Alexander Mccall Smith - Isabel Dalhousie 06 (18 page)

“I’m sorry even to have raised this,” she said.

He shrugged. “You were an emissary. I’m a lawyer and I know that you have to say unpalatable things when you’re acting for somebody else.”

She was relieved that he did not appear to be angry. But if he was not angry, then what had he been thinking when she made the offer?

“Minty mentioned a figure of fifty thousand pounds,” she continued.

He did not meet her gaze. He was looking at a bee orchid, now in flower: a blaze of gold. So are we all reduced by money, thought Isabel; so are we all corrupted.

I
SABEL HAD TRIED
not to think about Christopher Dove, ignoring him as one studiously avoids looking at an ominous rain-cloud spotted on a country walk. But such acts of self-delusion provide only temporary relief, and she knew that sooner or later she would have to answer his letter and the charge it contained. She was not a prevaricator by nature and she would get round to it, but it seemed at the time that there were just rather too many unpleasant or delicate duties waiting to be performed.

She would have to write to Christopher Dove; she would have to speak to Minty Auchterlonie; she would have to buy Cat an engagement present and make a further effort to like Bruno; she would even have to bring herself to watch
Oil
so that she could tell him that she had seen him on the screen. He would like that, Isabel thought, and it might be a way of building a relationship between them, which she knew she had to do. She had to do so many things, and most of them, it seemed to her, were things that she did not really want to do. That, though, was what life was like for most of us: doing things that we would probably not do if we really had any choice in the matter.

She thought about this as she sat at her desk the following day. Jamie had caught an early train from Haymarket to Glasgow, to play in a recording session—lucrative work that came his way occasionally and that he enjoyed. Grace had taken Charlie for a walk down Morningside Road, where there was household shopping to be done, and that left her with the time to get through the mail that had piled up again on her desk. But no sooner had she started than the telephone rang.

For a moment she toyed with the idea of not answering. It was a delicious feeling, ignoring the phone, a feeling of freedom almost wicked in its intensity. Why, she asked herself, should we be so enslaved by such instruments?

She looked at the telephone on her desk, struggling with the temptation to let it ring itself out. How many rings would that be? If it was Jamie on the line he would let it ring and ring because he would know that she was somewhere in the house. But if it was a stranger it might ring only five or six times before the caller gave up.

After eight rings she reached forward and lifted the receiver.

“Miss Dalhousie?”

The man’s voice was one that she had heard before, but not for some time and she could not place it.

“Lettuce speaking.”

Her hand tightened about the receiver. Of course, that was it; those precise, rather pedantic tones were familiar because it was Professor Lettuce, former chairman of the editorial board of the
Review
, professor of moral philosophy, author of
Living Strenuously
and, most significantly, friend and mentor of Christopher Dove.

“How nice to hear from you, Professor Lettuce.” The words
came out before she could stop them. It was a lie, and she should not have uttered them. It was not nice to hear from Professor Lettuce—it never had been. Lettuce: what a ridiculous name, she thought. Poor Lettuce: his salad days were over. She smiled; a secret joke, even such a weak and childish one, made it so much easier.

“And I am pleased to be talking to you, Miss Dalhousie.”

Are you really?

“I happen to be in Edinburgh, you see,” Lettuce went on.

Isabel tried to sound enthusiastic. “Well, what a pleasant surprise. Shall we meet up?”

She did not want to meet him but felt that she had to say it.

“That would be a great pleasure,” said Lettuce. “I’m giving a paper this afternoon. The philosophy department at the university is running a series of seminars and they very kindly invited me up to say something about my new book on Hutcheson.”

Isabel caught her breath. “Hutcheson?” Realising that she sounded surprised, she corrected herself. “I didn’t know you were working on him. I knew of your interest in Hume, of course.”

Professor Lettuce chuckled. “Yes. It would be more logical, of course, to move on from Hutcheson to Hume. I have done things the wrong way round. But there we are. The point is this: Would you by any chance be free to meet me for lunch? I know it’s no notice at all, but I wondered.”

Isabel looked at her watch. It was almost eleven and she had accomplished virtually nothing that morning. If she went off for lunch now, then she would probably not get back to her desk until well after two, when Charlie would wake up after his afternoon sleep and she would want to spend time with him.
The next issue of the
Review
would have to be ready for the printer in six weeks’ time and that meant …

“I do hope you can make it,” urged Lettuce. “I have something fairly important I’d like to discuss with you.”

Isabel tensed. It would be difficult now to decline Lettuce’s invitation as she knew that he would not talk about anything important on the telephone. He had always been like that when he had chaired the editorial board, alluding to information which he was party to but nobody else knew, or could be admitted to. “He’s talking as if he were the head of Secret Intelligence,” she had once whispered to a colleague at the annual meeting of the
Review
’s board.

“Perhaps we should call him C,” came the reply. “Or M, or whatever it is that these people call themselves.”

“L,” whispered Isabel. L suited Lettuce so well, just as one would have thought that D might have fitted Dove—but did not. Christopher Dove was a perfect name, in Isabel’s view; it had the ring of Trollope to it, every bit as suited to its bearer as was Obadiah Slope. She had always felt that people could grow into their names, just as we brought about self-fulfilling prophecies once we realised they applied to us. Obadiah Slope might have become a schemer because his childhood companions expected him to be one. Professor Lettuce must have gone through his childhood being the butt of mockery from other boys—fortunate boys not named after vegetables—simply because of his unusual name, and perhaps for this reason his character had developed in the way it had. There was always a reason for wickedness, she was convinced—a reason to be found in the classroom or the playground, or even earlier, in the crib, when the mother failed to love, or the father withheld his
approval, or something else dark and unhappy occurred. There was inevitably an explanation for the coldness of the heart that years later could be so damaging in its effect. Let that never happen to Charlie, she thought. Let him never be loved too little … or too much.

“Are you still there?” asked Lettuce, somewhat peevishly.

“Yes, I am. And yes, I’ll be happy to meet you for lunch.”

“Good,” said Lettuce. “Something light, I think, if I’m to do Hutcheson justice this afternoon. A salad perhaps.”

Isabel could not resist the temptation. “That would be very appropriate,” she said.

Lettuce did not notice. “Good,” he said quite evenly, and, once they had agreed where to meet, they brought the call to an end.

The telephone rang again almost immediately. This time it was Jamie, who was on a coffee break halfway through the recording session and wanted to chat. “This conductor is a slave-driver,” he said sotto voce. “We’re being given an eight-minute break. Eight minutes!”

Isabel made sympathetic noises and then told him about the call she had just taken. “You’ll never guess who’s just been on the phone,” she said. “Professor Lettuce. He’s invited me to lunch.”

Jamie laughed. “Perhaps he’s turned over a new leaf.”

Isabel smiled. There was something very reassuring about weak humour; it took the tension out of a situation, made children of us once more. But such humour was only possible when shared with the closest of friends and with those whom one loved; they always knew that you were capable of better.

“Poor Professor Lettuce,” she said.

“Don’t give him a dressing-down,” said Jamie.

“Surely your eight minutes is up by now,” Isabel retorted.

THEY MET
in the Tower Restaurant, a rather expensive place perched on top of the Royal Scottish Museum. Isabel had suggested the venue because she appreciated the view it afforded of the rooftops of the Grassmarket and the Castle beyond. And, as she had once said to Jamie, “When meeting for lunch somebody one’s uncomfortable with, it’s important to have somewhere to
look
, don’t you agree?”

“I agree with almost everything you say.” Jamie paused before adding, “Within reason. And sometimes even with strange remarks like that.”

“But I’m serious,” protested Isabel. “When you sit down with somebody and make eye contact, you’re drawn into each other’s
sphere.
Unless you can think of a better word for it.”

“For
sphere
?”

“Yes. Essence? Soul? Being?”

Jamie thought. “I suppose
sphere
expresses it.”

“So,” Isabel went on, “you need to be able to escape. And that’s why a table with a view is important.”

She looked at Jamie as she said this, and he returned her gaze. She noticed that his eyes, which were hazel, had small flecks of another colour in them: green. His eyes were kind. Somebody—a friend of Isabel’s—had once described Jamie’s eyes as being Scottish. But of course they are, Isabel had said; Jamie’s Scottish, all of him. That’s not what I meant, the friend had responded. I meant that there’s a certain sort of look that you get a lot of in Scotland, in which the eyes are, well, almost
translucent. You look through the eyes and you see something else—you see a whole country, light made thin by Scotland. You know our light, how thin it is; you know our colours.

She looked up from the table. She had been the first to arrive, and now here was Professor Lettuce coming in, standing at the door, looking myopically across the restaurant. She raised a hand to wave but he did not see her; the waiter at Lettuce’s side did, though, and pointed to where Isabel was sitting.

“What a fine choice,” said Lettuce, as he took his seat. “I didn’t know about this place.” He said this almost accusingly, as if he should know about restaurants and Isabel should not.

“Yes, it is rather nice, isn’t it? I like the view. Have you looked at it?”

Lettuce twisted round in his seat and looked out over Chambers Street. “Roofs,” he said.

Isabel did not know what to say to that. She handed him the menu and he adjusted his glasses to read. “My stomach is not what it was,” he said. “I find that I take very little at lunch.”

She thought of the word he used:
take.
Most people
ate;
one had to be terribly grand to
take.

“It’s best not to overeat,” she said. She might have said
overtake
, she mused, but that would have made a very odd statement, more about driving than eating.

“You’re smiling.”

Lettuce was staring at her. She noticed his slightly prissy expression, one that some large men have; an expression of fastidiousness that for some reason seems at odds with their size.

“A passing thought,” she said. “I have a tendency to think about wordplay. Don’t you find yourself drifting off from time to time—some odd little notion?”

He wrinkled his nose. “No. I can’t say I find that at all.”

“Well, maybe it’s a thing that women do.”

Lettuce smiled. “It’s as well that you said that, not me. These days it seems impermissible for men to make general remarks about the minds of women. Not the other way round, of course. You women can say what you like about men.”

Isabel had to admit that this was true, although she did not like hearing it from Professor Lettuce. She had noticed that the constraints on such remarks seemed to apply only to men. Women could say, quite freely, that men could not multi-task, for instance, but men could not say that women could not reverse cars as well as males could. Or if they said that they would inevitably be accused of condescension, or sexism, or some other unforgivable -ism. It was contextual, she realised; it is not just what is said that is judged, it is what was said before. So what men say now is taken in the context of what they used to say—and what they used to do, too, which as often as not was to put women down and make jokes about how women reversed cars. Whereas the words of women, who rarely put men down—except in some Amazonian fantasy—were free of this contextual baggage. So the motives behind a man’s words were now evaluated in the light of what men
used
commonly to think. Yet that, surely, was as wrong as saying that a person with a criminal record is likely to have committed the offence with which he is now charged. There were rules of evidence that were designed to stop exactly that conclusion, in the name of simple justice. So Professor Lettuce was right about this; it
was
unfair, but she was not sure that she wanted to concede the point, to Lettuce at least.