The Charming Quirks of Others (5 page)

Isabel took a step backwards. She looked at the garden rake in his hand. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Maybe you could prune them just a bit.”

The man frowned. “Prune and prune,” he said. “Yes.”

She walked away. She felt raw after the encounter; he was clearly suffering from a neural condition of some sort, and she should not blame him for remonstrating with her, but it still left her feeling uneasy. The speech difficulties suggested that somewhere in his brain there were lesions or misplaced connections, or perhaps connections that were not there any more. She looked about her, at the stone buildings and the metal shapes of the cars parked along the road. All that was so solid and resilient, while our brains were such soft and living things. A few cells went out of order, forgot their function or died, and that marvellous gift of language went awry. A few more cells might go, and then a blood vessel, and that brought the hammer blows of death. Just a tiny membrane, the sides of a fragile vessel, stood between us and annihilation and disaster.

When she reached the delicatessen, she found Eddie behind the counter. He smiled cheerfully.

“Cat left a note,” he said. “Thanks for coming.”

She told him about what had happened on the way in. “There was a rose that had grown across the pavement—sent
out one of those long shoots. It was full of thorns, and so I tried to break it off. Its owner got very excited about it. He spoke rather strangely—repeated himself.”

“Oh, I know him,” said Eddie. “He comes in here. He asks for cheese and cheese. And when I give him his change he says, ‘And thank you and thank you and you.’ It’s weird.”

“Who is he?” asked Isabel.

“He told me his name once,” said Eddie. “I just remember the first part. Gerald, I think. Something like that. He told me his life history, but there were people waiting to be served and they started looking impatient. He worked in Amsterdam for many years, he said. He was something to do with the bank.”

“Which bank?” asked Isabel.

Eddie shrugged. “Some bank. His wife is Dutch, he said. But I’ve never seen her.”

“It’s a very strange speech disorder,” said Isabel. “Very curious.”

“It’s like echolalia,” said Eddie.

Isabel looked at him in surprise. “What’s that?”

Eddie wiped some crumbs of cheese off the cutting board. “My grandfather had it. He repeated everything you said to him. If you said, ‘I’ve been to town,’ he would say, ‘To town.’ Or if you said, ‘It’s raining hard,’ he’d say, ‘Raining hard.’ He was like an echo, you see.”

“You see.”

“Yes,” said Eddie. “That’s the idea.”

“Strange,” said Isabel.

“Strange,” echoed Eddie, and then laughed. “He wasn’t unhappy. I don’t think he knew that he was doing it.”

Isabel wondered whether the man with the garden rake was unhappy; she thought that he probably was. But there was no time to speculate about that, as two customers had walked in the door and both, it seemed, wanted attention.

CAT ARRIVED
at half past eleven. The early part of the morning had been busy, but it had slackened off and the delicatessen was now quieter. Isabel looked at her niece, hoping to see some sign of how the medical consultation had gone.

“Is everything all right?” she asked, lowering her voice so that Eddie should not hear.

Cat shrugged. “Yes, fine.”

Isabel smiled with relief. “So they were not worried about the spot?”

“I don’t think so,” said Cat. “They sliced it out—it was pretty small. He injected novocaine so I felt nothing.”

“And everything was fine?”

“They’ve sent it off to the pathology lab,” said Cat.

Isabel’s heart gave a lurch. “Oh …”

“It’s standard procedure, Isabel,” said Cat. “You mustn’t worry. They have to do that if they take anything off. Just to be sure. He said that it looked fine to him but they just make sure.”

“Of course.”

Cat began to undo the strings of Isabel’s apron. “So why don’t you give me this and you go and sit down. I’ll bring you coffee. There’s yesterday’s
Repubblica
on the rack over there. You can practise your Italian.” Cat was given the newspaper by one of the staff from the Italian Consulate, who called in every day on the way back from work. She did not read it herself, but
quite a number of the customers who dropped in for coffee read it, or pretended to read it. “One or two of them can’t read Italian,” Cat had said. “They’d like to, but they can’t. So they sit there pretending to read—it makes them look sophisticated, I suppose. Or so they hope.”

Isabel did read Italian; if she had any difficulty with
La Repubblica
, it was with understanding the complexities of Italian politics. But that, she suspected, was the case with everybody’s politics. And it was not just a linguistic difference; she could never understand how American politics worked. It appeared that the Americans went to the polls every four years to elect a President who had wide powers. But then, once he was in office, he might find himself unable to do any of the things he had promised to do because he was blocked by other politicians who could veto his legislation. What was the point, then, of having an election in the first place? Did people not resent the fact that they spoke on a subject and then nothing could be done about it? But politics had always seemed an impenetrable mystery to her in her youth. She remembered what her mother had once said to her about some American politician to whom they were distantly related. “I don’t greatly care for him,” she said. “Pork barrel.”

Isabel had thought, as a child, that this was a bit unkind. Presumably he could not help looking like a pork barrel. But then, much later, she had come to realise that this was how politics worked. The problem was, though, that politics might work, but government did not.

She picked up
La Repubblica
and went to sit at the far table. A few minutes later, Eddie brought her a large cup of milky coffee. “Just as you like it,” he said.

She thanked him and continued to read the newspaper. A magistrate in Naples had been found floating in the sea; the government in Rome announced that it took a very serious view of this and would be dispatching further judicial resources. “We are not going to be intimidated by the Mafia,” a spokesman said. And also in Naples, an unidentified source close to “powerful interests” was quoted as saying that this unfortunate event had nothing to do with anybody in the city and merely underlined the need for swimmers to take great care when entering the sea. Isabel winced at the cynicism. And yet such people—such powerful interests—were everywhere getting closer and closer to the seats of power. There was corruption at every turn, and those who stood for honesty and integrity were more and more vulnerable, more and more isolated amongst the hordes of people who simply had no moral sense. And it was not just Italy; it was everywhere, even here in Scotland, that the lines between integrity and compromise were being eroded. Even here in Scotland, with the moral capital of Presbyterian rectitude in the bank, there were rich businessmen who thought they could buy the attention of those in power, and who did so, sometimes quite openly. And then, when people queried this or protested, the politicians in question simply brushed off suggestions that there was anything improper in the arrangement. Perhaps they were simply being honest; money spoke in every dialect, in every language, and it was rare that anybody said that they could not hear it. All human affairs, Isabel thought, are rotten; perhaps political morality was just a question of trying to limit the rottenness.

She put the paper down and reached for her coffee cup. Then she gave a start. There was a woman standing in front of
her; she had not seen her from behind the paper, and it was a shock.

“Isabel Dalhousie?”

She racked her brains to remember where she had seen this woman.

“Yes,” she said brightly. It was an unusual, rather angular face, not one that was easy to forget. “Hello.”

She feared that her lack of recognition would show, and it did. “You may not remember me,” said the woman. “Do you mind if I join you?”

Isabel indicated the empty seat on the other side of the table. “Please.”

The woman lowered herself into the chair. She was well-dressed, Isabel observed, with an understatement suggestive of both good taste and funds: it was not ostentatious clothes that were really expensive, it was quiet clothes that exhausted the credit card.

“Forgive me for interrupting,” the woman began. “Jillian Mackinlay. We met at …”

It came back to Isabel. “At the Stevensons’. Yes, I remember. Sorry, I was having difficulty.” People could tell when you were having difficulty placing them; it was best, Isabel thought, to be frank and apologise. And apology was usually necessary;
I can’t for the life of me recall who you are
may have the virtue of honesty, but it was no balm to the injured feelings that a failure to be remembered may otherwise cause. If we remember somebody, then how can they forget us? Are we that forgettable?

Jillian nodded. “I saw Susie the other day at a concert. She
spoke about you, actually. She said something about how you had helped somebody she knew.”

Isabel was uncertain what to say. She helped people occasionally, but it was not something she proposed to wear on her sleeve.

“Yes,” Jillian continued. “And I wondered … well, I was going to get in touch with you. And then I saw you here and I thought that it might be easier to speak face-to-face rather than to telephone you.” She paused, and looked at Isabel as if she was waiting for encouragement.

“It’s better to see the person you’re speaking to, I think,” said Isabel, adding, “as a general rule. So often today one is actually speaking to a machine somewhere—a very sympathetic machine, of course, but a machine none the less. Do you mind if I ask—are you in some sort of trouble?”

Jillian blushed. “No, good heavens, no. Not me. Not personally.”

Isabel felt relieved. It had crossed her mind that Jillian was about to make some sort of personal disclosure—of an errant husband, perhaps, or some other domestic difficulty, and she would have to explain that she would like to be able to help, but … Jamie’s words came back to her, “Listen, Isabel, I know that you feel you have to help, but don’t get involved—please don’t—in other people’s matrimonial problems. It rarely helps.” He was right. People with matrimonial difficulties usually wanted allies, not advisers.

“Well,” said Isabel, “I don’t know whether I can do anything, and of course I don’t know what the problem is. If you’d care to tell me.” She smiled encouragingly at Jillian; there was awkwardness
in the other woman’s manner and she wanted to reassure her. At the same time she thought,
I have enough on my plate. I have Charlie. I have the
Review.
I have Jamie. Brother Fox …

Jillian signalled to Eddie, who came to take her order for coffee. As Eddie left, she lowered her voice and said, “That young man—there’s something lost about him, don’t you think?”

Isabel was cautious. “Eddie?”

“Oh, you know him?”

“Yes. My niece owns this place, you see. I occasionally work here.”

Jillian blushed again. “I’ve been very tactless. Sorry.”

“Not at all. You’re right about Eddie. But I think he’s making progress. He’s more confident. He’s a nice young man.”

This seemed to please Jillian. “Good. I see so many young people because of my husband’s involvement with a school. Teenage boys. And I think we sometimes don’t realise just how hard it is for them these days. It’s much easier for girls, I think. Boys are more confused. They’ve lost the role they used to have—you know, being tough and so on. Brawn means nothing now.”

“Quite.”

“So you often come across boys who are quite lost. They retreat into themselves or their cults. Skateboarders are an example of that. Or at least some of them are.”

Isabel thought about skateboarders. It was not an attractive group, with their lack of interest in anything much except their repetitive twirls and gymnastic tricks. They tended to be teenagers, though, and teenagers grew up, although sometimes
one saw older skateboarders, almost into their thirties, overgrown boys stuck in the ways of youth. She shuddered. Certain groups of people made her shudder: extremists, with their ideologies of hate; the proud; the arrogant; the narcissistic socialites of celebrity culture. And yet all of these were
people
, and one should love people, or try to …

“Skateboarders are typical of the refuge cult,” said Jillian. “They retreat into the group and don’t really talk to anybody else.”

Isabel said that she thought that many teenagers did that, and not just skateboarders. Yes, that was true, Jillian said, but skateboarders were an extreme example. “They block out the rest of the world, you know. They think that there are skaters and then there are the rest. It’s that bad.” She waited a moment, and then added: “I know about this, you see. Our son became one. He didn’t talk to us for two and a half years. Just a few grunts. That was all.”

“But he came back?”

“Yes. He came back. But he had wasted those precious years of youth. Think what he might have seen and done, instead of spending his time on streets, skating aimlessly. Just think.”

“We all have our ways of wasting time,” said Isabel. “Think of golf … What’s your son doing now?”

“He works for a hedge fund.”

She could not help but smile. “Oh.”

“Yes, it sounds ridiculous,” said Jillian. “But one’s children don’t always turn out exactly as one hoped. Do you …”

“I have a son. Still very young. He has yet to … to disclose his hand.”

Eddie returned. He had made Isabel another cup of coffee too. On the top of the foam he had traced in chocolate powder the shape of a four-leaf clover. She studied the clover design and then looked up at him. “It’s good luck,” he said, and winked.

“Sweet,” said Jillian, after he had left them. She dipped a spoon into the top of her coffee and licked it. “Do you mind if I call you Isabel?”

Isabel did not, although she was not sure about this woman. There was something imperious about her, something highhanded that made her doubt whether they could ever be close. If there was a clear division between friend and acquaintance, then Jillian, she decided, would remain an acquaintance.