The Charming Quirks of Others (26 page)

She continued: “You have to forgive my sister. She’s not well.”

There was something in the other woman’s manner that reassured Isabel. She started to speak. “I’m shocked … I don’t know …”

“Of course you are. But listen: it’s not true. None of it. It’s all imagined.”

It took a few moments. There were words; now there was meaning, and eventually, slowly, there came relief. Isabel felt herself being plucked from the dark place into which she had fallen. “Not true about Jamie?”

The woman shook her head. “Certainly not. She’s done this before, I’m afraid.”

Isabel winced. “And she’s dying.”

The other woman groaned. “There’s nothing wrong with her—at least nothing physical. It’s a trick she plays. She tells people that she’s at death’s door. It gets sympathy.”

It took Isabel a moment or two to absorb this. Of course. Of course. It was an obvious trick: if you were dying you could get what you wanted. “It’s a sort of blackmail,” said Isabel.

“Exactly. Look, we’re trying to get her to have treatment. I think we’re getting there, but it’s not easy.”

Isabel felt weak with relief. “It never is.”

“You’ve been very understanding,” said the woman. “And I can promise you there’ll be no more of this. She’s going up to Aberdeen. Our parents are there, and they’re taking over. My
father’s a doctor up there. He’s spoken to his psychiatrist friends.”

Isabel felt sympathy for both of them—for Prue and for her sister. There were apologies. The woman told her how embarrassed she was by Prue’s behaviour. Not everybody, she said, was as understanding as Isabel.

They made their goodbyes to one another and Isabel walked out into the street. She felt drained, and would need to get a taxi. She saw one at the end of the road, its yellow light glowing. She waved her arms. The taxi turned, the driver signalling with his headlights that he had seen her.

“You all right?” he asked, as she settled into her seat.

“Entirely all right,” she said.

Edinburgh taxi drivers were not just taxi drivers. They were social workers, psychotherapists and, like Isabel, philosophers. She caught his eye in the mirror.

“You seemed upset,” he said.

“I was,” she admitted. “A few minutes ago I thought my world was in ruins. Now I know it’s not.”

The taxi was making its way up the hill past the end of Ann Street. Down to the right, at the end of a wide road, was the Gothic bulk of Fettes College, another school.

“Well, that’s good,” he said.

“May I ask you something?”

He looked into the mirror again. “Of course.”

“Should we feel ashamed of believing ill of someone we love? When we ought to trust them?”

He thought for a moment before replying. “No,” he said. “That’s natural.”

“You think it is?”

“I know it is.”

She smiled. “I suppose you people see all of life in your cabs—and then some.”

“Aye, we do.”

They were now approaching the Dean Bridge; beyond it, the dizzy terraces perched on the edge of the ravine. Edinburgh was called a precipitous city, and it was.

“So I shouldn’t feel bad about thinking the worst of somebody I love?”

The driver was clear on the point. “Not in the least. As long as you’re ready to admit you’re wrong.”

“I was wrong,” said Isabel.

WHEN SHE RETURNED
, she found Jamie at the piano. She came into the room behind him, quietly, and it was a few moments before he became aware of her presence. He turned round, his hands on the keys, and looked at her. She nodded.

“You spoke to her?”

“Yes.” She crossed the room so that she was standing immediately behind him. She placed her hands gently on his shoulders. “I think it’s over.”

He sighed. “Poor girl. It’s very unfair, isn’t it?”

“What’s unfair?”

“That she’s so ill. That sort of illness—it’s unfair, isn’t it?”

Isabel wanted to laugh. “Yes, if it’s genuine.”

She felt him react. He twisted round to face her. “What?”

“Prue isn’t dying at all,” she said. “I spoke to her sister. There’s nothing wrong with her—at least not in the physical sense. Mentally, it’s a different matter.”

Isabel explained to Jamie what had happened and what Prue’s sister had told her. He listened in astonishment that slowly turned to anger.

“Forget all about it,” she said.

“I hate her for this.”

Isabel bent down to kiss him. “You mustn’t. Don’t hate her. I don’t think it’s ever the right thing to do to hate somebody.”

“Isn’t it?”

She thought. Righteous anger? Yes, there was a place for that. Hatred? Could that ever be right? “What’s hatred? Wishing ill for others? Wanting their utter negation, their death?”

“Yes. That, and …”

“And what?”

“Wanting to see them suffer.”

She stroked his cheek. “And do you want that for her? Do you really want her to suffer?”

He shook his head. He nestled against her. “No, I suppose I don’t.”

She thought: Hatred shrivels you up inside. It’s like stoking a fire to burn the other person and all the time it’s burning you yourself. She knew that she would have to remind herself of this, because she had found it so easy to hate Jamie when she had first heard of the cinema outing with Prue. She had shocked herself over that.

“I interrupted you,” she said.

He turned back to the piano and began to play. She recognised the song and she mouthed the words silently.
I shall build my love a bower / By yon pure crystal fountain / And upon it I shall pile / All the flowers of the mountain
.

All the flowers of the mountain. All the flowers of the
mountain. She would gladly bring him all the flowers of the mountain. Gladly, however long it took. Songs did not exist in a world of reality; they made such feats quite possible. Ten thousand miles was not far to walk in a song. Nor was Eternity a long time to endure.

W
ITH ALL THE BRISK ENTHUSIASM
of one who has at last successfully tackled one awkward task, Isabel set about disposing of the second. She had telephoned Alex Mackinlay to arrange to see him and tell him what she had found out and what her views were. She could not give him a firm answer to his problem, but could reveal what she knew about the three candidates and leave him to reach his own conclusions. She did not relish voicing her suspicions about Gordon, but she felt that she had no alternative. She would put it in as objective a way as she could manage: he might, just might, have written that letter, and the board
might
care to bear that in mind. She had no grounds for attributing the letter to him, yet somehow she felt that this is what had happened. There was something in their conversation that had made her think so: some sixth sense had prompted her to this conclusion. But should one pay any attention to a sixth sense?

When it came to John Fraser, he
might
have behaved less than heroically on a mountain, but once again she was unsure
about exactly what had happened. She knew that she should have talked to the family of the other climber, but she had not done so. They had moved to London and were difficult to contact; she had not pursued the matter.

John Fraser was the victim of a campaign of whispers, but perhaps, just perhaps, with good reason. Which left Tom Simpson, a man considered to be none too intelligent by Alex Mackinlay himself. Well, what did that mean? His assessment of the candidate could be based on personal animosity. Sometimes people had strong views on the question of who would be their successor. Harry Slade might have conveyed his dislike of Tom Simpson to Alex and this might have led him to question the genuineness of Simpson’s claim to a master’s degree. But again this sounded like tittle-tattle, and did the board want even to consider it?

Isabel had expected that Alex Mackinlay might offer to come to the house to hear what she had to say, but he did not.

“We’re having a meeting at the school tomorrow afternoon,” he said. “It’s the end of term. We’re meeting through lunch and should be finished by three. If you would care to come out, I could show you round, and then you and I could have a private conversation.”

She was on the point of saying that this would not be convenient and would he mind coming in to see her, but she did not. It was convenient, as it happened; Grace wanted to take Charlie to tea with one of her friends in Trinity, and Jamie was rehearsing. She had wanted to see what the school was like, and this would give her a chance. So she replied that she would be happy to come out.

“And do you have an answer for us?” asked Alex.

Isabel hesitated. “Some answers come more in the form of questions,” she said.

He laughed. “That sounds very enigmatic.”

“Some situations are inherently enigmatic.”

She was not sure whether he would appreciate that. He was a businessman, she remembered—a doer—and he probably thought in terms of certainties. But he appeared intrigued. “Then let us de-enigmatise them.”

Isabel laughed. “Indeed.”

The next day, she left the house shortly after two. It would not take her much more than half an hour to get to the school, but she thought that she might walk round the grounds before she had the meeting with Alex. The school had a well-known garden that had been stocked with rare rhododendrons brought from the Himalayas in Edwardian times, and Isabel wanted to see this. There were sculptures too—a renowned sculptor who lived not far away had donated some of his unusual works to the school: there was enigma enough there, she thought, in the messages the sculptor carved into the stone.

On the drive out she stopped just after Silverburn to watch a bird of prey hunting over the lower slopes of the Pentlands. It was a large hawk, waiting to swoop down on its victim. She drew up at the side of the road and watched as it was mobbed by a flock of smaller birds and ignominiously chased away. The small birds, like tiny spitfires in some unequal, heroic Battle of Britain, twisted and turned in dizzying aerial combat; the hawk, outnumbered and irritated by the onslaught, suddenly flew off towards higher ground and disappeared. Isabel sat for a moment, the engine of the green Swedish car idling,
before she resumed her journey. This little battle was so close to the city and yet belonged so completely to another world—as did the man feeding his cattle in the field a mile further along the road, emptying a sack of food into a metal hopper while the cattle thronged about him, jostling for position at the trough.

She knew West Linton, where her friend Derek Watson had his tiny bookshop. She resisted the temptation to call on him; there would be time for that on another occasion. Driving through the village, she followed the smaller road that led into the hills and after a few hundred yards came to the gates of the school.
Bishop Forbes School, an Independent Boarding School for Boys Aged 8 to 18
. Eight, she thought, was terribly young to be sent away from home. She tried to imagine sending Charlie off to boarding school in just over six years’ time, his possessions packed in a small suitcase. No, she could never do it, no matter what people said about the character-building and the sense of independence fostered by such schools. Those could be developed at home, she felt.
She
would socialise Charlie—she and Jamie—not some stranger.

She followed a sign to the car park, where she left the car. Behind this, beyond a stand of oak trees, she saw the main building of the school, a large stone structure, Palladian in spirit, with several wings stretching out on either side. There were wide lawns around it, with, at their edges, clusters of other, more modern buildings—what looked like a gym, hostels, a chapel. Here and there small groups of boys moved from doorway to doorway, books under their arms, going, she thought, from lesson to lesson. From somewhere further away the wail of pipes split the afternoon air: band practice.

The rhododendron garden was reached by a path that led away from the car park. She followed this, and after a few minutes found herself standing before a small notice that explained the history of the garden and listed some of the varieties it contained. Some of the shrubs had lost the blossom of early summer; others were still a brilliant flourish of colour. The paved walkway snaked its way through the shrubs, and she made her way along it, pausing from time to time to read the small nameplates at the side of each plant.

She reached the far end of the garden and found, to her surprise, that she was on the edge of a cricket pitch. Cricket was not a Scottish game, but was played at schools such as this; a sign of English influence. She knew a few Scottish cricket players, and it seemed to her that they took a perverse pride in playing an arcane game that was a matter of such little interest to the vast majority of their fellow Scots. And here were boys being initiated into just such an attitude.

Not far from where she was, a couple of benches had been placed under the shade of a tree, and it was here that the members of the batting team were sitting. Around them was a mess of pads and other cricket paraphernalia: bats, white jerseys with the arms tied in knots, a large blackboard on which the score had been written in chalk. She walked over; the boys acknowledged her politely, one raising his cap in greeting.