Alexander Mccall Smith - Isabel Dalhousie 05 (8 page)

Her question seemed to unsettle him. He looked down at his hands for a few moments before he replied.

“There was no falsification,” he said. “There was an error in the transcription of the results somewhere along the line. It's possible that it was a slip by a medical student who was attached to my unit at the time. They accepted that. They said, though, that I should have rechecked and should not have relied on a medical student. They said that I was careless. That was the actual word used:
careless.
”

“And do you think you were?” asked Isabel.

He closed his eyes. She noticed that his right eyelid was twitching. “Yes. I should have checked. And I should have declared the conflict of interest. I failed to meet the standards expected of a doctor of my experience.”

There was something that Isabel was unsure about. Was this failure directly linked with the Glasgow case? She asked him this, and again he took a little while to answer.

“According to the press it was,” he said. “One or two of the papers went so far as to accuse me of…” He faltered. “Of killing the patient in Glasgow. They said that if I had done my work properly, safeguards would have been put in place. The drug would not have been given to somebody with a history of heart problems—which that man had. They blamed me for his death.” The next words were chiselled out. “Publicly. Unambiguously.”

Isabel reached out and put her hand on top of his clasped hands. “But you weren't responsible for that,” she said. “Somebody made a mistake. That's all.”

But there was something she still needed to know. Why had he not checked the results, if they were so out of line with what might have been expected? She asked him.

His answer came quickly, and Isabel thought that it sounded rehearsed. But then she realised that repetition may have the same effect as rehearsal. He would have had to explain himself a hundred times before, sometimes, perhaps, even to himself; of course it would sound rehearsed. “It didn't cross my mind,” he said. “It didn't occur to me that the results could be wrong. I took them on face value.”

They spoke for a few more minutes. Isabel asked him the name of the assistant who had worked with him, and he gave it to her. But he added, “It was definitely not his fault. It really wasn't.” Then Stella appeared, hovering anxiously about the door. Isabel said good-bye to Marcus, who had sunk back in his chair and started to stare out of the window again.

Glancing behind her, Isabel whispered to Stella. “He looks very depressed,” she said. “Has he seen a doctor?”

“He won't,” Stella replied. “I've tried. I've tried everything.”

“All right,” said Isabel. “Give me a week. Maybe ten days. Then telephone.”

Stella reached out and briefly held Isabel's arm. “You're a saint,” she said.

The compliment surprised Isabel. She did not conceive of herself in those terms at all; it simply would never have occurred to her to do so. A saint with a young boyfriend, she thought. And a taste for New Zealand white wine. And a tendency to think uncharitable thoughts about people like Dove and Lettuce. That sort of saint.

CHAPTER SEVEN

P
EOPLE DON'T REALISE IT,”
Cat had said. “They don't realise what running your own business is like. It's always there. Day in, day out. And you can't get away when you like. You're tied down.”

“Like having a baby,” said Isabel.

She had not intended to make the comparison, but it had slipped out. And it occurred to her that even if this was true for most women who had babies, it was hardly true for her, with her resources, with Grace to support her. If tact required that one should not complain about those respects in which one is better off than others, it also required that one should not complain about things that others did not have at all—such as children. Isabel was unsure about how Cat felt about not having a child herself, even if she had a boyfriend now—“the one after the last” as Grace had called him.

The last had been an apprentice stonemason, although Isabel still thought of him as a bouncer, the job he had been doing before he started to work with stone. He had the physique of a bouncer—and the physiognomy, too, including a protruding jaw that must have been such a tempting target for those whom he was called to expel from the noisy, subterranean club in Lothian Road that had employed him. Isabel had met him a couple of times and had suppressed the urge to stare at him in a way which would have revealed her astonishment that such a man should be the choice of her niece, as if Cat's choices said anything about Isabel—of course they did not, she told herself, but still…

Of course she knew exactly what it was that attracted Cat. It was the same thing that she had seen in Toby, her skiing wine-dealer boyfriend; that she had seen in the one who followed him—the one to whom Isabel had never been introduced but whom Isabel had spotted her with, arm in arm, walking along George Street one Saturday; and that she had seen in Christopher Dove—Dove of all people!—when she had had that brief flirtation with him. Cat was attracted by tall, well-built men; it was as simple as that.

It may have been simple, but Isabel thought that it was also incomprehensible. She understood that everyone had their preferred physical type, but she found it odd that this could be the sole factor in somebody's choice. One may find the combination of dark hair and blue eyes, for example, a heart-stopping one, but would one want to spend time in the company of dark-haired, blue-eyed people who had nothing to say, or, if they had something to say, it was trite or even distasteful? She thought not. The problem was that the search for beauty was something that we were destined to conduct, in spite of ourselves; we wanted to be in the presence of beauty because somehow we felt it rubbed off on us, enriched our lives, made us more attractive. This was felt even by those who themselves were attractive; beauty sought beauty. Cat was tall and attractive, and clearly wanted tall and attractive men; that the men she found were empty vessels had not deterred her at all. But none of them had lasted, thought Isabel, which showed that the consolations of beauty were not long-lasting: there had to be something else.

Cat was talking to her, and had said something that Isabel had not caught. Now she repeated it.

“I don't like to ask you,” said Cat. “But you said that you really enjoyed looking after the delicatessen. The last time that you did it, you…”

“Yes,” said Isabel. “I enjoyed it. And I don't mind doing it again. You have only to ask.”

They were talking in Cat's office at the back of the delicatessen, and now she sat back in her chair, relieved that Isabel was volunteering. She had wondered whether she dared leave Eddie in control, but had decided that she should not. It was not that he did not know enough to run the shop—he could handle any of the tasks involved in keeping the delicatessen going, but he lacked the confidence. She had seen it before, on occasions when she had left him in charge for a few hours: everything would be all right when she came back, but Eddie would be anxious, his relief at her return quite palpable.

Cat explained that a friend had invited her to join her for ten days in Sri Lanka. She could fly from Glasgow to Dubai, she said, and then from there to Colombo. Helen, her friend, had a boyfriend who knew somebody who had a villa. They had taken the villa for a couple of weeks and a party of them was filling it up.

“Are you going by yourself?” Isabel asked.

Cat looked at her sideways. “Yes. Just me.”

There was a brief silence. “I wasn't prying,” said Isabel softly.

Cat hesitated. Then, “You can pry if you like. I don't mind. He's called Martin, but I'm afraid that he's not the one. We're still seeing each other, but I just don't know.”

“If your heart's not in it, then what's the point?” said Isabel.

Cat shrugged. “You're right. But then it's not all that easy breaking things off. Particularly if the other person is still keen.”

“Which he is?”

“Which he is.”

Cat was looking at her in a bemused way, and Isabel wondered whether she was expected to say anything more. But what could she say about this Martin, this man she had never even met, and about whom she knew nothing? She could assume, of course, that he was tall and well built, but beyond that she could only speculate. Martin: the name gave nothing away. At length she said, “You probably don't want to hurt him, do you?” It was a trite remark, but it led to her adding, “So don't string him along. Tell him it's over.”

It appeared to be what Cat had wanted. “I will. I'll tell him before I go to Sri Lanka.”

Isabel winced. Her advice had been seized upon, and this made her uneasy. She knew her niece, and understood that if Cat came to regret her decision to end her relationship with Martin, then she would lay the blame at Isabel's door, even if subtly.

“It must be your decision, of course,” said Isabel. “I wouldn't want to interfere.”

Again Cat looked at her in bemusement; her niece shared Jamie's view that she interfered too readily and far too frequently. But this time Isabel had told her what she wanted to hear—that the relationship with Martin should be brought to an end. The decision taken, she felt a strong sense of relief. She was free.

         

CAT LEFT
for Sri Lanka on a Sunday morning, and Isabel took over on that Monday, arriving at the delicatessen shortly before Eddie. Grace had come to the house early, pleased to be placed in sole charge of Charlie for the entire day. She had already mapped out his week; a journey on the bus to her cousin in Dalkeith; an outing to the café at the Chambers Street museum; several trips to the Botanical Gardens—“He loves the squirrels,” she said. “And the hot houses too.” Isabel knew from a friend's report that Grace pretended that Charlie was hers. This friend had been standing behind her in a café at the zoo and had complimented her on Charlie's Macpherson tartan rompers. Grace had replied that she was part Macpherson, as if that were the explanation for Charlie's attire. She had not said that Charlie was hers, but had certainly implied it, not knowing, of course, that it was a friend of Isabel's who was addressing her. Isabel had been saddened by the story; she could so easily have been in Grace's position, had Jamie not turned up; and had it been she who was taking somebody else's child to the zoo, she might well have wanted others to think the child was hers. Who amongst us was above such longing, such pretence?

Eddie came in and hung up his green windbreaker on the back of the office door. He always wore the same thing, Isabel had noted: a pair of blue jeans, blue sneakers with white laces, and a curious long-sleeved white tee-shirt. She had never seen him in anything different, although he obviously had several pairs of jeans and several tee-shirts, as his clothes were always clean.

“Will she be there by now?” asked Eddie, looking at his watch.

“Yes,” said Isabel.

Eddie looked thoughtful. “Where is it?” he asked. “I've heard of it, but I've never really known. Is it somewhere…somewhere near Egypt?”

Isabel's eyes widened in surprise. “No,” she said. “Not really. It's near India. It's the teardrop off India.”

“Oh,” said Eddie.

Isabel watched him. There were so many people who knew very little about the world, and Eddie's generation knew less than most. She wondered, in fact, what he did know. Would he know who David Hume was, or Immanuel Kant, or Aristotle?

“Aristotle,” she said, on impulse.

Eddie frowned. “I don't know about that,” he said. “I've never sold any myself. Has Cat ordered any?”

Isabel looked away and muttered something about checking on it. She had not intended to expose him, and she knew that she should not laugh. There were plenty of people who would not know who Aristotle was, but there were not many who would think that he was…a cheese.

She entered Cat's office and switched on the lights. Cat had left a list of things to be done, and Isabel now went through it. There were to be several important deliveries, including a large one of Parmesan cheese—two wheels of it. Could she cut that up, Cat asked, and vacuum pack it with the vacuum-pack machine? Eddie knew how to operate that, Cat explained, although sometimes it made him anxious. She thought about this: Why should anyone be anxious about a vacuum-pack machine? She remembered her psychiatrist friend, Richard Latcham, telling her that free-floating anxieties could settle on anything—anxiety, like love, needs an object, and that could be anything.

A tempting smell of freshly ground coffee reached Isabel through the open door of the office. She put down Cat's list and joined Eddie at the counter. The coffee was for her.

“Do you eat breakfast, Eddie?” she asked, as she cradled in her hands the warm mug he had passed her.

Eddie shook his head. “No. Never. I have a cup of coffee when I come in here and one of those biscotti things.”

She looked at him. He was wiry, flat-stomached; there was no spare flesh. Eddie was good-looking, she thought, in a very boyish way, with his close-cropped light brown hair and the freckles that dotted his cheeks. He could have been a Scottish version of a boy from a Norman Rockwell poster, Isabel thought; one of those boys who delivered newspapers from his bicycle or dispensed sodas in the drugstore, open-faced Midwestern boys who belonged to an altogether more innocent era. There was an innocence about Eddie—a sense of being slightly surprised by the world. And the world had surprised him, she remembered—surprised him badly.

“You should eat breakfast, Eddie,” she found herself saying. “You need it.”

The young man shrugged. “I'm not hungry in the mornings.”

Isabel looked at him again. If he lost a few more pounds he would begin to look anorexic. But did young men suffer from anorexia, as young women did? She vaguely remembered reading somewhere that they did, although much less frequently. Perhaps that was changing as boys became more like young girls.

It proved to be a busy morning, and when Isabel next looked at her watch it was almost one thirty. Things slackened off slightly then, and they each took a quick lunch break. Then, in the early afternoon, a dishevelled man came in and stood in front of the counter, staring at the cheese. Eddie asked him if he could help him, but was brushed away. He looked to Isabel for assistance.

As Isabel approached the man he raised his eyes and met her gaze. “I want some cheese,” he said. “I want some cheese.”

Isabel smiled encouragingly.

“What sort?”

“That one,” he said, pointing to a large piece of Gorgonzola.

Isabel peeled on a plastic glove and reached down to extract the Gorgonzola.

“I haven't got any money,” said the man.

She paused. Her hand was just above the cheese. Eddie, standing behind her, nudged her gently.

She hesitated. The man had a cadaverous, hungry look about him, but it was not her job to feed him. This is a delicatessen, she thought; it is not a soup kitchen. But then, on impulse, she lowered her hand, took hold of the cheese, and lifted it out of the cabinet.

Eddie watched her as she began to wrap the cheese in grease-proof paper. He was glowering at her. “Cat wouldn't…,” he whispered. “Cat…”

“Don't worry,” Isabel replied. “I'll pay for it.”

“Don't bother to wrap it,” the man said suddenly. “I want to start it now.”

She let the wrapping paper fall away. She had noticed that the man had the lilting accent of the Western Islands.

“Where are you from?” she said, as she handed the cheese over the counter.

“Skye,” he said. And then added, “A long time ago.”

She smiled at him as he took the cheese, and watched as it stuck to his fingers, which were stained and dirty. He licked at his fingers, and then took a bite out of the cheese. She watched him, and thought of the place from which he had come, a place of mountains and green pastures, of a green sea coming in from the Atlantic, the edge of Scotland, the outer limits of a world. What had brought him here, from that place—a failed croft, a mothballed fishing boat, enlistment in the army? And now this penury and hunger in a prosperous city that had no place for him.