The Charming Quirks of Others (17 page)

She thought about this as she crossed the road and made her way up Albert Terrace, on the brow of the hill that fell away sharply to the south, down into deep Morningside, with the Pentlands beyond, veiled now in a drifting mist that had not yet quite reached Edinburgh itself. It was a terrace of well-set Victorian houses, on the roof of which, at either end, a large stone heron was perched. She and Jamie used to walk that way when they took Charlie to the supermarket, and she used to point out the herons to Charlie, who looked up but saw only clouds, she suspected … She stopped. She felt too raw to think about that.
Used to;
what if that became the tenor of all her memories of Jamie, as it must do to all who have been deserted by somebody?
Used to
. I used to be happy, she thought. I used to have a lover who was mine and mine alone. I used to think that … Unbidden, the line of Auden returned to her. It was from “Funeral Blues,” that poem of his that had become so well known after being declaimed in a popular film:
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong
.

G
RACE MET HER
at the front door. “He’s fast asleep,” she said, nodding in the direction of upstairs. “Exhausted. Out for the count.” She rolled her eyes heavenwards. “I wish I could sleep like that. The benefits of a clear conscience, perhaps.”

“Or no conscience,” said Isabel.

Grace, who had started to go back into the kitchen, stopped sharply and turned round to face Isabel. “Why do you say that?”

Isabel did not feel like engaging in a discussion; she felt weary and defeated. But she had to explain herself, and so she told Grace that in her view Charlie did not yet understand right and wrong, and that she very much doubted whether he would be plagued by conscience, were he to do something wrong. “Or not just yet,” she added. “A child that small doesn’t really understand the feelings of others. Charlie can’t see the world from our point of view.”

Grace listened with what seemed to be growing impatience as Isabel trailed off with a half-hearted reference to the Swiss psychologist Piaget and his theories of moral development in children.

“Charlie understands more than you think,” she said grimly.

Isabel shrugged. “It’s not really about understanding things. It’s about empathy.”

Grace was not to be put off. “I’ll give you an example,” she said. “When I took him to see the ducks at Blackford Pond once, there was a horrible little boy there. He was five or so; bigger than Charlie. A horrible,
vulgar
little boy. And he picked up a rock and threw it at one of the ducks. Do you know what Charlie did?”

Isabel noted the use of the word
vulgar
. Grace could get away with saying such things; she could not. She shook her head. “What did he do?”

“He screamed with rage and then …” Grace paused. “And then he shouted
Mine, mine!”

“Well …,” Isabel began.

“So he was cross because that other boy had done something to
his
duck. Charlie knew it was wrong, you see, and he protested.”

Isabel was lost in thought. She thought of Jamie, and then she dragged herself back to where she was: standing in the hall discussing ducks and conscience with Grace.

“I’m not sure if he knew that it was wrong,” she said. “Charlie shouts
Mine!
when other children touch his toys. I think he was cross because the other child was doing what he would have liked to do, had it occurred to him.” She looked at Grace half apologetically, aware of how disloyal it must sound to be attributing to her own son so base a motive. “I’m afraid that Charlie would love to throw a stone at a duck.”

There was an audible intake of breath from Grace. “No. You’re wrong.”

Isabel shrugged. “I don’t think we need to get ourselves all het up over it. All I’m saying is that very small children don’t really know what’s right or wrong. He’ll learn, but not just yet.”

Grace moved off towards the kitchen. “And by the way, ducks do eat fish. I looked it up on the Internet. It said that the diet of ducks includes weed
and
fish.”

JAMIE RETURNED
to the house shortly after one, carrying his bassoon case. Isabel was in her study when she heard the front door open, and the sound made her heart lurch. She rose to her feet, and then sat down again. She had tried to work since she had returned from her visit to Peter and Susie, but she realised that she had done very little other than read through a few pages of the proofs of the new issue of the
Review
. She kept losing her place as her mind wandered, and had read and re-read the same bit of text several times. It was not an interesting article, she decided, and she wondered why she had accepted it for publication. “Citizenship and the Duty to Vote”: Should criminal law be used to ensure that everybody who could vote did in fact do so? It was a potentially interesting subject, but the author, she felt, rendered it ineffably dull:
Rights, as the classic Hohfeldian analysis of jurisprudence reminds us, exist in a close relationship with corresponding duties, one of which is to do that which gives the right its basis …
She had checked up the spelling of Hohfeld; did it have a second
h?
And did the author need quite so large a footnote—twelve lines—to explain who Hohfeld was when his relevance to the main thrust of the paper was so tangential? And what exactly was the main thrust of the paper, anyway? That you should vote and could be obliged to do so? But
was that not intolerant of those who might not like the choice available at a particular election? Should the ballot paper provide
None of the Above
as an option for the reluctant voter?

She pushed the proofs to one side and waited. She could hear Jamie outside in the hall, and then the door of her study opened and he came in. She held her breath. She suddenly felt that she hated him; she hated this man coming into her study. It was so easy, so very easy.

He smiled at her. “Busy?”

How dare you smile? she thought.
How dare you?
She looked away.

“Isabel?” He sounded anxious.

“Yes.”

He immediately picked up the coldness of her tone. “Is something wrong?”

She opened her mouth intending to say that nothing was wrong, but that was not what came out. Instead, she said, “Did you enjoy that film?”

He looked puzzled. “What film?”

“That Italian film.” Her voice faltered.

The effect was immediate, and dramatic. “Oh God …” He moved quickly towards her, and then stopped. He had been carrying an envelope that he had picked up off the hall table, and now he dropped it. He did not bend down to pick it up. He said, “Oh God …”

He was now standing close to her. He reached out, but she avoided his touch.

“Eddie told you,” he said simply.

She looked up at him. It was true; there was no innocent explanation. If there had been one, he would not look like this:
drained, guilty.
The onset of conscience
, she thought.
Throwing a stone at a duck
.

“I didn’t want you to know,” he admitted.

She turned on him angrily. “Evidently not.”

“Because I felt so awkward about the whole thing.”

Awkward? She shook her head in disbelief. “As one might,” she said. And then, almost under her breath, but audible none the less, she continued: “I hate you, you know.” The words were flat, were ugly, and she regretted saying them the moment she uttered them; she did not hate Jamie, she loved him, but she hated him too, wanted to harm him, to strike him, push him away from her. She closed her eyes.
This isn’t happening. I don’t know what I’m thinking or doing. Go away
.

Her eyes were still closed, but she felt his hands upon her shoulders. She tensed: it was not a lover’s touch, would never again be such.

“Isabel,” he whispered. “It’s not what you think. It really isn’t. Prue invited me there. The rehearsal finished early and she asked me to go to the cinema with her.” He paused. She heard his breathing; she felt his breath against her cheek. “What could I do? You know about her. She’s the one who’s ill. Dying.”

She opened her eyes. She looked at him; there were the beginnings of tears in his eyes.

“I only went with her because … because I couldn’t say no. She has nobody.”

She reached out and took his hand. Her relief made her feel almost dizzy. “Oh, Jamie …”

“And there’s something more,” said Jamie. “I wanted to talk to you about it, but I didn’t know how to.”

“I’m sorry,” said Isabel. “I thought …” She did not know
how to say what she had thought. How could she tell him that she had not trusted him?

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I don’t blame you for feeling as you did.”

She shook her head. “What’s this other thing?”

He looked away. “It’s very difficult to know how to put it. Prue asked me to go back to her flat with her after the film.”

Isabel was quite still. She felt her hand in his, but she did not press it as she normally would. “And?”

“Well, of course I said no. But I didn’t say to her what I should have said.”

“Which was?”

“That I can’t. She knows about you, but she behaves as if it makes no difference. She’s pretending that you don’t exist.”

Isabel tried to smile. “I do.”

“I don’t want to hurt her. She’s only got a few months to live.”

“Of course you mustn’t hurt her. Of course not.”

She felt a sudden tenderness; a return of tenderness really. He was so kind; he could never hurt anybody, even a persistent girl who needed, however gently, to be told that what she wanted could not be.

Jamie seemed to be preparing to say something more. Was there anything more? Suddenly it occurred to her that he might already have been unfaithful, and that the cinema outing was nothing important; a sequel rather than a prequel to something else. She felt herself tensing again.

“She said something to me,” said Jamie, his voice lowered. “She said that she had never had a proper boyfriend. Then she said that she did not want to die without ever having had a lover.
That’s what she said. The implication was … well, I could hardly misread it.”

Isabel drew in her breath. “Oh …”

“What could I say? So I didn’t say anything. I called her a taxi and came home. But I felt … well, so awful about it.”

Isabel rose to her feet. Now she felt angry. “I don’t know what to say either. What can one say? This is … well, it’s blackmail, moral blackmail—if there’s such a thing. It’s terrible. She’s trying to get you to sleep with her because you feel sorry for her—and who wouldn’t feel sorry for somebody in her position. But it’s an awful thing to do to anybody.”

Jamie nodded his head miserably. “Yes, it is. I should have felt angry with her, but …” He shrugged. “How could I? How can you feel angry with somebody in her position.”

Isabel looked out of the window. What Jamie said was right: you could not be
—should
not be—angry with somebody who was dying; or … or could you? The fact that somebody was suffering from an incurable disease did not give them licence to behave as they wished; that was absurd. And presumably there were people who knew that they were dying who did things for which they could quite properly be censured. One might feel sympathy for them; one might exempt them from punishment; but one could still be angry with them and tell them that their actions were unacceptable.

She turned round to face Jamie again. He was sitting on the edge of her desk now, looking at his hands. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to talk to her.”

He answered bluntly, “What should I say?”

She felt slightly irritated that he had asked this question.
Everybody should know how to let a would-be lover down gently. Did she have to spell it out for him?

“Say that your relationship can be a friendship, but nothing more. Tell her that you’re fond of her, but that’s as far as it can go.”

He nodded. “Yes, you’re right.”

“So when will you do it?”

He looked away. “Sometime. I don’t know.”

“But you will do it?”

He looked hounded. “It’s not going to be easy …”

She felt a growing sense of frustration. “Of course not. But life isn’t necessarily easy, Jamie. It’s messy.” A further possibility occurred to her; not an obvious one, and she barely thought about it before she expressed it. “Unless I do it myself.”

He did not think this a good idea. “You can’t do that,” he protested. “I don’t want her to know that I’ve spoken to you about this. And anyway, why should you do my dirty work for me?”

“Because I’m not sure that you’re going to do it,” Isabel challenged. She did not see why Prue should not know that they had discussed what had happened. Engaged people shared secrets with their fiancés; did Prue not know that? Perhaps not: Jamie had said that she had never had a proper boyfriend, and it could be that she simply did not understand the emotional intimacy of such relationships.

“I suppose I’m just putting it off,” said Jamie.

He was, she thought, but only because he had no desire to hurt. “Kindness is holding you back. You don’t want to hurt her, but I’m afraid she has to be hurt here—even if only a little.” She paused. Perhaps it was not such a bad idea for her to take this matter in hand. “And it might be easier if I were to do it, rather
than you. That way she may still be able to idealise you—she won’t blame you; she won’t think that you’ve turned against her.”