Alexander Mccall Smith - Isabel Dalhousie 06 Read online

  The question took Jamie by surprise, but Isabel often said odd things; he was getting used to it.

  “Now a young prince cam’ to Edinburgh toon,” he began, half singing, half speaking, “And he wasnae a wee bit German lairdie / For a far better man than ever he was / Lay oot in the heather wi’ his tartan plaidie.”

  “That’s it,” said Isabel.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE NEXT MORNING Isabel’s niece, Cat, telephoned at seven. Isabel had been awake since six and had taken Charlie on an outing in the garden. He had been late in starting to walk, but now seemed eager to make up for lost time, rushing off purposefully and quite indifferent to any falls that came his way. It was an exhausting business for her, if not for Charlie himself, as he had to be watched every moment. She had a playpen, which at least could give her time to get her breath back and do things that needed to be done in the house.

  “Do people approve of those things?” Jamie had asked when the pen had been delivered. “Don’t some people look on them as little prisons?”

  Isabel had read about this. “Some do,” she said. “But not everyone, by any means. It all depends on how long the child is in one. If they’re in it for short periods of time they can enjoy playing by themselves.”

  “But not for hours.”

  “No, not for hours. And nor should children be parked in front of the television.”

  “Which we don’t have,” Jamie pointed out.

  “No.”

  Jamie had bought something called a baby bungee, an apparatus that gripped on to the jamb of a door and allowed the child to bounce up and down on a strong elastic rope. Charlie had loved it, but on the second occasion it had been used he had bounced off one side of the jamb and then back against the other. He had been slightly bruised, even if he had not complained, but the baby bungee had been retired to a cupboard. Charlie, she had decided, was a stoic by temperament, a useful thing in this life. If this stoicism came from anywhere—rather than being an entirely random quirk of personality genes—then it must have been inherited from Jamie, who was fond of saying “It happens” when faced with any frustrating development. Stoicism and defeatism, of course, can be kissing cousins, but Isabel would never find fault in Jamie’s quite exceptional ability to accept setbacks. She had never seen him angry—not once; distressed, perhaps, but not angry, and it seemed that Charlie was the same. Of course the tantrum stage still lay ahead of him, and that would be a stringent test of any stoicism he possessed; it was no use saying “It happens” to a three-year-old brewing a stamping attack.

  “Sorry to phone so early,” said Cat. “Crisis.”

  Cat was visited by crisis rather more often than others, but the difficulties these crises entailed always seemed genuine enough, even if they were clearly of her own creation. A crisis was a crisis, Isabel believed, and it was unhelpful to allocate blame. You did not ask the drowning man how he ended up in the river, nor point to the No Swimming notice—you rescued him; even if he happened to be Dove, Isabel thought, or Professor Lettuce. A delicious scene came into her mind: Dove and Lettuce had both fallen into a loch and were calling for help. Isabel, passing by, would not hesitate, of course, nor would she relish their evident discomfort as it dawned on them who their rescuer would be. But what if it were in her power to rescue only one of them? It was the familiar and horrific dilemma that must cross the mind of at least some imaginative or overanxious parents: Which of my children would I save? The thought is usually too appalling to contemplate, and the question is suppressed rather than answered.

  But here it arose with Dove and Lettuce, both schemers and plotters of the same stripe, and in moral terms, Isabel reluctantly concluded, both of equal merit. The deciding factor in such a case would have to be age; all other things being equal, the sole remaining basis of just discrimination would be that Professor Lettuce, being the older of the two, had less claim for a future than the relatively youthful Dove. So Dove was saved. She did not like the conclusion, but doing the right thing, even if that took the form of making the correct choice in an entirely hypothetical situation, was often uncomfortable.

  Cat waited for a reply. Isabel was thinking, she decided, and was probably mentally chewing over something altogether different, as often happened.

  “You need me to do the delicatessen?” Isabel asked eventually.

  “Yes, if you don’t mind,” Cat explained. “The boiler in the flat has gone on the blink and the engineer is coming. However …”

  Isabel was familiar with such issues: the gas people were always unwilling to commit to a time, and would give only the most general indication of when it might be.

  “They said that it could be either morning or afternoon,” said Cat. “And they wouldn’t budge. So I have to stay in all day to let them in.”

  “Frustrating,” said Isabel. “Of course I’ll help. What about Eddie?”

  Eddie was a rather vulnerable young man who lacked the confidence to look after the delicatessen on his own. Isabel believed that he was perfectly capable of doing so, and Cat did, too, but his anxiety had been acute on the few occasions on which he had been left in charge by himself.

  “He’ll be there,” said Cat. “But you know the problem.”

  Isabel said that she did, and the arrangements were made. Isabel had a key to the business and would open it up at ten to nine, to be ready for Eddie’s arrival. Cat promised that in the unlikely event of the gas engineer arriving early she would come straight in to work; Isabel, however, put her off. “Take a day off,” she said. “That’s what aunts are for.”

  Her own words struck her. That’s what aunts are for. It was true, of course: aunts were for coming to the rescue, and she always tried to do just that. But were aunts for helping themselves to their nieces’ discarded boyfriends? It was Cat who had got rid of Jamie—an act that betrayed appalling judgement, Isabel felt—and so she could hardly complain when Isabel took up with him. But she had complained, and had done so bitterly. Things were slightly better now, but there was still a touchiness on Cat’s part that could flare up at any time—and it did.

  Jamie was not yet up, and so Isabel took him a cup of tea and the copy of the Scotsman that came through the door early each morning. When she told him that she would be spending the day in the delicatessen, for a moment she saw a shadow cross his face. She hesitated; they did not talk about Cat because she was an unseen third person in their relationship, as a former lover sometimes can be. It was akin to a past act of unfaithfulness that can stand, a painful monument, in the history of a marriage—a forbidden memory, cauterised and sealed off, but still with the power to hurt.

  “We could see whether Grace could come in,” said Isabel. “She tends to be free on Saturday, so you needn’t have Charlie all day.”

  Jamie looked at her reproachfully. “I like having Charlie all day,” he said.

  She was emollient. “That’s fine then. He loves being with you.” She bent down and kissed him on the cheek, gently tousling his hair as she did so.

  “Don’t do that.” But he did not mean it.

  She sat down on the bed. “You don’t resent my helping Cat, do you?”

  He looked away. “No, not really.” A small rectangle of sunlight streamed in through a chink in the curtains, across Jamie’s shoulder.

  Isabel reached forward and placed her hand against his chest. “I think you do, you know. But I can’t just … just cut Cat out. She’s family. I can’t.”

  He looked at her. “I never wanted you to do that.” He hesitated for a moment, and then took Isabel’s hand in his. “I’m the one who feels awkward about this. I know I don’t need to, but I do. I feel embarrassed, I suppose, that I’ve …”

  She waited, but he did not complete the sentence. “Embarrassed that you’ve what?”

  “That I slept with her, and now I’m sleeping with you.”

  He spoke with transparent honesty, but the pain his words caused him was laid quite bare. Isabel pressed his hand. �
�But that’s …” She found herself at a loss as to what to say.

  “Nothing?” said Jamie.

  “No, of course it’s not nothing.”

  “Then what is it?”

  Isabel took a deep breath. “What I mean is that it’s something you simply don’t need to think about.”

  He sighed. “You can’t just deny these things.”

  “I’m not saying that you should deny it. What I’m saying is that you should forget it. That’s quite different.” She watched him. He had a way of looking at her when something she was saying interested him profoundly—it was a sort of searching look—and she saw it now. “Do you really want me to discuss it with you?”

  “Of course. Why not?”

  She pressed his hand again. “Because I sound like a philosopher, and I don’t always like that. Not when I’m with you. It’s just the way it is.”

  He had not been returning the pressure of her hand; now he did so. “But that’s what I like,” he said. “It’s like being … like being married to Socrates.”

  The analogy was so unexpected that Isabel burst into laughter. “Thank you! Socrates …”

  Jamie grinned. “In a purely mental sense, of course. You’re far more beautiful than Socrates.”

  “Poor Socrates—just about everybody is.”

  Jamie steered the conversation back to its original subject. “But what about forgetting? How can you forget on purpose?”

  She acknowledged the difficulty. “All right, I know that forgetting is normally something over which you have no control. But you can tell yourself to forget, you know. You say to yourself that you are not going to dwell on something and then the mind—the bits of the mind that are in charge of forgetting, so to speak—do the rest. The memory is suppressed, I suppose.”

  “So?”

  “So you tell yourself that the fact that you and Cat had the relationship that you did is something you are not going to think about—that you’re going to forget it. And then you will.”

  For a few moments Jamie said nothing. He was looking up at the ceiling now, thinking; or perhaps trying to forget.

  “Maybe I don’t want to,” he muttered.

  She gently withdrew her hand. “Then don’t.”

  She felt a stab of disappointment, and she wished that she had not started to discuss the subject with him. Perhaps his instinct had been better: to say nothing, to leave it where it lay. The past was so powerful that sometimes when we chose to deny its potency it reminded us just who we were—its creatures.

  She crossed the room and drew open the curtains, flooding the room with morning light. “Let me make you something special for breakfast,” she said.

  He sat up in bed, reaching for the cup of tea she had brought him. “Mushrooms,” he said. “And scrambled eggs with some of that truffle oil in them—not a lot, just a few drops.”

  “And?”

  “And a piece of very thin toast.”

  “And?”

  “And a mug of Jamaican coffee with really hot milk. Not milk heated up in the microwave but scalded in a pan.”

  She smiled, and watched him get out of bed, his limbs caught in the sunlight. I do not deserve somebody so beautiful, she thought, or so gentle; but none of us deserves good fortune, perhaps—it comes our way, dispensed at random, irrespective of what prayer flags we string across our mountain passes, what chants and imprecations we devise; it simply comes.

  She stopped herself. Do I really believe that? I do not, and never have; in thinking it I have simply succumbed to a defeatist impulse. Even young children understand that often, if not always, we get what we deserve; Charlie, at his tender age, is beginning to learn that good behaviour is rewarded with a treat. And there was no reason why she should not have been given Jamie: she was attractive and she had looked after herself. Jamie himself had referred to what he called her Pre-Raphaelite beauty; “Holman Hunt might have painted you,” he had said. She had protested that she found this most unlikely, but she had been flattered, and she had filed the remark away in her memory, to be taken out and reflected upon, as such compliments should be, when one was feeling one’s worst, on a bad-hair day.

  ISABEL HAD OPENED UP the delicatessen by the time Eddie arrived. Eddie always looked sleepy when he turned up for work. He was rarely late, but he still managed to look as if he had tumbled out of bed only a few minutes ago—which he might well have done. Isabel knew that Eddie did not eat breakfast. “I’m not hungry,” he had said when she asked him. “The thought of breakfast makes me ill.” But within half an hour or so she would see him pop a piece of cheese or a slice of Parma ham into his mouth.

  “Breakfast?” she asked.

  “It’s different,” said Eddie, slicing off another sliver of cheese.

  “There’s nothing wrong with having a snack.”

  When Eddie came in that morning Isabel noticed that he had a scratch on his face—a line of punctured red that ran down from the cheekbone and ended just above the edge of the jaw. Her eye went straight to it, and he noticed that, as he instinctively reached up to touch his cheek.

  Isabel caught his eye. “Have you washed that?”

  Eddie looked away. “Washed what?” he mumbled.

  Isabel touched her own cheek, as if in sympathy. “That scratch. Let me take a look at it. Cat keeps some disinfectant in the cupboard.”

  She took a step towards Eddie to get a better view of the scratch, but he withdrew sharply. “I only wanted to look at it,” said Isabel. “It won’t hurt to put something on it. It looks a bit angry to me.”

  “You can’t just go round putting disinfectant on people,” said Eddie.

  Isabel smiled. “I suppose you can’t. Or at least not on people you don’t know …” She imagined herself in the street, dabbing disinfectant on passers-by, as a religious proselyte might thrust a tract into a stranger’s hand; absurd thought. But surely it was just as intrusive for people to buttonhole others with a view to converting them to a religion. She had often thought of the massive presumption of such earnest missionaries, that they should imagine that a few words from them should be able to overturn another’s whole theology or philosophy of life. Did they really expect that one would say, “My goodness, so I’ve got it wrong all my life!” The offensive presumption here was that the one’s world-view should be so shallow as to fold up in the face of the approach of the other. But that is how ideas spread, she supposed, and sooner or later if you put your proposition to total strangers you would come across one who was ready for plucking by the first person of conviction who crossed his path.

  Isabel remembered the circumstances of a well-known essayist’s conversion to communism. He had gone to a party and drunk too much. He had woken up in the company of a woman he did not really like. And when he went to the window to look out on to the street, he saw that the weather was freezing; subsequently he found out that the engine of the car he had borrowed from a friend had frozen and was ruined—he had forgotten to put in antifreeze. In such circumstances communism offered a fresh start—a cleaning of the old slate—and he converted.

  She became aware that Eddie was looking at her resentfully. “All right,” she said. “It’s your own business.”

  “It is.”

  Isabel felt momentary annoyance. All she had done was to offer help, and yet he was treating her as if she had proposed some sweeping infringement of his autonomy. “As a matter of interest, Eddie,” she said, “if you saw me coming in with a scratch on my face, would you ask me what happened? Would you want to help?”

  He continued to stare at her.

  “Well?” pressed Isabel.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe.”

  Isabel felt that she had proved her point. “So you understand, then, why I offered. You’d do the same for me.” She paused. “How did it happen, Eddie?”

  Eddie turned away. “A branch. I was down near the canal and I walked past this bush—you know, one of those fruit ones, blackberries—and it sc
ratched me. The council should cut those things.”

  “Oh well,” said Isabel. “A scratch from a thorn shouldn’t be too dangerous. But you should watch it. If it starts to throb, then that means that it’s infected and you should go to the doctor.”

  Eddie seemed relieved that the interrogation was over. He went behind the counter and placed the cheese-cutting boards in position. Then, while he filled the large espresso machine with water from a jug and ran a cloth over the steam nozzle, Isabel went through to Cat’s office to retrieve the cash float from the lock-up cupboard. She noticed the disinfectant on the shelf—the label showed a picture of a boy having his knee attended to by a concerned mother—for minor day-to-day cuts and bruises. They were innocent, those day-to-day cuts and bruises; Eddie had been scratched, and although she had initially believed his explanation of how the scratch came about, suddenly she began to doubt him. It was the same with those black eyes that people claimed were the result of walking into a door; usually they were the result of domestic violence, or of a brawl somewhere. Somebody had scratched Eddie—a girlfriend? Isabel wondered. Probably—Eddie had had that rather sinister-looking girl and although she was no longer with him, he might well have replaced her with somebody similar.

  She went to the counter and put the float in the till. It was now nine o’clock, the delicatessen’s official opening time, and she nodded to Eddie to take the door off the latch. It was not unusual for customers to appear within minutes of their opening—these were people who called in for a cup of coffee on their way to work, and would spend a few minutes reading the papers at one of the small tables at the far end of the delicatessen.

  It proved to be a busy morning. Shortly after eleven Cat telephoned to say that the gas board engineers had not come yet and that she was sure now that they would not arrive until much later that afternoon.

  “What if we have an explosion?” she complained. “What then?”

  “We must just hope that you don’t explode,” said Isabel. “That is all we can do.”