Alexander Mccall Smith - Isabel Dalhousie 05 (5 page)

Isabel decided that Cat would be too busy over the next little while for them to talk, and so she made her way directly to one of the spare tables and sat down. There were always interesting overseas newspapers in Cat's delicatessen, often
Corriere della Sera,
but sometimes examples that were more recondite, for Scotland at least:
The Straits Times, The Globe and Mail, The Age,
several days old, perhaps, but nonetheless interesting for that. Today she found a copy of
The Washington Post
dated four days previously, and she began to page through it, skipping over the political news of electoral campaigns that seemed to go on and on forever. There was a review of a new opera at the Kennedy Center, together with a picture of the composer and librettist at the premiere, alongside various society figures. The society figures dressed as expected, one of the women sporting a tiara and all of the men having that air of slick grooming and benevolence that accompanies real wealth. Rich people, thought Isabel, never look anxious in photographs; they look relaxed, assured, untouchable by the worries of lesser mortals.

“Isabel?”

She looked up. Eddie, Cat's timid assistant in the delicatessen, the damaged boy who had been taken on and nurtured, was standing before her, wiping his hands on the floury-looking apron he was wearing. More progress, thought Isabel; there had been a time when Eddie had been unwilling to don the apron on the unexpressed grounds that it was unmascu-line, or those were the grounds that Cat and Isabel had inferred. Now he felt sufficiently sure of himself to wear it, and Isabel felt pleased. Little by little, whatever trauma it was that Eddie had experienced—and she had a good idea of its nature—was receding in the face of his increased confidence.

“Nice apron,” she said.

The words came out automatically, but it occurred to her just as automatically that she should not have said anything.

Eddie hesitated. He looked down at the apron and then looked up again. He smiled.

“It's really for lassies.”

Isabel shook a finger at him playfully. “No, Eddie. We don't say that sort of thing anymore. Men do women's work, or what used to be women's work, and vice versa. It's the same with clothes.”

Eddie looked at her disbelievingly. “You mean that men wear women's clothes? Dresses?”

Isabel shrugged. “Some do,” she began, and then laughed. “No, I didn't mean that. I meant to say that the categories of what's for men and what's for women have blurred. We share so much now.”

Eddie decided that the conversation had gone far enough. “Are you going to have coffee?” he asked. “Cat said I wasn't to keep you waiting.”

Isabel explained that she was expecting to be joined by somebody, but that he could bring her a coffee anyway if he did not mind coming back for a second order once her guest arrived. Eddie nodded.

“And what are you up to these days, Eddie?” she asked.

“The usual.” He paused. “Well, the usual, and something else. I'm taking a course.”

Isabel expressed her pleasure. She had hoped that Eddie would eventually get round to obtaining some sort of qualification. He was intelligent enough, she thought; once again it all came down to confidence. She enquired what the course was. He had once mentioned a catering certificate that one could start by post and then go on to finish at catering college. Was it that?

“Hypnotism,” announced Eddie.

Isabel stared at him. “Hypnotism?”

“Yes. I've been doing it for six weeks now. There's one lecture a week—Thursday nights at college. You don't get an actual certificate, but you do get a bit of paper at the end saying that you're licensed to hypnotise people.”

Isabel thought this unlikely. “A licence? Surely not.”

Her disbelief took Eddie aback, and he started to become defensive. “It's not the sort of hypnotism you see at those shows,” he said. “We don't make people eat an onion and think that they're eating an apple. We don't make them see things that aren't there.”

“I'm glad to hear it,” said Isabel. “I should hate to find myself eating a raw onion at your behest, Eddie.”

“It's about hypnotising people to help them stop smoking or…or doing other things that they don't want to. Bad habits. Hypnotism can cure bad habits.”

“I'm sure it can,” said Isabel.

“And past lives,” Eddie went on. “You can take people back to their past lives.”

Isabel thought: We're in Grace's territory now. Had Eddie been put up to this by Grace? “Are you sure?” She looked at him enquiringly and he inclined his head. He was perfectly serious.

“My friend Phil is in the class too,” said Eddie. “He allowed one of the girls—I forget her name—to regress him. I was there. I watched it. It was at Phil's place after the class. We'd gone back there and Phil asked to be regressed.”

Intrigued in spite of herself, Isabel asked what Phil had been in his previous life. “A coal miner,” said Eddie. “A coal miner up in Fife. Somewhere near Lochgelly.”

That, thought Isabel, is progress. There were too many exotic previous incarnations; too many Egyptian princesses, too many figures of minor royalty, too many Napoleons, no doubt. A coal miner from Fife had the ring of authenticity about it.

“And then,” Eddie continued, “she took Phil one life further back.”

“And what was he then?” asked Isabel.

“Robert the Bruce,” said Eddie. “I'm not making this up, Isabel. I swear. He was Robert the Bruce. Phil was. He didn't open his eyes or anything. He just said, ‘I'm Robert the Bruce' when we asked him who he was.”

“Fancy that!” said Isabel. “Phil, of all people! Robert the Bruce.”

“Aye,” said Eddie. “It was dead spooky, Isabel. He started talking about a battle and how he was going to defeat the English.”

Isabel opened her mouth to say something, but the door opened and Stella Moncrieff walked in. She looked across the room, searching for Isabel, and Isabel gave her a wave.

“My friend,” Isabel said to Eddie. “Could we carry on our conversation some other time?”

Eddie nodded. “Anytime, Isabel. And I'll regress you, too, if you like.”

“All right,” said Isabel. “But you do realise, don't you, that I'm likely to be Bonnie Prince Charlie? Or possibly Louis the Fourteenth?”

Eddie looked at her with the air of one about to disabuse another of a fondly held notion. “No you won't,” he said. “Women are women in their previous lives and men are men. You'll just be a woman, Isabel. Same as you are now.”

         

STELLA MONCRIEFF
began with an apology. “I haven't kept you waiting too long, I hope.”

Isabel indicated the chair on the other side of the table. “No, you haven't. I arrived just a few minutes ago.”

Isabel glanced at Stella as she sat down. She was one of those people it was difficult to place in age terms, but Isabel thought that she was probably somewhere in her early fifties. The trouble, of course, was that clothing no longer provided a cue; middle-aged clothing still existed, but the middle-aged no longer wore it; jeans had liberated them from all that. So now the only way of distinguishing between those who were twenty and those who were forty was by the age of the fabric of the jeans: threadbare cloth meant twenty, cloth integral meant forty, the reversal of what one might expect. Until you looked at the face, of course, or, more tellingly, directly beneath it, at the neck, and then you could tell. That's where the years showed, like rings in the trunks of trees. And no trick of the surgeon could deal with that; Isabel wondered why people bothered with plastic surgery, with the nips and tucks, the stretching and plastering that left the victim looking like the mask of a Japanese Noh actor, flattened, pinned back in perpetual discomfort. Who was that unfortunate queen, she asked herself—an earlier queen of the Netherlands, was it not—who was one of the first to have plastic surgery and had been left with a perpetual smile? And then her husband had died and the surgeons had been obliged to perform frantic corrective surgery so that the queen should not appear to be too cheerful about her husband's death.

Isabel smiled at the thought, and Stella Moncrieff returned the smile.

“It's good of you to see me,” she said. “I sat at the telephone for ages, plucking up the courage to call you.”

The frankness of this remark struck Isabel. “But why? Why worry about phoning me? I'm not…” She trailed off. None of us is.

“Oh, you know how it is. You meet somebody briefly, and you wonder whether they want to hear from you.”

“I was delighted to hear from you. I hoped that we might have had a longer conversation the other evening. But dinner parties of that size…”

Stella nodded. “You know, I had asked them to invite you…I wanted to meet you, you see.”

Well, thought Isabel, that at least explained the invitation; it was nothing to do with Jamie. She hesitated for a moment, and then decided to be as frank with Stella as Stella was being with her. There was something about the moment which prompted confession. “Well, I was wrong about that,” she mused. “I thought that they had invited me because of Jamie.”

Stella looked blank.

“The young man I was with,” Isabel said.

For a moment Stella's puzzlement continued. “The young man with…with the dark hair? That lovely looking one?”

Isabel felt an intense flush of pleasure. He was lovely looking. It was not just a case of her looking upon him with a lover's eyes; lovers will make anything lovely. “Well, yes,” she said. “I suppose he is.”

There was still something Stella did not seem to understand. “You were with him?”

Isabel's pleasure began to turn into annoyance. “Yes,” she said. “We have a child together.”

The disclosure unnerved Stella, who struggled to maintain her composure. “Of course…But, why would they have invited you because of him?”

“To see him. To inspect him. It's fairly recent. And, well, people have talked about it a bit. He's a few years younger than I am.”

“I could tell that.” It slipped out, and could not be retracted. But Isabel did not care. She had decided that she liked Stella.

“Anyway, from what you tell me it had nothing to do with Jamie.”

“No. It was me. I wanted to meet you, you see. And I'm afraid I seem to have very little confidence these days. I know it's silly, but it's just the way things are.”

Isabel decided to take the initiative. “I heard something,” she said. “That doctor I was sitting next to, the cardiologist, he said that there had been some issue with your husband.”

Stella looked away. “That's one way of putting it.” She paused and looked back up at Isabel. “The truth of the matter, Isabel, is that I want you to help him. I know that you don't know me. I know that our troubles have got nothing to do with you, but that's the problem, you see, our troubles have got nothing to do with anybody. Except us.” She made a gesture of despair. “So what am I to do? I can't do anything myself, and Marcus, that's my husband…he's paralysed with guilt and self-reproach. With shame, too. He'll hardly leave the house. Won't talk to his old friends.”

Isabel listened carefully. It was not clear to her why Stella had chosen her. She decided to ask.

“Because I've heard about you,” said Stella. “I knew somebody you helped a couple of years ago. Nobody asked you. You just helped. And you made a difference.”

Isabel noticed that Eddie was signalling from the counter, making a gesture towards the coffee machine. She nodded to him and then said to Stella, “They make a particularly good cappuccino here. Would you…”

“Yes. Please.”

“And then you can tell me exactly what the problem is. I can't imagine that I'll be of any use, but tell me anyway, and I'll do what I can.”

It sounded so trite to her, even as she said it; the stock scene from the detective novel. The investigator reassures the distraught wife. Find out who's blackmailing/having an affair with/holding prisoner my husband, please. Don't worry, I'll do what I can. And then the relief on the face of the supplicant.

Stella looked relieved.

Isabel stopped herself short. Don't make light of human pain, she told herself. It's not funny.

CHAPTER FIVE

T
HAT EVENING,
on impulse, Isabel said to Jamie, “Look, it's five o'clock, or just about. If we bathed Charlie now and gave him his—”

“Tea,” supplied Jamie, pointedly, but smiling as he said it. He wanted to use the popular Scottish word for what Isabel would have called dinner, or possibly supper.

“If you like,” said Isabel. “I was going to say dinner, as you well know. But then, if you're going to be all down and demotic, dinner means lunch in such circles, doesn't it?”

“Feed,” suggested Jamie. “How about that as a compromise?”

Isabel did not think so. “Give him his
feed
? It sounds like agriculture to me. You give feed to cattle, don't you. Anyway, after he's had his…”

“Grub.”

“All right, after he's had his grub, why don't we…” She paused. “Grub first, then ethics. You know who said that?” It was an accurate description, perhaps, of the daily routine of the editor of the
Review of Applied Ethics,
which did indeed begin with breakfast and proceed to ethics.

Jamie did not hesitate. “
Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral.
Brecht.”

Isabel bowed her head in mock homage. “I'm impressed.”

“My German teacher at school went on about that,” said Jamie. “He said that
Fressen
was appropriate for animals rather than people. Brecht was showing his low opinion of humanity by choosing to say
Fressen
rather than
Essen.
That's why
grub
is a better translation than
food.
Grub is messy, animal stuff. He was very clever.”

“He was a hypocrite,” said Isabel. “He lived very comfortably in the GDR. No belching Trabbi for him. And he supported those horrific people who ran the place.”

Jamie shrugged. “He believed in communism, didn't he?”

“Yes,” said Isabel. “But he enjoyed what other writers in the GDR were denied. Freedom.” It was tawdry, that shabby republic, with its legions of informers and its unremitting greyness, its rotten, crumbling concrete. And then it had all gone so quickly, as in a puff of smoke; the whole Soviet empire, with its deadening tentacles of fear, collapsed and discredited, vanished like a confidence trickster who has been exposed. And yet there had been so many who had connived in it, had derided its opponents; what had they to say now? Her thoughts turned to Professor Lettuce, who had been a founder of something called the East-West Philosophical Engagement Committee. He had gone to East Berlin, as had Dove, and had publicly complained about reactionaries, as he described them, who had questioned the visit on the grounds that meetings would be restricted to those with posts in the universities, Party men every one of them. Dove…She thought of his paper on the Trolley Problem; she felt a vague unease about that, and she felt that there would be more to come.

But Brecht and the GDR, and even Dove and Lettuce, seemed far away. “Let's leave Brecht out of it for a moment,” she said. “After Charlie
has been fed,
I thought we could go out to the Pentlands and just…just go for a walk. Up past the reservoir. Charlie could go in the sling. He's getting a bit heavy for that, but you can carry him. He'll probably just nod straight off. It's such a lovely evening.” And I want to talk to you, she thought. I want to be with you.

         

THEY DROVE OUT
onto the Biggar Road, leaving the last of the town behind them. Isabel was at the wheel of her green Swedish car and Jamie sat in the back, to keep Charlie company in his car seat. At Flotterstone, a few miles round the back of the Pentland Hills, they turned off the main road and parked in the small car park set aside for hikers. Then, Charlie safely installed in the sling affixed to Jamie, they set off up the winding road into the hills. Jamie gave Charlie a finger, and the child gripped it tightly. “Look,” said Jamie, nodding in the direction of the little fist around his index finger. “Look.”

Isabel smiled at the sight. She had watched the process of Jamie's falling in love with Charlie, watched every step, from the first surprise and discovery to this emblematic moment, each act of tenderness by Jamie confirming the diagnosis of deepening love. Nothing had been said, and she thought that it was right that this should be so; the declaration of love could weaken its mystery, reduce it to the mundane. To say on the telephone,
Love you,
as she heard people doing, was dangerous, or so Isabel thought, because it made the extraordinary ordinary, and possibly meaningless.
Good day
meant nothing now because it had become an empty formula;
love you
could go the same way. It was significant that it had already been shortened, and the
I
had been dropped. What did that mean? That people were too busy to say
I love you,
or too embarrassed by the subjectivity of the full expression?

They began their walk, following the narrow road that worked its way up between the fold of the hills. The road, which was not used by ordinary traffic, was bordered on either side by an undulating stone dyke. To their left, all the way down to the bed of a small river, the throaty gurgling of whose waters could just be heard, was a slope on which Scots pines grew, their branches host to crows, which cawed and flew away. On the other side of the road, beyond the lichen-covered stones of the dyke, fields swept up the hillside; fields interrupted here and there by clumps of gorse, in flower at this time of year, the dark green foliage spiked with small clusters of yellow. Blackface sheep, hardy enough for the Scottish hills, dotted the fields, paused in their grazing and stared vacantly at Isabel and Jamie as they walked past, then dropped their heads again, unconcerned, and moved away.

“Charlie's asleep,” whispered Jamie. “Off like a top.”

She peeked at him. “It must be the most wonderful feeling, being carried like this. Warm and secure. Why would one want to grow up?”

Jamie laughed. “Why indeed?”

They walked on. They were now drawing level with the reservoir, which covered the flooded floor of the glen. The road they were following traced a route round the side of it before making its way up to the head of the glen, to peter out at the just-visible buildings of an isolated sheep farm. The surface of the loch was still, as there was no wind, no breeze, and the sky ahead, high and empty, was reflected on the water; no clouds, just blue. She turned to Jamie and took his hand, easily, unself-consciously. The touch of him thrilled her, and she shivered.

“I met Stella Moncrieff for coffee this morning,” she said. “Remember, I said I was going to do that.”

He was looking up, trying to make out something halfway up the hill. “And?”

“Well, she wanted to see me. She's asked me to help her with something.”

As Isabel expected, this caught Jamie's attention. He turned to her. “Isabel…” There was an unmistakable note of warning in his voice. Jamie did not approve of Isabel's getting involved in matters that did not concern her and had told her as much, on numerous occasions.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes.” And then, after a few moments, “I could hardly refuse.”

Jamie shook his head. “But that's exactly what you could do,” he said. “Life consists of refusing things we shouldn't be doing.”

Isabel reflected on this for a moment. Perhaps for some people life did indeed consist of refusing to do things—there were those who were adept at that. But she was not one of them. Her problem, rather, was one of deciding which claims on her moral attention to respond to and which to ignore; and it seemed, for some reason, that there were always more of the former than the latter. How can we ignore a cry for help? she asked herself. By steeling our hearts? By closing them?

She stopped and turned to Jamie, placing a hand on his forearm. Behind him, above the hill, a bird of prey circled watchfully; the evening sun, still with a touch of summer warmth in it, touched the heather with gold. At this time of year in Scotland it would be light until eleven at night; farther north, in the Shetlands, it would never get dark at all; at midnight the
simmer din
would make it possible to read a newspaper outside without strain to the eyes.

“Don't you want to know what she asked me to do?” He could hardly say no, she thought.

He sighed. “All right.” They began to walk again, and he added, “But I don't approve. You know that, don't you?”

She held his arm lightly, and began to tell him about her conversation with Stella. Marcus, Stella's husband, was a doctor.

“What sort?” asked Jamie. “Everybody's a doctor in Edinburgh. Or a lawyer.”

“An infectious diseases specialist—a very highly regarded one, apparently. Or he used to be highly regarded.” She went on to explain what Stella had told her. Marcus, she said, had been at the forefront of work on MRSA, the so-called superbug, which had been the cause of a growing number of deaths in hospitals.

“Apparently quite a few people are carriers of this,” said Isabel. “You or I might quite innocently have it. In our noses, I'm sorry to say. Our systems keep it under control, but we can pass it on to others, who can't cope with it.”

Jamie looked down at Charlie, at his tiny nose. “And?”

“And he was doing a trial on a new antibiotic,” Isabel continued. “One that can knock this MRSA on the head. A drug company has come up with a pretty good candidate and has been given a licence to produce it in this country. Marcus had been involved in the clinical trials and was monitoring its use in patients.

“Everything was going perfectly well, and then, very much to his surprise, a patient who had taken the drug developed pretty serious side effects. Heart palpitations, Stella said. And another one turned up with the same sort of thing. Alarm bells started to ring.”

If Jamie had been indifferent to the story at the beginning, he no longer was. “What was that drug that was so disastrous? The one that people used before they realised that it caused terrible birth defects?”

“Thalidomide. I suppose this was a bit different. The patients were all right, even if things were a bit scary for them. Anyway, Marcus was asked by the health authorities to look into these cases. He did that, and he also published a report in a medical journal in which he showed that both of these patients had been given a massive overdose of the drug: one was a drug addict and had self-administered it in the deluded belief that he would get some sort of hit from it; the other was the victim of a nursing error. So he claimed that everything was fine and that the drug was perfectly safe within the limits they set for this sort of thing.”

She sensed Jamie's absorption in the story, and was pleased. “But,” Isabel went on, “there was an unpleasant surprise around the corner. A few weeks later he published his findings, in the form of a letter in one of the big medical journals—a few weeks after he had said everything was perfectly safe, a man up in Perthshire was given the drug and promptly died. There was an enquiry and the hospital authorities took a closer look at Marcus's original report—the one that said that everything was perfectly all right. And what did they find?”

Jamie frowned. “That he'd made a mistake?”

“Yes. But more than that. The data in his original paper was shown to have been falsified. It was something to do with the level of the dosage.”

They walked on. Jamie was lost in thought; then he spoke. “I see where this is going. The implication was that he had an interest in keeping the drug manufacturers happy and that he falsified the figures for their sake. For money.”

That was not what Stella had suggested, Isabel explained. She had said that although the press had had a field day and blamed Marcus for the death, they had not accused him of doing it for money. But he had been reported to the General Medical Council and he had been heavily censured for issuing a misleading report. He resigned from his university chair, too, and stopped all medical work.

“A rather sad story,” said Jamie. “Sad for everybody.” He paused. “And she wants you to…” He looked at Isabel. “She wants you to clear her husband's name? Is that it?”

Isabel nodded.

“Oh, Isabel!” exploded Jamie. “What's this got to do with you? What's this got to do with being the editor of the
Review of Applied Ethics,
for heaven's sake?”

“Everything,” said Isabel.

Jamie looked puzzled. “I'm sorry…”

“She says that he's completely innocent. That's what it's got to do with me. An innocent man is now consumed with shame for something he didn't do. That has something to do with all of us, I would have thought. And it just so happens that I have been asked by his wife to do something about it. That brings me into a relationship of—”

“Moral proximity with him,” said Jamie. “Yes, I know all about that. You've told me about moral proximity.”