The Quiet Side of Passion Read online

  BOOKS BY ALEXANDER McCALL SMITH

  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

  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

  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 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

  My Italian Bulldozer

  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 © 2018 by Alexander McCall Smith

  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 2018.

  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 quiet side of passion / Alexander McCall Smith.

  Description: First United States edition. New York : Pantheon, 2018. Series: Isabel Dalhousie series ; 12

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018006531. ISBN 9780307908964 (hardcover). ISBN 9780307908971 (ebook).

  Subjects: LCSH: Dalhousie, Isabel (Fictitious character)—Fiction. Women philosophers—Fiction. Edinburgh (Scotland)—Fiction. BISAC: FICTION/Mystery & Detective/Women Sleuths. FICTION/Mystery & Detective/Traditional British. FICTION/Contemporary Women.

  Classification: LCC PR6063.C326 Q54 2018 | DDC 823/.914—dc23 | LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/​2018006531

  Ebook ISBN 9780307908971

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  Cover illustration by Bill Sanderson

  v5.3.1

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  Contents

  Cover

  Books by Alexander McCall Smith

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  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

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  About the Author

  This book is for Alex and Henry Field.

  CHAPTER ONE

  “GOSSIP?” asked Isabel Dalhousie, philosopher, wife, mother and editor of the Review of Applied Ethics. With the first three of these roles she was unreservedly happy; the editorship, though, she would at times gladly have passed on to somebody else—at particularly stressful moments to anybody at all—except that there was nobody to take it on, or at least no one who would do it unpaid, without complaint, and with the enthusiasm and wit that Isabel devoted to it. All of which seemed to suggest that Isabel was the editor of the Review of Applied Ethics for life.

  She was sitting in the kitchen of her house in Edinburgh, a glass of chilled white wine on the table before her. It was a warm evening, at least by the standards applied in Scotland, where summer is sometimes no more than a promise, an aspiration. On the side of the glass small beads of condensation had appeared, some of which were now becoming tiny rivulets, hesitant at first but growing in confidence. Isabel had a tendency to get lost in her musings, and now the thought came to her that this was the way in which all rivers started: a single drop of water somewhere joined up with another and became something altogether more significant; as with the Ganges, for instance, from whose banks people still bathed in the hope of spiritual gain, indifferent to the coliform load of each drop of that lethal water. Or the Limpopo, the river so alliteratively described by Kipling as great, grey-green and greasy, all set about with fever trees—though apparently it was not like that at all, she had been told by a friend who had actually seen it. “The Limpopo was somewhat sluggish,” her friend had said. “There was no sign of grease, and it was more brown than green.” But that was not the issue: what interested her was the observation that a large river starts with a tiny drop. There was a tipping point, it seemed, for everything: fame, fads, political careers—and water.

  On the other side of the kitchen, paging through a recipe book, undecided as yet as to what to cook for dinner that night, was her husband, Jamie: bassoonist, father, occasional composer, incidental tennis player and, in the view of virtually every woman who ever met him, the perfect ma
n. That last encomium was one Isabel herself readily would have bestowed, but only after a third or fourth meeting. When they’d first met, Isabel had been recovering from an uncomfortable divorce and was still wary of her ability to judge men. Some years earlier she had taken up with John Liamor, an Irishman she had met in Cambridge and whom she had then married, to the dismay of her father and just about all of her friends. They had seen what she had not, and over the next few years she learned what it was that she had missed.

  There had been another reason why Isabel might have been cautious of Jamie on first meeting: at that time he happened to be the boyfriend of Isabel’s niece, Cat, owner of a delicatessen a short walk from Isabel’s house. They may have been aunt and niece, but the age gap between Isabel and Cat was small enough for them sometimes to be taken for sisters. But there were limits to such sisterhood as existed between them, as they were very different characters. Both were sociable, but Cat was rather inclined to fall for people—particularly men—before she had any real chance of getting to know them properly. This meant that her boyfriends—of whom there had been a steady succession—tended to be chosen without adequate attention to compatibility. She liked handsome men, and also seemed to cultivate men about whom there was a slight whiff of danger. Isabel was far more cautious in her friendships, and tended to show a certain reticence before she opened up to a new acquaintance. Cat could at times be a bit moody, whereas Isabel usually made an effort to keep bleak feelings to herself. Cat was decisive—a useful quality when running a small business—whereas Isabel was inclined to worry about the pros and cons of any particular action. Isabel reflected on things before she acted; Cat acted and then—sometimes, but not always—reflected on what she had done. Isabel took the view that if one made a mistake, one should be careful not to make it again. Cat’s view of any mistakes she made was to regard them as water under the bridge and to move on as cheerfully as possible. Sometimes, of course, that meant she moved on to the next mistake rather than anywhere else.

  Cat’s life, then, was not an example of the examined life of which philosophers have long written; Isabel’s life, by contrast, was a life lived under a moral microscope. In their different ways, both these approaches worked for the two women. Both were happy with their lot; each felt that the other had the wrong approach to things, but tolerated the contrast. Sometimes, though, matters became fraught, and the relationship was tested in an uncomfortable way. That had happened with Jamie, Cat’s former boyfriend, and now Isabel’s husband.

  When Isabel was introduced to Jamie, she imagined that he must be just one more of Cat’s unsuitable boyfriends—as unreliable as he was good-looking. She was wrong; Jamie was quite unlike any of Cat’s previous men, and it was perhaps for this reason that she ended her affair with him after they had been together for little more than a few months. Jamie, it seemed, was not what Cat was looking for. He was simply too safe. Not that Jamie was ever dull—far from it—but if you were somebody like Cat, looking for a man who had just a touch of wildness about him, then Jamie was not that. Jamie was decent—“heart-meltingly decent,” as one of Isabel’s friends had once described him. “And dishy,” the same friend had added, “knee-weakeningly dishy.”

  After Cat had broken up with him, Isabel had continued to see Jamie, whom she had considered a friend. This friendship had in due course become something more, and Isabel and Jamie became lovers, and eventually spouses. Not surprisingly, Cat took this badly—with a complete lack of grace, in fact: no niece expects her cast-offs to be taken on by her aunt, and there ensued a period of chilled relations between the two women. The birth of Isabel’s son, Charlie, had made matters even worse, although eventually a thaw set in and Cat accepted the existence of Charlie—huffs can be demanding, even to the huffiest. What was more, Cat needed Isabel’s help in running her delicatessen, and now Isabel regularly, and generously, provided cover over busy periods or when Cat was short-staffed.

  As for Jamie, willingness to cook was one of the qualities that made him the perfect man. He was versatile in his approach, perhaps a bit more adventurous than Isabel, and he had a particular appetite for vintage cookery books, of which he had built up quite a collection. That evening he had extracted a first edition of Julia Child—signed by Julia herself to one of Isabel’s American aunts in Mobile, Alabama, and passed on years earlier as a special birthday present. He was planning a chicken dish, and was taking an inventory of ingredients before he embarked on the recipe.

  They were by themselves, enjoying that blissful period of calm so familiar to parents when the children have been put to bed, the scattered toys rounded up and put away, and quiet reigns in the house. Both Charlie and his younger brother, Magnus, were now asleep, each broadcasting, from their separate monitors, a reassuring sound of breathing, punctuated by occasional snuffles, into the kitchen. Charlie had taken some time to settle, insisting on the re-reading of a book that Isabel had found in the Morningside Library. She rather wished she had left the book there on the library shelf; there was a tiger in this book, and he had no discernible redeeming qualities. He was fortunate, she felt, to avoid the fate of the tigers she remembered from her own childhood reading of a book now suppressed for reasons unconnected with tigers, but that had entailed the transformation of encircling tigers into ghee, Indian butter. As a small girl she had loved that ending, and had imagined that the fate of being turned into butter might be extended to other threatening creatures or even people. In fact, one might even have a “butter list” of such persons, who, even if they saw their names on it, would be unaware of what it entailed. Having an enemies list was too overt, as more than one politician has discovered: the existence of an enemies list could be embarrassing if it fell into the hands of the press—or a fortiori into those of the enemies it listed; a butter list, by contrast, would attract no adverse attention.

  Jamie looked up from his recipe book. “Gossip?”

  Isabel took a sip of her wine. The glass was cold to the touch; she liked that. “Yes, I was wondering what you thought of gossip.”

  Jamie smiled; he was used to Isabel’s non sequiturs. “That’s an odd question, don’t you think?”

  She shook her head. “Not really. Gossip is a pretty important subject, even if gossip itself is about things that aren’t all that significant.” She paused before adding, “If you see what I mean.”

  He laid aside Julia Child, marking his place in the book with a small sprig of parsley. “If you’re interested in gossip,” he said, “have you met that woman who’s just started taking her son to Charlie’s nursery? The little boy’s called Basil. He’s got freckles.”

  Isabel and Jamie shared the task of taking Charlie to nursery school, and they knew most, if not all, of the other parents.

  Isabel thought. There had been a freckled child, but she had not taken much notice of him. And the mother? She wasn’t sure. “I think I’ve seen the child. I don’t know about her, though. What’s her name?”

  “Patricia. She’s Irish. Rather tall. She wears her hair piled up at the back of her head, like Princess Anne. It wouldn’t suit everybody, but it looks good on her. She’s a musician, actually. Viola.”

  “Oh, yes, I think so...Have you worked with her?”

  Jamie nodded. “Yes. She stood in for Robbie the other day. The usual thing.” Robbie was the viola player in Jamie’s regular ensemble. He had a reputation for calling off engagements at the last minute for reasons connected with a complicated, and unfathomable, love life.

  “Is that it? Is that the gossip?”

  Jamie hesitated. “That boy—Basil—is the son of Basil Phelps.”

  “Basil Phelps the organist?” Two weeks earlier, they had both gone to hear Phelps play Messiaen at a concert in one of the city’s large churches, and had talked to him briefly afterwards. He was a slender man with piercing blue eyes—eyes alight with intelligence.

  “Yes. The gossip is that
she had an affair with him. They say he didn’t want the baby—she did.”

  Isabel winced. “Awkward.”

  “Very,” said Jamie. “They split up over it. It became acrimonious. She then went and had the baby and called him after his father, although he didn’t want anybody to know about it.” He paused. “He—Basil Senior—plays the organ at a church over on the other side of town. She took Basil Junior to be baptised there during the Sunday service the other day. Basil Senior wasn’t told—and he was on duty playing the organ when the son he’s had nothing to do with was brought up to the font and introduced to the congregation.”

  “Oh no...”

  “Just imagine the scene. The minister always holds up the child to show to the congregation. So he held up this one and said: ‘This child we welcome today is Basil Phelps.’ ”

  Isabel gasped. Public humiliation could be very cruel, but if men refused to shoulder their responsibilities...

  Jamie agreed. “Why should she be the one to pay all the bills?” said Jamie. “He should know what children cost.”

  Isabel thought of what lay ahead for the child: How would he feel about a father who refused to acknowledge him? She had read recently of the experience of adopted people using their legal right to discover the identity of their biological parents. It was not uncommon for them to be rebuffed. One woman she heard about had found her mother and been given a half-hour appointment to meet her. “I’m dreadfully busy,” the woman had said, which was worse, in a way, than a flat refusal to meet.

  Jamie picked up Julia Child once more. “You started the conversation,” he said. “But I’m not sure if I feel entirely comfortable telling you that story. It’s gossip, isn’t it?” He found his recipe and extracted the sprig of parsley. “In fact, I’m sorry I mentioned it.”