The Quiet Side of Passion Read online

  “I know them,” said Isabel. “When I was at school we sometimes played there.”

  Claire continued, “We had a Japanese postgraduate student last year who was, I think, desperately homesick. He stood at the window for hours on end watching people playing tennis down below. If there was a good match going on, his head used to turn from side to side—like the heads of people watching games of tennis do—rather like a metronome. This could go on for ten, fifteen minutes, and then the game would become less exciting and he would simply stare out without moving his head.”

  Isabel was struck by the poignant image. She pictured the Japanese student, unhappy in Scotland because it so clearly was not Japan, watching tennis. She wondered what had brought him to Edinburgh. Where did he live? Did he have friends? Were there other Japanese students at the university—there must be—with whom he could go off and drink tea and speak Japanese and converse in the way that a shared language allows—a conversation of private allusion and unspoken understanding?

  “This poor young man,” said Isabel. “What did he do?”

  “Apart from watch tennis from the postgraduate room?”

  “Yes.”

  Claire thought for a moment. “He was writing a thesis on the Scottish Enlightenment. It was for his own university back in Japan somewhere. He had been sent to Edinburgh for a year, to do further research on that. I think he rather expected to find David Hume and Adam Smith still wandering around; I don’t know. He certainly looked disappointed.”

  Isabel remarked that people often feel they have to go to places in search of what used to be there—and don’t always find it. “Pilgrimage, you see. Classicists go to Rome, to Athens—they always have. They’re two thousand years late—more if you’re going in search of Odysseus.”

  Claire thought that you would at least see the places the ancients had seen; that was something.

  “Yes,” said Isabel. “Circe’s island, I suppose—or an island rather like it. Horace’s farm—or somewhere where Horace might have had a farm. That sort of thing.”

  Now, in the kitchen, Isabel gestured for Claire to sit down while she prepared the coffee. “We don’t have to stay in here,” she said. “We’ll go to my study once I’ve made the coffee.”

  “I like kitchens,” said Claire. “I work in my kitchen—I don’t mean work in the cooking sense—peeling potatoes, et cetera—but actual work. Marking student papers and so on. I give them back covered in butter and marmalade. Well, not quite, but they do pick up the occasional stain.”

  Isabel confessed that the same thing happened with articles for the Review. She had spilt a glass of water all over one that had been printed on an ink-jet printer, with disastrous results. “I could have written back to the author saying that his paper was fine as far as it went—but go it did. All the ink ran and I couldn’t read it. It was the only copy I had.”

  Claire’s eyes widened. “Embarrassment!” she said.

  “Yes. I had to come clean. I had to write to the author and ask him for another copy. I explained what happened. He sent another one immediately—that was before I accepted electronic submissions. He said that he hoped the dog wouldn’t eat the new copy.”

  Claire laughed. “Dogs have done such damage to homework in their time, haven’t they? Apocryphally, of course.”

  “But there must have been some dog, somewhere,” Isabel said, “that actually ate some poor child’s homework. The index case, as the epidemiologists would have it.”

  She poured the ground coffee into the cafetière. She was thinking of the Japanese student again. She saw the tennis courts—she had walked past them only last week; she saw the window above—one of the windows looking down from the old tenement block—and he was there at the window, standing slightly back, but touched by the slanting sun, illuminated in his unhappiness. One of the tennis players shouted; they were scruffy—four students, two young men and two young women; the young women wearing sandals, ill-shod for the court; the young men in shorts, their white legs showing that they were Scots, as yet unused to summer; all bad players, except for one of the boys, who was lithe and threw himself around the court with confidence.

  She became aware that Claire was looking at her expectantly. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I have a tendency to drift off a bit. I was thinking of that Japanese student, and you probably said something to me.”

  “I said: ‘Have you lived in this house for a long time?’ ”

  “Just about forever,” said Isabel. “It was my childhood home. Then I went away, Cambridge, followed by a short time in the States. I came back not long before I inherited the house from my father. So it’s pretty much the only permanent home I’ve ever known.” She looked at Claire. She was oddly disturbed by her beauty. “What about you?”

  “I come from Callander,” said Claire. “You may know it.”

  Isabel did. Callander was the archetypical Highland town; the inspiration for any number of paintings of Highland Scotland. “Of course I do. Very pretty.”

  “That’s the word for it: pretty.”

  “I don’t use it in any demeaning way,” said Isabel. “It’s an attractive town.”

  “My parents ran a toffee shop,” said Claire. As she spoke, she looked up at Isabel, as if to watch her reaction.

  Isabel had to smile. Callander was just the place for a toffee shop, of all things; the toffee would be sold in tartan-edged boxes, with pictures of Highland cattle on the front. Summer visitors would buy these boxes in their thousands.

  Claire returned the smile. “Yes, a toffee shop. I used to help during the summer months when people came on their way to the Trossachs. They bought toffee from us and then went on to a woollens shop down the street, where they bought tartan scarves and Rob Roy bonnets.”

  “And then?” asked Isabel.

  “I made it to Glasgow,” said Claire. “I think my parents had been secretly hoping that I’d marry a farmer’s son from up the glen. In fact, I think they had the actual boy in mind, but there was no chemistry, even if I had been prepared to stay. He was called Robert. He used to stare at me in church on Sundays. He sat there and stared.”

  Isabel could imagine it. Of course the boys would stare. “Were you surprised?” she asked. She had not intended to ask the question; it slipped out, as questions that reveal what we are really thinking tend to do. This one was unfortunate: people who looked like Claire tended to be well aware of their looks and of the effect they had on others; some might be happy to talk about this, but others were embarrassed by the attention. Her unwitting comment would now reveal to which group Claire belonged.

  It was as if the question had not been asked. Claire ignored it, continuing instead, “I discovered philosophy in Glasgow. I went there to study German and Spanish—I had done rather well at languages at high school—but I was able to take a minor subject in philosophy. I was bitten. I wanted to know more.”

  Isabel understood that. She remembered the first philosophy she had read—Plato’s Symposium, at the age of sixteen. That had determined the course of her life.

  “So I changed degree courses and ended up doing philosophy. And then went for two years to Leiden, where I held an exchange fellowship. After that, I worked for a year and a bit in an investment firm in Edinburgh. I didn’t like it, and applied to do my PhD with Professor Lettuce. I was lucky to get funding, but I did.” She shrugged. “And that’s me, I suppose.”

  The coffee was ready, and Isabel poured it. As she got the milk from the fridge, she asked about Lettuce. “You’ve enjoyed working with him? With Professor Lettuce?”

  Claire did not hesitate. “Yes. Very much. He gives me a lot of his time.”

  Isabel looked into her coffee cup. Yes. Of course he would. Uncharitable thought, a voice within her said. So she told herself: Why should Professor Lettuce not appreciate beauty as much as everyone else? Why should
this appreciation not be free of sexual interest, as an appreciation of beauty could be? As in Roger Scruton’s book on beauty, itself such a beautiful object that Isabel had once found herself kissing its cover, platonically. Because that’s highly unlikely, retorted the voice. Because Lettuce is Lettuce—and he’s a man.

  “Now, that’s uncharitable,” Isabel muttered internally; or thought she muttered internally.

  “I beg your pardon?” asked Claire.

  “Oh, nothing,” Isabel said hurriedly. And made a silent resolution: Do not engage in private dialogue. Do not.

  She handed Claire her cup of coffee. “Shall we take these into my study?” she suggested. “That’s where the Review happens.”

  She watched as Claire rose from her chair at the kitchen table. Botticelli, she thought; she might have stepped straight from his studio.

  In the corridor, just as he was about to go into the kitchen, they encountered Jamie. The bassoon lesson he had been due to give had been cancelled, and he had come home. Thinking Isabel alone, as he came down the corridor he had started to tell her vociferously about his unreliable pupil.

  “That boy Geoffrey Weir,” he half shouted. “He’s a real pain in the lower section of the bassoon. He cancelled ten minutes beforehand. Ten minutes. Man flu, or in his case boy flu—”

  He stopped mid-sentence as Isabel and Claire emerged from the kitchen. Isabel introduced them. She was looking at Jamie as he was looking at Claire. She saw his surprise, and noticed as it turned to something else. It was the reaction, she suspected, that must greet Claire on virtually every meeting—nothing more than that, of course, but that very specific, momentary acknowledgement of beauty.

  * * *

  —

  AT LUNCHTIME, preparing a meal of puréed carrots for Magnus, Jamie said to Isabel, “Is she going to take the job?”

  Isabel turned the question back on him. “What did you think of her? Would you?”

  “I hardly met her,” said Jamie. “Just those few minutes in the corridor. I hardly had time to judge.”

  “No, I don’t suppose you did,” she conceded. “But what did you think, anyway?”

  Jamie concentrated on the puréed carrot. “She’s a bit of a stunner, isn’t she?”

  There had been tension; now this disappeared. Isabel laughed. “Yes, she is. I didn’t think much about it when I met her the other day, but today...she looked different; it was more striking.”

  Jamie crossed the room to where Magnus, strapped into his high chair, was awaiting his lunch. “Carrots,” he said breezily, trying to enthuse his small son. “Totally delicious carrots.”

  “Of course, her looks are neither here nor there,” said Isabel.

  “Of course not.”

  The first spoonful of carrot was presented, sniffed at and grudgingly admitted.

  “We talked quite a bit,” Isabel continued. “I explained what the job would entail, and it seems to me that she’ll be able to do it very well. She asked all the right questions.”

  “So that’s it, then,” said Jamie. “I think you should take her on.”

  Isabel agreed. She was ready to offer the job, she said, but she had wanted to run it past Jamie first. “She’ll be working in the house,” she said. “You have to feel comfortable about it.”

  Jamie shrugged. “I’ve no objection. Although...”

  He put down the spoon. Magnus had been distracted by his mug and was intent on dribbling it over his plate. Jamie, distracted too, did nothing to stop him. Isabel waited.

  “With somebody who looks like that,” he said, “there’s almost a presumption that it’s not going to be simple.”

  Isabel frowned. “In what way?”

  “Well, good-looking people can be...how should I put it? Brittle? Selfish? Pleased with themselves? It’s because they’re used to people looking at them, fawning over them—they become dependent on it. They expect to get their own way. They expect their whims to be indulged.”

  Isabel thought about this. “Examples?” she said.

  Jamie seemed taken aback. “You want me to give you examples?” he asked.

  “Well, you’ve made a bit of a generalisation about good-looking people. Give me some examples.” He himself, she thought, was the best counter-example, but he would never recognise that.

  Magnus reached for the spoon and banged it on the table.

  “I can’t,” said Jamie. “Not just now. And it was a passing thought. As long as you think she’ll fit in, that’s fine.”

  “All right,” said Isabel. “Let’s take her.”

  “Fine,” said Jamie.

  She watched him feeding Magnus. He was gentle with the boys, but there was still a masculinity about the way he handled them. It was different from the way in which a woman would do the same thing; a woman envelops a child, embraces it; a woman holds a child in such a way that reveals she will be holding it for a very long time, for years, in fact; a man holds a child—may hold it with affection and gentleness—in a way that indicates he is going to hand it back. It was one of those odd little differences that people did not see, but that Isabel had always noticed.

  She left the kitchen and went to her study. There she typed a message to Claire to tell her that she had given the matter thought and the job was hers, if she wanted it. The terms would be as they had discussed; Claire would be paid at an hourly rate, on the understanding that there would be at least ten hours’ work a week, reading proofs, corresponding with authors, and doing a preliminary sift-through of the constant stream of submissions that the Review received. She could choose the hours she wished to work, and Isabel would be as flexible as possible in order to fit in with her university commitments. An hour later Claire’s reply came through. She was happy with everything Isabel suggested, and would start tomorrow, if that was not too soon.

  “No time like the present,” Isabel wrote back.

  She sought out Jamie, who was entertaining Magnus in the music room.

  “I’ve just offloaded half my burden in life,” she announced.

  He grinned at her. “Feel lighter?”

  “Yes. And there’s another thing: the au pair agency has phoned. They have somebody in mind. All I have to do is accept and she’ll be ready to start next week.”

  “And are you going to accept her?”

  “I already have,” said Isabel.

  Jamie raised an eyebrow. “You’re not letting the grass grow under your feet, are you?”

  “She’s twenty-one and she’s called Antonia,” said Isabel. “She’s Italian—from Reggio Emilia. She’s studying at the University of Bologna, but she’s taking a year out. She wants to bring her English up to scratch.”

  “Good,” said Jamie. “If she’s Italian, she’ll like small children.” He bounced Magnus on his knee, and the little boy beamed with pleasure.

  “Do you think we could ask Grace to babysit tonight?” asked Isabel.

  Jamie looked surprised. “We aren’t going out, are we?”

  “I’d like to,” said Isabel. “I’d like to celebrate. Dinner. Somewhere different. Perhaps at one of those seafood places down in Leith.”

  Jamie pointed out that Grace would have had a long day of it, with the lengthy play date in Albert Terrace. On the other hand, he could prepare a special meal for her and chill a bottle of the rosé wine she liked. She enjoyed babysitting, he thought.

  Grace was doing the ironing upstairs. She would be happy to babysit, she said. And yes, some of that rosé would be very welcome. “Just a glass or two,” she said severely. “I don’t over-indulge, you know.”

  “Of course you don’t,” said Isabel.

  “Unlike some,” added Grace.

  Isabel looked puzzled. “Anybody in particular?” she asked.

  “Oh, there are plenty of people in this city who drink far t
oo much,” said Grace disapprovingly. “And in Scotland as a whole.”

  Isabel agreed it was a problem. “I wouldn’t press the rosé on you,” she said.

  “Oh no, I wasn’t referring to myself,” said Grace hurriedly. “And the Scottish government is doing its best to stop people overdoing things, but they have an uphill battle.”

  “On every front,” said Isabel.

  “I’ll tell you something,” said Grace, pressing the iron down firmly on the sleeve of one of Jamie’s shirts. “I wouldn’t be First Minister for all the tea in China.”

  Isabel laughed. “You’d make a very fine First Minister, Grace.”

  Grace looked pleased with the compliment. “I wouldn’t do it, though. Not if they begged me.”

  “Very wise,” said Isabel. “I wouldn’t either.”

  Grace began to fold the shirt. “Where are you going for dinner?” she asked.

  “There’s a place called the Quayside,” Isabel replied. “It’s down in Leith.” Leith was Edinburgh’s port—a place of cobbled streets and of whisky warehouses, of grain merchants and chandlers, of frequent mists that rolled in from the North Sea.

  “Leith,” sniffed Grace. “I can’t remember when I was last down there.” She paused; the folded shirt was placed neatly on a shelf in the laundry room. “Be careful,” she added, and then muttered under her breath, not for Isabel’s benefit, but for her own, “Leith.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  “THERE’S ONE THING you have to remember when it comes to lobster,” said Jamie. “Never over-cook it. Many people do.” He glanced over the table at Isabel, almost as if she might be the type to ruin a lobster through over-cooking.

  They were examining the menu at the Quayside. Isabel was vacillating; she liked lobster, but sometimes found it a bit too sweet for her taste; she liked mussels, but was not sure how satisfying they would be—moules marinière were all very well, but they were soup, she thought, rather than a main course; and then there was sea bass, which could be just perfect, but was offered here with a caper sauce, and Isabel, prejudiced for some forgotten historical reason against capers, did not fancy that.