The Charming Quirks of Others (7 page)

“Jillian Mackinlay. I met her today at the delicatessen. She came to sit at my table.”

Jamie walked over towards Isabel and pulled out a chair.
“Oh? Did you mind? I find it a bit irritating when I want to read something or just sit and think and somebody comes up.”

Isabel shook her head. “No, I didn’t mind.”

“And?” He hesitated, watching her closely. “She didn’t …” He sighed. “She asked you to do something? Is that it?”

Isabel did not reply for a moment. She knew exactly what Jamie would think—and say—about this. He had advised her to stop what he called meddling—but it was
not
meddling, she felt. Meddling was interfering unasked; she was always asked. And there was another difference: a meddler did not necessarily interfere for the good of somebody else—meddlers as often as not had their own interests in mind, or were driven by vulgar curiosity. And what, she wondered, was the difference between vulgar curiosity and acceptable curiosity? Was it just that our own curiosity was perfectly understandable, whereas the curiosity of others was vulgar? She smiled at the thought; that sort of distinction lay at the heart of many of our acts of discrimination. What I like is art; what you like is kitsch. My old car has character; yours is a wreck.

Jamie frowned. “What’s the joke?” He sounded peevish, and Isabel stopped smiling.

“I was thinking of something,” she said evenly.

“You haven’t answered my question.”

She raised her glass to her lips, looking at him over the rim. “Yes, she did ask me to help her. And before you say anything, I don’t see why I shouldn’t say yes to requests of that sort. I am, after all, a moral philosopher by trade, and if I feel an obligation to help, then it’s difficult to stand back. You do see that, don’t you?”

To her surprise, Jamie did not argue. He shrugged. “All right. Fine.”

She waited. He was looking away from her now, out of the window, and she knew at that moment, she knew with a conviction and certainty that took her by surprise, that there
was
something wrong. She knew, too, that she had to ask him now.

“There’s something wrong, isn’t there?”

It was as if he had not heard her question, as he continued to look away fixedly, saying nothing.

“Jamie?”

He turned round and she saw that there were tears in his eyes. She rose to her feet and came round the table to be beside him. She fumbled; she knocked over her glass, but it was empty now, and it simply described a half-arc on the table and then came to rest unharmed.

“Jamie, what’s wrong? My darling … What is it?”

He took her hand. “It’s been a horrible day,” he said.

“Why? Tell me about it. Go on.”

She felt the tension in his hand; even there.

He wiped ineffectively at his eyes. “You know that new group I’ve been playing with? The chamber group?”

She nodded. He had told her a little about it. “The one that meets down in Stockbridge? In St. Stephen Street?”

“Yes. Tom lives there. He runs it. We’ve got a concert in August, on the Fringe. We’ve been doing one or two other things too. A wedding reception. And there’s a possible engagement in Stirling …”

“Yes? Isn’t it going well?”

“No, it’s going fine. It’s just that there’s this girl in it, Prue. She’s a cellist.”

Isabel tensed. “Yes?”

“A couple of weeks ago she told me that she was ill. She said she had something that they could do nothing for. She said she had a few months left—that was all.”

Isabel continued to hold his hand, and put her other arm around his shoulder. “Oh, Jamie!”

“She has this condition, you see. I knew she wasn’t well because she had talked to me about going to see a doctor in Glasgow, a specialist of some sort. I had the impression that what she had was quite rare. Anyway, we were rehearsing today and she looked so ill—really pale and thin. I found it so … so upsetting. I walked with her down St. Stephen Street. She lives in Leslie Place, just over the bridge, and she asked me whether I would come back with her to her flat. She said that she needed to talk to somebody and there was nobody in the flat. So I went with her and she made me some tea and … and I just found it so difficult.”

Isabel did not say anything. There was nothing to be said. She felt that in the face of something like this, words of comfort could be platitudinous and even inflammatory. She had once lost a friend at school in a car accident and her father, in an awkward attempt to comfort her, had said something like
At least she didn’t suffer
. His words had been well meant, but they were inappropriate and had merely served to make her angry with him. The absence of suffering was not the point; the point was the untimely loss.

But she could say that she was sorry to hear this, and
she did. Jamie acknowledged her with a squeeze of his hand. He said “Thanks” and then he rose to his feet; the casserole needed attending to, and it was getting late. She watched him as he served the potatoes that would go with the main dish. He put two on his plate and two on hers; then, like a server in a school kitchen determined to be scrupulously fair, he placed a further one and a half on her plate and the same number on his.

She watched him, and the thought came to her: The actions of the beautiful could be strangely fascinating, could assume an almost sacramental nature. Any one of us might do something simple, like tying a shoelace or combing our hair, or, as now, putting potatoes on a plate, and our acts would seem unexceptional. But when Jamie, or somebody like him, did such things, the act became something more than its mundane essentials. Artists sensed this, she thought, and captured the significance. Through Vermeer’s eyes we could look for hours at a young woman reading a letter. We knew that it was simply a young girl reading a letter—but it was more than that, far more.

Jamie sat down, and they ate in a silence that was punctuated only with desultory exchanges. Halfway through the meal, she reached out and touched him on the arm. He paused, and looked at her, and briefly closed his eyes. She touched him again, lightly, and they resumed their meal.

He spoke with lowered eyes. “I’m sorry, I’m just not myself.”

“I understand.” She did. She imagined, too, how he felt; there would be the rawness that came with the hearing of bad news, the feeling of hopelessness that comes from the knowledge
that we all must die, and some sooner than others. The only time this did not hurt was when we still had about us the immortality of youth, and Jamie would be far beyond that now.

She told him at the end of the meal that he should not bother to help with the clearing of the table and the stacking of the dishes.

He offered. “No, I will.”

“No. Go and play the piano. Leave the door open. I’ll listen.”

He did not insist, and left the room. She heard him open the door of the living room and a few moments later there came the sound of the first notes. Schubert.

Jamie played for half an hour or so. Isabel finished in the kitchen and went into her study, where she picked up an article she had been reading earlier and had abandoned. It was tough going, and she knew that she could not accept it for the
Review
. Yet there was something dogged about the author’s argument, and in spite of herself she found herself reading it to the end. There the author concluded: “Ultimately we act for the good because we see it to be there—like the sun. We cannot judge the sun, and there is no point in trying to do that. The sun is there. We are here. We cannot either explain or deny these facts.”

She set the paper aside. She was not convinced. The suggestion that we acted for the good because it was there was no answer, except, perhaps, in an intuitive system of ethics. How did we know that what we thought of as the good was, in fact, good? That was the job of the moral philosopher, and it did not help merely to say that the good was there, like the sun. She felt her irritation growing, but then, quite suddenly, she thought: Unless … unless the good was indeed something like the sun, something that we
felt
, just as we feel the sun upon our skin.
Goodness would be a glow, a source of energy, a radiating force that we might never understand but which was still there. Gravity was there, and we felt it, but did anybody, other than theoretical physicists, actually understand it? What if goodness were the same sort of force: something that was there, could not be seen or tasted, but was still capable of drawing us into its orbit?

She felt almost dizzy at the thought. Perhaps there was a force of moral goodness, every bit as powerful, in its way, as any of the physical forces that kept electrons in circulation about the nucleus of an atom. Perhaps we understood that, even if we acted against it, even if we denied it. And that force could be called anything, God being one name that people gave to it. And we knew that it was there because we felt its presence, as the religious believer may be convinced in his very bones of the presence of God, even if we could not describe the nature of it.

Or was it just a brain state—something within us rather than outside us, a trick of biochemistry? The feeling of recognition experienced on encountering this force of goodness might merely be an entirely subjective state brought about because some region of our brain was stimulated by something we saw—or even thought we saw. The perception of goodness as a force, then, might be nothing more significant than the warm feelings brought about by alcohol, or by a mood-enhancing drug. Those insights, it was generally agreed, were unimportant and solipsistic—a chemical illusion that signified nothing.

The moment passed. She thought she had come to some understanding of goodness, but it had been illusory, a quicksilver flash of vision, nothing more. Perhaps that is how goodness—or God—visited us: so quickly and without warning
that we might easily miss it, but perceptible none the less, and transforming beyond the transformative power of anything else we have known.

THE FOLLOWING MORNING
, while Isabel was in her study, Jillian Mackinlay walked up the front path of her house, an envelope in her hand. Grace, who was entertaining Charlie in the garden, intercepted her as she approached the front door. “Yes?” she said. “Good morning.”

Jillian gave a start. “Oh, sorry, you gave me a bit of a fright. I hadn’t expected to find anybody lurking …”

Grace’s nostrils flared. “I was
not
lurking. Charlie and I …”

The visitor blushed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. I was just a bit surprised.” She paused to smile at Charlie, who was looking up at her with unblinking eyes. “This is Isabel Dalhousie’s house, isn’t it?”

Grace reached for the large envelope that Jillian was clearly in the act of delivering. “It is. I’m the housekeeper.”

“I see. Then could you give this to Isabel?”

“That’s what I was proposing to do.”

There was a short silence. Jillian looked down again at Charlie. “Well, you are a very serious little fellow, aren’t you?”

Charlie returned her stare, and then, without warning, began to cry.

Jillian seemed confused. “Oh dear, I seem to have upset him.”

Grace, holding the envelope in her left hand, scooped
Charlie up with her right. “He’ll recover,” she said. “I’ll take the letter in now.”

Isabel was at her desk when Grace delivered the letter. “This came by hand?”

Grace nodded. “Why do people deliver by hand?” she asked. “To have a look round, if you ask me.”

Isabel chuckled. “That’s understandable enough. Most of us are interested in other people’s houses.”

From her expression, Grace made it clear that she was not. She gestured to Charlie, who had found the wastepaper basket and was busy emptying it of its contents. “She frightened Charlie. He started to cry.”

“Children sometimes take against people,” said Isabel vaguely, slitting the flap of the envelope with the paper-knife that Jamie had found in an antiques shop in Stockbridge. Peering inside, she paged through the top of the papers without taking them out. It was what she had expected. She looked up; Grace’s eyes were on the envelope.

“No,” said Isabel. “It’s not what you think. She hasn’t written an article for the
Review
. It’s not that.”

Grace raised an eyebrow.

“It’s something quite different,” Isabel went on. “It’s …” She stopped. Grace obviously wanted to know, but she was not sure whether she wanted to tell her. Grace had a tendency to pry, apparently believing that she had a right to know Isabel’s business. But did she? There were some things that she would find out about, just by being in the house and witnessing Isabel’s life at close quarters, but that did not give her the right to know everything.

She wanted to say, “It’s private,” but it would have seemed so petty, so unfriendly. So instead she said, “I’ve offered to look over some applications for a school principal’s post. Nothing exciting.”

The effect of this was to make Grace all the more interested. “Where?” she asked. “What school?”

Isabel hesitated. “It’s confidential, I’m afraid.”

Grace stared at her. “I can keep a secret,” she said, adding, in an accusing tone of voice, “You know that.”

Isabel did know that. Grace would never reveal anything that happened in the house; she trusted her on that. “All right, Bishop Forbes. You see it if you drive out past West Linton.”

“I know,” said Grace testily. She leaned forward, looking pointedly at the envelope. “How many?”

“Three,” said Isabel. “This is the short leet.” She used the Scots word for
list
, as many still did. “I really don’t think I should say any more about it, though.”

Grace turned. “Come on, Charlie. We’re not wanted here.”

“I don’t want to sound rude,” said Isabel hurriedly.

“And I don’t want to know things you don’t want to tell me,” said Grace. “Even if I happen to know who one of them is anyway.”

Isabel held up a hand. “Excuse me?”

Grace affected insouciance. “I happen to know, now that I think of it. There’s a man called Fraser. He’s one of them, isn’t he?”

Isabel looked in the envelope; the names were clearly written at the top of the first page of each application. Grace was
right. John Fraser. “How on earth did you know?” she asked. The envelope had been sealed; Grace could not have opened it on its short journey from the garden path to Isabel’s study, and even if she could, she would not have done such a thing. She might be nosy at times, but she was utterly correct in her dealings with others.