The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds: An Isabel Dalhousie Novel (9) (10 page)

“How do you calibrate pain?” asked Jamie.

“By cutting out the background pain of the world,” answered Isabel. “By cutting all
that out, not registering it, and responding only to those painful things that we
can do something about. Because otherwise …”

Jamie had seen a taxi approaching; the thin band of yellow light above the vehicle’s
windscreen weaving its way towards them. He stepped out into the road and raised an
arm.

“Because otherwise what?”

“Because otherwise we couldn’t get on with our day-to-day lives. The pain of the world
would burden us too much.”

“True,” said Jamie.

CHAPTER SIX
 

T
HERE WAS
an unspoken understanding between Isabel and her niece Cat that when Cat went away
on holiday or was otherwise unable to get in to the delicatessen, then Isabel would
take over, even with very little notice. It would have been more sensible for Eddie
to do this, but Eddie, for all his willingness to embark on a long tour of North America
with his uncle—and uncle’s girlfriend—and to follow this with a spell working at a
ski resort in Alberta, still lacked the confidence to be left in sole charge of the
delicatessen. Isabel wondered whether this might be changed by his having reached
the milestone of his twenty-first birthday and having met his new girlfriend Diane—or
the Huntress, as she had unfortunately become lodged in Isabel’s mind, though not
a reference to any man-hunting on her part (Eddie was not the most obvious prey for
a dedicated man-hunter), but to the occupation of the Greek goddess of that name.
Eddie was still unwilling to accept full responsibility and had shown signs of alarm
when Cat telephoned the following Monday morning to inform him that she had come down
with a norovirus and would be off work for at least three days,
possibly more. Cat had reassured him that Isabel would help out and that he would
not be left to manage by himself; she had then phoned Isabel and broken the news to
her.

“I hate asking you,” she said. “But I really can’t go in. I don’t want to go into
details—”

“Then don’t,” said Isabel quickly.

“But I’m bringing up the most amazing amount of fluid,” Cat persisted. “I have no
idea where it’s all coming from. And the diarrhoea, I’m not exaggerating, I promise
you—”

“I’ll be there,” Isabel interjected. “How many days?”

When Cat warned her that it could be the whole week, Isabel’s heart sank. There were
spells in her life—often as long as a month—when the affairs of the
Review of Applied Ethics
could safely be put to one side, or benignly neglected as Isabel put it, but this
was not one of them. The proofs of the next issue had arrived, and an entire article
was being withdrawn on the grounds that the author had placed it elsewhere without
telling Isabel. He had been keen, she believed, to have a back-up home for it if another
possibility of publication—in a rather more prestigious journal—came to nothing. The
prestigious journal had accepted the paper and the author had either forgotten to
inform Isabel timeously or had become too embarrassed to do so, eventually leaving
it to a secretary in his department to let her know what was happening. Isabel had
mentally composed a stinging rebuke, and had gone so far as to type it out as an email,
but had eventually decided not to send it. The delete button, that saviour of how
many relationships, had again done its work: the swingeing censure had been replaced
by a mild, rather sad reproach:
It would have been helpful to know about this before I sent everything off to the
printer; but no matter, I’m very pleased
that you’ve found such a good home for your very fine piece. And their circulation
is admittedly so much larger than ours, and looks as if it will remain so, no matter
how hard we try
. The “no matter how hard we try” was later removed; reproach should not too quickly
become self-pity.

All this, though, meant that she had to find an article to take its place, contact
the author and have all the editing done within the next three days. That was feasible,
even if she were to be busy in the delicatessen, but it would mean that she would
have to work in the evenings as well as all day—something she did not particularly
enjoy. She was, after all, a mother with an affectionate and demanding three-and-three-quarter-year-old
to look after. She wanted to spend as much time with Charlie as she could, and now
she would be unable to get away from the delicatessen until six-thirty every evening,
by which time the bath would be over and the bedtime story would be about to begin.

But she could not let Cat down, and, after a quick consultation with Grace, who had
just come in at the door, and a rushed telephone conversation with Jamie, who was
on his way down to the Academy to start one of his teaching days, she finished her
breakfast quickly and started out of the house.

Eddie greeted her warmly. He always arrived at the delicatessen early and he had coped
perfectly well with the rush of people who called in on their way to work. That rush
had now abated, and there were only one or two customers browsing the shelves when
Isabel arrived.

“It’s been all go,” said Eddie, wiping his hands on his apron. “I’ve taken over two
hundred and fifty pounds in …” He looked up at the clock above the refrigerated display.
“In forty minutes. How about that?”

“Very good,” said Isabel, reaching for a fresh apron from the hook on the wall. “You
spoke to Cat, I take it?”

“I did,” said Eddie. “She’s got projectile vomiting, you know.”

Isabel looked away. Any sort of vomiting was bad enough, but projectile vomiting …

“I’ve never had projectile vomiting,” Eddie went on. “I was really sick for a day
or two on the trip, though. We were in a place in Idaho and I was really hungry. We’d
booked into a motel just outside town, and my uncle and his girlfriend had gone to
a bar. I stayed in the motel. Then I found that I got really hungry, and so I went
to this hot-dog place and ordered a really big hot dog. You should have seen it, Isabel,
it was humungous. And it tasted really good.”

Isabel busied herself with sweeping excess grounds off the work surface around the
coffee machine. “But it wasn’t?”

“No,” said Eddie. “I think it had
E. coli
in it. Or something like that. I was seriously sick. Not projectile vomiting, but
I felt really bad. The man in the motel said it was
E. coli
. He said that there was a lot of
E. coli
about and some of those hot-dog places make their hot dogs out of dead horse meat.
Yuck. That’s what he told me. He said the horses die, and if they go like that, rather
than being sent to the slaughterhouse, they shouldn’t be eaten. But apparently the
mafia have a racket in horse meat, and they sell it to these hot-dog places and pretend
that it comes from cows.”

“Well, you survived,” said Isabel. “And I’m sure Cat will too. So let’s get things
organised.”

Eddie worked calmly and efficiently, and yet Isabel suspected that if she were not
there, he would be jittery and anxious. “Could you manage by yourself, do you think?”
she asked him during a lull at the counter.

He looked at her with alarm. “Why?”

“I just wondered.”

“Do you have to do something else?” His voice was taut with anxiety.

“It’s all right, Eddie,” she said calmly. “I’ll stay. I’m not going anywhere.”

He visibly relaxed. “Good,” he said. “I know I should be able to handle things by
myself, but I get this tight feeling—right here …” He pointed to his chest. “And it
makes it hard for me to do anything. I know it’s stupid, really stupid. But …”

She put a hand on his shoulder. “Eddie, you’re doing just fine. You’re fine.”

He looked down for a moment, and then raised his eyes to meet hers. Something passed
between them—a moment of understanding, she thought. He had never told her what had
happened to him—she had an idea—but now it seemed to her that he had somehow acknowledged
that she knew, and that fact made it much easier for him. He was getting better, she
was sure of it; time’s healing effect—the old saw, the folk wisdom—was absolutely
true. It was something to do with memory: things forgotten lost their power.

She changed the subject. “How’s Diane?”

Eddie smiled. “You could meet her,” he said. “She’s around today. I could phone her
and ask her to drop in.” He looked at Isabel enquiringly. “That’s if you want to.
Only if you want to.”

“Of course I want to meet her, Eddie. Phone her. Tell her to come after lunch some
time, when we’re not so busy.”

He reached for his mobile phone and made the call.

“She can come,” he said. “She wants to meet you too.”

“Good.”

Eddie looked anxious. “I hope you like her, Isabel.”

“I will.”

He hesitated. “She’s older than me, Isabel.”

Isabel paused. “Much older?” she asked, trying to keep her tone natural. What if Diane
were fifty?

“A bit,” said Eddie. “Twenty-six.”

Inwardly, Isabel breathed a sigh of relief. “Well, that’s nothing, Eddie. I’m older
than Jamie. It’s nothing to worry about.”

Eddie looked shifty. “There’s something else,” he said.

“Yes.”

“I may have told her that I’m a bit older than I really am.” He began to mumble. “I
told her I’m twenty-four.”

Isabel frowned. “That’s a bit stupid, Eddie. What on earth possessed you to do that?”

The censure was unplanned; and she herself was surprised by its forcefulness. Almost
immediately, she repented. Isabel was sensitive about telling other people what to
do in a moralistic sense—that was most definitely
not
the role of the moral philosopher. Philosophy was there to guide people to the right
and the good—not to wag a disapproving finger at them.

She tried to make up for her mistake. “I’m sorry, Eddie. I shouldn’t have said it
was stupid. It’s just that …” She saw his face crumple. “It’s just that it’s best
to be honest in a relationship. And I’m sure that you yourself want to be honest,
don’t you?”

“Of course.”

She reached out to take his hand. He resisted for a moment, and then allowed her.
“All of us are dishonest in some respects—from time to time. Hands up all those who’ve
never been dishonest about something. See, my hand didn’t go up.”

He smiled weakly. “You don’t lie to people. I know you don’t.”

“I try not to. But sometimes I’m tempted to. Lying can be so much easier.”

“Easier?”

“Yes, in the short term. But any advantage it confers doesn’t usually last very long.”

He thought about this for a moment. “What shall I do?”

Isabel squeezed his hand. “That’s for you to decide.”

“I should tell her?”

“You could.”

He nodded. “I will.”

Isabel smiled at him encouragingly. “I suspect that you’ll find she won’t mind. If
she loves you …” She was not sure whether she should have said that.

Eddie looked at her. “How can I know that? How can I know that she loves me?”

Isabel let go of his hand. “That sort of thing is usually obvious. If she wants to
live with you, then I’d have thought that she probably does.”

Eddie bit his lip. “I could ask her, I suppose.”

“You could.”

He hesitated for a moment before continuing. “How do you know that Jamie loves you?”

“He married me,” said Isabel. “He stood in the Canongate Kirk and made a declaration
to that effect. In public.”

“That’s what I want to do,” said Eddie. “I want to stand up in front of a whole lot
of people and tell Diane that I love her. And I want to do that soon.”

“I understand,” said Isabel. “That’s how one feels when one is in love. But perhaps
you shouldn’t do anything too sudden.”

“Why not?”

She did not want to pour cold water on his enthusiasm. “Because one of the things
about falling in love is that you can fall out of it again. So you have to be sure.”

He was adamant. “I am. I am sure.”

LUNCHTIME WAS
particularly busy that day. Both Eddie and Isabel were kept at it solidly from twelve-thirty
until shortly after two, when the shop suddenly emptied.

“You go and sit down,” said Eddie. “Diane will be here in ten minutes.”

Isabel went to one of the tables and flopped down on a seat. One of the customers
had left a newspaper behind, a copy of the
Financial Times
, and she paged through this idly as she waited for Eddie to bring the restorative
cup of tea he had promised her. She was not particularly interested in the doings
of the markets, but the paper had good arts coverage too, and she found herself absorbed
in a review of a recent staging in London of a new opera on the life of a Colombian
drug baron. Opera could be as recondite, as obscure, as it liked, she mused, because
people expected it. And the plot really did not matter too much either way—Philip
Glass’s
Einstein on the Beach
had no plot at all, as far as Isabel could ascertain, and there were operas with
plots so complex that lengthy explanations were required before one could work out
what was going on. And a silly plot—of which there were numerous examples—was not
necessarily a drawback. Isabel had always considered that
Così fan tutte
was all about nothing very much, and yet it was one of the most beautiful of Mozart’s
operas.