The Charming Quirks of Others (18 page)

It was not his fault. Some people attracted others to them through flirtation, implying availability even when they were not. She had encountered that type before, and they were dangerous. There had been somebody like that in her undergraduate philosophy class, a girl who timed her entrances into the lecture theatre with calculated precision, so that the men were already mostly seated and she could brush past them on her way to her place, smiling coyly, invitingly. And there was another such person she had met in Cambridge, a good-looking young man from Yorkshire, avowedly heterosexual, who had nevertheless picked up at his expensive boys’ boarding school the habit of fluttering his eyelids at other males without understanding the confusion that this could cause. These people asked for a particular sort of attention—and got it. Jamie, with his matinée-idol looks, turned eyes—and heads—but did not contrive to do that and never encouraged it. No, it was not his fault that this unfortunate girl had been drawn to him, moth-like; and while a flirt who got what he asked for might reasonably be expected to dig himself out of a self-created hole, that did not apply to an innocent victim like Jamie.

She seemed to be convincing herself, even if Jamie’s expression betrayed his continued doubts. If she spoke to Prue—gently, of course—she could make it quite clear to her that Jamie was unavailable. Not only that; she could go further and tell her that she, Isabel, had asked Jamie not to see her, other than in a professional context. Isabel would come across as the ogress, the possessive woman, and the poor girl could continue to harbour whatever romantic notions she liked of Jamie, keeping
him unsullied. And that, thought Isabel, was surely kinder. Prue would spend her last days in the knowledge that there had been somebody, and he had been fond of her, but another woman prevented him from showing just how fond he was. It was an easier version of the truth; a better conclusion to a life.

They left it unresolved between them, although in Isabel’s mind, at least, it was clear that she would save Jamie the discomfort of a showdown with Prue. What was an awkward half hour or so tactfully explaining to a much younger woman the boundaries over which she should not cross? Nothing; and she would do it soon.

But first she had to make it up to Jamie. She had said that she had hated him, and while it did not seem to her that he was taking her words seriously, they had to be withdrawn.

She put her arms about him. “I didn’t mean what I said.” She kissed him. “I wasn’t thinking.”

He smiled at her, touching her cheek gently. He had a way of doing that, as if he was confirming the reality of something he could not quite believe. It was a flattering gesture, and one that made her weak with pleasure. “I didn’t hear you,” he said. “What did you say?”

She thought quickly. An apology for something forgotten or not heard was not always helpful. “Oh, I said something silly.”

He smiled again. “You? Something silly? I don’t believe that. Anyway, what was it?”

“I was cross with you. It made me …”

“I know you were cross. But I wasn’t listening. You didn’t say that you hated me or anything like that?” He laughed: the very thought.

“You did hear,” said Isabel reproachfully.

Her hands on his shoulders, she felt him stiffen. It was almost imperceptible, but he had reacted.

“I don’t know what I was thinking,” she continued. “I was all over the place, and I feel awful that I could even have thought that you would allow somebody to come between us.”

He was gentle. “Let’s not give it any more attention. It’s over. Remember: we’re going to get married soon. Just think of that.”

She hugged him to her. “I know. I know.” They had not talked about it much since that evening when the decision had been taken. There were dates to discuss. Was one month too short a period for preparations? What exactly had to be prepared if one was going to have a small, virtually private wedding? And there was the next issue of the
Review of Applied Ethics
to consider; or should one not take notice of such things when one was getting ready to be married?

“Misunderstandings occur,” said Jamie.

She moved her hands up to the back of his neck; his skin was so smooth, like a piece of silk. “They do, don’t they?”

“And then they go away. Just like that. And the sun comes out again.”

She smiled at the words. “That sounds very poetic.”

He slipped a hand round the back of her blouse, the inside. “Do you remember that funny little poem you made up about the tattooed man? Remember it?”

She did—even if she had not given it a second thought after the telling of it. Something about a tattooed man who had a tattooed wife and was proud of his child, the tattooed baby; it was
a snippet of nonsense; a haiku-like bit of nothing. It was surprising that he remembered it, she thought, but he sometimes tucked her words away and came up with them later.

“Make up something about the sun coming out again.”

“Do you really want me to?”

He said that he did. “It will show that you forgive me.”

She thought for a moment. Then she whispered to him,
“Gentle as love itself is Scottish rain / Before the healing sun will shine again.”

Jamie said nothing at first, and then asked why the rain was gentle as love.

“It just is,” Isabel said.

They stood together, arms about one another, quite still. She wondered, What do I have to forgive him for? For being too kind? Or for something else?
Undisclosed failings
, she thought; that great weight we all carry around with us, some of us for all our lives, unable to speak about them, unable—involuntary Atlases all—to share the burden.

I
T WAS A RAW FEELING
—that feeling of emptiness, of bruising, that sometimes descends after the witnessing of an act of human cruelty or folly. But even if Isabel felt this way after confronting Jamie, it was not to last: a vacuum in the soul, like an area of low pressure on the weather map, attracts repairing winds: and these came.

They made it up, in the way in which a couple may make it up: tenderness, expressions of concern for the feelings of the other, solicitude, acts of gentle touching. If unforgivable things had been said, then these words seemed soon to be forgotten. Charlie distracted them, of course, and reminded them that they were bound together not just by love and affection but also by the life of this small boy. So Isabel tried to put out of her mind what she had said, even if she could not help but ask herself how she could have said it. And what, she wondered, if Jamie had taken her seriously: Would he have repaid her with the same coin? The tendons of love could snap very easily, and when they did, they frequently failed to heal. Falling out of love, after all, was just that: a fall.

It would not happen again, thought Isabel; she would never again distrust Jamie. And even thinking this made her blush with shame that she could have suspected him of an affair, like some insecure teenager worrying about an errant boyfriend. That would not happen again—ever.

They were both busy: Isabel continued with the final preparations of the next issue of the
Review
and with sending out the piles of books that publishers hoped would be mentioned in the Books Received column. There were reviewers to be contacted, some of whom required something perilously close to flattery, or even cajoling, before they agreed to write the reviews. There were ambitions and enmities to be considered: she had once sent a book out to a reviewer in Australia who had rapidly accepted the commission—too rapidly, perhaps, as she later discovered that the author under review had seduced the reviewer’s wife, a scandal that was well known in Australian philosophical circles; the seduction had taken place at a weekend conference of the Australasian Association of Philosophy, on, as it happened, loyalty—but there was no way in which she could have been aware of that. The reviewer, now spending a lonely retirement in an echoing house in the Blue Mountains, must have fallen upon her request to write a review as one coming upon manna in the desert. “I shall be delighted to do this for you,” he wrote back. “Do not bother to send the book: I have recently purchased the work and will work with my own copy, so I can start immediately. Thank you again.”

She should have been warned by the effusiveness of the response, but she was not. And when the review came in—there was nothing to make her suspicious, except perhaps the final sentence. This read:
The author needs to reflect on what he
has done
. The general tone of the review was highly critical, with reference being made to “egregious errors” and “sloppy scholarship.” But such remarks, although discourteous, were within the range of what might be expected in the cut and thrust of academic debate. A few weeks after publication, though, when the background was pointed out to Isabel, she had read the final sentence, and indeed the entire review, in a very different light. It was an act of revenge.

While Isabel worked on the
Review
, Jamie had a week of rehearsals in Glasgow; he was standing in for a woman bassoonist who had gone off to have twins and would be away for at least six months. It was regular work and he liked the conductor; he was happy. He knew most of the orchestral players already and he enjoyed playing for opera, especially for the Italian repertoire that Scottish Opera was working on. “It always makes me want to cry,” he said. “ 
‘Una furtiva lagrima,’
in fact. Donizetti does that to me. Brings out the furtive tears.”

“But of course music should do that,” she said. “I’m never dry-eyed when I hear ‘
Soave sia il vento.’
I can’t help myself.”

“Mimi’s death did it for me,” said Jamie. “I first saw
Bohème
when I was thirteen. We went to the Theatre Royal in Glasgow, with the school, and her death scene had me in floods. I didn’t want the other boys to see, and so I looked down at the floor, which meant that I really didn’t see much of her actual demise. But I think the others noticed and one of them kicked me on the shin.”

“Boys,” said Isabel. They were always hitting each other, kicking things; that lay ahead with Charlie, who was gentle, like his father, but who would no doubt go through the phase of testing the fragility of the world. Yesterday he had thrown a toy
wooden train at a door and been thrilled by the experience; there would be more to come.

Jamie inclined his head in agreement. “Yes, boys. But then years later I saw
Bohème
done in a modern setting—an artist’s warehouse in New York rather than a garret in Paris. Everything on the stage was very minimalist: acres of white, even minimalist white, if that’s a colour. Mimi was still dying of consumption, though, and it suddenly occurred to me that there was a real problem here. If it was meant to be contemporary New York, then Mimi wouldn’t have died. She would have been given antibiotics …”

Isabel burst out laughing. “I’m not sure that antibiotics help opera,” she said. “They could change so much.”

“And they would have meant so much more Mozart,” mused Jamie, for whom the death of Mozart had been the big tragedy. He had once said to Isabel: “Mozart’s dying so young, Isabel: was that, do you think, a bigger loss for the world than the wiping out of the dinosaurs?” She had been about to say “A silly question, Jamie,” but had realised that it was not so silly at all; in fact it was profound, whichever way one looked at it. Was a refined statement of truth and beauty—some great artistic creation, perhaps—better in its essence than a destructive and brutish life-form? Better for whom? And if the dinosaurs had continued to exist, would we—or Mozart—have come into existence? Perhaps we had progressed enough in our understanding of the world to abandon our claims to being
that
special. If the choice were between dinosaurs and
Homo sapiens
, then did it really matter one way or the other, except to the species involved? Ultimately, of course, if we were the ones passing the judgement, then it was infinitely better that
it was people rather than dinosaurs. But that was a conclusion simply begging for objections because it meant that we could despoil the world at will, as long as we judged what we did to be in our best interests. The dinosaurs had gone: next might be the tigers, if we wanted their forests or if we thought that they might eat a few too many of us; or the whales, if
we
wanted to eat
them
, or make them into watch oil or some other product. No, the moment one began to deny any value other than that conferred by humans, the moral game was up. There could be no morality beyond the limited world of what we did to each other.

But now Jamie continued: “Just think, if Mozart had been given another thirty-five years. Just imagine.”

Isabel wondered whether the composer had said everything he wanted to say by the time he died, as had happened with Auden, who had said less and less in his later years, and much of it rather cantankerous. Perhaps there was a time for an artist to die, or at least to become silent, before he said something that contradicted everything he had said before. She had thought this recently when a distinguished philosopher—a long-professed atheist—began in his final years to write articles that took a different view. Those who had applauded his earlier works were dismayed and put the change of view down to senility. She had mentioned this to Jamie—read it out from a letter published in the newspaper—and he had said, “Yes, but he still believed what he said when he wrote those articles. He may have been losing the place, but he still believed what he said.”