Alexander Mccall Smith - Isabel Dalhousie 06 (15 page)

Isabel looked up. “Let’s just risk it,” she said. If one was going to throw caution to the winds, one had to start somewhere.

Grace looked at her in astonishment. “Risk it?”

Isabel shrugged. “I thought that perhaps …” She did not finish her sentence. “No, what I meant was, yes, I’ll get some more. One would not want to risk anything.”

“Of course,” said Grace. She gave Isabel a curious sideways look and left the room. That, thought Isabel, is the trouble: I live a life in which caution simply cannot be thrown to the winds; the winds in Edinburgh would throw it right back in one’s face. It was just that sort of place, and that is what its winds were like.

THE SECOND TELEPHONE CALL
,
the less welcome one, came an hour or so after Guy Peploe’s. This was from Minty Auchterlonie, or rather from her assistant, who asked, in rather cold tones, whether Isabel was available to take a call from her employer. Isabel said that she was, and there followed a brief pause before Minty came on the line. There were voices in the background during this pause, and she heard a man saying, “Due diligence? Have they done it yet?” The expression intrigued her—due diligence sounded rather like natural caution; perhaps it was the same thing. And she imagined one could not throw due diligence to the winds either.

Minty sounded anxious. “I’m sorry to bother you,” she said. “But I really needed to speak to you. Can we talk freely?”

Isabel said they could. What listening ears did Minty imagine? Unsympathetic, hostile people, crowded about Isabel’s desk eager to hear something compromising, some scandalous morsel?

“Good,” said Minty. “I’m afraid that I’ve had another call from Jock, Roderick’s father. He wants me to bring Roderick to see him tomorrow. He insists. He says that he wants me to come to the Botanical Gardens.”

“Why? Why there?”

“God knows. He likes to see him in places where he can play with him, I think.”

Isabel waited for her to continue.

“And I can’t,” said Minty. “We’re going over to Skye for a few days. We’re taking some American clients of Gordon’s to Kinloch Lodge. It’s important. What would I say to Gordon? That I can’t go? That I have to meet my … my former lover?”

“Awkward,” said Isabel.

“More than awkward. Distinctly more than.”

Isabel cleared her throat. “I don’t really know what to suggest.” She thought: this is what happens when one has affairs. This is what happens.

“And I just don’t trust Jock,” Minty said.

Isabel tried to sound politely interested. “Oh?”

“He could so easily become a loose cannon,” Minty continued. “I’m terrified that he’ll phone the house.”

Isabel shrugged. “I suppose that’s always a danger.”

“And if he spoke to Gordon, then … well, he might say something.”

Isabel made a noncommittal remark. What she wanted to say was that this was a risk of having a clandestine affair—the best-known and most obvious risk.

Suddenly Minty became businesslike. “Can you go?”

“Me?”

“Yes. I don’t like to ask you, but I’m at my wits’ end. Please go and talk to him. Tell him that I just can’t do this. Offer him money.”

Isabel drew in her breath. Danegeld—the money that the Anglo-Saxons, and others, paid the Vikings to stay away. But the problem with Danegeld was that the Danes came back for more.

Minty continued. “Fifty thousand pounds. Tell him that if he drops all claims to Roderick I’ll give him fifty thousand pounds. Sixty. Go up to sixty.”

“No, I’m sorry. I really don’t think—”

Minty cut Isabel short. “Just this one thing. That’s all I ask. Just go and meet him. Keep him from doing anything stupid.”

For a moment Isabel said nothing. She had her reservations
when it came to Minty Auchterlonie, but there was no doubting the anguish behind her words; the voice on the other end of the line, she thought, was that of a trapped woman. And with that assessment, Isabel realised that she could not turn Minty down. This was a cry for help, and one could not—and certainly
she
could not—leave such a cry unanswered.

“I’ll go,” she said. “But I don’t know what I’ll be able to do. Surely it’s better for you to try to speak to this man. Reason with him. Reach some sort of compromise.”

“I can’t,” said Minty. “I’m scared of him. I’m scared of what he’ll do.”

Isabel wanted to say that she did not think of Minty as being a type to be scared, but she could not.

“I just can’t face him,” Minty went on. “Do you think I’m a coward?”

Isabel said that she did not. “You’re in a very difficult position,” she said.

“I can’t face him,” Minty repeated. “I’m afraid of what I might do. I want to kill him. I really do.”

Isabel tried to calm her down. “You feel angry, that’s all. And a bit frightened. Understandably.”

“Angry.”

“Well, I understand,” said Isabel. “But this offer of payment—I don’t think that we should mention money just yet. I think that I should see whether I can reason with him first. I want to talk to him about what he’s been doing. This campaign against you. People can sometimes be shamed into stopping what they’re doing if you confront them. Shame is a powerful thing, you know.”

The silence at the other end of the line made Isabel wonder
whether Minty really understood about shame. But of course she did; Isabel had been wrong about her. Minty was quite normal; she was not a psychopath, as Isabel had once thought her to be, and that meant that she would have a normal understanding of shame, and guilt, and all the other emotions and feelings forming the emotional backdrop to our lives.

“You go over to Skye,” said Isabel. “And I’ll go to the Botanical Gardens.”

As she said this, Isabel suddenly realised that Minty was sobbing. “You’re really kind,” the other woman said. “I can’t believe that you’re doing this for me. We hardly know one another, and yet you’re doing this for me.”

“I’m very happy to do it,” said Isabel. She said so, but she was not happy to do it; she was not. She resented Minty, who had intuitively understood that Isabel would help her even though she had no right to make this claim on Isabel’s time and charity. But although she resented her, Isabel knew—and Minty knew too—that she would have no alternative but to act. If she had never studied philosophy and never wrestled with issues of our moral obligation to others, she would not have had to act at all. But she
had
done, and she could not unlearn everything she had acquired in Cambridge and Georgetown; nor could she forget that she was a citizen of Edinburgh, of the city of David Hume. I am obliged to act, she thought; by geographical propinquity, and by the mere fact of being human, I am obliged to act.

They discussed the details. Minty told Isabel a little more about Jock, where she should meet him and how she would recognise him. Then came the note of caution. “It would be best not to phone me,” said Minty. “Gordon might wonder.”

Isabel assented, but reluctantly. She did not like subterfuge
in any form, and she felt uncomfortable about contacting Minty as if they were fellow conspirators. She was not in collusion with Minty Auchterlonie; she was helping her, out of charity, that was all. Sometimes, she thought, the barricades in this life are in the wrong place; but they are still barricades, and they have to be womanned.

I
SABEL HAD DECIDED
that the last thing one should do when one met a funambulist was to ask about tightrope walking. This exercise of tact was not particular to tightrope walkers; there were numerous situations, many of them much more mundane, in which one refrained from talking to people about what they did. One did not ask judges about how they felt when they sent people to prison; one did not enquire of airline pilots whether they had ever had a near miss; and one did not ask overweight chefs whether they found it difficult to keep from sampling their creations. In all of these examples such questions would stray into sensitive territory, and it was the same with tightrope walkers, who must feel, Isabel thought, the inherent absurdity of their profession.

“He may be proud of it, of course,” Jamie pointed out. “It may be exactly what he wants to talk about.”

Isabel suspected that even if Bruno were proud of being a tightrope walker, Cat would be cagey about it. “He’s in the theatre,” her niece had said opaquely, which gave the game away, in Isabel’s view.

“Let’s just not mention it,” she said to Jamie. “If he mentions it himself, then we can ask. Otherwise, let’s not say anything about it.” She paused. “Of course, there’s nothing wrong in being a tightrope walker. We need them.”

Jamie looked at her in amazement. “Do we?”

Isabel shrugged. “Perhaps not. But what I’m saying is that we must respect the dignity of all labour.”

Jamie shook his head. “But is it labour?”

“Oh, I don’t know. But let’s not raise it, anyway. Just don’t mention it unless she does.”

Jamie agreed, although reluctantly. “But I’m really interested,” he said. “I’d like to know how he trained for the job. I’d like to know what was the highest rope he’s ever walked on. Do you think he’s one of these people who walks across the Niagara Falls?”

“Nobody walks across the Niagara Falls any more,” said Isabel. “Waterfalls are very tightly regulated these days.”

Jamie burst out laughing. “That sounds very funny.”

“Or sad,” said Isabel, becoming thoughtful. She remembered reading about the visit of Pius XII to the Niagara Falls when he was a papal envoy to the United States. He had been taken to Niagara and had gazed out over the river. Then, presumably feeling that something was expected of him, he had proceeded to
bless the falls.
That had tickled her. What was the point of blessing a natural feature? Did he expect that the falls would behave better if blessed? Or would they just bring more pleasure to visitors if they had the benign disposition of blessed falls rather than unblessed falls? The irreverent thoughts gave way to more sober reflection. We all wished for places to be made special somehow; people had holy rivers, after all: the
Ganges, the Brahmaputra. And Isabel was sure that there were others, even if she could not name them.
Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.
Auden again—he came back to her, at these odd moments; she could not help it.

When Cat rang the bell, Isabel was with Charlie in the sitting room, reading to him from a battered copy of
Now We Are Six.
A poem about the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace might not have been the most intellectual of fare, but for Charlie, not yet two, it was as metaphysically challenging as the most obscure lines of John Donne or Andrew Marvell. But whereas Donne and Marvell did not go
tiddly-om-pom-pom
in metrical terms, Milne did, and that was what Charlie liked. So it did not matter that Charlie had no idea why one of the sergeants should look after the guards’ socks or why Alice was about to marry one of the guards. Nor did it matter when Isabel read
Hiawatha
to him that he had no inkling as to what a wigwam or the shining Big-Sea-Water was; what counted was Longfellow’s use of metre, a monstrously repetitive business, which Charlie loved, and which could be counted upon to send him into a state of somnolence after fifty lines. Noticing this, Isabel had toyed with the idea of suggesting to some far-sighted publishers that they publish a book specifically targeted at insomniacs. This volume would not offer advice on how to tackle sleeplessness (there were far too many people advising us about
everything
, she thought); it would simply contain passages the reading of which could be relied upon to send the insomniac reader to sleep.
Hiawatha
would be there, but so would, for quite different reasons, excerpts from Caesar’s
De Bello Gallico
, and from one or two modern political memoirs.

Isabel put down the Milne and announced to Charlie that
she would have to leave him for a moment to answer the door. She laid him down gently in his playpen, and then said, “Your cousin’s at the door, Charlie.”

Charlie looked up at her expectantly. “Olive,” he muttered.

“Not now,” said Isabel. “But well done.”

She went through to the front hall and opened the door. Cat was there, and immediately behind her was a man whom Isabel took to be Bruno. The evening sun, slanting in from the west, was in Cat’s hair, creating a halo effect.

Isabel stepped forward and gave the younger woman a light kiss. “And this, I assume, is Bruno.”

“Yes,” said Cat, moving aside to let Isabel reach out to shake hands with her new fiancé.

Bruno inclined his head. His expression was one of bemusement shading into condescension. It was the look of somebody who would rather be somewhere else but was there anyway and was prepared to be tolerant.

When he spoke, Bruno did so with a curiously high-pitched voice. “Pleased to meet you.”

It was entirely involuntary, but Isabel felt the muscles about her mouth tighten. She knew she should not feel that way, but she did. She did not like the tone in which Bruno said
Pleased to meet you.
There was a jauntiness to it, almost an irony, as if he were saying that he was pleased but was not, or was indifferent. He is here on sufferance, she thought; he has come here only because Cat has insisted. She disliked that intensely. It was like one of those occasions at a cocktail party when you find yourself conversing with somebody who is looking over your shoulder to see if there is anybody more important to engage in conversation.