Alexander Mccall Smith - Isabel Dalhousie 05 (4 page)

Isabel thought quickly. “Ghastly fate,” she said hurriedly. “And poor Demeter: What parent could fail to sympathise with her!”

“I'm sorry,” said Nick Smart. “I thought at first that you didn't like it.”

Isabel laughed. She looked desperately at Jamie, who was smirking. “Heavens no. I thought it very arresting. Remarkable.” The man outside had used that adjective and she reached for it now.

“Yes,” said Jamie, coming to her rescue. “Remarkable.” He paused. “Nick, this is Isabel.”

Nick Smart took Isabel's hand and shook it. She thought: Anybody could have done that. He looks very like Jamie; so much so, they could be brothers.

The young woman, whom Isabel recognised as one of the violinists and who had been standing next to Jamie, looked at her watch and muttered, “Sorry. Must go. Glasgow train.”

Jamie said, “Fine. I'll see you next time, whenever that is. Next month, I think.”

Isabel, her poise now recovered, turned to Nick Smart. “I see that you're composer in residence at the university, Mr. Smart. Do you have to teach?”

Nick Smart turned to her, but only briefly. When he replied, it was as if he were uttering an aside. “A bit. Not much.” He turned back to face Jamie. Isabel noticed that as he did so, he smiled. American teeth, she thought, knocked into shape by expensive orthodontics, but slightly worrying in their regularity.

“So do you play a lot for Scottish Opera?” asked Nick.

“Yes,” said Jamie. “I stand in. Quite a lot.”

“I've been working on an opera,” said Nick. “On and off.”

“What's it about?” asked Isabel.

It was possible, she thought, that Nick did not hear her question; either that, or he ignored it.

“The difficulty with a full-length opera is that there's just so much music,” said Nick, addressing Jamie. “It's pretty difficult.”

“So I gather,” said Jamie.

Isabel looked to see if Jamie had noticed her question being ignored, but he did not. She glanced at Nick Smart, at the black linen suit. She noticed an expensive watch on his left wrist and a discreet signet ring. There was an air of expensive grooming about him. But there was something else there, and she could not quite fathom it. Smugness? Narcissism? One thing was clear: he was not the slightest bit interested in talking to her; that had been apparent right at the beginning.

“Jamie,” she began. “It's getting a bit late. I think…”

Nick moved his head slightly to glance at her; no more than that. Then he turned back to look at Jamie. A smile played about the edge of his mouth, a look of enquiry.

Jamie muttered something and took Isabel aside. “Would you mind?” he asked. “Nick has asked me to have a drink with him. Would you mind if I stayed?”

She thought: I do mind. I mind a great deal. But she said, “No, that's all right. Will you be in later?”

He leaned forward and kissed her on the brow. “Of course.”

Nick Smart was watching, bemused. His eyes moved away. He touched his watch with his right hand, a delicate gesture, as a conservator might remove dust from a painting, with a silk cloth.

CHAPTER FOUR

O
VER BREAKFAST
the next day she said to Jamie, “You changed your tune.” She had not intended it to sound like an accusation, but that is how it came out.

He had been feeding mashed-up boiled egg to Charlie, and he kept at his task as he replied. “Why do you say that? What tune?”

“A metaphorical one,” she said. “Nick Smart's piece.
Melisma for Persephone
or whatever it was called. You were…well, you were hardly enthusiastic before the concert. Then…”

He buttered a small piece of bread and spread white of egg across it. Charlie, watching eagerly, reached out to snatch the morsel. “Gently does it,” said Jamie. “There. How about that? Delicious, isn't it?” This is what babies are, thought Jamie: graspings and softness; splatterings of food, dribbles of liquid; small, unintelligible sounds of creaturehood. He half turned to Isabel, licking a small smear of egg from his fingers. “I found it better second time round,” he said. “Some pieces are like that. You hear things that you've missed.” He paused and wiped his hand on a small piece of paper towel. “Actually, one should always be prepared to listen to music again. I remember that when I first heard Pärt I missed a lot of the subtlety. I thought it was Philip Glass all over again. But it isn't.”

Isabel reached for a slice of toast and began to butter it. Charlie watched intently.

“And what was he like? Nick Smart? Were you impressed?”

Jamie reached forward and tickled Charlie under the chin. “Very interesting. We had a good talk. We went to a bar down near the Pleasance. He has a flat over there, behind Surgeons' Hall somewhere. This bar was a real down-to-earth place. Locals standing there looking at you with that look…that appraising stare that you get when you go into a local pub and you don't belong.”

Isabel kept her voice even. I might have wanted to come, she thought. Had it occurred to him that she might have wanted to go along with them? “And you talked music?”

“Mostly. He's quite an accomplished composer, you know. He was at Tanglewood last year, that place in New England, doing a summer seminar. They don't invite just anybody.”

“I'm impressed.”

If there was sarcasm, intended or otherwise, in Isabel's tone, then Jamie did not pick it up. “Yes,” he said. “He is impressive. And he suggested that we could work together on something. He's interested in writing something for the bassoon and wants to try some ideas out on me.”

She absorbed this disclosure in silence. Of course it was perfectly reasonable that Jamie should work with other musicians and composers; of course he had to do that. But for some reason, she did not like the idea of his working with Nick Smart. She wanted Nick Smart to go away, to not be there.

She swallowed. “Good,” she said. “It sounds as if you'll enjoy that.”

He's without guile, she thought, and his reply had that note of boyish enthusiasm that so appealed to her. “Yes. I'm really excited about it. I love working with composers. And he's the real thing, Isabel.” He picked up Charlie's plate and scraped at the last vestiges of boiled egg. “But I can't work out why he should want to work with me. Why me?”

Isabel looked at him, and looked away again sharply. She had an idea, but she would not spell it out for him. Not yet.

         

JAMIE HAD THE ENTIRE MORNING
and part of the afternoon off. He had cut back on his teaching commitments recently in order to give himself more time for rehearsals and the occasional recording sessions that he had begun to do. This meant that he was also more available for Charlie, which of course Isabel encouraged, although Grace did not. Grace regarded herself as being responsible for Charlie during the day, in order to give Isabel time to devote herself to her work. Or that was how she dressed up her desire to keep Charlie to herself as much as possible. Fathers are all very well for when they're older, she told herself, but when they're small, as Charlie still is, they need women to look after them. Jamie picked up Grace's unspoken jealousy, but sailed through it regardless.

That morning he would take Charlie to the museum, he decided. They could have something to eat in the cafeteria, and Charlie could be shown some of the working models of machinery, held up against the glass cases so that he could see the intricate whirring models within. He had watched these with some interest on the last occasion that Jamie had taken him there, although it was not clear whether he had the remotest idea of what was going on. A bassoon could equally well be a steam engine, and a steam engine a bassoon, thought Jamie, reflecting on the fact that for Charlie the world was probably just shapes and sounds.

Isabel had once remarked to Jamie that it would be interesting to know what would happen if a mysterious virus were to wipe out everybody older than four, leaving the world to infants and toddlers. Presumably all these small children would be like Charlie, faced with the models of machines, uncertain what everything was.

“Would we learn what everything was for?” she asked. “Or would we have to invent things all over again?”

“It would be one great feat of reverse engineering,” said Jamie.

Isabel was not so sure. “What about music notation?” she asked. “Would we eventually work out what musical scores meant, if we had nothing to base our knowledge on?”

Jamie thought we would, although he doubted whether anybody but the four-year-olds would stand a chance. “Those aged one, two, and three would pretty quickly fall by the wayside,” he said. “Because the four-year-olds, who might just be able to fend for themselves, would not do anything for the younger ones. Four is too young for altruism.”

She thought about this. Would it really be as William Golding had predicted in
Lord of the Flies
? The thesis behind that was that children left to their own devices reverted to savagery, but it was really just a mirror image of the savagery of the adult world; remove the adults and the children fell into tribalism and superstition. But if the resulting childish dystopia merely reflected the adult world, then what happened if one removed the adults—in other words, the authority figures—from the adult world? What if we really did kill God, what then? Would we all be rationally committed to the greater good, or would savagery be the norm? To kill God: the idea was absurd. If God existed, then he should be above being killed, by definition. But if he was just something in which we believed, or hoped, perhaps, killing him may be an act of cruelty that would rebound upon us; like telling small children that fairies were impossible, that Jack never had a beanstalk; or telling a teenager that love was an illusion, a chemical response to a chemical situation. There were things, she thought, which were probably true, but which we simply should not always acknowledge as true; novels, for example—always false, elaborately constructed deceptions, but we believed them to be true while we were reading them; we had to, as otherwise there was no point. One would read, and all the time as one read, one would say, mentally,
He didn't really.

But now Isabel had other things to think of. Charlie was going off with Jamie; Grace was tackling a large load of washing, somewhat grumpily, but tackling it nonetheless; and she had agreed to meet somebody for a cup of coffee at Cat's delicatessen.

“Who are you seeing?” Jamie asked when she told him that she had the appointment. “Somebody about the
Review
?”

“No,” said Isabel. “It's somebody we met at that dinner the other night. She was sitting on the same side of the table as you were. That woman who was there by herself. Stella Moncrieff.”

Jamie seemed largely uninterested. None of the guests had made an impression on him that evening, and he was unsure as to whom Isabel was talking about. “Oh yes.” He stood up to lift Charlie out of his high chair.

“Yes,” said Isabel.

He turned away from her, holding Charlie to him. Tiny fingers were grasping at his hand; there was sweet, milky breath on his cheek, soft breathing like that of a small animal. Words had such power, greater power, even, than music, and it still hurt him to hear Cat's name; hurt him and filled him with a disconcerting feeling of excitement. Cat. It was a name redolent of desire, of sex—Cat. It still had that effect, when he knew that it should not, when he willed that it should become like any other name, stripped of its power to rekindle feelings that he did not want rekindled.

         

AS SHE WALKED
along Merchiston Crescent, Isabel thought about what Jamie had said about Nick Smart. She should not become possessive; she knew that. It was the worst thing that she could possibly do, as it would be massively resented by Jamie if he were to detect it. If she was to keep Jamie, then she should not suffocate him; he had to have his freedom, had to have his own life, and that life included time spent with other musicians. I-Thou, she thought, remembering Martin Buber; the Thou has a part to it that I cannot possess. Neither could she expect to like all of Jamie's friends, nor could he be expected to like all of hers. She did not care for Nick Smart, but that was because Nick Smart, she decided, had not liked her; that had been obvious on their first meeting. But why should he take against her? Her apparent faux pas over
Melisma
had been defused through her quick explanation, so that could not be the reason; there was something else. Because I am a woman, she thought; that was it. Because Nick Smart does not like women and, in particular, he did not like women who had claims on the man with whom he was engaged in conversation. I am not the jealous one here, she thought; there was an entirely other sort of jealousy operating.

She put Nick Smart out of her mind and thought about the telephone call that she had received from Stella Moncrieff. She had not masked her surprise at the call, and the other woman had evidently picked this up. “Yes, I know that this is unexpected,” she said. “But I had hoped to have the chance to speak to you privately the other night. Somehow the occasion didn't arise. I hope you don't mind my getting in touch with you now.”

“Of course not. And I'm sorry we didn't have the chance to talk.”

She had been on the point of inviting Stella to the house but had stopped herself and suggested instead that they meet for a cup of coffee at Cat's delicatessen. This would give her the ability to bring the meeting to an end when she wanted to; it was difficult to do so when the other person was a guest in one's house; short of lying about having to go out, of course.

Now, as she stood before Cat's window and stared admiringly at the imaginatively arranged display of foodstuffs, she found herself looking forward to the meeting with Stella Moncrieff. There was something to be discussed, she thought, and the most likely topic, surely, was the other woman's husband and what had happened to him. Isabel's curiosity had been aroused by what had been said to her at the dinner, and now, she thought, she would get a further explanation as to why he should be ashamed to show himself in public. The modern world was a tolerant place: even murderers brazened it out these days; they wrote their memoirs, telling all, and publishers fell upon them with delight. There was no shame there, she thought, unless the memoirs included an apology to the victims, which they usually did not; on the contrary, they sometimes blamed the victims, or the police, or their mothers, or even, in the case of one set of memoirs, the mothers of the police. Mothers, of course, were to blame for a great deal; Vienna had established that beyond all doubt. But that was another matter; the immediate question was that if shame had been so convincingly rendered old-fashioned, de trop, then why should anybody feel unable to attend a dinner party on the simple grounds that he stood accused of doing some nameless thing? And what could that have been? Some sexual peccadillo, no doubt, that made him seem ridiculous; some sad story of middle-aged loss of self-control, a momentary aberration, a little thing, probably, but enough to drive him into shamed retreat. The press, in particular, was cruel, rushing to cast the first stone, luxuriating in the humiliation of its victims.

She went inside. Although two of the four coffee tables in the corner were vacant, there were quite a few other customers examining or ordering food from the counter. Cat, who was serving cheese to a tall, rather angular woman, looked up when Isabel came in and smiled a greeting. Isabel smiled back; the days of open warfare in her relationship with Cat were over now, or so she hoped. Even if she seemed slightly remote from him, Cat had accepted the existence of Charlie and had forgiven Isabel for having him with Jamie, her former boyfriend. Nor did Cat resent Jamie's presence in her aunt's life, although Isabel was careful to avoid situations where she was together with Jamie in Cat's presence, just to be on the safe side.