Alexander Mccall Smith - Isabel Dalhousie 06 (14 page)

Jamie smiled, and filed the information away in his memory. One of his pupils, a particularly grubby small boy, might like to hear that. Now, though, he wanted to get back to the discussion of Cat’s tightrope walker, and Isabel was leading them into something quite different—as she often did. “But what’s the liar paradox got to do with Cat’s tightrope walker?”

“Nothing to do with him,” said Isabel. “But everything to do with her. I said that the one predictable thing about Cat is that she is unpredictable. But if that statement is true, then what I said about her unpredictability is untrue.”

“Oh.”

Isabel took Jamie’s arm. “You don’t have to bury yourself in philosophy. I can do enough philosophy for both of us.”

“And I can play enough music for two,” he said.

“Exactly.”

They walked on in silence, content with one another, each aware that this moment, like a number of others that they had experienced since the engagement, had a noumenal feel to it: there was a mystery to it, a sense of the sacred. For his part, Jamie felt that he was looking at the world differently, that quotidian and unexceptional surroundings now seemed charged with an excitement and a feeling of possibility.
Through lover’s eyes:
that was how he was seeing the world again, and that would be the first line of a song that he felt was already coming to him, right there in Merchiston Crescent, halfway home.

No. That was not going to work. He muttered the words again, with Isabel listening; she loved these impromptu songs Jamie seemed to be able to summon up from somewhere within him, so effortlessly.

“That’s beautiful,” she said. “And the tune?”

He hummed it first, without its words, and then sang it,
softly, as they turned the corner into their road. Further down the pavement, a woman they both knew slightly, a neighbour from a few streets away, was walking her dog, a brindle greyhound. The dog looked up sharply, sniffing at the air, and Isabel knew at once that with its sharp hearing it had picked up Jamie’s song.

Jamie stopped. “I need to work on it a bit,” he said. “The trouble about writing songs is this: Who’s going to sing them?”

“You and I,” said Isabel. “And little Charlie when he’s a bit bigger. He’ll love that song about olives.”

“He’ll have forgotten about olives by then. He’ll want songs about trains and bears and so on,” said Jamie.

“You can write those too.”

Jamie smiled. “He likes music. I sang him ‘Dance to your Daddy’ the other night, and he cooed with pleasure. I need to sing him ‘The Train to Glasgow’ some day, if I can find the words. All about a fortunate boy getting the train to Glasgow.”

“Children like simple tales,” said Isabel.

“And we don’t?”

Isabel thought about this. It was just too easy to say that adults did not like stories that were simple, and perhaps that was wrong. Perhaps that was what adults really wanted, searched for and rarely found: a simple story in which good triumphs against cynicism and despair. That was what she wanted, but she was aware of the fact that one did not publicise the fact too widely, certainly not in sophisticated circles. Such circles wanted complexity, dysfunction and irony: there was no room for joy, celebration or pathos. But where was the
fun
in that?

She answered his question. “We probably do. We want resolution and an ending that shows us that the world is a just
place. We’ve always wanted that. We want human flourishing, as Philippa Foot would put it.”

“One of your philosophers?”

“Yes, Professor Philippa Foot. She wrote a book called
Natural Goodness.
I would offer to show it to you had I not just agreed not to burden you with philosophy.”

“I like the sound of her,” said Jamie. “Professor Foot. Is she naturally good?”

“I think she is,” said Isabel. “Though usually people who are naturally good have to work at it. The goodness may be there, but they have to cultivate it, work to bring it out.” She paused. “She’s the granddaughter of an American president, Grover Cleveland. One does not necessarily expect an Oxford philosopher to be the granddaughter of anybody like that.”

Jamie was lost in thought. “If you’re not naturally good—let’s say that your inclinations are, in fact, distinctly on the bad side, then can you become naturally good? Or will it just be superficial?”

They were almost at the gate. “I think you can,” said Isabel. “Change your nature, that is. I suppose it depends on what sort of faults you’re talking about.”

“What if you only have one?” asked Jamie.

“That would be a rather short list,” said Isabel. “Have you only got one fault? Most of us have rather more.” She frowned. “I have, for example …”

Jamie cut her off. “None.”

“Oh, I do.” She wondered whether he truly thought that.

Jamie pushed the gate open. “Is this really the sort of thing you spend your time thinking about?” He smiled at her as he ushered her through.

“I am a moral philosopher,” said Isabel.

Jamie was still thinking about faults. “What are the really difficult ones?”

“Addictions,” said Isabel. “Faults that aren’t necessarily people’s fault.”

Jamie stopped. “Drinking too much? Alcoholism?”

“Yes,” said Isabel. “I don’t think that people choose to be alcoholics, or heroin addicts for that matter. And if they don’t choose, then how can it be their fault?” We are responsible, she explained, only for those things that we choose; everything else
happened
to us—we did not do it.

Jamie objected. “Maybe they should have shown more self-control to begin with?”

“But if they don’t
have
that capacity for self-control?” Isabel said. “If they’re weak? You don’t choose your character, you know.”

“Don’t you?”

They resumed their walk down the path. Jamie reached for his key. “What if you know that you have to practise certain things? As musicians have to? We aren’t born being able to play the piano.”

“That’s precisely what I’m saying: in order to become better people, we must practise,” Isabel said. Jamie had a nose for philosophy, she thought, but she was not sure that this was what she wanted. The best sort of relationship, she thought, was where each person had a private area, a place of mental retreat. She did not necessarily want to talk to him about these things; he did not belong here. He lived in a world of music, and beauty, to which she was readily admitted but in which she did not really have a right of abode. We live where we belong, she thought; that is where we really live. But although she understood
this, she did not think she could spell this out to him, as it would sound condescending, which it certainly was not, or unfriendly, which it even more certainly was not. There was a time when men had said to women,
Don’t you worry your pretty little head about that;
what outrageous, patronising condescension. And women, or so many of them, had suffered it meekly, because they had been trapped.

They heard a squeak from within. Grace must have returned early from the walk by the canal and had now brought her charge into the hall. Held up by Grace, Charlie was able to look at them through the letter box while Jamie fumbled with his keys. Isabel bent down and stared into the bright eyes that watched her, jubilant at her return, brimming with delight. Dogs, she had read somewhere, think each time their owners leave the house that they have lost them for ever. Did small children think the same, she wondered; for if they did, each parting must seem like the beginning of a lifetime apart, each return a reunion with those one thought one would never see again. Or was it exactly the opposite with children? Did they think that we were always there, that we would never go away, and that our occasional absences were no more than a temporary interruption of our attention, as in a hotel when room service is for some reason suspended?

THERE WERE TWO TELEPHONE CALLS
before Cat came round with Bruno, both of them important, but only one of them welcomed. The one that Isabel was pleased to receive was from Guy Peploe, who telephoned her shortly after lunch with the simple message, “We got it.”

Isabel, whose mind had been on her editing, asked what they had got.

“Charles Edward Stuart.”

She remembered that this was the day of the auction in London. “Oh. Well, that’s very good news.”

“It is. And there’s something else.”

“Oh yes?”

“We got it cheaply. One other person in the room was after it. And another phone bidder, apart from us.” He paused. “But that’s not what makes me feel rather excited.”

Isabel reached across her desk to the catalogue. The relevant page had been turned down at the corner and she went straight to it. Charles Edward Stuart, Bonnie Prince Charlie, last real hope of the Stuart dynasty, looked out at her from a feigned oval. A very weak face, she thought; pretty, but weak. How could those tough Highlanders have fallen for such a foppish-looking pretender?

Isabel asked whether there was anything special about the painting.

“Have you seen that Nicholson book?” asked Guy. “The one on the iconography of Bonnie Prince Charlie?”

Isabel knew the book. There was a copy somewhere in her library.

“Go and take a look at the engraving of the Toqué portrait of Charlie,” said Guy. “The one that was lost.”

Isabel was puzzled. “The engraving was lost?”

“No, the original painting. It was engraved by somebody before the painting was lost. So the only way we know what it looked like is through that engraving.”

“Oh.”

“Yes. Take a look at it. Then tell me what you think.”

“Now? It’ll take some time to find Nicholson.” She looked at her shelves, her overstocked bookshelves. She imagined Nicholson himself lost in the piles and confusion of books. She imagined calling him,
Professor Nicholson! Professor Nicholson!
And a faint answering cry coming from somewhere in the midst of all those books.

“Not now,” said Guy. “Some time soon, though. Take a look. He has a picture of the engraving in his book.”

“And?”

“And it’s identical to our painting,” said Guy. “The one we’ve just bought.”

Isabel took a moment to digest this. She was not sure about the implications; she had bought the portrait with a view to putting it in a spare bedroom where her mother’s picture of Mary Queen of Scots had always hung. She had known that portrait all her life, and she knew that it was a special favourite of her mother, her sainted American mother. She was not sainted—not in the conventional sense; indeed Isabel had discovered that her mother had conducted an affair, but that did not change her view of her. Her mother had represented love, as most mothers do to most people; not that this love was always helpful. Boys, she knew, could be smothered by it, could feel that they had to escape, but she had never felt that. She wondered about Jamie’s mother, whom he rarely mentioned. His parents had separated and his father had moved to Spain. His mother had remarried, to a surgeon, when Jamie was at music college, and they had gone off to live in London.

Jamie had said that they wanted to come and meet Charlie,
but they never had, which had secretly appalled Isabel. And hurt her too: she had decided that they must disapprove of her—why else would they not come and meet their only grandchild? Well, she would not force it, if that was how they felt. They might meet Charlie at the wedding—if there was a wedding in the formal sense. She realised that not only had they not talked about that, she had not even
thought
about it. She would like something quiet and understated, and she imagined that Jamie would too: a ceremony in St. Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral, perhaps, with a full choir and her friend Peter Backhouse on the organ playing Parry’s “I Was Glad.” She smiled. On the other hand, there was always the Register Office in Victoria Street, which presumably had no arrangements for music, not even a tape recorder. She imagined that the Register Office would be fairly similar to Warriston Crematorium, both being functional places run for the convenience of citizens by well-meaning bureaucrats; both with no time for too much fuss; both dedicated, in the final analysis, to changing the status of those whom they served. Surely Jamie would not like that.

Guy’s voice came down the line: “Are you still there, Isabel?”

“Yes. I was just thinking.”

“About Toqué?”

She looked up at the ceiling. “And other things.”

The conversation wound to a close. Guy would make further enquiries. In the meantime, Isabel should not raise her hopes too much, as there were always disappointments in the art world—so many pictures were not what their owners wanted them to be, and this might be no exception. “I think it’s likely to be exactly what it says in the catalogue. Dupra’s circle, not Toqué. But I’ll have a closer look, just in case.”

She wondered how important one had to be before one was given a circle. She had no circle, she thought: just Jamie and Charlie and Grace … and Brother Fox, of course. Or she was in his circle:
Circle of Brother Fox, Scottish, early twenty-first century.

“I am naturally cautious,” Isabel said, before Guy hung up. But even as she said this, she wondered whether it was true. And if it was, was it something to be pleased about, or something to regret? Was natural caution found in people who did something with their lives, or was it a quality of those whose lives ran narrowly and correctly to the grave? The question depressed her. She did not want to be naturally cautious, she decided; she wanted to throw caution to the winds and … and what?

Grace appeared at the door of her study, a duster in hand. This was unusual: Grace did not like dusting, and only rarely did so. “We’re almost out of dishwasher detergent,” she said. “I’m worried that we’ll run out. Could you get some more?”