The Geometry of Holding Hands Read online

  BOOKS BY

  ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH

  IN THE NO. 1 LADIES’ DETECTIVE AGENCY SERIES

  The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency

  Tears of the Giraffe

  Morality for Beautiful Girls

  The Kalahari Typing School for Men

  The Full Cupboard of Life

  In the Company of Cheerful Ladies

  Blue Shoes and Happiness

  The Good Husband of Zebra Drive

  The Miracle at Speedy Motors

  Tea Time for the Traditionally Built

  The Double Comfort Safari Club

  The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party

  The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection

  The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon

  The Handsome Man’s De Luxe Café

  The Woman Who Walked in Sunshine

  Precious and Grace

  The House of Unexpected Sisters

  The Colors of All the Cattle

  To the Land of Long Lost Friends

  IN THE ISABEL DALHOUSIE SERIES

  The Sunday Philosophy Club

  Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

  The Right Attitude to Rain

  The Careful Use of Compliments

  The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday

  The Lost Art of Gratitude

  The Charming Quirks of Others

  The Forgotten Affairs of Youth

  The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds

  The Novel Habits of Happiness

  A Distant View of Everything

  The Quiet Side of Passion

  The Geometry of Holding Hands

  IN THE PAUL STUART SERIES

  My Italian Bulldozer

  The Second-Worst Restaurant in France

  IN THE DETECTIVE VARG SERIES

  The Department of Sensitive Crimes

  The Talented Mr. Varg

  IN THE CORDUROY MANSIONS SERIES

  Corduroy Mansions

  The Dog Who Came in from the Cold

  A Conspiracy of Friends

  IN THE PORTUGUESE IRREGULAR VERBS SERIES

  Portuguese Irregular Verbs

  The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs

  At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances

  Unusual Uses for Olive Oil

  IN THE 44 SCOTLAND STREET SERIES

  44 Scotland Street

  Espresso Tales

  Love over Scotland

  The World According to Bertie

  The Unbearable Lightness of Scones

  The Importance of Being Seven

  Bertie Plays the Blues

  Sunshine on Scotland Street

  Bertie’s Guide to Life and Mothers

  The Revolving Door of Life

  The Bertie Project

  A Time of Love and Tartan

  The Peppermint Tea Chronicles

  The Girl Who Married a Lion and Other Tales from Africa

  La’s Orchestra Saves the World

  Trains and Lovers

  The Forever Girl

  Emma: A Modern Retelling

  Chance Developments

  The Good Pilot Peter Woodhouse

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Alexander McCall Smith

  Map copyright © 2011 by Iain McIntosh

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Little, Brown, an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group, a Hachette UK company, London, in 2020.

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Excerpts from the poems of W. H. Auden appear courtesy of Edward Mendelson, Executor of the Estate of W. H. Auden, and Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Name: McCall Smith, Alexander, [date] author

  Title: The geometry of holding hands / Alexander McCall Smith

  Description: First American edition. New York : Pantheon Books, 2020.

  Series: An Isabel Dalhousie novel ; 13.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020010147. ISBN 9781524748944 (hardcover). ISBN 9781524748951 (ebook).

  Subjects: LCSH: Dalhousie, Isabel (Fictitious character)—Fiction. Women philosophers—Fiction. Edinburgh (Scotland)—Fiction. GSAFD: Mystery fiction.

  Classification: LCC PR6063.C326 G46 2020 | DDC 823/.914—dc23

  LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/​2020010147

  Ebook ISBN 9781524748951

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  Cover illustration by Bill Sanderson

  ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Books by Alexander McCall Smith

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  An Isabel Dalhousie Edinburgh Map

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  About the Author

  This book is for Roma and Michael Menlowe.

  CHAPTER ONE

  “WE DESERVE IT, don’t we?” said Isabel Dalhousie, half in jest—but only half.

  On the other side of the kitchen table, her husband, Jamie—whom she still thought of as her lover, as he thought of her too—was engaged in feeding their younger son, Magnus, a mixture of boiled egg and yoghurt. It was an unlikely dish, not one to be found in any cookbook of children’s food, but one that Magnus clearly enjoyed, at least judging by the way he waved his arms with delight whenever it was offered to him. Magnus had developed a habit of waving his arms that Jamie, in particular, found endearing. “He’s destined to be a conductor,” he announced proudly. “That’s the first sign. Daniel Barenboim must have waved his arms exactly like that when he was a baby.”

  “Be careful what you wish for,” Isabel had cautioned. “Would you want Magnus to grow into Toscanini?”

  Jamie laughed. As a professional musician, he had experienced his fair share of difficult and irascible conductors. Conductors could be bullies and fly into rages. “Perhaps not,” he said. “Unless that’s what he wanted.” He looked intently at Magnus, who stared back at him. “Would you like to be like Arturo Toscanini, my wee darling?”

  Magnus transferred his gaze to the bowl from which his father had been feeding him.

  “I read that as a no,” he said.

  “Grub first, then music,” said Isabel. “To parody Brecht.”

  Jamie picked up a spoon. He had stumbled upon the combination by mistake, when he had inadvertently emptied a carton of yoghurt into a bowl already containing chopped-up boiled egg. “I discovered it in the same way in which Sir Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin,” he said. “He left a Petri dish on a windowsill, didn’t he? And in floated the mould. Serendipity, I think they call it.”

 
Now, as the last remnants of œuf au yaourt, as he called it, was scraped off the side of the bowl and offered to Magnus, Jamie thought about Isabel’s question. They had been talking about their planned evening out, and Isabel, who tended to engage in moral self-examination in circumstances in which others would not bother, was now wondering about how they might justify a night out at an expensive restaurant.

  Jamie looked across the table and grinned. “Are you worried about spending the money?” he asked. “This place…what’s it called?”

  “Casa Trimalchio…I think.” She hesitated. “It made me think of Trimalchio’s Feast, of course. Petronius, the Satyricon. Remember?”

  Jamie shook his head. His classical education had stopped when he was sixteen, when the school’s Latin teacher had died unexpectedly and had been replaced by a teacher of geography. “I never did Petronius,” he said. “We did a bit of Ovid and Caesar’s De Bello Gallico, which was really boring. Gallia in tres partes divisa est…I remember that bit. Gaul is divided into three parts. God, Caesar was a bore.” He remembered something else. “And a bit of Horace. Not much, but a few of his Odes. I liked him. He would never have divided Gaul into three parts. And then that was that. No Greek at all. I don’t have a word of Greek, I’m afraid. Not one.”

  “Neither do I,” said Isabel. “And yet does that stop me expressing views on Aristotle? Or Plato, while I’m about it? Not to mention the Stoics?” She laughed. “Aren’t we a pair? Completely Greek-less.” But then she thought: Ethos, logos, akrasia—she was full of Greek without knowing it, just like Molière’s M. Jourdain, who discovered that he had been speaking prose for forty years without knowing it.

  Jamie said, “So it’s called Casa Trimalchio. I think I read a review in the Scotsman.”

  Isabel had read it too. “They liked it. That’s why I chose it.”

  He suddenly thought of Horace again. “Why did I like Horace?”

  Isabel shrugged. “He was pleased with life. He liked to write about farms and bee-keeping and drinking wine with friends. He was that sort of poet.”

  “Like your W. H. Auden?”

  “A bit. Auden had his Horatian moments. I think of ‘In Praise of Limestone’ in that light.”

  Jamie continued, “Horace wrote something that made our Latin teacher get hot under the collar. Blow a fuse.”

  “And mix a metaphor,” muttered Isabel.

  “I remember it distinctly,” said Jamie. “Horace writes somewhere Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori—it’s a sweet and noble thing to die for your country. And Mr. Henderson—he was the Latin teacher—shook his head and went red. He said, ‘That, boys, is perfect nonsense. It isn’t. It just isn’t. Die for a cause, but not for a country. And even then, it’s not sweet. It’s tragic.’ ”

  “Wilfred Owen would have agreed with him.”

  Jamie knew about that. “Ah, Britten’s War Requiem. That’s Owen, isn’t it? There are those utterly bleak lines, What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of the guns…I was fourteen when I heard that for the first time. I couldn’t believe it. It struck me as so sad. I was told that he was writing about eighteen-year-olds and that really struck me.”

  “I can imagine.” She could; she had seen a photograph of him at about that age and it had tugged at her heart: she saw in him the fragile beauty that can flower in boys at that stage and then coarsens as they get older, although in his case it had not—it had persisted. There was something about that somewhere in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, but she would not embarrass Jamie by mentioning it. He was indifferent to the way he looked, which was half his charm. People who were aware of their good looks could be narcissistic and precious, and that, curiously enough, was a form of ugliness. Jamie never looked in the mirror and had to be told when it was time to go to the hairdresser.

  He reminded her that she had asked about Casa Trimalchio and whether they deserved their reservation there. “You don’t have to worry all that much about money, Isabel,” he said. “I know you don’t throw it around—or talk about it. But it is there, isn’t it? We’re not exactly on the breadline.”

  She liked it when he said we in this context. Isabel had said from the beginning of their marriage that everything she had was his too—and she meant it. He, however, had been reluctant to dip into their joint bank account in any way, preferring to rely on the much smaller balance he kept in an old-fashioned savings account. It was into this account that his earnings as a musician and music teacher were paid—not much, he cheerfully pointed out, but enough to provide him with sufficient pocket money. The big bills—the expenses of running the house, Grace’s salary, insurance payments, the garage bills for the green Swedish car and so on—all these were paid by Isabel.

  “I know I don’t have to worry,” she conceded. “But I do. I don’t worry about not having enough—I worry about the whole idea of spending money I didn’t earn. You earn every penny of yours—I wish I could say the same.”

  “You work hard,” he pointed out. “You edit the Review. You deal with all those prima donna authors. Lettuce and that creepy Christopher…”

  “Dove.” He was creepy. It was an apt word for Dr. Christopher Dove. And Professor Lettuce, if not creepy in quite the same way as Christopher Dove, still seemed ridiculous. Isabel pictured him in all his self-importance. How might one describe Professor Lettuce? Perhaps no other word was necessary because his name—Lettuce—was ridiculous enough. Professor Robert Lettuce—how could one not smile at that? And yet making fun of another’s name was simply childish—she reminded herself of that—even if there were names that seemed to invite such a response. There were people in Scotland called Smellie, an old Scottish name and one that many Smellies still bore with pride—defiance, even. Or there were those English names, mostly originally from Lancashire, she understood, like Sidebottom and Winterbottom. People of that name must as children have become hardened to the smirks of others, although how many of them must have yearned to wake up one morning as simple Sides or unremarkable Winters? She put thoughts of names out of her mind and listened instead to what Jamie was about to say about the morality, or otherwise, of inherited assets.

  “You work pretty hard,” Jamie continued, “and so, quite frankly, I don’t see why you should feel guilty. What you’re doing is using money from those investments—that trust over there—you’re using that money to pay yourself for the work that the Review could never pay you for.”

  She looked doubtful. “I wish I could really see it that way.”

  “You could,” he said. “Stop beating yourself up over being financially comfortable. That family of yours over in Alabama, or Louisiana, or wherever it was, worked hard for it. Now it’s passed on to you. And you’re using it well.”

  “Going out to dinner at expensive restaurants?”

  Jamie shook his head in frustration. “When did we last do that? Come on, tell me when we last went out to dinner somewhere expensive.”

  “I can’t remember,” she replied, then hazarded a guess: “A couple of months ago?”

  “Well, there you are.”

  * * *

  —

  GRACE HAD AGREED to do the babysitting. She had been Isabel’s housekeeper, having more or less come with the house when Isabel had inherited it from her father. Grace had looked after him after the death of Isabel’s mother—her “sainted American mother” as Isabel called her—and she regarded it as part of the natural order of things that she should continue in her post when Isabel eventually took over. Isabel demurred, but Grace had quietly taken on everything from cleaning to ordering groceries. When the children had arrived, she had assumed the additional role of nurse and nanny, washing, changing and feeding Charlie and Magnus with brisk efficiency. The boys loved her, although they both knew that Grace was inherently more difficult to manipulate than either of their parents. “Children can sense a pushover,
” Grace said, adding hurriedly, “not that I’m saying that either you or Jamie is that. Heavens, no. But they can tell who is going to let them get away with things, little devils.”

  Grace arrived early that evening. Magnus was already asleep, but Charlie, being older, was on a half-hour extension, which would give him the chance to have his bedtime story read by Grace.

  “You concentrate on getting into your finery,” she said to Jamie. “I’ll do the story.”

  Jamie accepted her offer. “He’s been looking forward to that. There’s a new book from the Morningside Library. Isabel got it today. It’s about a boy who wants to wear a dress.”

  Grace was unsurprised. “Little boys sometimes want to dress like girls. My older cousin’s son—the one who lived over in Lochgelly—he was like that. He was always putting on his sister’s dresses. And…”

  Jamie waited. Grace, although single herself, had a wide extended family, and usually had a relative whose example could illustrate any proposition. “And?” he prompted. He was not sure that this story would end well; Lochgelly, once a coal-mining town, was no place for a sensitive boy to live.

  “He joined the army. He did pretty well. He’s still in it.”

  “A Highland regiment?” asked Jamie. “They wear kilts.”

  Grace smiled. “No, the Royal Marines, actually.”

  “Ah.”

  “He’s a sergeant now. He was based at Redford Barracks until a few months ago. Now he’s with the Gurkhas somewhere.”

  Jamie raised an eyebrow.

  “So you see, you can’t tell,” Grace concluded. “People should be able to do their thing, shouldn’t they?”

  “Of course,” said Jamie. But he wondered about the cousin; he wondered whether he had been encouraged to make himself tough—and had overdone it. The Royal Marines did the job they had to do very well, but did they have to be quite so tough? Were the ranks of these regiments full of people who were trying to prove something to others, or even to themselves?