Look at them. They are so thoroughly accepting of their place in the bee order. Workers. Queen. It’s interesting, Charlie, that the queen is the boss. Always a female bee. A model for matriarchies everywhere.’

  ‘Exactly,’ a voice said. ‘Exactly.’

  Isabel looked up. Cat was standing immediately behind her. ‘You’re back!’

  Cat looked down on them. ‘Does Charlie agree with you all the time?’

  Isabel laughed. ‘You are meant to talk to them, you know,’ she said. ‘Even if they don’t understand.’

  And if you did not? she wondered. She had heard a depressing talk on the radio which revealed that many children these days learned language not from their parents, who barely spoke to them, but from the television. So a child’s first words might be, ‘Here is the news . . .’

  Cat walked across the blanket, bent down, and tickled Charlie under the chin. But she did not kiss him. ‘Yes, you should talk to them. But surely you should say something they understand.’

  ‘Remember James the Fourth,’ said Isabel. ‘He thought that if children heard nothing at all, no language, then they would naturally speak Hebrew. He thought it the natural language.’

  Cat made a non-committal sound – possibly Hebrew.

  ‘And, as you know,’ Isabel went on, ‘he put a baby out on one of those islands in the Forth – just out there – with a dumb woman to look after him. The king of Scotland’s big experiment – to see if the boy would speak Hebrew.’

  ‘How cruel,’ said Cat. She did not sound interested.

  Isabel shot a glance at her niece. It seemed inconceivable to her, not to be intrigued by the world. But Cat really was not. She related only to those things that impinged upon her immediate life, Isabel thought. The delicatessen. Men. What else? ‘I suppose I was really talking to myself,’ said Isabel. ‘You know how people do that. They talk at great length to their cat or dog, but it’s merely a way of talking to themselves.’

  It was as if Cat had not heard what Isabel said. She sat down on the blanket and turned to look at Charlie. ‘Bees, Charlie. Those are bees. Bees.’

  ‘I already told him that,’ said Isabel. ‘Charlie does not need people to repeat things to him.’ She looked appraisingly at Cat, who had caught the sun in Sri Lanka – not badly, but it had been there, across her face.

  ‘The sun signs his presence,’ muttered Isabel.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’ve caught the sun. Just a bit. It’s nice to see you, anyway. I didn’t expect to see you so soon. You must be tired.’

  Cat raised an arm to brush the hair off her brow. She is very beautiful, thought Isabel. That’s why all these men fall for her. It’s something to do with her profile, her nose. How strange that a nose can be the determinant of happiness or unhappiness; a few centimetres more gristle in the wrong place, just that, and Cat might have battled to find one man, let alone . . . how many boyfriends had there been over the last five years? Five?

  ‘I slept on the plane,’ said Cat. ‘Somehow. The woman sitting next to me was tiny, and the aisle was on the other side, and so I was able to sleep.’ She closed her eyes and turned her brow to the sun. Isabel watched her.

  Charlie had stopped looking at the bees and was now crawling towards Cat. He was distracted, though, by a small stuffed dog which was lying on the blanket. He reached for it and began to suck one of its legs.

  ‘Thank you for your message,’ said Isabel. ‘You obviously enjoyed Sri Lanka.’

  ‘Loved it,’ said Cat. ‘I want to go back. The people. The place. Everything. I want to go back to Galle. It’s a place down in the south. An old fort.’

  Isabel visualised a map of Sri Lanka. It was tear-shaped, was it not? The tear off the coast of India. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘That’s next year’s trip sorted out for you.’

  Cat opened her eyes. ‘Not next year. Sooner. Really soon.’

  For a moment Isabel was silent as she contemplated the implications of this. Who would be in charge of the delicatessen while Cat was away? Then she asked, ‘Really soon means when? Next month?’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Cat. ‘But don’t worry. I won’t expect you to look after the shop. I’m going to advertise for somebody. A manager.’

  Isabel looked surprised. From time to time Cat had extra people working in the delicatessen – there had been that Australian girl who had been so friendly with Eddie – but she had always maintained that another full-time salary would push the business into loss.

  ‘I thought that margins were too tight,’ said Isabel. ‘A manager?’

  Cat did not look at her when she replied. ‘Change of plans. I think that I might be spending more time in Sri Lanka. I’ll need somebody who can run the shop full-time. Somebody who can supervise Eddie.’ She let this sink in before continuing: ‘Actually, I’ve met somebody there. He’s an artist. He’s done up one of those houses in the Old Fort. It was a Dutch merchant’s house – a lovely place.’

  Isabel listened attentively. ‘I’ve seen pictures of the town. I looked it up after you went. It looks—’

  Cat did not give her time to finish. ‘He’s an Australian. From Melbourne. He’s lived in Sri Lanka
for six years now. Quite a few foreigners live in Galle, you know. It’s the . . . the most gorgeous place. Courtyards. Frangipani trees. It’s so beautiful.’

  Isabel kept her voice even. She had her differences with Cat, but she did not want to lose her. ‘You make me want to go there.’

  ‘You’d love it,’ said Cat.

  ‘I’m sure I would.’ Isabel let a few moments pass. ‘When will you go?’

  Cat shrugged. ‘In six weeks. Maybe two months. It depends on who I find for the job and when that person can start.’

  ‘And will you . . .?’ The question was left unfinished, but its meaning was clear.

  ‘For ever? No, I don’t think so. Simon likes it there, but he likes to travel. He thought that he might spend some time here in Edinburgh. He’s never been to Scotland, but his father was Scottish, and he said that he always wanted to see it.’

  Charlie had now abandoned the stuffed dog and started to crawl back towards Isabel. She reached out and put him on her knee. Cat watched idly; she was still in Sri Lanka.

  Suddenly Isabel said something that she had not intended to say. She did that from time to time, as we all do, the words coming out unbidden. ‘Wouldn’t you like to settle down, Cat? Wouldn’t you like a baby? Just like Charlie?’

  Cat froze. Isabel, realising what she had said, busied herself with Charlie, adjusting his hat, which had fallen down over his eyes. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to say that.’

  ‘Then what did you mean?’

  ‘Oh, I suppose I’ve been worried about you. I want you to be happy, obviously I do. And, well, look at me. I’ve got Charlie now . . .’ She was making it worse.

  ‘I can settle down when I want,’ said Cat. ‘Any time.’

  Isabel was placatory. ‘Of course you could.’

  ‘And you don’t need to have a baby to settle down. Some men may not want one, you know. We don’t have to tie them down with babies.’

  Isabel said nothing. Cat’s meaning was clear. She – Isabel – was being accused of tying Jamie down; exactly the thing that she had tried not to do. ‘Is that how it looks to you?’ she asked quietly. ‘Do you think that I’ve tied Jamie down?’