Alexander Mccall Smith - Isabel Dalhousie 06 (10 page)

“It’s a jungle down there,” said Jamie, smiling. “We forget what it’s like to be two.”

“Selvan,” muttered Isabel.

Jamie raised an eyebrow. “Sylvan? As in forests?”

“No,
selvan.
It’s a word that I think should exist in English, but doesn’t quite.
Selva
exists in English—just—for Amazonian forest, from the Spanish word
selva.
So I think we should be able to say
selvan
for forests that are too jungly to be called sylvan.”

Jamie smiled wryly. Isabel occasionally made new words when it suited her, and he found himself adopting at least the more apt of these. The pad under a toe, for instance, was a
gummer
, a neologism she had coined one day when inspecting Charlie’s tiny feet. And the crook of a bassoon, that curious curved pipe that held the reed, she had called a
bahook
, a word which seemed admirably suited to its purpose, even if it had to be used carefully—and never diminutively—in order to avoid confusion with the Scots word
bahookies
, a word that bordered on the vulgar, if it did not actually tip over that border. “Well, it’s certainly
selvan
down amongst the two-year-olds,” he said.

“And up here too, amongst the …” She almost said
forty-year-olds
, but stopped herself, and said, instead, “adults.”

“Meaning?” he asked.

She was about to explain about her conversation with Minty, when Charlie started to cry in the back of the car and Jamie had to turn round to attend to him. So it was not until later, over dinner, that she told him of Minty’s unexpected frankness in the walled garden. Jamie listened attentively, sipping on the glass of New Zealand wine Isabel had poured him.
She was trying the products of new vineyards and had chanced upon one they both liked.

When she finished, Jamie asked her whether she had believed Minty. “I’m not sure about her,” he said. “Even if you believe what she says—and it sounds rather unlikely, I would have thought—you still have to wonder why she’s telling you all this. What’s it got to do with you?”

He asked the question but almost immediately realised that he knew the answer. Isabel was about to interfere in matters that did not concern her. She did it all the time, as a moth will approach the flame, unable to stop herself. She had to help; it was just the way she was.

Isabel sensed what he was thinking. “I didn’t commit myself,” she protested. “But it was a real
cri de coeur.
She was frightened—she really was.”

“But what are you meant to do?” asked Jamie. “Why doesn’t she hire somebody? A close-security guard or whatever they call themselves. She’s got the cash.”

“It was difficult for her to speak about it,” said Isabel. “I don’t think that she would find it easy to open up to a total stranger.”

Jamie sighed. “Isabel, you’re a lovely, helpful person. Everybody knows that, and it means that anybody could take advantage of you. Minty’s as sharp as all get-out—she knows that you’re a soft touch.”

Isabel looked into her glass. “All I said was that I’d look into it. I gave no promises.”

Jamie shrugged. “Well, all that I would say is be careful. Don’t get in too deep. That woman’s dangerous.”

“Come on!” said Isabel. “She’s ambitious and a bit pleased with herself, but she’s not dangerous.”

“Well, her son is,” countered Jamie, and then laughed. “Just don’t get sucked in.”

“If I’m sucked in, I’m sure I’ll be spat out,” said Isabel.

Jamie was not sure what she meant by this, and neither, in fact, was she. So he drained his glass and stood up.

“Let’s go and sing something. Or rather, you accompany me and I’ll sing. What would you like to hear?”

Isabel thought for a moment. “ ‘King Fareweel’?” she asked.

Jamie agreed. She had enquired about the words a couple of days earlier, on Dundas Street, outside the Scottish Gallery. Why was she thinking about Jacobite songs?

“Because I saw a picture of Charles Edward Stuart,” Isabel explained. “The song came into my mind. That’s all.”

She sat down at the piano and played; Jamie sang. And when he got to the lines about Prestonpans, she faltered and stopped, her hands unmoving on the keyboard.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t find this song very easy.” It was too painful to think of those boys deprived of their fathers, and these simple words made her think of how Jamie was so relishing being Charlie’s father. Charlie, her braw laddie, and his daddy.

“All right,” said Jamie. “Let me sit down there.” He gestured to the piano stool, which was wide enough for two. Isabel shifted over, and he sat beside her. He reached forward and played a chord, and then moved to another. “That’s it,” he said.

“That’s what?”

He repeated the chords. “That’s the tune I was going to compose,” he said. “ ‘Olives All Gone.’ Listen.”

He played a simple, rather sad melody; she thought it beautiful.

Isabel listened, solemnly, then burst out laughing, to be joined by Jamie. She kissed him lightly on the cheek, and he kissed her back, not lightly, but with passion.

She said, “Oh,” and he said, “Isabel Dalhousie, please marry me.”

T
HAT SHE SAID YES
,
and then yes, again, changed everything, but also changed nothing. There was no change in her world the next morning when she got out of bed to attend to Charlie; she was still Isabel Dalhousie, mother, with a child to look after and a house and philosophical review to run. She was still responsible for her somewhat unruly garden, with its attendant fox and rhododendron bushes; she was still the owner of a green Swedish car; she was still the aunt of the rather unpredictable and sometimes moody Cat; she remained a patron of Scottish Opera—to whom she reminded herself to send a cheque; all of that was the same. But now she was Jamie’s fiancée it seemed to her that her future—that bit of ourselves in which to a greater or lesser degree we live our lives—had changed utterly. Now the future was no longer a vague, uncharted territory; following Jamie’s proposal on the piano stool after the singing of his new song, “Olives All Gone,” it had acquired a shape.

Of course he had proposed once before. It was a year or so earlier, when they had come out of Lyon & Turnbull’s auction
rooms and made their way to the Portrait Gallery restaurant. He had told her that he wanted to marry her; she had been reluctant and had put him off, not because she had any doubts about him, or his seriousness, but because she was concerned—overly concerned, perhaps—about his freedom. That was when she was more sensitive than she now was about the difference in their ages. But now she barely thought about it.
So what?
people had said. And the liberating effect of those two, sometimes immensely dangerous words, had eventually been felt. So what if Jamie was a bit younger than she was; so what?

She had regretted her refusal and had hoped that he would mention marriage again, but he had not. Subsequently she considered broaching the subject herself, and on one or two occasions had come close to doing so, only to be inhibited by a vague sense of embarrassment. The problem was this: a woman did not ask a man to marry her, at least conventionally. There was no reason for it, of course, other than social custom, and Isabel knew that this was changing. People said that plenty of women were proposing to men—a third of all women, she had read—but prepared as she was to accept this figure, she could not think of anybody she actually knew who had proposed to their husbands. That did not mean that they had not done so, of course; there are some things that a large number of people do but few will admit to.

Entertaining subversive thoughts, for example, in a society in the grip of a political hegemony is not something that people will readily admit to, such is the power of intellectual intimidation; and yet people do have such thoughts. And when it comes to something that reflects on a person’s desirability or popularity, then the tendency to reticence may be particularly marked.
Not everyone would care to admit to finding a spouse through an advertisement—or to be the subject of an advertisement; where is the romance in finding somebody through a lonely hearts column, cheek by jowl with Cars For Sale and Miscellaneous Bargains? Therein lay an admission of personal failure: the glamorous, the attractive, the sought-after, they had no need to advertise, whereas the inadequate and the unwanted did.

This thought crossed her mind—only to be quickly dismissed. It was not like that at all: there were plenty of perfectly eligible people who resorted to the services of an introduction agency or who advertised, and the results were often very successful. And there were plenty of women—there must be—who even if they proposed to a man might just as easily have received proposals themselves. No, the male monopoly of proposals, such as it was, was untenable and should be abandoned. And yet, and yet … the fact of the matter was that she had lacked the courage to propose to Jamie.

It did not matter. She could now say
my fiancé
, and they could exchange rings. She wanted to give him one too and had already seen one she liked in a jeweller’s window in Bruntsfield. It was a discreet band made of rose-coloured gold; a lovely thing which it had never occurred to her she would eventually purchase. And when it came to a ring for her, when Jamie had mentioned it she had suggested something modest; she did not want him to spend too much. Of course, now that they were engaged the whole issue of the disparity in their respective means could disappear. Her possessions would be his by virtue of the marriage, and vice versa, of course; Jamie was about to become well-off.

There were other things to think about that were considerably
less attractive than rings. Prominent amongst these was the question of what, if anything, to say to Cat. Isabel’s niece had grudgingly accepted her aunt’s relationship with Jamie, her former boyfriend, but both of them, by unspoken agreement, kept off the subject when in one another’s company. Now Isabel had to decide whether to mention the engagement to Cat, or whether, in fear of her ire, to say nothing, leaving her to hear of it from somebody else. Eddie could be the messenger, perhaps, or even the personal announcements column of the
Scotsman
could break the news, not the bravest way out, but one that might make it easier for Cat to deal with news that almost certainly would not be welcome.

Even if she was still feeling euphoric—almost light-headed—after the evening’s events, Isabel had several things to do that morning. Jamie had hinted that breakfast in bed would not go amiss—for the second time, she observed, in three days, but she agreed, none the less, to make it for him.

“When we’re married,” she said, “I take it that you won’t expect breakfast in bed every day. Or will you?” She would make him breakfast in bed every day if that was what he wanted; of course she would. She would do anything for him.

“Of course not,” he said. “This will be the very last time. I promise.”

It sounded so strange to utter the words
when we are married.
As a moral philosopher, and arbiter, in that role, of hypothetical private lives, she was used to talking about the marriages of others. Now it was her—Isabel Dalhousie—whose future was being referred to.
Married:
the word had a delicious flavour to it; like the name of some exotic place—Dar-es-Salaam, Timbuktu, Popocatépetl. Marriage was a whole territory,
a citizenship, to be adopted and inhabited, as the neophyte takes on the ways and thinking of a new religion. She had been married before, of course, but it had been something false, something quite different.

When she took the breakfast tray up to Jamie, she found that he had taken Charlie into bed with him and was reading to him, a story of a fox and his family who defeat a trio of unpleasant farmers. The story had been translated into Scots as
The Sleekit Mr. Tod
, and it was this version that Jamie was reading to Charlie. It was well beyond his understanding, of course, but the little boy was listening intently.

“I want him to understand Scots,” said Jamie. “It’s our language, after all.”

Isabel smiled. “Of course. But he probably has to understand English first.”

Jamie looked doubtful, and returned to the story. “A tod is a fox in Scots,” he explained to Charlie. “That’s why he’s called Mr. Tod.”

Charlie stared at his father with grave incomprehension.

Jamie began to read again. “ ‘And so the wee tod askit his faither,
Will there be dugs?
’ ”

Isabel left the room, a smile lingering on her lips.
Will there be dugs?
Will there be dogs? That might be the dread question that every fox thinks when contemplating his end—if foxes are aware of mortality.
Will there be dugs, or will it be easy?