The Charming Quirks of Other Read online

  Grace turned. "Come on, Charlie. We're not wanted here."

  "I don't want to sound rude," said Isabel hurriedly.

  "And I don't want to know things you don't want to tell me," said Grace. "Even if I happen to know who one of them is anyway."

  Isabel held up a hand. "Excuse me?"

  Grace affected insouciance. "I happen to know, now that I think of it. There's a man called Fraser. He's one of them, isn't he?"

  Isabel looked in the envelope; the names were clearly written at the top of the first page of each application. Grace was right. John Fraser. "How on earth did you know?" she asked. The envelope had been sealed; Grace could not have opened it on its short journey from the garden path to Isabel's study, and even if she could, she would not have done such a thing. She might be nosy at times, but she was utterly correct in her dealings with others.

  "Yes," said Grace, not without an air of satisfaction. "John Fraser is the cousin of a woman who comes to our meetings. I sit next to her sometimes. She told me. He told her, and then she told me. He said he wanted the job because at the moment he's an assistant principal at some school near Stirling. He's ambitious, she said."

  Isabel digested this. The meetings to which Grace referred were, of course, her spiritualist sessions. All sorts of people went there, it seemed, as Grace often mentioned contacts she had made at some seance or other. She remembered her conversation with Guy Peploe about villages; not only was Edinburgh a village, but so was Scotland.

  "You haven't met him, have you?" asked Isabel.

  "No. Not him. As I said, his cousin sometimes sits beside me."

  Isabel nodded. "Has she said much about him?"

  Grace thought for a moment. "I don't think so. She likes him a lot, though. They were quite close as children, I think, and they've kept up with one another. He's ..."

  Isabel waited. "Yes?"

  "He's a mountaineer, I think. He ..."

  A shadow moved outside; Isabel noticed it out of the corner of her eye. Brother Fox? He sometimes slunk through the gardens during daylight hours, leaving the path he had created for himself under the rhododendrons and venturing out into the middle of the lawn, blinking in the direct sunlight. What did foxes see? she wondered.

  "So he's a climber. Interesting."

  "I think he's one of these people who climbs Munros. You know--they collect them."

  Isabel did know. Munros were Scottish mountains above three thousand feet, named after a famous Scottish mountaineer. There were several hundred of them, and the real Munro-baggers tried to climb them all in as short a time as possible; sometimes that was a few years, sometimes it was a lifetime.

  Isabel thought for a moment. She, too, had had a cousin, Delia, who was a mountaineer, a cousin of her father's generation who had been a staunch member of the Scottish Ladies' Climbing Club. Cousin Delia had taken the eighteen-year-old Isabel to climb in Glencoe, and they had stayed in a bothy belonging to the club. It had been during the high summer, with its white nights, and Isabel had awoken early, not long after four, and the tops of the mountains were already touched by the first rays of the sun. She had ventured outside, startling a couple of sheep grazing at the side of the small whitewashed building, and they had scurried away up a slope, sending scree trickling down the hillside. The experience had remained in her mind, as some moments can, like a photograph filed away in an album, a captured moment of her life.

  And later that day, when they were coming down the mountain, for a while they followed the course of a river that was joined at one point by a burn tumbling off the mountainside. At this confluence there was a pool, bounded by smooth rocks that sloped gently under the water. Delia had turned to her and said--Isabel remembered her words so clearly, again one of those curious memories that lodge in our minds for no particular reason--"This is where the men swam; the lady mountaineers bathed in a pool just a little further down." And in her eighteen-year-old's imagination she saw the men in the water, swimming purposively, as men might do, while round the corner, in their concealed pool, the Scottish ladies stood half submerged, like Diana and her nymphs caught by some passing artist and fixed for ever in paint.

  She looked at Grace, who had picked up Charlie again and was bouncing him up and down, to his evident pleasure. "Do you think I could meet the cousin?"

  Grace continued to bounce Charlie. "Him?"

  "No, her. Your friend. The woman who goes to ..."

  "The Psychic Centre?" It was the name of the organisation that ran Grace's meetings.

  "Yes. I'd like to meet her."

  Grace shrugged. "She's not there every week. Most weeks, but not every week."

  Isabel assured her that this would be perfectly all right and asked when the next meeting would be.

  "Tomorrow night," said Grace. "There's a man from Denmark coming to speak to us."

  "I'd be most interested in coming," said Isabel. "A medium?"

  "Another of these psychic locators," said Grace. "He finds missing people. He goes into a trance and sees people. He is very effective."

  "That reminds me," said Isabel. "Have you seen my Chambers Dictionary? I had it somewhere and I can't ..."

  Grace responded quickly. "In the morning room. Beside that green chair."

  Isabel smiled. "You saw it?" she asked.

  Grace looked at her suspiciously. "Don't joke about these things, please. They are not for laughing at."

  "But I wasn't joking," said Isabel. "I simply asked you if you saw it. The trouble with English is that words mean so many different things." And that was true, she thought. English was such a strange language, one in which even the words please and thank you could be used as stinging weapons in arguments.

  Grace raised an eyebrow. "Oh yes," she said, meaning, in fact, that she did not believe Isabel's protestations of innocence.

  Charlie began to niggle. He was bored with all this, and meant exactly what he said.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  SHE DID NOT TALK to Jamie about the cellist; every couple has areas into which they know it is best not to venture. Isabel sensed that Jamie did not want to discuss what he had told her the previous evening, and she did not broach the subject. He would talk to her again, she thought, but only when he felt ready to do so, when he had adjusted to the fact that his colleague would not recover.

  She told him, though, of her intention to go with Grace to the lecture by the Danish parapsychologist. Would he care to accompany them? Cat had recently suggested she might babysit, and Isabel wanted to take her up on the offer. It would help to cement her niece's relationship with Charlie, which was not as close as Isabel might have wished. She could not force Charlie on Cat, but she could make it possible for her to unbend a bit and forgive her tiny cousin for being her ex-boyfriend's child.

  Jamie looked doubtful. "I'm not interested in all those ... those spirits," he said. "Is it a good idea? If people survive death, why bother them? It's like running after people you've said goodbye to and trying to start the conversation all over again."

  "I'm rather inclined to agree with you," said Isabel. "But I think that Grace secretly appreciates our taking an interest in these meetings of hers."

  "Maybe," said Jamie. "But I'm not sure I want to get mixed up in it. Mind you ..."

  "Yes?"

  He began to smile. "You went once, didn't you?"

  "I did."

  He remembered her telling him about the meeting she had attended with Grace. Messages had been received, she said, for named people in the room, and received with enthusiasm. He wondered whether this would happen again; if it did, perhaps it would be interesting to see it, even if the messages did not really come from the other side, as he had heard Grace calling it.

  "Maybe I'll come."

  She encouraged him, and it was agreed. "But you must keep a straight face," she warned. "It wouldn't be right to go in the wrong spirit."

  It was an unfortunate choice of words, and they both smiled at it, wryly. Isabel felt disloyal to be d
oing or saying anything that could be considered to be making fun of Grace. There was a simple rule, she thought, holding that we should only say of people that which we are prepared to say to their face. But it was a rule that was almost impossible to follow--at least for those who fell short of sainthood. "I'm serious," Isabel continued. "It would offend Grace if you burst out laughing."

  "I know," said Jamie. "I'll dig a fingernail into my palm. Or count backwards from one hundred--in French. That's what I used to do when I was a choirboy. We all found it very difficult not to laugh. We found the Old Testament screamingly funny at that age. All that smiting."

  "And begetting," said Isabel. "Boys must find talk of begetting very amusing."

  Jamie looked up, summoning lines from distant memory. "Goliath of Gath," he lisped, "with his helmet of brath / One day he that down upon the green grath / When up thlipped young David, the thervant of Thaul / Who thaid, 'I will thmite thee although I'm tho thmall.'"

  Isabel imagined Jamie in his choirboy's cassock, holding a candle perhaps, and struggling against laughter. But then her mind wandered and she thought of the folklorists Iona and Peter Opie and their combing the streets for the rhymes and sayings of childhood, those little scraps of nonsense, like Jamie's verse about Goliath and Saul with its flattened vowels and its lisped sibilants. Would Charlie hear any of this in the playground? Would these things be passed on to him?

  "I don't remember that one about Goliath," she mused. "But what about Skinny Malinky Long-legs, Big Banana Feet? Did you hear about his misfortunes?"

  Jamie remembered. "Of course. He went tae the pictures, didn't he? And couldnae find a seat."

  "Poor man," mused Isabel. "Imagine him--a lanky, rather socially inadequate figure, going to one of those old-fashioned Glasgow cinemas all by himself because he has no friend to go with him. And then that business with the seat, and people laughing at him."

  "He probably had Asperger's," said Jamie.

  Isabel nodded. "Possibly. I suspect many of the victims of nursery rhymes had Asperger's, or something similar. There was a lot of pathology in nursery rhymes. Georgie Porgie, for instance, who kissed the girls and made them cry but who ran away when the boys came out to play. He obviously couldn't maintain mature relationships with women." She paused; she was remembering the old copy of Struwwelpeter that she still kept somewhere in the attic but that she had decided she would not show to Charlie. The old German children's book had been written in an age when it was considered quite permissible to scare small children with threatening and admonitory tales.

  "Augustus and his soup," she said. "Remember: we talked about this before. Augustus was a chubby lad / Fat, ruddy cheeks Augustus had. But then I'm afraid he developed an eating disorder. 'Take, O take that soup away / I won't eat any soup today!'"

  "And died?" asked Jamie.

  "Yes," said Isabel. "Wasted away. And Belloc took a similar line, come to think of it. Remember his Cautionary Tales? Matilda, who called the fire brigade out without reason and was not believed when the house really did go up in flames? For every time she shouted 'Fire!' / They only answered 'Little Liar!' Or Henry King? The chief defect of Henry King / Was chewing little bits of string. And the consequence? Intestinal blockage. Which is another great thing to give children to worry about."

  "What other defects do you think Henry King had?" asked Jamie. "If eating string was his chief defect, it suggests that there were others, doesn't it?"

  "I have no idea," said Isabel.

  "Cross-dressing, perhaps," suggested Jamie. "Wearing women's jewellery. The other defect of Henry King / Was dressing up in female bling."

  They both laughed. "How did we get to this?" asked Isabel.

  "By thinking," said Jamie, leaning forward to kiss her lightly on the cheek. He loved the way that Isabel's mind could pursue such odd lines of enquiry. She was unpredictable; she was clever. He loved her so much for both of these qualities, and for being who she was. I could not love anybody else, he thought; not after her, not after Isabel. Really? enquired an unsettling internal voice. Are you sure about that?

  CAT AGREED TO BABYSIT CHARLIE the following evening, when they were due to accompany Grace to the Danish parapsychologist's lecture.

  "Of course," she said when Isabel phoned her. And then, after a moment's hesitation, she asked, "It'll be all right, will it, if I bring somebody with me?"

  Isabel had not expected this, but tried not to show her surprise. Since the disappearance of Bruno, Cat's singularly unsuitable last boyfriend, there had been no talk of anybody else. And yet the post was vacant, as Jamie had put it, and judging by Cat's previous behaviour it would not be long before it was filled.

  "Of course. That's absolutely fine. I'll leave something out for the two of you. A couple of salmon steaks? You could ..."

  "Not fish, please," said Cat. "He doesn't like fish."

  He, thought Isabel.

  "All right. A stew. How about a venison stew--I've got some in the freezer. And some ..." She was still thinking of Cat's boyfriend, trying to picture him--on the basis of no evidence at all. He could not be worse than Bruno; nobody could be worse than Bruno, with his elevator heels and his habit of leering. "Puy lentils." It was the first thing she thought of, and she was not sure whether she had any. But Puy lentils went with everything, she believed, and she had yet to come across anybody who said, "No Puy lentils, please."

  "Not venison, I'm afraid," said Cat. "I'm not so keen on eating venison. Bambi's mother, and all that. No, he ..."

  Isabel interrupted her. "Who is he?" she asked. "I can't really just call him him."

  Cat seemed to ignore her question, at least at first. "I'll just make an omelette," she said. "Gordon likes that. I'll bring mushrooms--if you could leave out some eggs, that'll be fine."

  Gordon. Isabel savoured the name. A Gordon would be utterly reliable; a bit solid, perhaps, in an old-fashioned Scottish way, the product of any number of possible homes in the hinterland of Edinburgh--Peebles, perhaps, or somewhere like Kelso, one of those Border towns that produced such reliable rugby players, bank managers, engineers.

  "Gordon," she said. "Have I met him?"

  "No, I don't think you have."

  "Ah."

  There was a silence. Then Isabel spoke again. "Have you been ... Have you known him long?"

  A defensive note crept into Cat's voice. "Not all that long. A couple of months. He's from just outside Kelso originally."

  I knew it! I knew it! It was difficult for Isabel not to feel a certain pleasure at having guessed so accurately the origins of Cat's new boyfriend. We like predictability, she thought, and we are always satisfied when people behave as we think they will. It makes us feel ... well, powerful; the world is not as complex a place as some might think--at least it is not complex for us. She stopped herself. Nemesis stalked those who became pleased with themselves, and it was wrong, anyway, to indulge in self-congratulation. The line between having an adequate view of oneself and smugness was a thin one, and those who walked too close to it usually fell over the edge. So she simply said, "Kelso?" And Cat, equally simply, answered, "Yes, Kelso."

  "And what does he do?" This was a more difficult question, and she realised that Cat might resent it. After the rise and (not only metaphorical) fall of Bruno--who had been a tightrope walker--the issue of the occupation of Cat's boyfriends had become potentially awkward. She would not want Cat to think that she was going to draw any conclusions as to suitability based on what they did.

  The answer surprised her. "He's a teacher," said Cat.

  "Oh. Where?"

  Cat hesitated. "He's always taught in boys' schools. It's Firth College." She named a school with a particularly good reputation and a headmaster whom Isabel had met on several occasions and liked.

  Isabel nodded. She knew the school, which was only a mile or two away, on the brow of a hill that looked down across the city towards the Firth of Forth and the hills of Fife beyond. Her father's cousin had been there, as had his
two sons, and she had dutifully been to see them in the school's production of The Pirates of Penzance, put on with the help of girls imported from St. George's School for Girls.

  "You remember Cousin Fraser's two boys?" she said. "They were there. They enjoyed it. A very good school. Nice staff."

  "Gordon likes working there," said Cat. "The boys are all sons of prosperous farmers and so on, I'm afraid. They play a lot of rugby. There are no discipline problems." There was a slight note of sarcasm in her voice.

  Isabel considered this. There was nothing wrong with playing rugby. There was nothing wrong with being the son of a prosperous farmer. There was nothing wrong with being the son of anybody, she felt. And yet Cat had made it sound like an apology. So was she apologising for Gordon being middle class; for working in a conventional institution with conventional values? "I don't see anything wrong with that," she said.

  "Maybe," said Cat. "It's just that this city is so bourgeois. It really is. Everybody's so respectable."

  Again Isabel thought: What was wrong with being respectable? And what, she wondered, was the opposite of respectability? It became important to answer that if Cat was suggesting that one should not be respectable. Bohemian? Dissolute? Unconventional? The problem with that was that if everybody was unconventional, then they became conventional. So wild, bohemian, laid-back places, filled with free spirits, would have conventions of their own, which would soon make conventionalists of their inhabitants.

  She began to feel irritated. "But, Cat, you yourself are bourgeois," she said. "Sorry to have to say this, but it's the truth. You're ineluctably bourgeois. You own a business. You employ Eddie. You don't even have a mortgage on your flat. Doesn't that make you bourgeois?"

  There was a silence at the other end of the line, and Isabel quickly continued, "Of course, I mustn't throw the first stone. I'm bourgeois myself, I suppose--and frankly I don't see anything wrong with that. I'm very fortunate in this life, I know that, I know that ... and I try to help ..." She trailed off. One should never boast about what one gave away--and Isabel gave a lot. Yet Cat's assumption of superiority had irked her, and she almost felt like asking her niece what she gave, which she did not think was very much. And come to think of it, Isabel said to herself, am I all that bourgeois, when I live with a younger man, I don't engage in trade, when philosophy is my job? This was not the normal pattern of a bourgeois life, whatever that might be.