The Quiet Side of Passion Read online

  “I met some friends.”

  Isabel waited for Antonia to say more, but she did not.

  “New friends?” Isabel ventured. “Or people you already knew?”

  “Oh, new. I met them in a pub where they play folk music. Sandy something...”

  “Sandy Bell’s,” said Isabel. “It’s very famous.”

  “I met them there. They are students at the university.”

  Isabel took a deep breath. This was the time to say what she had to say.

  “I should have discussed this with you yesterday,” she began. “But we need to talk about it now. If you want to bring people here—your friends—then that’s fine with us.”

  Antonia nodded. “Thank you.”

  “But not to stay, of course,” Isabel went on hurriedly.

  Antonia did not blink. “Of course not.”

  “Just to visit,” said Isabel, thinking, I sound as if I’m speaking to Charlie.

  Again, Antonia nodded. “I would not bring anybody back here without asking you.”

  Isabel looked away. Then she said, “Good,” and left the room. Her overwhelming feeling was one of disappointment. She had liked Antonia on their initial meeting, but now the lie that had just been told to her ruined that. How could she trust somebody who was ready to lie with so little hesitation? She couldn’t, she told herself. She couldn’t trust her now.

  Or was it what was sometimes called an understandable lie—one of those mistruths we tell when we are unprepared to explain ourselves properly, or when we are caught out unawares. Such misstatements may be aspirational, as when we say what we would like to be the case, but which we have not quite managed to achieve. Isabel did not condone them, but she understood why they were uttered, and had in the past been as guilty as anybody else of resorting to them. The test of whether a lie was simple: Could one add I’m sure to the statement? Did you leave the door unlocked/leave the light on/forget to turn the tap off? I’m sure it wasn’t me—which can be translated as It was possibly/probably me, but I really didn’t mean to, I won’t do it in the future, and you’ve done it yourself so you’re in no position to point the finger...

  Thinking about understandable lies made her feel rather more positive towards Antonia. The Italian girl was young; she was in a foreign country; they had not discussed the terms of their arrangement with her—at least in relation to the use of the house. Her bringing the boy back might have been quite innocent—young people thought nothing of sharing a room with their friends of the opposite sex, and it might be quite wrong to assume that there was a sexual dimension to this. And even if there were—and Isabel smiled at the memory of one of her Mobile aunts drawing her aside and saying, Isabel, honey, sex is happening all the time, you know—it’s going on all the time!—then did that really make any difference?

  Thinking it through helped, and by the time she sat down at her desk to begin the day’s work, she felt much easier about the whole situation. She had a feeling now that this was a day in which a great deal would be achieved. But then Cat telephoned.

  “I know this is really, really short notice, but could you possibly...”

  Isabel sighed.

  Cat was sensitive. “Was that a sigh?”

  “No,” lied Isabel. “When do you want me?”

  Cat said that by really short notice she meant extremely short notice. “Is there any chance of your coming up here within the next half hour? Eddie’s going to be late in—he has to go to the doctor about...about something, and he won’t be in until at least ten.”

  “All right. I’ll—” She broke off. It was so obvious.

  “Isabel? Is that all right?”

  “I’m going to bring somebody with me,” said Isabel. “I’ll be there.”

  Antonia accepted immediately. “Would I like to do some work in a deli? Of course I would. Now? I’m ready—I can do the ironing later. There’s plenty of time. Can I wear what I’m wearing? This is wonderful.”

  Isabel felt herself won over by the young woman’s sheer ebullience. Last night was forgotten; she liked company, that’s all, and now that they had had that conversation she would no doubt be more discreet in future, with no more shoes being thrown to the floor or audible laughter. Isabel rolled her eyes—how very Edinburgh I sound, how Jean Brodie. But then I am from Edinburgh, and if people from Edinburgh cannot have just a touch of Jean Brodie in their attitudes, then who can?

  They walked together to Bruntsfield, where Cat was behind the deli counter, serving a short queue of customers. Isabel decided to wait until the last customer had gone before she made the introductions. And once she did, she could tell from Cat’s attitude that she approved of Antonia.

  “Once Eddie comes in,” said Isabel, “I’ll leave Antonia here. I have work to do.” There was a hint of reproach in the reference to work, but Cat appeared not to notice it.

  “This is a fabulous place,” said Antonia. “I love food.”

  Isabel caught her eye, and smiled. “Don’t we all?”

  Antonia gazed about her. “And look at all the salamis.” She reeled off the names. “Cacciatore. Finocchiona. Sbriciolona. Oh, I feel so homesick now.”

  Cat was clearly enjoying this display of approval. “And our pastas too. Look over there.”

  Again, Antonia enthused. “This is like being at home,” she said.

  Cat indicated that she had to leave. Isabel had not asked her where she was going, and did not express any view on the length of her absence, which was to last the entire day. But when Cat drew her aside and whispered, “I haven’t said anything about pay. I take it you’re paying her?” she decided to hold her ground.

  “You can’t expect people to work for nothing, Cat. Be reasonable.”

  Cat looked at her reproachfully. “I don’t expect people to work for nothing. I pay Eddie.”

  And me? thought Isabel.

  “And anyway,” Cat continued, “you’re paying her, aren’t you? She doesn’t need to be paid twice.”

  Cat looked at her watch, a signal that the issue needed no further discussion. Isabel did not press the matter; Cat was exploitative by nature—and she was not going to change. Even if Isabel had wanted to argue the point, there would be no time: two customers had entered the shop and were waiting for service. Cat nodded in a friendly way to Antonia and left by the front door, turning briefly to wave to Isabel and Antonia once she was outside.

  “She must be a very busy person,” said Antonia.

  Isabel handed her an apron. “Yes,” she said. “She is. But now you should watch me for a little while. See what I do.”

  She sold cheese to the first customer—a small Saint-Félicien and a thirty-degree wedge of Parmesan—and to the second customer a dozen slices of prosciutto crudo. Antonia volunteered to cut this, and operated the machine quickly and expertly, while Isabel held her breath. How would she put it to the au pair agency if she had to report that Antonia had sliced off a finger? They would accuse her not only of endangerment but also, perhaps, of trafficking: au pairs were not meant to be employed in ordinary non-household jobs, especially if those jobs were unpaid. That took one into slavery territory.

  Within less than an hour, Antonia had familiarised herself with the operation of the till, with the location of a wide range of stock items, and with the idiosyncratic habits of the espresso machine. When Eddie arrived, Antonia had already made friends with several customers and, through her explanation of the source and merits of various Italian products, persuaded them to buy rather more than they had intended.

  Eddie was reserved at first, but soon came under her spell, and when Isabel announced that she would leave the two of them to get on with it, he was quick to agree. “We’ll be fine,” he said. “You can go home now, Isabel—don’t worry about us.”

  Isabel hesitated. “Are you sure, Antonia? Are you happy to stay?
”

  “Very,” she said. “My friend Eddie and I”—she glanced at him, exchanging a look for which Isabel could find only one word, premature—“we’ll be fine.”

  “I’ll come back if you like,” said Isabel. “I could come back and collect you.”

  Eddie now intervened. “I’ll look after her, Isabel,” he said. “Stop worrying.”

  * * *

  —

  BUT SHE CONTINUED TO WORRY, all the way back to the house and into her study. There were worries about Antonia, whether she was going to be too much to handle, and about what her intentions were for Eddie; worries about Claire and what she was going to say to her about the Lettuce question—more complicated and ominous, Isabel suddenly thought, than the Schleswig-Holstein Question itself; worries about what Grace thought of both of them—Antonia and Claire; and worries about how when you think you are simplifying your life you might really be complicating it. At least life seemed to be going reasonably smoothly at present for Magnus and Charlie: for Magnus, the day was filled with small experiences and triumphs: expeditions with Grace to feed the ducks in the canal, extra apple pudding—he had a sweet tooth—and a bath-time in which he was turning into an inveterate and prodigious splasher. For Charlie, there was nursery and its low-level politics: the unchallenged possession of the sandpit, the grabbing of food at lunchtime, the securing of the attention of the popular teaching assistant—enough to keep any assertive four-year-old more than busy. At least their lives were simple and unassailed by doubt, as was Jamie’s, it seemed to her—he did not agonise over what he had to do; he led a life in which the saliences were clear enough and could be spotted in good time: next week’s concert, the following month’s rehearsal sessions, the day-to-day task of teaching pupils at the Academy, although admittedly that involved the likes of Geoffrey Weir. Why could she not lead a life like Jamie’s, in which everything seemed so cut and dried, so clear and unambiguous?

  The Schleswig-Holstein Question...It was a long time since she had thought about that; not since schooldays, in fact, when as a sixteen-year-old she had listened to the history teacher, Miss Macleod Grant—she of the beige crinoline dresses, all the same, every day for however many years and generations of students—telling them about Palmerston’s comment that only three men in Europe had understood it, one being Prince Albert, who was now dead, the second being a German professor who had become mad, and finally he himself, who had forgotten all about it. That was political wit of the sort that had all but faded from sight, although occasionally it appeared, a sudden shaft of sunlight in the gloom, as when Harold Macmillan, having been interrupted by Khrushchev banging the table with his shoe in a United Nations debate, had languidly asked for a translation...That cheered her up.

  Claire was not due in that day—she would be coming tomorrow, sans Lettuce, Isabel hoped. This gave Isabel the opportunity to tackle a task that she had been putting off for some time: the shortening by two thousand words of a five-thousand-word review article by a particularly prickly professor of philosophy at a university in Nova Scotia. She had met this woman at a Hume conference in Edinburgh years earlier, and had been struck by her sense of self-importance. There had been no contact between them in the intervening years until Isabel had invited her, at the suggestion of another member of the editorial board, to write a review of a recent tome on the theory of sentiments in the Scottish Enlightenment. This invitation had brought forth five thousand words instead of the requested three, and Isabel’s politely put suggestion that it be cut had been met with a blunt refusal. “I’m far too busy,” the author wrote. “If you wish to edit it, that’s up to you.”

  It was a rude rebuff, in its grandiosity worthy even of Professor Lettuce, but Isabel appreciated the quality of the review and did not want to lose it. That woman, she thought, can think. And so she had decided to precis it herself—a task that had been waiting until now to be tackled. It was not easy. The author was far from prolix, and when Isabel removed, or even just shortened, one sentence, this seemed to unstitch at least five others. She worked through lunchtime, snatching from the kitchen, where Grace was administering lunch to Magnus, a home-made prawn sandwich that she took back into her study. The sandwich was a disaster: the prawns had given up, it seemed—were defeated—turning to soggy small strips of pink protein, and the supermarket bread was stale: Jamie had forgotten his promise to buy a country loaf from la Barantine. But she ate it nonetheless and continued with her editing until it was time for her to go to fetch Charlie from the nursery.

  When she arrived, there was no sign of Patricia at the nursery gate—a relief for Isabel, as their last meeting had been an awkward one. She had decided that the way to handle the relationship was to be cordial rather than friendly. Earlier on, she had sensed that Patricia was keen to involve her in her life, for whatever reason, and she had been made to feel uncomfortable by the immediate and rather overwhelming friendliness. She had thought about that, wondering whether it was simply a cultural difference: the Irish tended to be warm in their approach to others, with none of the natural reserve of the Scots. Patricia was perhaps simply being Irish, which was not something one could blame an Irish person for being. That might be the explanation—in which case she, Isabel, should reciprocate her friendliness. But she had been wary of embracing her as a close friend—not yet, at any rate—as she had enough work to do in maintaining her existing friendships and the claims that those friends made of her. She thought, for example, of Peter Stevenson; she had not seen him for weeks, and at the back of her mind was a nagging awareness that she owed him a response to an email he had written her about something she could no longer recollect. If one could not remember what one’s existing friends had said to one in their last email, then perhaps one’s circle of friends and acquaintances should contract rather than expand...and quite apart from all that, her last meeting with Patricia had been awkward because the Irishwoman must have thought it odd that Isabel did not acknowledge her presence in the restaurant. And then there was the question of whether Patricia had spotted her in the street afterwards; that did not bear thinking about, and so she put it out of her mind and concentrated, instead, on examining a small arrangement of painted stones that the children had placed near the benches in the garden. It was a tiny version of Callanish, the mysterious circle of stones on the Hebridean island of Lewis. Isabel imagined that ants, making their way up the path, might have stopped and marvelled at the ingenuity and power of those who had placed such a mighty monument there. She played with the thought: being able to find the solution to any troublesome question could often depend on your perspective and your ability to look at things from above.

  * * *

  —

  THE CHILDREN WERE LATE. Somebody had been sick in the sandbox and somebody else had put modelling clay in somebody else’s hair and it had to be explained to the perpetrator, and to the class in general, that while the sandbox incident was nobody’s fault, the hair incident most certainly was. Waiting outside while order was restored in the classroom, Isabel acknowledged the other parents whom she knew; there was still no sign of Patricia. A woman she had not seen at the nursery before came up to her and introduced herself.

  “You’re Charlie’s mum, aren’t you?”

  Isabel looked at the woman addressing her. She was a bit younger than Isabel was, dressed casually, but in a way that Isabel would have associated with an affluent suburban life: expensive shoes, a silk scarf, well-cut clothes.

  The woman introduced herself as Carol, Patricia’s cousin. “I’m looking after Basil today because Patricia’s away playing in something or other. I knew who you were because I’d seen you in Bruntsfield with Charlie, and I’d met Charlie when he was round at Albert Terrace one day. Complicated, yes, but...”

  The accent was Irish, but not pronounced.

  “I knew of your existence,” said Isabel. “Patricia mentioned you. Your husband works offshore, she said.
”

  “That’s right. North Sea. He spends a lot of time on the rigs, I’m afraid. He’s an engineer.”

  There was an easy friendliness to Carol’s manner, but it was not quite so insistent as Patricia’s, and Isabel found herself warming to her.

  “Charlie’s quite the little man,” said Carol. “He’s good for Basil, I think.”

  “They’re just at the stage where co-operative friendship gets going,” said Isabel. “Prior to that, I’m not so sure.”

  “Oh, they can be little terrors, can’t they?” agreed Carol. “We don’t have a family ourselves, but...but I see a lot of Basil.”

  The regret was there in Carol’s voice. Isabel held her gaze for a few moments, and then looked away. It was a private sadness that those with children often forgot about, but that could sometimes be acutely painful.

  “Basil’s great,” said Isabel. Was he? She had not really paid much attention to what Basil was like as a little boy. Perhaps he was.

  “He has his moments,” said Carol.

  The volume of voices drifting out from the classroom grew. “They’ll be out any minute,” said Carol.

  “Yes.”

  Carol seemed to be studying her, and Isabel felt vaguely uneasy.

  “Patricia said you had a very nice house. She said it’s quite a place.”

  Isabel smiled. “We’re lucky,” she said. “It was my parents’ house.”

  “And a lovely garden, I hear.”

  “I can take no credit for that,” said Isabel. “I wish I could, but I can’t.”

  “I had a garden when we lived in Cork,” said Carol. “A rather nice garden. It’s warmer down there, of course. We didn’t have one in Dublin, though. We had a tiny patch and neither of us really bothered with it. Here in Edinburgh it’s a bit better. We’re out in Colinton, near that boys’ school—you know the one?”

  Isabel nodded. “Patricia mentioned being from Dublin. She said something about having a house there.”