Alexander Mccall Smith - Isabel Dalhousie 05 (16 page)

The childish trick worked in exactly the way it always did. She felt guilty; she regretted her lack of charity. Nick Smart was a stranger, far from home, and she had not comforted him.

“But why should I?” she asked herself.

“Because he is your moral neighbour,” a voice within her said. “Because you came into contact with him; that was all. But it was enough to make you behave towards him with decency, which you did not do because you are jealous and possessive.”

The branches of the trees moved gently, nudged by a wind that Isabel barely felt.

“Am I?” she asked the voice.

“Oh yes,” it replied. “Very.”

Conscience, she thought, walks with us; an unobtrusive companion, unseen, perhaps, but still audible.

         

LATER,
released from the postlecture reception, Edward Mendelson made his way up to Isabel's house for dinner. Jamie was busy putting Charlie to bed when he arrived, and so Isabel entertained him herself in the ground-floor drawing room.

“It's just us,” she explained. “You said that you didn't want me to have a large dinner party. So it's just Jamie, you, and me.”

“Exactly what I wanted,” he said. And then, “Jamie…I don't believe that I've met him.”

“You haven't,” said Isabel. “When were you last in Edinburgh? Five years ago?”

“About that. He's…” The question went unfinished.

“My boyfriend,” said Isabel. “Actually a bit more than that. We have a child together. A little boy.”

Edward Mendelson inclined his head in congratulation. “I'm delighted.”

Isabel poured them both a glass of wine, and for the next few minutes they discussed the lecture. Then Jamie appeared. He looked happy, thought Isabel; relaxed and happy. Charlie, it seemed, had that effect on him; and perhaps Charlie would grow up to be one of those people who made others happy just to be in his company. And would Charlie look like Jamie, she wondered, or be a male version of me? That one could not imagine, she decided; none of us could see ourselves as the opposite sex. Of course he might look like neither, as children often did; confounding recent genes in favour of ancient ones.

The conversation flowed easily. Jamie asked about a production at the Met that he had read about in the papers; Edward Mendelson had seen it, and thought highly of it.

“Auden had to live near a good opera house, didn't he?” said Isabel.

“Yes, which is why Kirchstetten suited him. It's only forty miles or so from Vienna.”

Isabel was silent. She knew that Edward Mendelson had been at the funeral in Kirchstetten; that he had been there when they played Siegfried's Funeral March on a gramophone and then carried the poet from his house and the local brass band had struck up and accompanied the cortege through the streets of the village that had been so proud of the Herr Professor. She wanted to ask,
What was it like?
But she could not, because it was not a question that could be answered easily. Sad, of course. Tearful, surely. But in her mind there must have been a poignancy that transcended normal grief; as there must have been at that other Austrian funeral, in the rain, when Mozart was laid in his pauper's grave; the death of poetry, the death of music, which leaves us nothing if those two things should die.

They talked about the lecture.

“Just where is the line between a rational sense of guilt,” Isabel asked, “and a neurotic one?”

“In a difficult place, I expect,” said Edward Mendelson. “These lines are often fine.”

“But you can tell when somebody's crossed that line,” said Jamie.

Isabel was interested. She was thinking of Marcus. There was no reason for him to feel guilty, if Stella's view was correct, and yet he felt shame—that was obvious enough. So that was a case of shame following upon guilt which other people thought should be there, but which was not. You cannot feel guilty about a wrong which you simply did not do. She looked at Jamie. “Can you tell?”

Jamie reached for the water jug. “Yes. I knew somebody at music college who felt perpetually guilty about the smallest things. He had been to one of those Catholic boarding schools and had been made to think about the implications for his soul of the very smallest things. His thoughts, for example. He felt guilty about his thoughts. All the time.”

Isabel knew what Jamie meant. So am I neurotic? she wondered. She thought uncharitable thoughts—about Dove, for example. Should she feel guilty about that? At the height of his plot against her, she had imagined Dove being exposed as a plagiarist. Then she had imagined herself writing a critical review of one of his books and demolishing it, chapter by chapter, elegantly, like a matador with a pen. Surely we should not worry too much about our uncharitable thoughts, as long as we did not act on them. And yet that was not the understanding that people had had in the past: Did not the Book of Common Prayer say, “I have sinned in thought, word and deed”? Or had we released ourselves from the tyranny of worrying about the things that the mind came up with? Isabel felt uncertain; the niggling doubt remained that perhaps there was something in purity of mind after all.

Edward Mendelson had an early plane to catch, back to London and then to New York, and so he did not stay for coffee after dinner. Isabel said good-bye to him at the front door, while Jamie remained in the kitchen to clean up. Edward said to her, “I'm so pleased to see you happy. I can tell that, you know—you're very happy.”

Isabel smiled. “There's every reason for me to be happy,” she said. “I have a job I love, a nice man, a son. This house.” She paused. “Not that one should enumerate one's good fortune in this life. Nemesis listens for that sort of thing, I fear.”

“She has far greater fish to fry,” said Edward. “Terrible politicians. Dictators. Actors who have grown too big for their boots. Your claims are pretty modest by comparison. Hardly a trace of hubris, I would have thought.”

He walked down the path. It was barely dark, as it was midsummer now, and even at ten in the evening the sky was suffused with an attenuated glow. The air was warm, almost balmy, and the leaves of the trees and shrubs, the rhododendrons, the azaleas, were heavy and static, as if weighed down by the air. I am very fortunate, thought Isabel, as she made her way back to the kitchen, where Jamie, who had stacked the dishes in the dishwasher, was standing in the middle of the room, stretching his arms up above him in an exaggerated yawn. The act made his shirt come up over his midriff, which was flat and muscled.
To me the entirely beautiful,
thought Isabel. He watched her, and let his arms fall. He has guessed what was in my mind, she thought.

“I just saw Brother Fox outside the window,” he said. “Trotting along the top of the neighbours' garden wall, bold as brass.”

“Did he see you?”

“No. I don't think so. He had places to go.”

“ ‘For he had many a mile to go that night,' ” said Isabel, looking out the window. “ ‘Before he reached the town-o.' ”

“I must learn the words of that song,” said Jamie. “We can sing it to Charlie.”

She waited for him to say something more, about a fox, or a painting of a fox, but he did not. He went over to her, though, and put his arms around her, and she closed her eyes and felt him against her, this young man whom she could not quite believe she possessed, whose every act, whose every word, no matter how banal, no matter how inconsequential, was precious to her. That was love, she supposed, elevating the ordinary into something beyond itself, and carrying one along with the entire absurd enterprise.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

E
DDIE HAD PREDICTED
that Saturday would be busy, and it was. Isabel liked Saturdays, but not quite so much, she thought, if she had to work. And yet even a working Saturday seemed subtly different from a weekday; the people who came into the delicatessen drifted in, rather than entered with purpose, and although she and Eddie were busy, there was a last-day-of-term feel about their work. At five o'clock they would shut the door for the weekend—or what remained of it—and that knowledge made the work easier.

Eddie had not said much to Isabel, but had seemed to be in a good mood and had apparently forgotten their discussion of the five hundred pounds. Isabel had not—obviously not, and was still thinking of the lie he had told her: that ridiculous story of his father's hip operation and wanting the money for that. On subsequent reflection, she had worked out where the money had gone, and it made her angry just to think about it. Eddie had a new girlfriend, who had come round to see him in the delicatessen on more than one occasion, including one afternoon that week. He had seemed embarrassed by her visit, and had shooed her out after a few minutes, but Isabel could tell that he was proud of her; perhaps proud of the mere fact that he had a girlfriend at all.

But Isabel had thought:
drugs,
and the more she pondered it, the more she thought,
drugs.
The girl was thin, dressed entirely in black, and had a prominent piercing on her lower lip. All of that could be a matter of fashion, of course—the Goth style—but there had been her expression, which Isabel found unsettling. It was that anxiety, that itchiness, that goes with the chemical personality. And she sniffed too.

So Eddie had given the five hundred pounds into the hands of this young woman.
My
five hundred pounds, thought Isabel. She looked at Eddie, who was cutting cheese for a customer. There was no evidence that he was on anything, except cheese, perhaps; she had noticed how he always scooped up the fragments from the cutting board and popped them into his mouth. He was on cheese and the girl was on something stronger.

Isabel decided that she would tackle him about the money and ask for it back. But then she decided she would not. She simply did not have the heart—or was it the stomach?—to engage with Eddie over this. If he had given the money to the girl, then he would never be able to get it back; and if he could not get it back, then any demand from her would put him under considerable pressure, and he was too insecure for that. Besides, she had given him the money, she had not lent it to him; she had given it, and one could not ask for gifts to be returned unless there had been a very explicit condition attached to the donation. And she had not said anything about that, as far as she recalled: she had pressed the money on him; she had urged him to take it.

While Isabel spent her Saturday working in the delicatessen, Jamie looked after Charlie. It was another warm day in a run of fine days, and he took Charlie for a long walk in his back sling round the Braid Hills, on the southern edge of the city. Up there, at the top of Buckstone Snab, the air was cooler, with a breeze blowing down from Stirlingshire and the hills of Perthshire beyond. Charlie started to shiver, and his small, snub nose looked red. They returned, back to Isabel's green Swedish car—which Jamie now drove too—parked in the car park of the golf club below.

When they got back to the house, Jamie noticed a car parked slightly farther up the street, in which a man was sitting. While he was getting Charlie out of the car, the door of the other vehicle opened and the man got out and approached Jamie in the drive. He was a tall man, somewhere in his early forties, dressed in the style that Isabel described as casual-smart-verging-on-the-formal, which meant a tie and a jacket, but not a suit, though almost, since the trousers and the jacket were close together in shade. He spoke in the accent of Aberdeen, which Jamie associated with a certain caution and canniness. Aberdeen people had the reputation of not wasting their words, nor anything really; it was a cold part of the country, a place of fishermen and offshore oil people, used to sea and biting winds and hardship.

“I'm looking for Miss Dalhousie,” he said. “I rang the bell, but thought that she might be out shopping. I've been waiting.”

Jamie wiped at Charlie's now-streaming nose. “I'm afraid that you've missed her. She's working today. She helps somebody out in a delicatessen.”

“I'd like to see her,” said the man, reaching into his pocket for a card. He proffered the card to Jamie, who took it and read it.

“David McLean. You're a lawyer.”

“Yes. I was hoping to have a word with Miss Dalhousie today, if at all possible. I have to go down to London next week for several days, and I thought I might just be able to catch her on a Saturday.”

Jamie shrugged. He knew that Isabel had dealings with various lawyers over financial matters, and he assumed that David McLean was one of these. “Saturday's their busy day, but you can go along and see if she has a moment.”

Jamie explained where the delicatessen was, and David McLean nodded. “I know the place. We use it from time to time. We don't live far away.” He paused. “Thank you. Nice wee boy. He is a boy, isn't he?”

“He is.”

“What's his name?”

“Charlie.”

“Hallo, Charlie.”

Charlie looked at the lawyer with that intense scrutinising stare of the very young. David McLean looked away, as if he were embarrassed by something; Jamie noticed this. Then he thanked Jamie and walked off, back to his car. Jamie hugged Charlie to him; the smooth cheek felt cold against his skin, and he reached for the little hand in its mitten. Even in summer, a small child was such a scrap of humanity that he might so easily be chilled by a breeze. And Scottish weather was so unpredictable; a warm, clear day could become almost Arctic if a wind blew up from the wrong direction. He needed to get Charlie inside and put him down for a sleep, in his warm room, where the afternoon sun came in the window. For a moment he wondered whether he should telephone Isabel in advance of David McLean's reaching her, but then he put the thought out of his mind. Charlie had started to complain; a cold wind was one thing, waiting for his lunch quite another.

         

“NO,” SAID EDDIE.
“You can't return cheese.”

The customer, a young woman wearing a knitted hat, held out the offending parcel. “But smell it. Go on, smell it.”

Eddie took the cheese and sniffed it, watched by another, slightly amused customer. The woman in the knitted hat watched him, waiting for the confirmation of her complaint.

Eddie lowered the parcel. “But that's how this cheese always smells. It's called Pont l'Evêque. It's French. French cheese smells. They like it that way.”

The woman snatched the parcel back from him and sniffed at it herself. “You're telling me that this is how it's meant to be? I bet that if I took a culture from it, it would show all sorts of things. There are European Union regulations about that sort of thing, you know. This cheese should be called salmonella.”

“It's not called salmonella,” said Eddie. “It's—”

“I know it's not called that,” interjected the woman. “I said that's what it
should
be called. Like Gorgonzola.”

Isabel had come up behind Eddie. She glanced at the cheese and whispered to him, “Take it back.”

Eddie cocked his head to listen to her, but then turned back to face the customer. “If you don't like smelly cheese you should get something different. Cheddar, maybe.”

Isabel intervened. “I think we can do a refund,” she said. “Or we can give you another cheese. Have you tried this one? This is an Italian cheese, Grana, which is just like Parmesan, but much cheaper. Here, try a little bit.”

She cut a small piece of cheese from a block on the counter and handed it, on the knife, to the young woman. Eddie glowered, but the young woman, mollified, nodded enthusiastically. “I really like that,” she said. “And it doesn't stink.” She threw a glance at Eddie as she made the last remark, and he blushed.

Eddie watched as Isabel cut the Grana for the young woman. From a corner of the shop, David McLean also watched, and when Isabel had finished attending to the customer he came forward to the counter.

“Isabel Dalhousie?”

Isabel was surprised to be addressed by name in the delicatessen, where she thought few people, other than the most regular of customers, knew who she was. “Yes.” It was guarded, as if she might assent now to be Isabel Dalhousie, but reserved the right to be somebody else if necessary.

David McLean fished for a card from his pocket and passed it over to her. “I wonder if we could possibly have a quick word,” he said, nodding in the direction of the coffee tables, none of which was occupied.

Isabel looked at the card. “We're very busy,” she said. “And there are just two of us at the moment.”

Eddie, standing just behind her, interrupted. “That's all right. I'll cope.” He spoke with a sense of injured innocence; Isabel might refund cheese unnecessarily, against his better judgement, but
he
was not one to bear a grudge or be petty.

She looked at Eddie. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

Isabel turned back to face David McLean. “As it happens, I'm ready for a coffee. Would you like one?”

“I'll make them,” offered Eddie.

Isabel did not argue, but loosened her apron and went over to sit with David McLean at the table near the window. The lawyer waited courteously while she took a seat before lowering himself into a chair. She noted that, and the shoes he was wearing—expensive black brogues, highly polished.

“Your friend told me that you would be here,” he said. “I hope you don't mind my coming to see you at work.”

“My friend?”

“At the house. Jamie. Your young musician.”

“I see.”

David McLean was resting his left hand on top of the table. Isabel noticed that there was a ring on the little finger, a signet ring, on which there was engraved in the gold a tiny ax. Isabel knew that this was the symbol of the clan McLean. Charlie McLean had told her that when she had seen the ax on his kilt pin. He took his hand off the table.

“I'll come right to the point,” he said. “My firm acts for a pharmaceutical firm. They are not based here in Scotland—they are based abroad, in fact. But we represent their London lawyers in Scotland.”

Isabel hardly had to ask, but did; more to say something than to find out the answer. “The people who make the antibiotic that…”

“Yes,” said David McLean. “Precisely.”

He put his hand back on the table. The ring caught a shaft of sun coming through the window, and glinted briefly.

“As you know,” he went on, “there was a very unfortunate incident not all that long ago. The doctor in question was represented by somebody else in the proceedings before the medical authorities; we merely watched the situation for our own clients. Obviously they were very concerned about the reputation of their product.”

“Obviously.”

“Yes. People are very quick to blame manufacturers for things that go wrong. And this seems to apply particularly to those who manufacture drugs. That's curious, isn't it? Everybody wants new drugs to be made available, but nobody seems to want to accept the risk that goes with putting these things on the market. And it's always the fault of the drug companies, isn't it, when something goes wrong? Or that's what the press implies.”

Isabel had forgotten about the coffee, but now it arrived. Eddie put two mugs on the table, glancing with distaste at the lawyer as he did so.

David McLean lifted the mug to his lips and sipped at the hot, milky liquid, looking at Isabel as he did so. It seemed to her that he was waiting for her to agree with him, with what he had just said.

She blew across the surface of her coffee to cool it. “Perhaps we shouldn't be so surprised,” she said. “The pharmaceutical companies make very considerable profits. They are quite simply rich. People have never liked—”

He interrupted her, smiling as he spoke. “People have never liked the rich? I suppose you should understand that, Miss Dalhousie.”

She caught her breath, and she thought of saying to him, “That remark is unprofessional.” But she did not. He had unwittingly—perhaps—declared his hostility, but she did not want to engage. She looked over towards the counter, where Eddie was standing, dealing with a customer. Suddenly, she felt vulnerable. This stranger knew who she was; he had been to the house; he knew her personal circumstances. Or did he? Had he merely seen the house and concluded that anybody who lived in a large self-contained Victorian house in that street, in that part of town, must have money in the bank? It did not require any great skill to reach that conclusion.