The Perils of Morning Coffee: An Isabel Dalhousie eBook Original Story

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “Exactly,” said George MacLeod in low tones. “I’m sure that Lettuce has his many good points, but …”

  It was turning into a conversation studded with ellipses, Isabel observed, but it confirmed her feeling that George MacLeod was a kindred spirit. If two people disliked Lettuce, then it was probable that they saw the world in much the same way.

  “There are certainly good points in Lettuce’s character,” Isabel said firmly. “It’s just that I haven’t seen them personally.” She looked away as she spoke. If I have not charity, a voice within her said, then I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal … She now added quickly, “I am at fault, I’m sure, for not noticing them, of course.”

  For a moment George MacLeod said nothing. Then he asked, as if innocently, “And Christopher Dove. What about Christopher Dove? Do you see much of him?”

  “Not very much,” said Isabel. “But that little, I’m afraid, is enough.”

  George MacLeod raised an eyebrow, and Isabel immediately felt guilty. “I shouldn’t have said that. It sounds awful,” she said.

  “It sounds honest,” he countered. “I can’t stand him either.”

  They moved from personalities to more substantial matters. At the end of their discussion, which ranged widely, Isabel had resolved to use George MacLeod as a reviewer, if he proved to be interested in the task. He was.

  “It’s the easiest way of building up one’s library,” he said.

  In her mind’s eye she saw the pile of books sitting on the edge of her desk; far from being built up, her library needed weeding.

  “But I shouldn’t review Lettuce on Hume,” he said quickly. “I don’t think that I could be objective.”

  She appreciated that. It would be tempting to give Lettuce’s book to one of the Machiavellian professor’s sworn enemies, and she wondered how firm MacLeod would be if she pressed it into his hands. But no, she could not do that; being editor of the Review of Applied Ethics involved certain obligations, and to act ethically was one of them.

  They talked for half an hour or so. Then, glancing at his watch, George explained that he had an appointment to keep. “An appointment with the dentist,” he said, pointing to the time. “I’m so sorry. I’ve enjoyed our talk so much.”

  She nodded, as if to say, yes, one should not keep one’s dentist waiting. Then she thought: One should keep nobody waiting, really. Yet there were reasons, of course, why it might be particularly unwise to irritate a dentist. “Yes,” she said. “One must always be in time for one’s dentist.”

  He smiled. “Just a check-up.”

  He rose to his feet, and they said goodbye. Isabel lingered for a few minutes, watching the other people in the café. Coffee could easily become lunch if one was not careful, and lunch could so comfortably slip into afternoon tea. But not today.

  That evening, while Jamie gave Charlie his bath—an occasion of energetic splashing and shrieks of delight—Isabel gave a brief account of her meeting with George MacLeod. Jamie listened in a rather bemused fashion before saying that in the future he thought she should not make a habit of meeting strangers.

  “I won’t,” she said. “Don’t worry.”

  They did not talk about it again and she did not think about George MacLeod until the following day when, remembering her decision to offer him books for review, she made a list of the review copies on her desk and sent it to him. “A few of these may be to your taste,” she wrote. “And if they are, perhaps I could persuade you to review them.” She mentioned that the Review of Applied Ethics could not pay its reviewers—or any of its contributors, for that matter—but said that she hoped he would understand. “In an ideal world …” She left the sentence unfinished, and thought, somewhat mischievously, In an ideal world the contributors would pay us. And that, alas, was true, she decided, although it would be ideal only for the publishers of the academic journals.

  The tackling of the stack of review copies amounted to progress, as did the inroads that she made over the following two days on the pile of manuscripts awaiting her attention. Soon that was reduced to a small number of what she called “heart-sink cases”—articles which she feared were barely publishable but had been written by people who had some claim upon her: former colleagues at university or people she had known when they were fellow graduate students at Georgetown. It would have been simpler to reject these rather than to seek to rescue them by suggesting changes and improvements, but with her highly attuned sense of moral obligation, Isabel could not give the brush-off to those with whom she had a connection, no matter how tenuous or ancient it might be.

  It was while she was contemplating one of these—an article on the moral significance of self-reproach—that the telephone rang. Her mind was still elsewhere as she picked it up: was a capacity for self-reproach a character trait that had to be respected? And if so, should we be hesitant to undermine it by suggesting that blaming oneself in a particular situation was unnecessary? If somebody should say to herself …

  “Is that Isabel Dalhousie?”

  The voice at the end of the line—a woman’s voice—was abrupt.

  “Yes. It is.”

  The woman came back quickly. “You don’t know me.”

  Isabel wondered how one replied to that. One could say that no, one did not, or, more politely, that one hoped that this would soon be rectified.

  “My name is Roz MacLeod.” This was followed by a slight pause, and then, “You know my husband, of course.”

  For a moment or two Isabel was at a loss, and then she remembered her meeting with George MacLeod. She hardly knew him; it would have been more appropriate to say, “You’ve met my husband.”

  “George MacLeod? Yes, I’ve met him.”

  The woman laughed. “That’s one way of putting it.”

  The voice now revealed itself as unfriendly, even sneering, and Isabel realised that this was a hostile call. She said nothing, but the discovery of unexpected hostility was a shock.

  The woman took a noisy breath. “Listen,” she said. “And listen carefully. You stay away from him. I know that he’s having an affair. I’ve known for some time. You stay away … We’ve been married for eleven years, you know, eleven years. You keep out of our marriage …” The accusing words tumbled out. There was a rawness, and the woman’s voice began to be choked.

  The shock hit Isabel with physical intensity. “An affair?”

  “Don’t deny it. I saw you. I saw you both. Coming out of that place on George IV Bridge. You didn’t think you might be seen, did you? George and I … Don’t think that just because a man says he’s available, he really is. Don’t you think that …”

  Isabel interrupted. “This is complete nonsense. I’ve met your husband precisely once. Once. Do you hear me? Once.”

  “Don’t try to deny it.” Roz MacLeod’s voice rose now, became shrill.

  “But of course I deny it,” said Isabel hotly. “I deny it absolutely. I met your husband for …” She paused.

  “Yes? Go on.”

  She wondered how she could explain: the real explanation sounded completely implausible. Who would believe a story about an accidental invitation issued by an over-enthusiastic computer program? Of course, genuine explanations or excuses often had a ring of oddness to them, while false ones sounded only too likely. Dogs sometimes did eat the homework; ice did on occasion fall from the wings of aircraft flying overhead and break windows; diary entries did get made on the wrong page, or erased by mistake. All of these happened, but who would think such excuses anything but made up?

  “I met your husband to discuss philosophy,” said Isabel, struggling to keep her voice even. But she sounded stressed; she could tell as much herself.

  Roz MacLeod snorted. “Oh yes! To discuss philosophy.” There was a brief pause to let the challenge sink in. Then, unceremonious and curt, the word was spat out: “Liar.”

  Isabel gasped.

  “Keep away,” the other woman continued. “Keep away.” And with t
hat she slammed down the phone.

  Jamie was sympathetic, and if he was tempted to say that he had warned Isabel of the consequences of assignations with strangers, he remained tactful.

  “She must be paranoid,” he said. “It’s obvious. Ignore it. That’s the best thing to do with paranoia.”

  Isabel looked indignant. “I can’t,” she protested. “She’s accused me of having an affair with her husband. How can I ignore that?”

  He made a gesture of resignation. “If you engage with people like that, you simply fuel their paranoia. Don’t you see? It makes it worse.”

  “And if she goes around telling people about it? What if a rumour gets going? You know how people talk in Edinburgh.”

  Jamie shook his head. “She’s highly unlikely to do that. She won’t want people talking about her marriage, will she? I don’t think so.”

  Isabel felt uncomfortable about it, but, after a brief further discussion, accepted his advice—for the moment. She tried to put the telephone call out of her mind—denial, she found, sometimes worked—but later that day her feeling of outrage returned, as insults will often seem the more painful some hours after they are delivered. She recalled reading somewhere, during an earlier period of enthusiasm for popular psychology magazines, about the physiology of provocation. The period immediately after an insult, the psychologists said, was not necessarily the time of greatest resentment; the real smarting came later, when adrenalin levels went up. Anger, it seemed, took time to brew; an insult, then, might sting most painfully three or four hours after its delivery. And of course that seemed true, particularly if one reflected after the event on what one might have said in response, and had not: the right words, the pithy, scathing response, is rarely there when we need it.

  She understood Jamie’s point about the pointlessness of arguing with paranoia, but she felt nevertheless that she could not ignore what had happened. She was unsettled, and quite deeply so. There were several questions that she believed required an answer. The first of these was particularly puzzling: Exactly how had Roz McLeod identified her? Isabel was reasonably well-known in Edinburgh but by no means a public figure. Her photograph never appeared in the newspapers, and so she could not understand how anybody who had never met her would know who she was. Could Roz have gone into the Elephant House and asked the staff? It was true that Isabel went there occasionally for coffee, but not frequently enough to be known to the staff. Did this mean that she had been followed? She had walked home from her meeting with George, and it would have been easy enough for Roz to trail behind her across the Meadows, through Bruntsfield, and then into her own street. She could have done that without being noticed—Isabel had not looked back at all, and why would one so much as glance over one’s shoulder while walking through Edinburgh in broad daylight?

  Of course, if she had been followed, it would have not been difficult to find her name. There used to be street directories that listed the occupants of each house; Isabel was not sure whether those still existed—they probably did not—but there was the electoral roll, and there might be other public sources of information. Or there was simple word of mouth; if one went to one of the other houses in the street with some specious reason for finding out who lived where, it would, she thought, be easy enough to get the answer one needed. People were trusting, and would not necessarily suspect an ulterior motive behind an apparently simple enquiry.

  And then another, perhaps more plausible, explanation suggested itself. She had arranged the meeting with George by email. Roz and George might operate different email accounts—spouses often used the same computer, and even when they did not, the newspapers were full of stories of wives who switched on their husbands’ computers to stumble upon incriminating material: notes to lovers, arrangements for assignations, clandestine chatting on chat lines. And vice versa. People behaved badly electronically, just as in the real world. Perhaps Roz had simply read the email in which they agreed to meet and, armed with the foreknowledge of where and when the meeting would take place, had stationed herself outside the Elephant House to get a glimpse of her rival.

  Isabel felt her resentment grow as she contemplated the sheer injustice of what had happened. She was innocent, and she simply would not tolerate a situation in which she was viewed as an adulteress. I am not; I am not … She stopped herself. She knew that she was innocent of the charge levelled against her—but was George MacLeod innocent too? What if Roz MacLeod was quite right, and her husband was having an affair, but with somebody else?

  It was an arresting thought, and it suddenly changed her feelings towards the other woman. Yes, she could understand the desperation, the irresistible desire to find out who it was who was ruining her marriage. Yes, she understood the sense of outrage, the anger at being betrayed by an unfaithful spouse; and Roz MacLeod, poor woman, must be feeling just that. Of course she would hate me for it, Isabel reflected; of course she would want to phone and warn me off. She was fighting for her man, after all, and many women would go to any lengths in that particular battle, even to the extent of calling up a perfect stranger—and what that cost must have cost her in emotional energy—and telling her to desist. Roz was not being aggressive; she could, on the contrary, have been much less restrained.

  Then the idea occurred to Isabel: if she found out more about George MacLeod, she might be able to work out whether he was indeed having an affair with somebody else. And if that were so, the fact would vindicate his wife. And if she could find out the identity of his lover, could she turn Roz in the right direction and deflect the wrath that was so unjustly focused on her?

  She hesitated. That was surely going too far. Was it any of her business? At first she thought that it was not, and then, rather quickly, she thought the opposite. There was a real sense in which it was very much her business. At present she was suspected by another woman of being her husband’s lover. That woman had already taken the step of approaching Isabel to warn her off. It was possible that she could go further and confront her again, perhaps even engage in some act of revenge. Was it fanciful? She would have liked to think that it was, but she feared that it was not: the fact that somebody hated you was not something you could ignore. Almost every act of violence had hate at its core, had behind it a heart filled with resentment; so many victims of such acts must have felt secure in the knowledge that it would never happen to him, or to her. But it did. It happened.

  “I hang on by my fingernails.”

  Isabel looked out of the window. Her friend Millie, who made this comment, had rigged a washing line between the metal window catch and a small stone thistle that decorated the ridge of the tenement roof. There was a white blouse and what looked like a vest hanging on this line, the sleeves of the blouse filled by the breeze, flapping arms conducting some wind-inspired melody. But the vest: who still wore vests like that? And who had gone out onto the roof to secure the line? Millie, of course, who had always been a tomboy and loved taking risks.

  Isabel’s gaze returned to her friend. She was fond of Millie, but did not see her often enough—only once that year, when she had bumped into her in George Street and they had both been too busy to do anything more than exchange a few words.

  “We all hang on by our fingernails,” Isabel said. “In one way or another.”

  Millie frowned. “You don’t. You’ve got a proper job. And you’re your own boss.”

  Isabel looked embarrassed. “Sorry. I didn’t mean it that way. What I wanted to say was—”

  Millie interrupted her. “No, I’m the one who should say sorry. Self-pity is very unattractive. You’re right—we all do hang on by our fingernails. There’s always something just round the corner ready to go wrong. Getting sick. Being evicted from your flat. Being run over by a bus.”

  Isabel smiled. “We’re unduly hard on bus drivers, don’t you think? People use that expression—getting run over by a bus—all the time. My mother used to say it. ‘If I get run over by a bus, remember to give your grandmother�
�s necklace—you know, the moonstone one—to Cousin Eve in Mobile.’ That sort of thing. And yet, when you think of it, there are very few people who are actually run over by a bus. By other vehicles, yes, but bus drivers are really rather good at avoiding pedestrians.”

  Millie waved a hand airily. “A metaphor.”

  “And you know all about metaphors,” Isabel said. Millie had written an article for the Review of Applied Ethics a couple of years previously on the metaphors by which we live. It had been well received, and was still cited from time to time in the literature.

  “Not much,” said Millie modestly. “Just a little.”

  “Your fingernails …”

  Millie laughed. “It’s by my fingernails that I hang on to my job—or my bit of a job.”

  Isabel was sympathetic. Millie belonged to that class of academics who had no full-time post, who laboured in the vineyards of their subject on post-doctoral fellowships or as badly paid teaching assistants. Such people were rarely fired from these posts, the view being that they would do them, largely without complaint, until they found a full-time job elsewhere, or drifted away in despair.

  “You deserve something better,” Isabel said.

  “Thank you. I have fantasies, you know, of somehow finding myself rich enough to be able to turn down the pittance they pay me and to say that I shall do the teaching for nothing. I’d become a volunteer, you see, and they couldn’t condescend to me.”

  Isabel studied her friend. Millie was an inspired teacher of philosophy—she knew that from experience because she had taught a course with her years ago, when she had returned to Edinburgh. Students liked Millie and often migrated to her seminars from the less interesting offerings of her colleagues; not that this helped—on the contrary, it enraged some of the senior members of the department, who would have given anything for that degree of popularity.

  Millie had made tea, and she now poured a cup for Isabel. “It’s good to see you,” she said. “Friends should see one another more often than we do.”