The Charming Quirks of Others

BOOKS BY ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH

IN THE ISABEL DALHOUSIE SERIES

The Sunday Philosophy Club

Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

The Right Attitude to Rain

The Careful Use of Compliments

The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday

The Lost Art of Gratitude

The Charming Quirks of Others

IN THE NO. 1 LADIES’ DETECTIVE AGENCY SERIES

The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency

Tears of the Giraffe

Morality for Beautiful Girls

The Kalahari Typing School for Men

The Full Cupboard of Life

In the Company of Cheerful Ladies

Blue Shoes and Happiness

The Good Husband of Zebra Drive

The Miracle at Speedy Motors

Tea Time for the Traditionally Built

The Double Comfort Safari Club

IN THE PORTUGUESE IRREGULAR VERBS SERIES

Portuguese Irregular Verbs

The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs

At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances

IN THE 44 SCOTLAND STREET SERIES

44 Scotland Street

Espresso Tales

Love over Scotland

The World According to Bertie

The Unbearable Lightness of Scones

The Girl Who Married a Lion and Other Tales from Africa

La’s Orchestra Saves the World

Corduroy Mansions

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2010 by Alexander McCall Smith

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in Great Britain by Little, Brown, an imprint of the Little, Brown Book Group, a Hachette UK Company, London.

Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Excerpts from poems by W. H. Auden appear courtesy of Edward Mendelson, Executor of the Estate of W. H. Auden, and Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McCall Smith, Alexander, [date]

The charming quirks of others / Alexander McCall Smith.

p. cm. — (Sunday philosophy club 7)

eISBN: 978-0-307-37945-0

1. Dalhousie, Isabel (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Women philosophers—Fiction. 3. Edinburgh (Scotland)—Fiction. I. Title.

PR6063.C326C47 2010 823′.914—dc22 2010028001

www.pantheonbooks.com

v3.1

This book is for Robin Straus, in gratitude

Contents

CoverOther Books by This AuthorTitle PageCopyrightDedicationChapter OneChapter TwoChapter ThreeChapter FourChapter FiveChapter SixChapter SevenChapter EightChapter NineChapter TenChapter ElevenChapter TwelveChapter ThirteenChapter FourteenChapter FifteenAbout the Author

CHAPTER ONE

SATURDAY EVENING,” remarked Isabel Dalhousie. “A time for the burning of ears.”

Guy Peploe, seated opposite her in the back neuk at Glass & Thompson’s café, looked at her blankly. Isabel was given to making puzzling pronouncements—he knew that, and did not mind—but this one, he thought, was unusually Delphic.

He stirred his coffee. “I’m not quite with you, Isabel. Not quite. Burning ears?”

She smiled. She had not intended to be opaque, and it was Guy, after all, who had brought up the subject of Saturday evenings; she was merely picking up on the theme. He had mentioned an opening he had attended last Saturday, a show featuring a Scottish realist painter who had been ignored in his lifetime but who was now lauded as a genius. Everybody had been there; which meant, he said with a laugh, everybody who went to Saturday-evening openings at galleries. The remaining four hundred and eighty thousand people who lived in Edinburgh and its immediate environs had presumably been doing something else.

That had triggered Isabel’s remark about burning ears, which she now went on to explain. “What I meant is that on a Saturday evening,” she said, “there are always a number of dinner parties in Edinburgh. The same people go to dinner with the same people. Backwards and forwards. And what do they talk about on these occasions?”

“Those who aren’t there?” suggested Guy.

Isabel agreed. “Exactly. And there are certain people who are talked about a lot. This is not a particularly big pond, you know. In some ways it’s a village.”

Guy nodded. “All cities have their villages,” he said. “Even the big ones. London claims to be full of them. New York too.”

“But New York has a village,” said Isabel. “It’s called the Village. Which is helpful, I suppose.”

Guy laughed; Isabel’s wry comments, dropped as asides, could seem so arresting even if, when you analysed them, it was hard to say why: this was an example. There was nothing exceptional about what she had said—not on the face of it—but the comment about helpfulness tripped one up.

“Of course,” Isabel continued, “to use the definite article about one’s village demonstrates—how should one put it?—a good conceit of oneself. That clan chief called the MacGregor: Does he correct people who call him a MacGregor? Would he have to say ‘No, the MacGregor, please’?”

“I’m sure he wouldn’t,” said Guy. “People like that are usually very modest. If you’ve been on the go for five hundred years, you’re usually fairly low-key about it.”

Isabel thought that was quite true. She knew a Nobel laureate who referred to “a little prize they were once kind enough to give me—totally undeserved, of course.” That took some doing, and some strength of character too; how many of us, she wondered, would hide a Nobel prize under our bushel? Her friend had heard the news, she remembered his telling her, through a message left on his telephone answering machine. This is the Nobel Committee in Stockholm and we are delighted to inform you that you have been awarded the Nobel Prize this year for…

But there was something else to be said about MacGregors. “You do know that their name was interdicted?” she said. “James the Sixth, I’m afraid, reacted rather harshly to some bit of bad behaviour by the MacGregors and made their name illegal. It’s an odd notion, don’t you think? Making a name illegal. They had to start calling themselves things like Murray and so on.”

Guy knew that. Isabel had spoken about it before; she often brought up the Stuarts, for some reason that completely escaped him. People had their historical enthusiasms, he supposed, and the Stuarts were not exactly a tedious dynasty. It might have been better, he thought, if they had been; better for them, that is.

“Mind you,” said Isabel, “it has to be said that James the Sixth was a somewhat miserable piece of work. I’ve tried to like the later Stuarts, you know, but I have to say it’s an effort. Charles the First was such a weak and self-indulged man, and by the time we get to Bonnie Prince Charlie the genes had gone pretty bad. James the Sixth, I suppose, was far brighter than most of them, but he must have been rather difficult company much of the time. Interesting, though: gay kings usually are.”

“Didn’t he have a wretched childhood?” said Guy. “That’s sometimes an excuse, isn’t it? The fact that one has had an awful time as a child can explain so much, can’t it?”

Isabel reached for her cup of coffee. “Does it? I wonder. I think that there’s a case for putting your early years behind you. Plenty of people have done that. They grow up and then draw a line.”

Guy considered this. “Yet the early years won’t necessarily go away. If you’re desperately unhappy when you’re young, aren’t you damaged goods?”

Isabel was prepared to concede this of James VI. “He had that awful tutor, that Buchanan man, who intimidated him.”

Guy nodded. “An inhumane humanist. Very grim.”

“And James,” Isabel continued, “was brought up in such a loveless atmosphere. A major case of maternal deprivation. Then his mother had her head chopped off, we must remind ourselves. That hardly leads to happiness. And his father was blown up, wasn’t he? Again, not a good thing for a parent, or for anyone, actually.” She paused, warming to the theme, which was a favourite one of hers. She thought Henry Darnley, Mary’s husband, was vain and scheming, a narcissist, and even if one would not wish an explosion on anybody, there were some who did seem to ask for it. “And even before he was blown up he would hardly have been a particularly good father, murdering Mary’s secretary, for heaven’s sake, and having all those affairs.”

She glanced about her. A woman at a nearby table was listening, and not bothering to disguise it; did she realise, Isabel wondered, that they were discussing events of four hundred years ago? But let her listen. “Then, of course, when some light comes into James’s life at last, it is taken away from him.”

“Light?”

“His cousin,” said Isabel. “Esmé Stuart, his cousin from France. He turned up in Scotland when James was thirteen, and James fell in love with him. He was very beautiful, by all accounts, and James at last had a friend. Poor boy.”

The eavesdropper’s eyes widened involuntarily.

He wrote poetry, Isabel continued. This sad boy-king of Scots wrote poetry. After Esmé Stuart had been forced out of Scotland by scheming nobles, James had written a poem about a rare Arabian phoenix coming to Scotland and being persecuted. “That was Esmé,” she said. “The boy he loved. He disguised him in the poem as a female phoenix because, well, in those days … It was so sad. And they are lovely lines—full of sorrow and loss.” And well they might have been, she thought. What sorrow there must be in loving somebody who does not love you back; or loving somebody whom the world says you cannot love.

They both fell silent. Then Guy said, “You were talking about ears burning.”

Isabel toyed with her cup. “Yes. There are a few people in this city who know that every Saturday their names are going to be mentioned at numerous dinner parties. They know it. Imagine that, Guy. Imagine knowing that there are ten, maybe twenty, tables at which you are being taken to pieces and then put together again—if you’re lucky.”

Guy made a face. “Uncomfortable.”

“Yes. Deconstruction always is. And that’s where the burning of ears comes in. If there’s any truth in the idea that your ears burn when somebody’s talking about you—and there isn’t, of course—then imagine the ears of these unfortunates. They must glow like beacons in the night.”

“Gossip,” said Guy. “Nobody should worry about gossip. There’s no need for ears to burn.”

Isabel looked up sharply. “Oh really? Don’t you think that gossip can be pretty wounding?”

“Yes,” said Guy. “Malicious gossip can. But a lot of gossip is mild—and really a bit pointless.”

Isabel agreed. “Utterly pointless,” she said. “Look at those glossy magazines that publish tittle-tattle about the doings of celebrities. None of these people actually does anything of any worth to anybody. Not really. But do people like to read about their private lives? Yes, they do. And how. He breaks up with her. She buys a house in France or is seen on so-and-so’s boat. She goes to the gym, and is photographed coming out of it. And so on and so on. Why do people read that sort of thing?”

“Do you read them?” asked Guy.

“Me? Of course not,” said Isabel. She paused. Even as she gave her answer, she realised that this was not true and would have to be corrected. One should never mislead a friend, or an enemy for that matter, she thought. We owed the same duty of truthfulness to everybody, no matter what we thought of them. “I don’t buy them, but as for reading—well, never, that is, never unless my teeth play up.”

Again Guy looked at her blankly.

“I read them when I go to the dentist,” she said. “There are some magazines that we read only when we go to the dentist. Mine has all of them in his waiting room. He also has those ritzy fashion magazines with advertisements for expensive designer sunglasses and so on, and magazines about boats. He has a boat, he told me. So I read these magazines from time to time. But only at the dentist’s.” She looked at him apologetically. “Should I feel ashamed?”

Guy shook his head. “No. We all have guilty pleasures. Yours is harmless enough.” He paused. “But back to burning ears. Who are these people whose ears burn?”

Isabel smiled. “The principals of schools,” she said. “Listen next time you go to a dinner party. People talk about the principals of their children’s schools. They do it all the time.”

Guy digested this. He frowned. “Strange.”

Isabel shrugged. “It keeps people going. Not that these teachers do anything dramatic—or not usually, although there was a good bit of gossip doing the rounds last year when one of the schools appointed a new head of French and then unappointed—or, should we say, disappointed—him before he even arrived to take up the job.”

Guy said that he had heard about that—vaguely.

“The rumour mill went into full-time operation,” said Isabel. “There were all sorts of stories going the rounds.”

“Such as?”

“Amazing things. One I heard was that he had applied under a false name and was wanted by the French police. The French police! I suppose to be wanted by the French police is somehow more exotic than being wanted by other police forces. It can’t be very glamorous to be wanted by the Glasgow police—rather ordinary, in fact—but the French police, now there’s a cachet.”

“And the truth?”

“The board had a change of heart. They had their reasons, no doubt, but these were probably pretty prosaic, and no reflection on the candidate. The French police wouldn’t have come into it, I would have thought.”

Guy changed the subject. He had a catalogue that Isabel had expressed an interest in seeing, and he had brought it to show her. There was an auction coming up at Christie’s in London, and there were several paintings, including a Raeburn, that Isabel said she had heard about. Now, as he put the glossy publication on the table, Isabel went straight to one of the pages he had marked with a small, yellow sticky note.

“Sir Henry Raeburn,” said Guy, as Isabel opened the catalogue. “Look at it. Portrait of Mrs. Alexander and Her Granddaughter.”

Isabel studied the photograph that took up most of one of the pages. A woman in a white-collared red dress was seated against a background of dark green. Beside her was a young girl, of eight perhaps, half crouching, arms resting on the woman’s chair.

“His colours,” said Isabel. “Raeburn used those fabulous colours, didn’t he? He occupied a world of dark greens and reds. Was that the Edinburgh of his day, do you think?”

“Their interiors were like that, I suppose,” said Guy. “Those curtains. Look.”

Isabel reached out and touched the photograph, her finger tracing the line of the fabrics draped behind the sitters. “I find myself thinking of what their world was like,” she said. “When was this painted? Does it say?”

“It’s late Raeburn,” said Guy. “Eighteen-twenty? Something like that.”

“So this little girl,” said Isabel, “might have lived until when? Eighteen-seventy, perhaps. If she was lucky.”

“I suppose so.”

“And then her own daughter—the great-granddaughter of our Mrs. Alexander—would have lived from, let’s say, 1840 until 1900, and her daughter from 1870 until 1930 or even 1940. Though she was actually a bit older when she died.”

Guy looked at her enquiringly. “Oh?”

Isabel sat back. “My paternal grandmother,” she said. “Which makes her”—she pointed to the girl—“my four-times great-grandmother.”

Guy’s surprise was evident. “So that’s why you asked me about this. You’d heard?”

“Yes. I knew that one of my ancestors had been painted by Raeburn—two, in fact. My father told me about it when I was a teenager—he showed me some of the Raeburns in the Portrait Gallery, and he said that on his mother’s side we were Alexanders. The painting was mentioned in one of the books about Raeburn, but its whereabouts were described as unknown.” She pointed to the catalogue. “Until now.”

Guy nodded. “I see. Well, that makes this sale rather important to you. Do you want to go for the painting?”

Isabel reached out to take the catalogue. Opening it, she turned to the full-page photograph. “What do you think?”

Guy shrugged. “It’s a fine double portrait. Everything that makes Raeburn such a great portraitist is there. The ease of it—he painted very quickly, you know, which gives his paintings a wonderful fluidity. That’s there. And the faces … well, they’re rather charming, aren’t they? The girl has a rather impish look to her. Perhaps she was planning some naughtiness, or Raeburn was telling her an amusing story to keep her still while he worked. It’s very intimate in its feel.”

Isabel thought that this was right, but it was not what mattered to her. What mattered was the link that existed between her and two people in the picture. My people, she thought. My people.

“How much do you think it’ll go for?”

There could be no clear answer to this, and they both knew it. “It depends. It always depends in an auction. You never know who’s going to be in the room. You never know who’s going to take a fancy to a painting. Some people have deeper pockets than others.”

She wanted him to put a figure on it, and she pressed him.

“Forty thousand pounds,” he said. “Something like that. But you could be lucky and get it for twenty-five or thirty. Interested?”

Isabel had forty thousand pounds. Not in cash, of course, but she could raise that if she needed it by selling shares. That year she had bought two paintings—one for three thousand pounds and one for eight hundred. She was not used to spending much larger sums on art, although she had done so before. This, though, was special. She nodded her assent. “Will you try?”

“I’ll do my best,” said Guy. “I’ll get a condition report and check that everything’s all right. Then we can go for it, if you like. Give me an upper limit.”

She closed her eyes and saw, rather to her surprise, her mother, her sainted American mother, as she called her. “Don’t miss your chances in this life,” her mother had said to her. And now she was saying it again.

“Thirty …” She hesitated. Her sainted American mother had something to say. Thirty-eight.

“Yes?”

“A hammer price of thirty-eight thousand. Let’s not go any higher than that.”

Guy took the catalogue and made a note in the margin. “We should be all right,” he said.

Isabel looked at her watch. Grace was looking after Charlie for a couple of hours; she had taken him to see her friend who had a child of the same age. She would be back, she said, at two, and Isabel wanted to be at home when they returned.

“I have to get back,” she said, rising to her feet. “When is the sale?”

“Six weeks from now,” said Guy. “Plenty of time. It’s down in London, and so we’ll bid by phone. If you change your mind, let me know.”

“I won’t change it.”

Guy knew that she would not. He knew Isabel reasonably well, and he had noticed two things about her. She told the truth, and she was as good as her word. He, too, rose to his feet, and as he did so, an elderly woman who had been sitting at a nearby table leaned over and addressed him.

“Mr. Peploe? You are Mr. Peploe, aren’t you?”

Guy inclined his head. “Yes.”

“I just wanted you to know how much I like your paintings,” said the woman. “Those lovely pictures of the island of Iona. And Mull too. So striking.”

Isabel bit her lip.

“I’m afraid they’re not mine,” said Guy politely. “My grandfather. Samuel Peploe. He painted them.”

The woman looked surprised. “Really? Well, doesn’t time pass? My goodness. Well, I still want you to know that I like them very much indeed, even if it was your grandfather, not you.”

Guy thanked her politely; he avoided catching Isabel’s eye. Once outside, he looked at her, his eyes bright with amusement. “Well!”

Isabel was thinking of the Raeburn, and of the woman and her granddaughter. We were all tied to one another—ourselves and those who came before us; this had been their city too, these streets their thoroughfares, these stone buildings their homes. The curious anachronistic mistake of the woman in Glass & Thompson merely showed that the barriers between present and past could be porous. Isabel had closed her eyes and seen her mother; as easily might she look into the mirror and see something in the shape of her nose, or the line of her brow, that she might discern in the two sitters in that Raeburn portrait. We were ourselves, but we were others too; our past written on us like lines drawn on a palimpsest, or the artist’s rough sketch beneath the surface of a painting. And little Charlie—she saw herself in him sometimes, in the way his mouth turned when he smiled; and her father was there, too, in Charlie’s eyes, which were like two sparkling little pools of grey and green.

She looked at her watch; she would have to rush to be home when Charlie arrived. She wanted to be there in the hall, to take him from Grace and to hold him tightly against her, which he allowed, but only for a few seconds, before he began to struggle to escape her embrace. That was the lot of the mother of sons; one embraced and held them, but even in their tenderness they were struggling to get away, and would.

CHAPTER TWO

THE NEXT DAY was a working day for Isabel. As editor—and now owner—of the Review of Applied Ethics, she could determine her own working patterns, but only to an extent. The journal was quarterly, which might have led outsiders to think that Isabel’s job could hardly be onerous. Such outsiders would be wrong—as outsiders usually are about most things. Although three months intervened between the appearance of each issue of the journal, those three months were regulated by a series of chores that were as regular as the tides, and as unforgiving. Papers had to be sent out for review and, if accepted for publication, edited. The professors of philosophy who wrote these papers were, as Isabel had discovered, only human; they made mistakes in their grammar—egregious mistakes in some cases even if in others only minor solecisms. She corrected most of these, trying not to seem too pedantic in the process. She allowed the collective plural: If you wish to reform a person, you should tell them—Isabel allowed the them because there were those who objected strongly to gendered pronouns. So you could not tell him in such circumstances, but would have to tell him or her, which became ungainly and awkward, and sounded like the punctilious language of the legal draughtsman. She also allowed infinitives to be split, which they were with great regularity, because that rule was now almost universally ignored and its authority, anyway, was questionable. Who established that precept, anyway? Why not split an infinitive if one wanted to? The sense was as easily understood whether or not the infinitive was sundered apart or left inviolate.

But it was not just the editing of papers that took up her time. An important part of each issue was the review section, where four or five recent books in the field of ethics were reviewed at some length, and a few others, less favoured, were given brief notices. Then there was a short column headed Books Received, which listed other books that had been sent by publishers and were not going to be given a review. It was an ignominious fate for a book, but it was better than nothing. At least the journal acknowledged the fact that the book had been published, which was perhaps as much as some authors could hope for. Some books, even less favoured, got not even that; they fell leaden from the presses, unread, unremarked upon by anyone. Yet somewhere, behind those unreadable tomes, there was an author, the proud parent of that particular book, for whom it might even be the crowning achievement of a career; and all that happened on publication was silence, a profound and unfathomable silence.

That morning, four large padded envelopes were sitting on Isabel’s desk in her large Victorian house in Merchiston. She closed the study door behind her, and looked at her desk. The four packages were clearly books—they had that look to them—and several other envelopes which her housekeeper, Grace, had retrieved from the floor of the hall were just as evidently papers submitted for publication. It would take her until lunchtime to deal with these, she decided; Jamie had a free morning—no bassoon pupils and no rehearsals—which meant that he could devote his time to his son. They were going to Blackford Pond, where the ducks were a source of infinite fascination to Charlie. Then they would go somewhere else, he said, but he had yet to decide where. “Charlie will have views,” he said. “He’ll tell me.”

Charlie now spoke quite well, in primitive sentences with a subject—as often as not himself—and a verb, usually in the present tense but occasionally in the past. His past tense, Isabel had noticed, had a special ring to it. “It is a special past tense he uses,” she said to Jamie. “It is the past regretful. The past regretful is used to express regret over what has happened. All gone is a past regretful, as is Ducks eaten all bread.” He still talked about olives, of course; olive had been his first word, and his appetite for olives was as strong as ever. Olives nice, he had said to Isabel the previous day, and she, too, thought that they were nice. They had then looked at one another, Charlie staring at his mother with the intense gaze of childhood. She had waited for him to say something more, but he had not. They had said everything there was to say about olives, it seemed, and so she bent forward and kissed him lightly on his forehead.

She thought of that now as she surveyed her desk. She sighed; she was a mother, but she was also an editor, and a philosopher, and she had to work. Settling herself at her desk, she opened the first of the book parcels. Two books tumbled out, accompanied by a compliments slip on which a careless hand had scribbled For favour of a review. Underneath was the date of publication and a request that no review should appear before then. That, thought Isabel, was easily enough complied with, given that journal reviews were sometimes published as much as two years after publication. She herself had reviewed a book eighteen months after publication and had discovered only after her review had been published that the author had died six months previously. It was not a good book, and in her review she had written that she felt that the author’s next book on the subject would be much better. Worse than that, she had commented on a certain lifelessness in the prose. Well, he was dead; perhaps he was dying when he wrote the book. She shuddered at the memory. She had tried to be charitable, but she had not been charitable enough. Remember that, she said to herself; remember that in your dealings with others—they may be dying.

The two books looked interesting enough. One was on the moral implications of being a twin; the second was on the notion of fairness in economic judgements. She was not greatly excited by the economics book—that would be received, she thought … unless the author was dying, of course. She turned to the back flap and looked at the photograph of the author. He looked young, she decided, and healthy enough to write another book, which might get a full review. He could be placed in the received pile without risk of … she was about to say injustice to herself, when she realised she was being unjust. Just because she was not particularly interested in discussions of fairness in economics, that did not mean that others would not be. No, she would promote the book to the Brief Notice section. That was fair. As for the twins book, on opening it, she saw this sentence: “Because moral obligation comes with closeness, there is a case for saying that the twin owes a greater duty to his or her twin than is owed by non-twins to their siblings.” She frowned. Why? She flicked through several pages and read, at random, “Of the many dilemmas confronting the twin, a particularly demanding one is the decision whether or not to tell one’s twin of a medical diagnosis received. If one twin is diagnosed with a genetic disease, for example a form of cancer in which there is a strong familial element, then the other twin should know.” That, said Isabel to herself, is not a dilemma. You tell.

The twins book would have to be reviewed, and it occurred to Isabel that it would be interesting to have it reviewed by somebody who was a twin. But the twin would have to be a philosopher, and she was not sure if she knew any person answering that description. The author, perhaps, might know; she would write to him and ask him. Of course she could not commit herself to any name that he suggested—authors could not choose their reviewers—but it would be a start.

She opened the next parcel and extracted from it a slender book bound in blue. Tucked into it was a folded letter, which she took out and opened. She saw the heading of the notepaper first and caught her breath. Then she read it.

The letter came from Professor Lettuce, the previous chairman of the Review’s editorial board and friend and collaborator of Professor Christopher Dove, the closest thing to an enemy that Isabel was aware of possessing. She had not chosen Dove as an enemy—he had assumed that role himself, and had revealed a ruthless streak in the process. He had recently accused Isabel of publishing a plagiarised article, but had been seen off. Lettuce had initially backed him, but had been persuaded by Isabel to change his ways—“I have been a foolish Lettuce” was his memorable remark on that occasion. Now it appeared that Dove and Lettuce were friends again, because here was Lettuce sending Isabel a new book by Dove and offering to review it.

Dear Isabel [wrote Lettuce], I hope that this finds you well and that the Review is thriving in your capable hands. Our mutual friend [our mutual friend, Isabel muttered sotto voce] Chris Dove [Chris!] has, as you may know, written a rather interesting new book. I’m not sure if the publishers have sent you a copy—perhaps they have—but at the risk of burdening you with numerous copies, here is another one. I thought I might offer to review it for you, and have started penning a few thoughts, if that’s all right with you. I’ll do about two thousand words because I think that this is a work that deserves a decent discussion. I’m a bit pressed at the moment—this wretched research assessment business is such a burden—and Dolly [Dolly Lettuce, his wife, thought Isabel. Poor woman. Dolly!] is in the middle of making redecoration plans for our house at Wimbledon, so all is rather fraught on the domestic front—but I should be able to get it done by the end of the month and will send it along then. Thanks so much for agreeing to this, and please—please—do get in touch with me when you wrench yourself away from the provinces and come to London. Lunch will be on me. All best,

Robert Lettuce

Isabel felt the discomfort of being outraged but not being sure of which cause of her outrage was the more significant. Lettuce had casually insulted Scotland, which was not a province of England, but a country—and an old one at that—within a union with England. Nothing could be more calculated to annoy a Scotswoman, and Lettuce should have known that. But that was merely a matter of personal pride, which Isabel could swallow easily enough; it was more difficult for her to deal with the breathtaking arrogance of his assumption that he could write a review without being asked. He thanked her for agreeing to publish his review—well, she had not agreed and felt highly inclined not to do so, and she would not be bought off with a breezy invitation to lunch in London.

She would write to Lettuce, she decided, and thank him for offering to review Dove’s book, but would say that she must—very reluctantly—decline his offer because … She thought of reasons. It would be tempting to say that it was because Dove’s book was not of sufficient interest to merit a review—that was very tempting. Or she might say that she had decided to review the book herself. That was perhaps even more tempting, because it would give her the chance to cast Dove’s book into the outer darkness that it undoubtedly deserved. “This slight contribution to the literature,” she might write, “is unlikely to find many readers.” Or, “An effort to elucidate a difficult topic—courageous, yes, but unfortunately a failure.”

She stopped herself. Such thoughts, she told herself, were crude fantasies of revenge. Dove had plotted against her and would have succeeded in hounding her out of her job had she not had the resources to buy the Review from under his nose, and then get rid not only of him but also of Lettuce, who had been his co-conspirator. Dove had planned her removal, but that did not mean that she should stoop to his level and seek revenge by writing a critical review of his book. That would be quite wrong.

She looked up at the ceiling. One of the drawbacks to being a philosopher was that you became aware of what you should not do, and this took from you so many opportunities to savour the human pleasure of revenge or greed or sheer fantasising. Well might St. Augustine have said Make me chaste, but not just yet; that was how Isabel felt. And yet she could not; she could not let herself experience the pleasure of getting her own back on Dove because it was, quite simply, always wrong to get one’s own back on another. It was her duty to forgive Dove and, if one were to be really serious about it, to go further than that and to love him. Hate the acts of Doves, not Doves themselves, she muttered; they said that about sin, did they not? Hate the sin, not the sinner.

She put aside Lettuce’s letter and picked up Dove’s book. She read the title, Freedom and Choice: The Limits of Responsibility in a Role-Fixated World. She wrinkled her nose. Was the world really role-fixated? Freedom of choice, though, was a subject in which she was interested, and indeed she had written on the subject when she was still a graduate research fellow. Turning to the end of the book, she found an annotated bibliography. She could see that Dove had been assiduous in his marshalling of the literature, and there, yes, there were her two papers on this subject. And after the first of these—a paper that had been published in the Journal of Philosophy, and which had been fairly widely cited—was Dove’s annotation. He had used only one word: Unreliable.

JAMIE RETURNED at twelve. Charlie had fallen asleep in his pushchair—a tiny bundle of humanity in Macpherson tartan rompers and green shoes. The rompers were damp across the chest with orange juice and childish splutterings; the shoes had a thin crust of mud on them. She smiled; an active morning with his father. She kissed them both: Charlie lightly on his brow so as not to awaken him; Jamie on the mouth, and he held her, prolonging their embrace.

“I’ve missed you,” he said.

She looked surprised. “Missed me this morning?”

“Yes. I wish that you had been with us. We saw the ducks. In fact, we had a really intense time with the ducks. We watched them for half an hour.”

She smiled. “They’re obviously fascinating when you’re …” She pointed down at Charlie. “When you’re that size. Think of what they must look to him. Massive.”

Jamie followed her gaze. “He’s out for the count. Should we leave him?”

“Yes, let him sleep.” She drew Jamie aside. “I wanted to ask you something.”

She took him into her study and showed him Dove’s book. Jamie took it from her and looked at the title on the cover.

“Christopher Dove,” he said. “Your friend.”

“It was sent to me this morning by Professor Lettuce. Can you believe that?”

Jamie shrugged. “I’ve never been able to tell them apart. Lettuce is the large, pompous one, isn’t he? And Dove’s the tall one with the creepy manner?”

“You describe them very well,” said Isabel. “Yes, that’s them.”

“Oh well,” said Jamie. “So Dove’s written this book. You don’t want me to read it, do you?”

Isabel explained about Lettuce’s letter and his completely unwarranted assumptions. “He shows the most amazing brass neck,” she said. “And I really don’t know what to do. That’s what I wanted to discuss with you.”

Jamie lowered himself into one of the easy chairs in Isabel’s study. “Say no. Send the book back and tell them that you decide which books are to be reviewed. Be polite, but firm.”

She knew that was perfectly sound advice. Lettuce should not be left in any doubt as to the position; a fudge of any sort would simply mean that he would proceed to write the review regardless and it would then be difficult for her to turn it down. And yet, and yet … She looked at Jamie. She could not imagine his being involved in a fight of any sort—he was just too gentle for that. And too nice. He was also truthful: he said what he was thinking and rarely agonised—as she did—before coming up with a view.

“You’re probably right,” she said. “But I’m afraid that I’m worried about something.”

Jamie raised an eyebrow. “You’re not scared of Lettuce, are you?”

“Of course not. No. But I’m worried about my reasons for turning him down. What will he conclude? Don’t you imagine that he’ll think me petty and vindictive? And others might think that too. If Dove goes around saying that I ignored his book for reasons of personal spite. And he could say that, you know.”

“Yes, he could. But do you really have to worry about what Dove says? People won’t necessarily believe him.”

She thought about this. She wanted it to be true, but she did not think it was. People were only too ready to believe things that were manifestly untrue. When it came to remarks that portrayed others in a bad light, people were happy to believe things that showed others to be weak or flawed in some way: we believed that of them because it made us feel better; it was as simple as that.

“You see,” said Isabel, “Dove describes one of my papers as unreliable. He says so in the bibliography to this new book of his.”

Jamie looked surprised. “Unreliable? Dove said that?”

Isabel nodded. Her dislike of Dove was growing; the slowburning qualities of anger meant that she was only now beginning to feel the impact of that one dismissive word: unreliable. How dare he? And what did he mean by it?

She closed her eyes. Anger disfigured. She told herself that, took a deep breath, and then told herself it once more. We are disfigured by anger and must avoid it. We must, no matter how much we seethe.

“I think I should let him write it,” she said.

“In spite of this unreliability business?”

“If I show him that I am happy to publish criticisms of my own work, maybe that will make him think again.”

“Think again about you?”

“Yes. About me.”

Jamie rose to his feet. He put Dove’s book down on the table and walked across the room to Isabel. He embraced her. He kissed her with a sudden, urgent passion. What have I done, she wondered, either to provoke this or to deserve this? She returned his kiss. It did not matter about Dove; it did not matter about Lettuce; they were nothing to her, now that she had this exquisite, gentle young man who had come so unexpectedly into her life. She had everything, while Dove and Lettuce had nothing. So she should forgive them and publish Lettuce’s review, even if it turned out to be—as she thought it would— a paean of praise to Dove and all his works. Let him do that; she had everything and could afford to be generous.

She disengaged from their embrace. “I’ll publish it,” she said. “I’ve decided.”

“If that’s what you want to do,” said Jamie. He looked at her tenderly. “You know, you’re a tremendously kind person. It’s one of the reasons I love you. Your kindness.”

She was taken aback. “There are many people much kinder than I am.”

He looked doubtful. “Name one.”

“You,” she said.

HE COOKED LUNCH—a light bowl of pasta with a few mushrooms; a salad. They ate in the kitchen, talking about a concert that he was due to be playing in the following week. She was beginning to know her way around the politics of music; she understood now the quirks of conductors, of concert hall managements, of temperamental, prickly administrators. Not enough effort, Jamie said, had been made to advertise this concert.

“And then, when they get a disappointing turnout, they wonder why,” he said.

“People can’t attend things they don’t know are happening,” said Isabel. And then laughed; it was such an obvious thing to say.

Jamie agreed.

She suddenly thought of something. “Have there been occasions when the players forgot to go?” said Isabel.

Jamie’s smile disappeared. “Don’t,” he said.

She looked at him inquisitively. “You?”

He looked down at his plate. “I can’t even bring myself to think about it,” he said.

She could see that he was distressed; what had started as a light-hearted conversation had become serious.

“You mustn’t let it worry you,” she said quietly. “Who amongst us hasn’t inadvertently done something awful?” She thought of her review of the dying man’s book. “We have to forgive ourselves, you know.”

He nodded. “They had to cancel. They had to refund the ticket money.”

“Forgive yourself.”

“Really?”

“Yes. People punish themselves—sometimes for years. But it’s not always necessary. Forgiveness allows everybody to start again, not to be burdened with a whole lot of old business.”

She thought of those studies of conversion that showed how people turned to a new faith or a new ideology to get rid of the burden of the past. They became new people, they thought, and could forget about what they had done before. She was not sure whether that was self-forgiveness or self-invention; they were different things, really, and she could not help but feel that self-invention was an easy way out. Not me, it said. A different person did that. Which could be quite true. We did become different people as we grew; the child is not the same person as the man.

She looked at Jamie thoughtfully. “What were you like as a little boy?” she asked.

He shrugged. “A little boy,” he said. “You know … a little boy.”

She tried to imagine him at the age of seven. “Your hair?”

“Same. And you?”

“I wore my hair in pigtails,” she said. “I had a doll called Baby Isabel and we had matching dresses. If I put on a gingham dress, then Baby Isabel wore the same.”

Jamie smiled. “Baby Isabel! What a lovely name. You must have loved her. Did you?”

Isabel looked away. “Baby Isabel was left on a bus,” she said. “I cried and cried. They tried to get me to pay attention to one of my other dolls, but it was Baby Isabel I wanted.”

He was silent. Then Jamie spoke. “You know something, Isabel? I murdered my teddy. I threw him over the Dean Bridge—you know, right over the Water of Leith, where the suicides jump. I threw my teddy over the edge. I don’t know why I did it. I suppose I might have wanted to see him fall, but the parapet was too high and I couldn’t. That was the end of him. My mother said, ‘Now you’ve done it. That’s the end of Teddy.’ ” He paused. “I’ve never talked about it. Never.”

She reached out to touch him. “I think you can forgive yourself for that too.”

He rose to clear the lunch things away. “All right, I forgive myself.”

“Good.”

She went out into the hall, where they had left Charlie to continue his sleep. She lifted him up gently; she would transfer him to his bed. She was aware that she and Jamie had experienced a moment of intimate disclosure in the kitchen, talking about their childhoods, about the little things that might seem inconsequential but that were obviously buried somewhere in the mind, where they could be far more powerful than one might imagine. The possessions of childhood are sometimes loved with astonishing intensity; precious to their owners in spite of their simplicity or raggedness. Baby Isabel was a cheap little doll, but adored with passion, as, no doubt, was that betrayed teddy.

As she carried the still sleeping Charlie upstairs, Isabel found herself wondering why Jamie had thrown his teddy over the Dean Bridge. He was punishing him, no doubt—or perhaps he was punishing himself. And if he was punishing himself, what for? She would ask a psychotherapist friend who knew all about such things. This friend had once said to Isabel that we punished ourselves for all sorts of reasons, but, for the most part, we did not deserve it. “In fact,” Isabel had said, “I wonder who truly deserves punishment, anyway. What good does it do to punish a person? All that does is add to the pain of the world.”

Her friend had stared at Isabel. “Yes,” she said. And then, after a further few minutes of thought, she had said yes again. “That sounds so right,” she said. “And yet I suspect, Isabel, that you are very wrong.” And Isabel thought: Yes, I am. She’s right; I’m wrong.

CHAPTER THREE

CAT HAD ASKED ISABEL to help out at the delicatessen the next morning, and Isabel, as she always did, agreed. She knew that her niece only asked for her assistance when she really needed it, and in this case it was the best of reasons: a medical appointment.

Isabel could not help but sound anxious. The news that anybody has a medical appointment is often taken as a sign of the worst; that was entirely natural, even if people saw doctors for all sorts of innocent purposes. “Is everything all right?” she asked. And thought, I could not bear to lose you.

“I’m seeing a dermatologist,” said Cat. “I have a spot and the GP said that …”

“Oh, Cat …”

“Listen, don’t panic. People have spots. She said that it looked absolutely fine to her but she suggested that I have it checked.”

“I know, I know. It’s just that …” And here she almost said, I could not bear to lose you, but did not. “It’s just that I always worry when people have medical appointments.”

“Well don’t,” said Cat. “Anyway, could you …”

“I’ll be there,” said Isabel. “Do you need me to open up?”

Eddie would do that, explained Cat, but it would be helpful if Isabel were able to arrive shortly thereafter. “He’s all right to begin with, but he gets really anxious if he’s in charge by himself for too long. You know how he is.”

Isabel did know. She was fond of Eddie, whom she had known for some years now, and she was used to his vulnerability, even if she had never been able to understand it. It seemed strange to her that a young man who looked robust enough should be so lacking in confidence as to be incapable of being left in charge of a delicatessen. But she realised that this was what anxiety was like—it knew no rhyme or reason; just as a fear of the dark cannot be assuaged by the pointing out that there was nothing there, anxiety could be without foundation.

Something had happened to Eddie—some dark thing—that Cat knew about, but that she would not explain to Isabel. Isabel had not pressed her; if Eddie had told her in confidence, then she would not want Cat to break that confidence. She could guess, though, and she assumed it was to do with sex, and with the shame that went with that. Her heart went out to Eddie; she wanted to wrap her arms about him and say to him that he should not feel ashamed, that whatever had happened to him was not his fault, it was no doing of his, and was no reflection on him. She wanted to say to him that such things happened to both men and women and that it did not mean he was less of a man for it. But she realised that there must have been people who had already said all these things to Eddie and it had made no difference. You did not erase horror and shame with a few words; it did not work that way.

Eddie had made some progress, of course. There had been a girlfriend, and even if she was not what Isabel might have wished for Eddie—she was a Goth, a follower of a fashion for pallid looks and dark clothes—he seemed to grow while she was with him. She had gone, Isabel understood, and she did not think that she had been replaced.

“Isabel?”

“Sorry. I was lost in thought.”

Cat was used to this. Isabel thought too much, she felt. “I said: Will Jamie be able to look after Charlie?”

Isabel was moderately surprised by Cat’s question. Her niece had experienced great difficulty in coming to terms with the fact that it was her aunt—even if Isabel was a very young aunt—who had taken up with her former boyfriend, and there had been a time when she would have scrupulously avoided any mention of Jamie’s name. But that had seemed to become much easier, as this question revealed.

“Yes,” she said. “Jamie will do it, or Grace can if Jamie is teaching. Either way, Charlie will be entertained.”

Arrangements were made, and that morning shortly after nine Isabel made her way along Merchiston Crescent to the delicatessen on Bruntsfield Place. It was a warm morning—June had eased itself into July with a grudging rising of temperature—and the foliage in the gardens along her route was in riot. She dodged a particularly ebullient climbing rose that had sent tendrils into the path of pedestrians; indeed, on one of these tendrils, snagged on a vicious-looking thorn, was a small fragment of blue material. A passerby had been caught, Isabel decided, and had lost a bit of a blouse or a shirt. She stopped, and gingerly took the piece of cloth from the thorn. No, she decided, if the owner of the garden was not going to cut back this impediment to the safe use of the pavement, then she would, before anyone lost an eye on one of those thorns. Reaching up, she took hold of the rose where it crossed the iron railings of the fence and bent it sharply to one side. The plant gave, but not enough; now the tendril pointed down towards the ground, discouraged but not detached.

“Excuse me!”

Isabel gave a start as she heard the voice from the garden.

“Excuse me, what do you think you’re doing?”

A man came into view in the garden; a man somewhere in his fifties, she thought, holding a garden rake.

“Your climbing rose had sent a shoot out over the pavement,” said Isabel. “It’s a bit dangerous, I’m afraid. I was just pruning it for you.”

The man took a step forward. He was wearing a khaki shirt and there were large damp patches under the armpits. His complexion was florid, his face rather puffed. She thought that he looked as if he had suffered a stroke at some point, perhaps not all that long ago.

“You can’t do that and that,” he said gruffly. “That’s my rose and rose. You can’t break its stems like that. Who do you think you are, are?”

“It was over the pavement. It’s already caught somebody. Look—here’s a piece of cloth I’ve taken off one of the thorns. And it could cause real damage. Somebody could get poked in the eye.”

The man took another step forward. She could hear his breathing now; it was shallow and rather fast. He was not healthy, she thought.

“Rubbish,” he said, his voice rising. “Rubbish and rubbish. You can’t take other people’s and people’s roses and break and break them. You can’t and can’t.”

Isabel said nothing. The curious repetition of words that marked his speech was strangely unsettling.

“So, so just you leave my roses and roses alone,” said the man.

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.

“My husband, Alex, is on any number of committees,” Jillian said. “He was a businessman before we retreated to a farm near Biggar, and he’s been co-opted on to virtually every public body in Lanarkshire. I put up with it, and he seems to like it. He’s pretty busy, as you can imagine.”

“What’s the popular saying?” asked Isabel. “If you want something done, ask a busy person.”

“True. And he gets things done. He’s really good at that.” Jillian paused to take a sip of her coffee. “One of the things he does is serve on the board of governors of Bishop Forbes School. You know it? It’s just outside West Linton.”

“Of course I do,” said Isabel. “I was at school in Edinburgh. We used to get the boys from Bishop Forbes shipped in for school dances.”

“They still do that,” said Jillian. “They send them in to dance with girls. Being a boys’ school, they try to arrange some female contact for the boys. Not that the boys need much help in that respect.”

Isabel looked out of the window. She was remembering a school dance where one of the girls had claimed to have seduced a boy in the chemistry lab, having slipped away from the hall with him. They had not believed her, and had pressed her for details. She had burst into tears and accused them of ruining a beautiful experience for her. “You’re such a liar,” said one of the girls. And “Wishful thinking,” said another. The cruelty of children.

Isabel brought herself back to what Jillian was now saying.

“Alex is the chairman of the board of governors, as it happens. It’s his second term; I tried to get him to hand over to somebody else after he had done three years, but you know how some people are—they think they’re indispensable. That, and a sense of duty.”

Isabel was trying to remember Jillian’s husband. There had been a dozen or so people at the Stevensons’ house that night, and she found it difficult. There had been a tall, rather distinguished-looking man who could well have been the chairman of a board of governors. He had talked to her about art, she thought; about Cowie. Yes, they had talked about a Cowie retrospective that the Dean Gallery had put on.

“Not that I would want him to give everything up,” Jillian went on. “I can imagine nothing worse than having one’s husband underfoot all day. So he carries on with my blessing, and I fulfil the role of chairman’s wife as best as I can, although frankly I find school politics pretty stultifying. It’s the pettiness. Any institution is like that, I suppose.

“The principal is a very good man—Harold Slade. Maybe you know him. He rowed for Scotland in the Olympics years ago. Rather like that politician—what’s his name?—Ming Campbell. He was an Olympic runner, wasn’t he? Well, Harold announced that he wanted to take up the headship of an international school in Singapore. He wasn’t going for the money—I think he was just ready for a change, which was fair enough. He had been principal for twelve years, which is quite a long time for one person to hold the job. So we advertised, and Alex was the chairman of the appointment committee—naturally enough.”

Jillian sipped again at her coffee. “We had rather more applications than we expected. Some of them were very good. One or two withdrew for various reasons, but eventually they put together a rather strong shortlist of three candidates, all of them from Scotland. We had expected to get some impressive applicants from England, but for some reason the English candidates were rather weak. So it’s pretty much a local list, which makes it easier to get in references and so on. Alex likes to talk to referees face-to-face if he possibly can, and he’s been able to do that since all three are Scottish.”

Isabel nodded. “I suppose it’s important to talk to people,” she said. “It’s hard to be honest in a written reference. You expect that the candidate will get hold of it one way or another. And then, if you’ve written something damning, there’s all sorts of trouble. It’s rather like doctors’ notes. They can’t write what they really think any more—the patient can see what’s there.”

Jillian had views on this. “And a good thing too,” she said. “Doctors used to write terrible things in the past. I had a friend who found out that she was described in her medical notes as a ‘dreadful woman.’ ”

“And was she?” asked Isabel. She spoke quickly; it slipped out, and she immediately apologised. “No, I don’t really mean that. I mean …” She trailed off. There were dreadful people, and doctors had to deal with them.

“Not at all,” said Jillian. “Maybe she’s a bit demanding, but that’s not the same as being dreadful.”

“No, of course not.”

“Anyway,” Jillian continued, “it looked as if we’d find no difficulty in getting a very good person to take over, but then my husband received an anonymous letter. Normally he would throw such a thing straight into the wastepaper basket, but in this case there was something that stopped him from doing so.”

“It was about the candidates?”

“Yes. Well, yes and no. It was about one of the candidates. Unfortunately, it didn’t say which one. It merely said that there was something about one of them that would cause the school considerable embarrassment if he were to be appointed. But it gave no further details.”

“A shot in the dark,” suggested Isabel. “The writer of this letter could be trying it on, surely. It could just be a spoiler. Perhaps from one of the unsuccessful candidates. People get pretty upset about these things.”

“I thought that,” said Jillian. “But there was something significant about this letter. It gave the names of all the candidates. So the person who wrote it must have seen the shortlist. And I can’t imagine there were many of those. There were the members of the committee—and it’s hardly likely to have been one of them. And … well, the school secretary, Miss Carty. She’s one of those people you find in schools who never seem to have a first name, but it’s Janet in her case. A rather mousy woman, probably unhappy about something or other.”

One might say that about most of us, thought Isabel. Most of us are unhappy about something or other.

“Anything else? Was there anything else in the letter?” she asked.

Jillian shook her head. “No.”

“Typed?”

“No. Handwritten. In green ink.”

Isabel smiled. “There’s a popular view that green ink is favoured by the insane. No truth to it, no doubt. But people say that. They say that real cranks like green ink.”

Jillian reached for her cup again. She had said all she wished to say, it appeared, and she was waiting for Isabel’s reaction.

“It must be rather worrying,” said Isabel. “I can see that. But I don’t know if I can say more than that.”

“Would you look into it?” asked Jillian.

“Well, I don’t really see what I can do. I really don’t.”

Jillian leaned forward. “Please,” she said. “We have to make an appointment. But we just can’t risk appointing somebody who is going to come unstuck because of their past. We can’t afford scandal—you do see that, don’t you?”

Isabel said that she understood that reputation was important. But this did not seem to satisfy Jillian, who returned to the theme. “I can’t stress enough how important it is to avoid scandal,” she said. “Education is competitive these days. Parents have a choice. A whiff of something not quite right and we would lose students—we really would.”

“I understand. But, really, what do you expect me to do?”

Jillian lowered her voice. A young couple had come into the delicatessen and had taken a seat at a neighbouring table. The woman was looking at them in a way that suggested more than casual interest. “We need a very discreet person—and I gather that you are just that. We need somebody to make enquiries and find out which of these three has … well, has a past.”

“We all have a past.”

Jillian brushed this aside. “There are pasts and pasts.” She paused. “Please help us. The last thing we could do is to get professional enquiry agents involved—imagine if that ever got out. So we need somebody like you—somebody who knows her way about Edinburgh, who understands the issues. You’d never be suspect. And I have done my homework on you—you have a reputation, you know, for helping people.”

Isabel stared down at the table. She had more than enough to do over the next few weeks. And yet she had never turned down a direct plea for help. Jillian was not to know it, of course, but Isabel found it very difficult indeed—practically impossible—to say to somebody in need of help that they would get no assistance from her.

“All right,” said Isabel.

Jillian reached out and took Isabel’s hand and squeezed it. “You’re an angel.”

I’m not, thought Isabel. I’m weak.

“Look,” said Jillian. “I’m not sure how you do these things, but why don’t I send you a photocopy of each candidate’s application? There’s a curriculum vitae with each of them—that’ll tell you all you need to know.”

“And more than I should know,” said Isabel.

Jillian looked blank. “I don’t see …”

“Confidentiality,” said Isabel.

Jillian laughed dismissively. “Oh, we never bother with that.” She paused. “Do you?”

Isabel looked at her in a bemused fashion. “But you yourself said that you wanted me to do this because you didn’t want it to get out. That suggests that you attach at least some importance to confidentiality.”

Jillian was brisk. “Where necessary,” she said. “But not otherwise.”

CHAPTER FOUR

JILLIAN MACKINLAY,” said Isabel from her chair at the kitchen table.

Jamie barely looked up from the stove. He was cooking dinner that night, and with Charlie safely tucked up in bed and asleep by now—he had been tired out by five o’clock and had had been given an early supper and bath—the house seemed quiet. Any sudden absence of children, Isabel noted, made the normal silences of the evening seem more pronounced; a small child could be a centre of noise, like a cyclone moving across the weather map, until suddenly, at bedtime, the storm subsided and quiet returned.

“Jillian who?”

“Mackinlay,” said Isabel. “We met them at the Stevensons’. It was some time ago …” She thought quickly; in the lives of most of us, there is a time before our partner and a time after our partner: in her case, BJ (Before Jamie) and AJ (After Jamie), although AJ suggested that Jamie was in the past, which he was not, and so DJ (During Jamie) might be more appropriate. She was sure that this meeting at the Stevensons’ had been in the DJ years.

“Can’t remember,” muttered Jamie.

Of course he could not, thought Isabel; they met so many people on the social round—such as it was—and one could not be expected to remember every conversation at every drinks or dinner party. Most such conversations were instantly forgettable anyway, merging into one another, smoothed out by banality.

“There’s no reason for you to remember her. I almost didn’t when I saw her this morning, but then she helpfully told me exactly who she was. People sense it when you haven’t got a clue who they are.”

“Garlic,” said Jamie.

She looked at him quizzically. “Garlic?”

“Sorry. I’m trying to get this right. I haven’t put any garlic in and she said that I should. Or I think that she did.”

“She being?”

Jamie dipped a spoon into the contents of the pot and tasted the result. “Mary Contini.”

“Check the recipe.”

He put down the spoon, shaking his head. “I don’t know where I put the book. It’s somewhere, but I don’t know … Do you think garlic makes a difference?”

Isabel smiled. “Yes, of course. Garlic in a dish makes it taste garlicky.” She paused; what was wrong with Jamie this evening? “Don’t you agree? Whereas dishes without garlic …”

Jamie sighed. “Don’t taste of garlic.”

She looked at him. The sigh was uncharacteristic; it suggested that he had found her comment tiresome, a weak attempt at humour.

“Do you want me to take over?” She had not asked him to cook that evening—he had volunteered. He was a good cook, she had discovered, and unlike many men he seemed prepared to stick closely to the recipe—or most of the time, at least. Men, she had noticed, were inclined to be slapdash in their measuring of quantities and even choice of ingredients; her father, who belonged to a generation of males who rarely ventured into the kitchen, had occasionally cooked but had been gloriously cavalier in his methods, substituting mint for basil and, on one famous occasion, onions for potatoes.

Jamie declined Isabel’s offer, but not very graciously, she thought. He was rarely irritable, and there seemed to be something on his mind this evening. Should she ask him? She watched him at the stove. Yes, his body language gave it away; there was something tense about his position, as if he were feeling hostility to the task he was performing, as if he were poised to move away. He was standing, she thought, in the way of an opera singer about to stride off the stage in a display of high dudgeon.

“Should I …”

He did not let her finish. “I’m fine. It’s just that I wish I had the recipe to hand … Garlic.”

“Put it in. You can’t go wrong with garlic.” You could, of course.

He mumbled something she did not catch. Then he gave the casserole dish a final stir, replaced the lid and turned to face her. “This woman, Jillian what’s-her-name—what about her?”

“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.

“Yes,” said Grace, not without an air of satisfaction. “John Fraser is the cousin of a woman who comes to our meetings. I sit next to her sometimes. She told me. He told her, and then she told me. He said he wanted the job because at the moment he’s an assistant principal at some school near Stirling. He’s ambitious, she said.”

Isabel digested this. The meetings to which Grace referred were, of course, her spiritualist sessions. All sorts of people went there, it seemed, as Grace often mentioned contacts she had made at some seance or other. She remembered her conversation with Guy Peploe about villages; not only was Edinburgh a village, but so was Scotland.

“You haven’t met him, have you?” asked Isabel.

“No. Not him. As I said, his cousin sometimes sits beside me.”

Isabel nodded. “Has she said much about him?”

Grace thought for a moment. “I don’t think so. She likes him a lot, though. They were quite close as children, I think, and they’ve kept up with one another. He’s …”

Isabel waited. “Yes?”

“He’s a mountaineer, I think. He …”

A shadow moved outside; Isabel noticed it out of the corner of her eye. Brother Fox? He sometimes slunk through the gardens during daylight hours, leaving the path he had created for himself under the rhododendrons and venturing out into the middle of the lawn, blinking in the direct sunlight. What did foxes see? she wondered.

“So he’s a climber. Interesting.”

“I think he’s one of these people who climbs Munros. You know—they collect them.”

Isabel did know. Munros were Scottish mountains above three thousand feet, named after a famous Scottish mountaineer. There were several hundred of them, and the real Munro-baggers tried to climb them all in as short a time as possible; sometimes that was a few years, sometimes it was a lifetime.

Isabel thought for a moment. She, too, had had a cousin, Delia, who was a mountaineer, a cousin of her father’s generation who had been a staunch member of the Scottish Ladies’ Climbing Club. Cousin Delia had taken the eighteen-year-old Isabel to climb in Glencoe, and they had stayed in a bothy belonging to the club. It had been during the high summer, with its white nights, and Isabel had awoken early, not long after four, and the tops of the mountains were already touched by the first rays of the sun. She had ventured outside, startling a couple of sheep grazing at the side of the small whitewashed building, and they had scurried away up a slope, sending scree trickling down the hillside. The experience had remained in her mind, as some moments can, like a photograph filed away in an album, a captured moment of her life.

And later that day, when they were coming down the mountain, for a while they followed the course of a river that was joined at one point by a burn tumbling off the mountainside. At this confluence there was a pool, bounded by smooth rocks that sloped gently under the water. Delia had turned to her and said—Isabel remembered her words so clearly, again one of those curious memories that lodge in our minds for no particular reason—“This is where the men swam; the lady mountaineers bathed in a pool just a little further down.” And in her eighteen-year-old’s imagination she saw the men in the water, swimming purposively, as men might do, while round the corner, in their concealed pool, the Scottish ladies stood half submerged, like Diana and her nymphs caught by some passing artist and fixed for ever in paint.

She looked at Grace, who had picked up Charlie again and was bouncing him up and down, to his evident pleasure. “Do you think I could meet the cousin?”

Grace continued to bounce Charlie. “Him?”

“No, her. Your friend. The woman who goes to …”

“The Psychic Centre?” It was the name of the organisation that ran Grace’s meetings.

“Yes. I’d like to meet her.”

Grace shrugged. “She’s not there every week. Most weeks, but not every week.”

Isabel assured her that this would be perfectly all right and asked when the next meeting would be.

“Tomorrow night,” said Grace. “There’s a man from Denmark coming to speak to us.”

“I’d be most interested in coming,” said Isabel. “A medium?”

“Another of these psychic locators,” said Grace. “He finds missing people. He goes into a trance and sees people. He is very effective.”

“That reminds me,” said Isabel. “Have you seen my Chambers Dictionary? I had it somewhere and I can’t …”

Grace responded quickly. “In the morning room. Beside that green chair.”

Isabel smiled. “You saw it?” she asked.

Grace looked at her suspiciously. “Don’t joke about these things, please. They are not for laughing at.”

“But I wasn’t joking,” said Isabel. “I simply asked you if you saw it. The trouble with English is that words mean so many different things.” And that was true, she thought. English was such a strange language, one in which even the words please and thank you could be used as stinging weapons in arguments.

Grace raised an eyebrow. “Oh yes,” she said, meaning, in fact, that she did not believe Isabel’s protestations of innocence.

Charlie began to niggle. He was bored with all this, and meant exactly what he said.

CHAPTER FIVE

SHE DID NOT TALK to Jamie about the cellist; every couple has areas into which they know it is best not to venture. Isabel sensed that Jamie did not want to discuss what he had told her the previous evening, and she did not broach the subject. He would talk to her again, she thought, but only when he felt ready to do so, when he had adjusted to the fact that his colleague would not recover.

She told him, though, of her intention to go with Grace to the lecture by the Danish parapsychologist. Would he care to accompany them? Cat had recently suggested she might babysit, and Isabel wanted to take her up on the offer. It would help to cement her niece’s relationship with Charlie, which was not as close as Isabel might have wished. She could not force Charlie on Cat, but she could make it possible for her to unbend a bit and forgive her tiny cousin for being her ex-boyfriend’s child.

Jamie looked doubtful. “I’m not interested in all those … those spirits,” he said. “Is it a good idea? If people survive death, why bother them? It’s like running after people you’ve said goodbye to and trying to start the conversation all over again.”

“I’m rather inclined to agree with you,” said Isabel. “But I think that Grace secretly appreciates our taking an interest in these meetings of hers.”

“Maybe,” said Jamie. “But I’m not sure I want to get mixed up in it. Mind you …”

“Yes?”

He began to smile. “You went once, didn’t you?”

“I did.”

He remembered her telling him about the meeting she had attended with Grace. Messages had been received, she said, for named people in the room, and received with enthusiasm. He wondered whether this would happen again; if it did, perhaps it would be interesting to see it, even if the messages did not really come from the other side, as he had heard Grace calling it.

“Maybe I’ll come.”

She encouraged him, and it was agreed. “But you must keep a straight face,” she warned. “It wouldn’t be right to go in the wrong spirit.”

It was an unfortunate choice of words, and they both smiled at it, wryly. Isabel felt disloyal to be doing or saying anything that could be considered to be making fun of Grace. There was a simple rule, she thought, holding that we should only say of people that which we are prepared to say to their face. But it was a rule that was almost impossible to follow—at least for those who fell short of sainthood. “I’m serious,” Isabel continued. “It would offend Grace if you burst out laughing.”

“I know,” said Jamie. “I’ll dig a fingernail into my palm. Or count backwards from one hundred—in French. That’s what I used to do when I was a choirboy. We all found it very difficult not to laugh. We found the Old Testament screamingly funny at that age. All that smiting.”

“And begetting,” said Isabel. “Boys must find talk of begetting very amusing.”

Jamie looked up, summoning lines from distant memory. “Goliath of Gath,” he lisped, “with his helmet of brath / One day he that down upon the green grath / When up thlipped young David, the thervant of Thaul / Who thaid, ‘I will thmite thee although I’m tho thmall.’”

Isabel imagined Jamie in his choirboy’s cassock, holding a candle perhaps, and struggling against laughter. But then her mind wandered and she thought of the folklorists Iona and Peter Opie and their combing the streets for the rhymes and sayings of childhood, those little scraps of nonsense, like Jamie’s verse about Goliath and Saul with its flattened vowels and its lisped sibilants. Would Charlie hear any of this in the playground? Would these things be passed on to him?

“I don’t remember that one about Goliath,” she mused. “But what about Skinny Malinky Long-legs, Big Banana Feet? Did you hear about his misfortunes?”

Jamie remembered. “Of course. He went tae the pictures, didn’t he? And couldnae find a seat.”

“Poor man,” mused Isabel. “Imagine him—a lanky, rather socially inadequate figure, going to one of those old-fashioned Glasgow cinemas all by himself because he has no friend to go with him. And then that business with the seat, and people laughing at him.”

“He probably had Asperger’s,” said Jamie.

Isabel nodded. “Possibly. I suspect many of the victims of nursery rhymes had Asperger’s, or something similar. There was a lot of pathology in nursery rhymes. Georgie Porgie, for instance, who kissed the girls and made them cry but who ran away when the boys came out to play. He obviously couldn’t maintain mature relationships with women.” She paused; she was remembering the old copy of Struwwelpeter that she still kept somewhere in the attic but that she had decided she would not show to Charlie. The old German children’s book had been written in an age when it was considered quite permissible to scare small children with threatening and admonitory tales.

“Augustus and his soup,” she said. “Remember: we talked about this before. Augustus was a chubby lad / Fat, ruddy cheeks Augustus had. But then I’m afraid he developed an eating disorder. ‘Take, O take that soup away / I won’t eat any soup today!’”

“And died?” asked Jamie.

“Yes,” said Isabel. “Wasted away. And Belloc took a similar line, come to think of it. Remember his Cautionary Tales? Matilda, who called the fire brigade out without reason and was not believed when the house really did go up in flames? For every time she shouted ‘Fire!’ / They only answered ‘Little Liar!’ Or Henry King? The chief defect of Henry King / Was chewing little bits of string. And the consequence? Intestinal blockage. Which is another great thing to give children to worry about.”

“What other defects do you think Henry King had?” asked Jamie. “If eating string was his chief defect, it suggests that there were others, doesn’t it?”

“I have no idea,” said Isabel.

“Cross-dressing, perhaps,” suggested Jamie. “Wearing women’s jewellery. The other defect of Henry King / Was dressing up in female bling.”

They both laughed. “How did we get to this?” asked Isabel.

“By thinking,” said Jamie, leaning forward to kiss her lightly on the cheek. He loved the way that Isabel’s mind could pursue such odd lines of enquiry. She was unpredictable; she was clever. He loved her so much for both of these qualities, and for being who she was. I could not love anybody else, he thought; not after her, not after Isabel. Really? enquired an unsettling internal voice. Are you sure about that?

CAT AGREED TO BABYSIT CHARLIE the following evening, when they were due to accompany Grace to the Danish parapsychologist’s lecture.

“Of course,” she said when Isabel phoned her. And then, after a moment’s hesitation, she asked, “It’ll be all right, will it, if I bring somebody with me?”

Isabel had not expected this, but tried not to show her surprise. Since the disappearance of Bruno, Cat’s singularly unsuitable last boyfriend, there had been no talk of anybody else. And yet the post was vacant, as Jamie had put it, and judging by Cat’s previous behaviour it would not be long before it was filled.

“Of course. That’s absolutely fine. I’ll leave something out for the two of you. A couple of salmon steaks? You could …”

“Not fish, please,” said Cat. “He doesn’t like fish.”

He, thought Isabel.

“All right. A stew. How about a venison stew—I’ve got some in the freezer. And some …” She was still thinking of Cat’s boyfriend, trying to picture him—on the basis of no evidence at all. He could not be worse than Bruno; nobody could be worse than Bruno, with his elevator heels and his habit of leering. “Puy lentils.” It was the first thing she thought of, and she was not sure whether she had any. But Puy lentils went with everything, she believed, and she had yet to come across anybody who said, “No Puy lentils, please.”

“Not venison, I’m afraid,” said Cat. “I’m not so keen on eating venison. Bambi’s mother, and all that. No, he …”

Isabel interrupted her. “Who is he?” she asked. “I can’t really just call him him.”

Cat seemed to ignore her question, at least at first. “I’ll just make an omelette,” she said. “Gordon likes that. I’ll bring mushrooms—if you could leave out some eggs, that’ll be fine.”

Gordon. Isabel savoured the name. A Gordon would be utterly reliable; a bit solid, perhaps, in an old-fashioned Scottish way, the product of any number of possible homes in the hinterland of Edinburgh—Peebles, perhaps, or somewhere like Kelso, one of those Border towns that produced such reliable rugby players, bank managers, engineers.

“Gordon,” she said. “Have I met him?”

“No, I don’t think you have.”

“Ah.”

There was a silence. Then Isabel spoke again. “Have you been … Have you known him long?”

A defensive note crept into Cat’s voice. “Not all that long. A couple of months. He’s from just outside Kelso originally.”

I knew it! I knew it! It was difficult for Isabel not to feel a certain pleasure at having guessed so accurately the origins of Cat’s new boyfriend. We like predictability, she thought, and we are always satisfied when people behave as we think they will. It makes us feel … well, powerful; the world is not as complex a place as some might think—at least it is not complex for us. She stopped herself. Nemesis stalked those who became pleased with themselves, and it was wrong, anyway, to indulge in self-congratulation. The line between having an adequate view of oneself and smugness was a thin one, and those who walked too close to it usually fell over the edge. So she simply said, “Kelso?” And Cat, equally simply, answered, “Yes, Kelso.”

“And what does he do?” This was a more difficult question, and she realised that Cat might resent it. After the rise and (not only metaphorical) fall of Bruno—who had been a tightrope walker—the issue of the occupation of Cat’s boyfriends had become potentially awkward. She would not want Cat to think that she was going to draw any conclusions as to suitability based on what they did.

The answer surprised her. “He’s a teacher,” said Cat.

“Oh. Where?”

Cat hesitated. “He’s always taught in boys’ schools. It’s Firth College.” She named a school with a particularly good reputation and a headmaster whom Isabel had met on several occasions and liked.

Isabel nodded. She knew the school, which was only a mile or two away, on the brow of a hill that looked down across the city towards the Firth of Forth and the hills of Fife beyond. Her father’s cousin had been there, as had his two sons, and she had dutifully been to see them in the school’s production of The Pirates of Penzance, put on with the help of girls imported from St. George’s School for Girls.

“You remember Cousin Fraser’s two boys?” she said. “They were there. They enjoyed it. A very good school. Nice staff.”

“Gordon likes working there,” said Cat. “The boys are all sons of prosperous farmers and so on, I’m afraid. They play a lot of rugby. There are no discipline problems.” There was a slight note of sarcasm in her voice.

Isabel considered this. There was nothing wrong with playing rugby. There was nothing wrong with being the son of a prosperous farmer. There was nothing wrong with being the son of anybody, she felt. And yet Cat had made it sound like an apology. So was she apologising for Gordon being middle class; for working in a conventional institution with conventional values? “I don’t see anything wrong with that,” she said.

“Maybe,” said Cat. “It’s just that this city is so bourgeois. It really is. Everybody’s so respectable.”

Again Isabel thought: What was wrong with being respectable? And what, she wondered, was the opposite of respectability? It became important to answer that if Cat was suggesting that one should not be respectable. Bohemian? Dissolute? Unconventional? The problem with that was that if everybody was unconventional, then they became conventional. So wild, bohemian, laid-back places, filled with free spirits, would have conventions of their own, which would soon make conventionalists of their inhabitants.

She began to feel irritated. “But, Cat, you yourself are bourgeois,” she said. “Sorry to have to say this, but it’s the truth. You’re ineluctably bourgeois. You own a business. You employ Eddie. You don’t even have a mortgage on your flat. Doesn’t that make you bourgeois?”

There was a silence at the other end of the line, and Isabel quickly continued, “Of course, I mustn’t throw the first stone. I’m bourgeois myself, I suppose—and frankly I don’t see anything wrong with that. I’m very fortunate in this life, I know that, I know that … and I try to help …” She trailed off. One should never boast about what one gave away—and Isabel gave a lot. Yet Cat’s assumption of superiority had irked her, and she almost felt like asking her niece what she gave, which she did not think was very much. And come to think of it, Isabel said to herself, am I all that bourgeois, when I live with a younger man, I don’t engage in trade, when philosophy is my job? This was not the normal pattern of a bourgeois life, whatever that might be.

She decided to move away from the subject. “Those two boys I mentioned,” she said. “Fraser’s boys. Gavin and …”

“Steve.”

“Yes, Gavin and Steve. They went off to university, didn’t they? They must be almost finished by now. Gavin was the older one, wasn’t he? He went off for a gap year in Argentina, didn’t he? He got a job as a gaucho, I think. You must remember that. One knows so few gauchos, I find.”

“Gauchos?” said Cat. “I don’t know any. And what have they got to do with it?”

Isabel laughed. “Don’t make the mistake of underestimating gauchos,” she said.

Jamie would have liked that; Cat did not. “I have to go,” she said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

They discussed the time when she and Jamie would have to leave for Grace’s Psychic Centre, and then rang off. Isabel walked from her study, where she had made the call, to the kitchen, where she was going to make a cup of tea. As she did so, the thought that had been hovering around at the edge of her mind, crystallised: Yes, yes.

She returned to her desk and picked up the envelope she had received from Jillian. She took out one of the papers—the front page of one of the curricula vitae. She hardly had to read it, as she knew what it would say. Gordon Leafers. Place of birth: Kelso. Current position: Senior Mathematics Teacher.

She put down the piece of paper and then picked it up again. She looked at the date of birth. He would be thirty-eight. She smiled. Cat was in her late twenties, which made a gap of about ten years between them. There was nothing unusual in that, but what was interesting here was that Gordon was younger than the other two candidates. And thirty-eight was on the young side for appointment as a principal, which suggested that Gordon was a high-flyer in career terms. That interested her: Cat had chosen respectability.

She went to the window and stared out. She wondered whether she should be astonished at the coincidence, but she realised that she felt no real surprise. As she and Guy had decided over lunch, Scotland was a village, and a very small one at that. She looked up at the sky, and felt appalled. She had been asked, and had agreed, to look at these three candidates, and it transpired that one of them was Cat’s new boyfriend. She now had an interest in the matter and would have to declare it. She could not start investigating somebody who was the boyfriend of a relative, which would go against all the rules, if there were any. But that, of course, was the problem with life. We were often unsure what the rules were or where one found them, even if we knew that they existed. It would be so useful to have a large book that one could put on the table—a book entitled, quite unambiguously, The Rules. Life would be so simple if that were the case; but it never was, and even when one paged through The Rules, one would find areas of ambiguity and doubt, and one’s uncertainty would return. That’s why, she thought, we have judges and lawyers and courts—in other words, as a Freudian might perhaps suggest, that’s why we have Father. But what if Father went away, or said that he really didn’t know about the rules and did not want to start enforcing them? The loss of good authority, she thought; that’s what happened then.

JAMIE LOOKED AT ISABEL and smiled. “You’re behaving as if you’re going on a first date,” he said. “Calm down. It’s just another of Cat’s boyfriends, after all.”

She was aware of being nervous, and when she was nervous she felt fidgety. “You’re right,” she said. “I just have a feeling about this one. I think that somehow he’s going to be different from the others.” She blushed, and corrected herself. As a former boyfriend of Cat, Jamie was one of the others himself. “By that, I mean people like Bruno.”

He reached out and touched her arm gently. “I know you don’t mean me. Don’t worry.”

“I didn’t. You were different. Although I must say that I’m glad that things didn’t work out between you and Cat. Otherwise—no me, no Charlie.”

“I’m glad too.”

There was something else she wanted to ask him, and she decided that this was the time. “How do you feel about her now? Is there still any awkwardness … any difficulty?”

He took time to weigh his reply. “I don’t think so.” He hesitated. “There used to be, yes. Not now.”

“So in your eyes she’s just like anybody else?” Isabel was interested in this. She was not sure that she understood how people could feel indifferent to former lovers. She understood lingering love for somebody who had rejected one, intense love perhaps; reproach; she could even understand hate and detestation; she did not understand indifference.

Yes,” said Jamie. “She’s just like anybody else now.” He paused. “Mostly, that is. If I start thinking about her, then … well, then I get all confused, I suppose.” He looked at Isabel almost apologetically. “That’s the way it is. I’m sorry—it just is. So I don’t think about her in that way. I just don’t.”

“You put the past out of your mind?”

“Yes, I suppose I do.”

Her gaze dwelled upon him, upon the face that seemed to her so perfect. How was it, she wondered, that character could reveal itself so clearly in the structure of human flesh and bone? Jamie looked kind, and intelligent, and gentle, and that was what he was. Could it be otherwise? Could the faces of the wicked look like this, have this light behind them? Perhaps there could be a book of photographs exploring face and character. Goebbels and Mussolini—they could be there to illustrate the proposition at the beginning: Goebbels with his pinched, rat-like features; Mussolini with his thuggish bully’s face; both perfect illustrations of the proposition that character shines through. And from the other end of the spectrum? She wondered about that. Nelson Mandela, perhaps, would be a good candidate: his face was suffused with kindness, with a sort of joy that was unmistakable; or Mother Teresa of Calcutta, whose lined, careworn features were so transformed when she smiled. She could look severe sometimes, but that was the effect of suffering and the day-to-day toll of caring for those for whom nobody else would care. And then there were the politicians, some of whom so neatly illustrated pride, ambition and cunning; the various types of bullies; soldiers whose faces often seemed trained into hard, wooden expressions; sleek bankers to remind us of the face of human greed; gentle doctors … It would be a book of clichés, she decided, demonstrating that stereotypes—for all that they be derided—are so often true. The eye is the window to the soul. Of course it is.

“Isabel?”

“Sorry, I was thinking.”

And then the bell sounded and Jamie raised an eyebrow. “Do you want me to let them in?”

“No,” she said. “I’ll do that.”

She walked to the front door and opened it. The self-closing lock was stiff—it behaved like that in certain weathers—and she had to tug. But then it swung open and she saw Cat standing in front of her with Gordon a pace behind on the front step. Cat had half turned when Isabel opened the door and was addressing a remark to Gordon. What is said about ourselves on our own doorsteps, thought Isabel, is probably as revealing a judgement as we are likely to hear.

“Well,” said Isabel. “Here you are.”

Cat moved to one side to effect the introduction. “I don’t think you’ve met Gordon.”

Gordon stepped forward and offered his hand. Isabel glanced at him quickly and then back at Cat. She’s reverted to type, she thought. Bruno, with his elevator shoes, was an exception: Gordon was tall, with the easy confidence of the good-looking. She resisted the temptation to look at his legs—Cat had views on men’s legs, she was sure of it. In fact, Cat herself in an unguarded moment had said something about how important legs were. She liked legs to be strong; Toby, the skier, several boyfriends ago, had well-muscled legs, Isabel seemed to remember. Stop it, she told herself. Don’t think this way. Stop it.

She invited them into the house, feeling as she did so a stab of guilt over the advantage she enjoyed. This was their first meeting, and yet she knew Gordon’s age from the documents in the study, and the university where he had done his first degree: Aberdeen. President of the Students’ Union. Scottish Universities’ rugby team (captain, tour of South America). In respect of all of this he looked the part; but there was something else—something that she had noticed immediately. Presence.

Jamie was in the kitchen, and she took them there. I feel like a spy, she thought. I feel like one of those people who does the positive vetting of applicants for posts in the secret services; who know everything about the people they meet because they have pored through their records beforehand; absorbed the intimate secrets of a life, stripping away the armour that privacy affords, rendering the other naked.

“We’ve left the eggs out for your supper,” said Isabel. “Jamie and I were thinking of going out for a bite to eat after this talk we’re going to. Would that be all right?”

Cat glanced at Gordon, as if for confirmation. “Fine,” she said. “Take as long as you like.”

Isabel wondered what they would do. Babysitters usually watched television, or that is what householders assumed. But when they came in pairs … She recalled reading somewhere about a babysitter who was found taking a bath when the parents returned. Why not? Student flats, in which many babysitters lived, had uncomfortable baths and not enough hot water. Visiting a house with a good supply of hot water and clean towels might be just too much of a temptation. And yet there was an element of trust involved: one did not imagine that a person left in one’s house would open drawers, for example, or read one’s correspondence, or even run a bath. That was what the story of Goldilocks and the three bears was all about: breach of trust.

She would have to look at this for the Review. What were the limits of trust in everyday life? What liberties could we legitimately take when we were entrusted with the property of others? Could you read a book you were looking after for somebody? Yes, she thought, you could. Drink from their bottle of water? No. Germs dictated that. Take fruit from a bowl? No. A nut from a dish of nuts? Yes. Sit in their chairs? Of course: chairs are public, and one only needs to seek permission to sit in another’s chair if the owner of the room is present; once you were by yourself, any chair was fair game. Except the chairs of really important people—one should not sit on a throne when left unattended in a monarch’s throne room; that really was going too far. And yet who would miss such an opportunity? There could surely be little doubt but that visitors to Her Majesty sat down on the nearest throne when Her Majesty went out to fetch something. And, indeed, polite American presidents actually engineered excuses to leave the Oval Office for a few moments so that their guests could run round and sit in the President’s chair for a few seconds. The only occasion when this had led to embarrassment was when President de Gaulle had visited the White House and had momentarily dropped off to sleep while seated in the President’s chair.

Isabel smiled. Cat glanced at her suspiciously.

“Parapsychology,” said Gordon. “Cat tells me that you’re going to a lecture on parapsychology.”

Isabel laughed. “I know that sounds a bit odd,” she said. “It’s rather complicated. My housekeeper, you see, is a great enthusiast for these things and keen that we should go. I’m not a believer in parapsychology myself. But …” She knew that she was telling only half the truth. The full truth, she thought, is that I’m trying to find out about three people, of whom you, Gordon, are one.

“Well, plenty of people take it seriously enough,” said Gordon. “And isn’t there evidence for the existence of telepathy?”

“No,” said Isabel. “Not as far as I know.”

“I knew you were going to say that,” said Jamie, and laughed.

Cat looked at him sideways. What was so funny?

Isabel changed the subject, asking Gordon about the school he was currently teaching at, Firth College.

Gordon nodded. “I’ve been there for five years now. I like the place.” He paused. “Although I’m currently in for another job.”

Isabel found herself warming to him. He need not have said that—a more … more closed person would have said nothing. She looked at his face; his expression was frank.

“A promotion?” she asked.

“Yes. A headship.” He looked at Cat, and at that moment Isabel realised that as far as Gordon was concerned, his plans included her niece.

“Well, good luck,” said Isabel. “I have the luxury, I suppose, of being self-employed. But I know what it’s like to apply for jobs.”

She thought of the last time she had applied for a job, which involved being interviewed by Professor Lettuce for the position of editor of the Review. The interview panel had consisted of three people: Lettuce, who had been in the chair; a woman from King’s College London, who had gazed out of the window throughout the interview; and a slight, rather thin-faced man, who had been a fellow of a Cambridge college but who had looked, in Isabel’s view, like a bookmaker from Newmarket Racecourse. Lettuce had barely bothered to look up from the table when Isabel had come in, and the nature of their subsequent relationship had been dictated from that morning. Yet she had been given the job, presumably because nobody else had been prepared to do it for the salary offered, which was virtually nothing.

“Thanks,” said Gordon. “But I really don’t think that I stand much of a chance.”

“Don’t assume anything,” said Isabel under her breath. She wanted him to get the job now—and that complicated matters immensely: How could she be objective in her enquiry if she started off wanting one of the candidates to emerge unsullied and papabile? Life’s goalposts, and hurdles too, are never in the right place, she told herself; and they have the unfortunate habit of shifting within seconds. One sees them, and then suddenly they are no longer there, where they should be, but somewhere altogether elsewhere.

CHAPTER SIX

AFTER THE DANISH LECTURE, Isabel and Jamie said goodbye to Grace, who was going to have tea with a fellow member of her spiritualist circle in Stockbridge. They had seen this woman at the lecture, and had both noticed her eyes, which were grey and cloudy, as if in the advanced stages of some occluding condition, cataracts perhaps. But no, explained Grace, she saw perfectly well: “She sees more than we do—far more, I assure you.” Isabel had avoided catching Jamie’s eye when this was said, but she saw him discreetly mouth the word “Strange!” She shook her head in warning; this was not meant to be funny, and he was not to laugh. “Don’t even think of laughing,” she whispered as they walked away up the street. “These people have ways of telling.”

They had reserved a table at the Café St. Honoré in Thistle Street Lane, a restaurant that they had been going to for some years now. It was Paris transplanted, but without the falsity that sometimes goes with transplantation. Jamie, in particular, disliked Irish pubs outside Ireland. “All these O’Connor’s Taverns and McGinty’s Bars and so on are completely bogus,” he had complained to Isabel. “I went into one with the band the other day and it was full of old Guinness signs. I looked closely at one of them and saw that it was made in China. And the barman, who had a name badge which said Paddy, was Russian, or sounded like it.”

“People have their dreams,” said Isabel. “And it’s harmless enough. We go to French bistros and Italian restaurants. What’s the difference between them and Irish pubs? The intention in each case is to provide you with an illusion. Don’t look out of the windows and you could be in Paris or Naples. That’s what people want.”

Jamie was not convinced. “It’s a Disneyland culture,” he said. “Insincere. Infantilised.”

She looked at him sideways. “I’m not sure about insincerity. Disneyland may not be to your taste, but I don’t think it’s insincere. They mean to be syrupy.”

“Mickey Mouse,” said Jamie dismissively.

She raised an eyebrow. “Mickey Mouse? I don’t see anything wrong with Mickey.” She paused; one did not associate Auden with Disney characters, but she recalled an interview in the Paris Review in which the interviewer had asked the poet, for some reason, what he thought of Mickey Mouse. And Auden had replied, “He’s all right.” She mentioned this to Jamie, who said, enigmatically, “Is he?”

“Yes, he is. Mickey’s decent. He represents the little person.”

None of this stopped them from enjoying the French atmosphere of Café St. Honoré, nor from ordering coquilles St. Jacques and a bottle of Chablis.

“Well,” said Isabel. “Danish psychics?”

Jamie shrugged. “I’d like to see proof. Proof that stands up in the labs.”

Isabel thought about this. She understood why Jamie should insist on sound evidence for any conclusion, and part of her agreed with that. But she often acted on hunches, on the prompting of her feelings or on simple intuition. And labs were not always the answer, she felt: there were things that were invisible and undetectable by any physical means but that were none the less real: sorrow, pain, hope, for instance; or an atmosphere of tension or distrust in a room. “It may be that labs have an inhibiting effect,” she said. “Have you thought of that?”

Jamie reached for a piece of bread and dipped it into a small bowl of olive oil. The wine had arrived and was now being poured. “No. I hadn’t.” And she could be right, he decided. He had a friend who could not have his blood pressure taken accurately; every time the rubber cuff was placed around his arm, his heart began to thump and a misleadingly high reading resulted. Could it be the same with telepathy? Perhaps it worked only when the people present were in a receptive mood, in the same way that a composer or an artist may need peace and quiet before the Muse will speak.

“Who was that woman you were talking to?” he asked. “Before the lecture—the woman with the ginger hair?”

Isabel reached for her glass. “It’s to do with this school business.” She watched his reaction; she had not told him about her ulterior motive in accompanying Grace to the lecture. It was not that she wanted to mislead him; she just had not thought to do so. Some couples live in each other’s pockets, sharing every bit of their lives, every bit of information. That might suit some, but it was not what she—nor Jamie, for that matter—wanted. They both wanted room to lead independent lives, and that is why she did not tell him about everything that happened to do with the Review or with … this other side of her life. She could not bring herself to describe it as enquiries: that sounded far too arch, and investigations sounded downright hyperbolic. Isabel did not investigate things; she considered them.

“These principals?”

“Yes, or would-be principals.”

He waited.

“The woman with the ginger hair,” she continued, “is called Cathy. She’s the cousin of one of the candidates. Grace told me.”

Jamie reached for another bit of bread. “The trouble with this French bread,” he said, “is that it’s too tasty. You could fill up on it before anything else arrived.” He dipped the bread into the olive oil, allowing a small drop to fall back into the bowl. “So? Did you find out anything?”

“Yes,” she said. “I did. I managed to bring up her cousin’s name. I said, ‘Aren’t you John Fraser’s cousin?’ and before she had the chance to ask me whether I knew him, I said, ‘I haven’t seen him recently.’ That was absolutely true. I might have said, ‘I’ve never seen him,’ but at least I didn’t lie.”

Jamie looked at her. He smiled. “You didn’t lie? No, I suppose you didn’t. Not technically.”

“I didn’t lie,” she repeated firmly.

“All right. And what did she say then?”

Isabel told him that she had asked about John’s climbing. Did he climb as much in the summer as in the winter? Was he planning to go abroad?

“She was clearly very proud of him,” Isabel said. “Just as Grace had told me. But then, just after she said something about how he had been talking for years about climbing in the Andes, her face clouded over. You know how that sometimes happens? It’s as if a dark shadow has come over somebody. She stopped mid-sentence, as if she’d remembered something.”

Jamie was silent. They were sitting off to the side, away from the light, and for a moment it was as if they were completely alone in the room, rather than in a restaurant in which there were other diners, movement, warmth.

Isabel continued. “Then she said something very strange. She said that he was troubled in spirit. Those were her exact words. Troubled in spirit. I asked her why this was, but she didn’t answer me. She said that he wanted to come to one of the meetings, but hadn’t got round to it. She said that it was a pity, because it helped to talk to the one on the other side. Again, those were her actual words. The one on the other side.”

Jamie took a sip of his wine. “He’s lost somebody? Lots of the people at that meeting had lost somebody, I think. That’s why they go there.”

Isabel nodded. She had seen it at the previous meeting. “But who? Somebody he’s wronged, do you think?”

“Maybe.”

Isabel looked over Jamie’s shoulder. The waiter was approaching their table, plates balanced expertly in either hand. “If you had let somebody down badly and then … before you made your peace, they crossed over to the other side, as Grace would say, wouldn’t you want to speak to him?”

The waiter put the plates before them. The scallops, fresh and firm, had been arranged to make a peninsula across a shallow lake of sauce. Isabel sniffed at the steam rising from the plate. “If I had to give up everything,” she said, “seafood would be the last thing to go. I’d have a final scallop and say, ‘That’s it, that’s eating over.’ And then I’d cross over happy.”

Jamie laughed. He raised his glass to Isabel. “May that never be necessary.”

She had not been serious, of course, but the absurd, the fanciful, may bring grave thoughts in its wake. She and Jamie would not be together for eternity; one day one of them would leave or die—those were the only two certainties—and the other would be on his or her own. It was a thought that crossed the mind of everybody who ever entered into a relationship with another. It applied as much to friends as to lovers and spouses: one day somebody would see the other for the last time, and probably not know it. And there would be things left unsaid, little gestures—kindnesses—left undone, as there are in every part of life.

Jamie tackled a scallop, and then dabbed at his mouth with the starched table napkin. Isabel watched him. Napery, she thought: the word for table linen. Napery—the word had such a solid ring to it, suggesting houses that had drawers and trunks full of tablecloths and the like, neatly pressed and folded away, like old memories; napery and silver and plenishings—words that lawyers used when itemising the household effects of clients who had died and left such things behind them.

“What are you thinking of?” asked Jamie, putting down the napkin.

“Household effects,” she said. “That table napkin …” She pointed, and he looked at it in puzzlement.

“Nothing wrong with it.”

“No, of course not. I was just thinking of how we fill our houses with things. Rather too many things, in most cases.”

Jamie shrugged. “I don’t. My flat’s uncluttered. Or was … when I last visited it.”

She caught his smile, and returned it. Jamie only used his flat now to teach in, his pupils hauling their bassoon cases up the stone staircase to tug at his antiquated brass bell-pull and wipe their feet on the coir doormat with its Welcome legend and ingrained mud. He still used one room there as a bedroom, in the sense that there was a made-up bed in it, but he never stayed there now, and the flat had a cold, rather desolate feel to it. Charlie did not like it, and had fidgeted and fretted when Jamie had last taken him there.

“Your flat …,” Isabel began, but did not finish the sentence. Space, she reminded herself.

“Yes? My flat?”

Isabel waved a hand in the air, carelessly. “Your flat is your flat,” she said. “You like it—that’s all that matters.”

Jamie frowned. “But I don’t really like it,” he said.

She was surprised; he had never said this before. She wondered whether he wanted to get rid of it; he could teach just as easily in the music room in her house, and they were engaged, after all, and would be getting married in due course.

“Is there any point in keeping it, then? Do you want to sell it?”

Jamie looked away. She saw how the light accentuated his high cheekbones. She wanted to reach out and touch him; to put her hand against his cheek, which felt so smooth, and which she had become accustomed to touching, briefly, when she awoke and he was there beside her, his head on the pillow. How long would this beauty last? Five more years? Ten? Or was it more fleeting than that, as human beauty inevitably is?

She asked him again. “How about selling it? Wouldn’t you feel less … tied down?”

“I might,” said Jamie thoughtfully. “Do you think I should?”

She hesitated. “When we’re married, do we need it?” Space, she thought again.

“No, I don’t see why we should keep it.” He looked back at her. “Can we get married soon? I mean, really soon.”

She felt her heart beating within her. She closed her eyes, involuntarily. “Yes. I think we should.”

“In two or three weeks’ time?”

She felt her breath leave her; she had to force herself to breathe. “I think so.”

“I don’t want a great big wedding,” he said. “Do you mind? Something more or less private. You, me, Charlie.”

“If that’s what you want. Are you sure?”

He nodded, and reached across the table to take her hand. “Yes, it is.”

They had much to talk about. They would go to Old St. Paul’s, an Episcopal church where Isabel knew one of the clergy. There was a side chapel there—a tiny place—that would be suitable for a small wedding. The choir, though, might be asked to sing. Would Jamie object to that? He would love it, he said. They would be off to one side, out of sight, but it would be lovely hearing them in the background.

“You choose the music,” said Isabel. “Naturally.”

He agreed, but said that he wanted her to be happy with his choice.

“No,” she said. “You’re the musician.”

“Ireland,” he said. “Definitely Ireland, then. ‘Greater Love Hath No Man.’ Remember it?”

She did. “Many waters cannot quench love,” she said.

He sung, in response, barely above a whisper, “Neither can the floods drown it.”

“And what else?”

“Oh, I’ll think. We’ve got at least four centuries of music to choose from.”

Towards the end of the meal, when they were drinking coffee, Isabel said, “You know, I have an awful feeling about John Fraser. I know it’s ridiculous, but I can’t get it out of my mind.”

He looked at her with interest. “What do you feel?”

She knew that she had no grounds for saying what she was about to say. It was ridiculous—a complete whimsy. But the thought had occurred to her and it would not go away. “That he’s killed somebody.” She regretted the words even as she uttered them. It was an accusation—a gross defamation, even if the victim would never hear what was said of him. You can defame people, she thought, even if you speak the words into a void, to be heard by nobody. The wrong in such cases was not that you lowered them in the eyes of others—you did not do this, because nobody heard what you said—but simply that you had thought it. It was a wrong done to truth and the cause of truth. And it was dirtying; one felt grubby after thinking unkind, uncharitable, or even lascivious thoughts—why? Because for a few moments one imagined that the thought was deed.

She watched his reaction. At first he looked blank, and then he shook his head. “Surely not.”

“I know, I know. I shouldn’t think that of him, but that’s what I feel. I know I haven’t a shred of evidence, other than that his cousin, who may well be over-imaginative—”

Jamie interrupted her. “Over-imaginative? She believes in ghosts and … and spirits and all the rest. Of course she’s over-imaginative.”

“Even so, she thinks that he wants to talk to somebody—through a medium. And if that’s true, then it’s possible that he’s killed somebody and wants forgiveness.”

Jamie was silent as he thought about this. “Do you really think,” he said, “that murderers want to talk to their victims? Surely it’s exactly the opposite: they have no desire to hear from them again.”

Isabel weighed this for a moment. It was probably true that most murderers had no desire to hear from their victims, but there were two objections to Jamie’s statement. One was that people could be killed by accident as much as intentionally: so not all of those who took another’s life were murderers. And secondly, not everybody who even intentionally caused the death of another would be without all conscience; people had their regrets, and lots of them.

She was on the point of telling Jamie this when he leaned across the table and said to her, very slowly and clearly, “Isabel, listen to me. This is Edinburgh. Edinburgh. We haven’t got any murderers here. We just haven’t. At the most, people have little failings. That small.” He held up a hand, with barely a chink of light between his thumb and forefinger. “Mere quirks. So think of something else. Please.”

She laughed. She knew that he did not mean this: Edinburgh was the same as anywhere else, and had the same range of people as other places did: the good, the bad, the morally indifferent. They had their quirks, of course; Jamie was right about that. But even their quirks were charming—at least in the eyes of a lover, who would forgive her city anything.

THEY DECIDED TO WALK BACK from the Café St. Honoré because the night was a fine one and even at ten there was still light in the sky. Being as far north as Moscow, and only three degrees south of St. Petersburg, Edinburgh had summer nights almost as white as those of Russia. Soon the dying day would slip into half-darkness and that curious Scottish half-light, the gloaming, would mantle the city; for now, though, every architectural detail, every branch moving gently in the breeze from the west, was clearly visible.

They walked up through Charlotte Square, past the well-appointed offices of the financiers. “Money,” said Isabel, “likes to clothe itself in respectability, doesn’t it? And yet why should we kowtow to financiers? All that these people do is lend money to people who actually do things.” She gestured towards the well-set façades of the classical square before continuing. “But they—these people in these offices—end up having far greater status than those who actually do things with that money. Odd, isn’t it?”

Jamie agreed. He had no interest in money. “We should be more like the Germans,” he said. “They show more respect for engineers than they do for accountants.”

Isabel said that she was not sure that respect should be based on a person’s job alone. A good and conscientious emptier of rubbish bins, she suggested, was better in moral terms, surely, than a self-serving accountant. Yet a job might say something about a person’s character: a nurse was likely to be more sympathetic than a futures trader, although not inevitably so.

What she had said clearly interested Jamie, who now made a remark about musicians and their position in society. “And nobody really respects musicians all that much,” he said. “We’re very far down the pecking order.”

They were now within sight of the Caledonian Hotel, that great red-stone edifice at the end of Princes Street, a battleship made of gingerbread, Isabel thought. She remembered seeing a crowd outside the hotel one day when some rock star had been staying there and word had got out to the fans. Were musicians all that low in the pecking order? Did people wait outside hotels for accountants, or engineers, or architects?

“Are you sure?”

He half turned to her. There was a piper outside the Caledonian, welcoming somebody or sending them off; or possibly just standing there, playing the pipes. Isabel recognised the tune, “Mist-covered Mountains,” a tune that she always found evocative—of what? Of Morven, she thought, or Ardnamurchan, those wild, mountainous parts of western Scotland on the edge of the Atlantic, the last land before the Hebrides, and beyond them the cloud banks, the green cliffs of Newfoundland.

She remembered how she had once been in the Old Town of Edinburgh, near the Canongate, when she had heard from somewhere in the vicinity, echoing through the small wynds and closes, the muffled thumping of a great drum. And she had turned the corner to find herself face-to-face with a pipe band, the pipers draped in dark-green tartan, on the point of striking up “Mist-covered Mountains.” And she had stood on the pavement, close to the wall to allow the band to get by, and watched them as they slow-marched past her. She had noticed the white spats that each kilted piper wore; she had seen the faces of the young men in the ranks of the band, clean-shaven, smartly turned out, like boy-soldiers. Which is what they were, she learned from a woman standing beside her on the pavement. “Just laddies,” said the woman, shaking her head as she spoke. “Just laddies. And now they’re away to the ermy.” She pronounced army in the Scots way, as mothers had done for generations, watching their sons going away.

A couple emerged from the hotel, followed by a gaggle of guests. The couple got into a car, and a young man from the group of friends sat on the bonnet of the car, preventing it from driving away. “Newlyweds,” said Isabel. “That explains the piper.”

The piper had struck up a different tune, a quicker one; a woman reached out to drag the young man off the car. There were cries of mirth and then applause as the car began to move off towards Rutland Square.

They walked on. Jamie reached for her hand. “Like us,” he said. “Soon.”

“Yes.” She paused. “Are you sure that you want to go ahead … so quickly?”

He did not hesitate. “Of course I’m sure.” He looked at her. His expression was anxious. “Why do you ask? Are you having doubts?”

She said that she was not. “It’s just that I’ve become more or less accustomed to how things are at the moment. I haven’t really thought about the next stage.”

“But we agreed to get married. Remember?”

She asked him how she could forget.

“Then why the surprise?”

She did not want him to feel that she had become lukewarm. Of course she wanted to marry Jamie; of course she wanted to be with him for the rest of her life. Of course she did.

She squeezed his hand. “Fine,” she said. “It’s fine. I’m just so happy that it’s going to happen. I wanted to know that you were absolutely sure, and now I do. I’m ready. Marry me. Go ahead, marry me.”

He laughed. “Marriage is not something you do to somebody.”

“With, then. You do it together. You do it with them.”

“Exactly.”

They were now halfway up Lothian Road. They had passed the Usher Hall and were walking past a line of dubious bars and cheap restaurants. Two bouncers stood on duty at the entrance to one of the bars; black-clad figures with wires disappearing into tiny receivers in their ears.

“Mesomorphs,” whispered Isabel.

“What?”

“Those types—the bouncers. Mesomorphs. There are ectomorphs, mesomorphs, and endomorphs. Ectomorphs are thin, lanky people; mesomorphs are large-boned and muscular; and endomorphs are rounder, chubbier, I suppose. Those men back there are mesomorphs.”

“What am I?” asked Jamie.

Isabel looked at him, as if seeing him for the first time. “Ecto-mesomorph,” she said. “Which is just perfect.”

She thought for a moment. “Professor Lettuce—remember him? A large endomorph. Flabby.”

The thought of Lettuce reminded her of his review of Christopher Dove’s new book. She had not put him off; she had not written to tell him that she would not have room to publish it, and now she was more or less barred by inaction. And that, she thought, was how people became trapped; they let things slip, they put things off, and then the landscape around them changed and they found themselves in a cul-de-sac from which there was no easy escape; and the cul-de-sac could so easily become a redoubt. They … Not they, she corrected herself; we do that, which includes me. The thought depressed her. Life was complicated enough without Lettuce adding to its difficulties.

“But let’s not talk about him,” she said.

“I wasn’t,” said Jamie.

They continued their walk in silence. Then Isabel said, “Our honeymoon.”

“Yes?”

“Do you want one?”

He nodded vigorously. “Of course.”

“So where shall we go? Somewhere exotic? Bhutan? Kerala?”

“Would you mind very much if we had it in Scotland?”

She was surprised, but said that she did not mind; Scotland would be fine.

“It’s just that I love the islands,” said Jamie. “We’ve been to Jura, so we need to go somewhere different. We could go to the Outer Hebrides. Harris. South Uist. Somewhere like that.”

“Perfect,” said Isabel.

Jamie reeled off a litany of island names. “Coll, Tiree, Rhum, Colonsay. They’re full of poetry, aren’t they?”

She thought of Michael Longley, and of his poem to the blues singer Bessie Smith. The lines were haunting, and came back to her whenever she heard somebody mention the Hebrides: I think of Tra-na-Rossan, Inisheer / Of Harris drenched by horizontal rain. She was not sure where Tra-na-Rossan and Inisheer were; Ireland, she assumed. And they had enough rain of their own there, not to be drawing attention to the rain that fell on Scotland. But yes, the poet was right: Harris and the other islands were often drenched by rain, even if not always horizontal. It was more a drifting rain, she thought, a curtain, a veil that came in from the Atlantic, white and smoky as an attenuated cloud.

“Yes. And the Treshnish Islands,” said Isabel. “I’ve always loved the sound of the Treshnish Islands.”

“Uninhabited,” said Jamie.

“Therefore ideal for a honeymoon.”

“I’d like to take you on a slow boat somewhere,” said Jamie.

She smiled. “Would you?”

“Yes. Isn’t that what everybody wants to do with the person they really love?”

She opened her mouth to reply, but said nothing. He had uttered a declaration of love that was indirect, but was all the more powerful for that. She did not want to spoil the moment. It was perfect. This young man, this perfect man, had said that she was the one that he really loved. She closed her eyes for a moment, and saw herself in a cabin on what must be, she assumed, a slow boat to China. It was hot, and they were half unclothed, wearing only underwear, for the heat. Through the porthole there was an oily sea stretching out to a hazy horizon, a languid swell. She looked into his eyes; she held his hand; he leaned forward and kissed her. She felt his lips, the warmth of his breath.

When she opened her eyes she wanted to kiss him back immediately, to embrace, unheeding of the people in the street, of the passing traffic. But she saw where they now were, on the pavement outside a large office building at Tollcross. It was the block in which her lawyers had their offices, and that fact alone seemed to inhibit her. But she smiled at the thought. Why should the idea of one’s lawyers prevent one from kissing anybody? Could one kiss with enthusiasm if one was thinking of … Who would have the maximum inhibiting effect? The answer came to her immediately, and she smiled again. It was a public figure she pictured; a man whom she had seen interviewed on the television the previous night, labouring a political point with his interviewer. He was very inhibiting. Very. Poor man. Did anybody ever kiss him?

Jamie looked at her and again bent to kiss her on the lips. “There,” he said.

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE NEXT MORNING Charlie woke at exactly the hour at which he always awoke, and drew himself to their attention by kicking the high sides of his cot. Rattling the bars of his cage, as Jamie put it; which made Isabel think how like imprisonment was the world of the small child. There were barriers everywhere; meals at set times; watchful eyes; long periods of restriction and restraint; supervised exercise. The prison of childhood.

She left Jamie to lie in while she attended to Charlie. He was a sunny child, particularly in the morning, when his delight at the world brimmed over into peals of laughter at the smallest thing. She usually carried him to the window so that they could look out together over the garden, and she did that now, standing with him in her arms, watching the morning sun struggle up over the high wall that separated their house from their neighbour’s. Occasionally, if they were lucky, they saw Brother Fox trotting along the top of the garden wall, his raised highway, or sneaking into the clump of rhododendrons that was his refuge, his low bower.

“Fo!” exclaimed Charlie, pointing wildly into the garden; x defeated him. He’s algebraically challenged, Isabel had remarked to Jamie, who looked puzzled; Our son has no x’s, she explained.

“No fo,” she said to Charlie. “Not today, at least.” Words have power for you, Charlie, she thought; the uttering of a word will make something come to you. And it was the same for adults; what was prayer but that?

She took Charlie into the kitchen and prepared his breakfast. She turned on the radio and listened to the news and the beginning of the morning current-affairs programme. The world had not improved from yesterday; there was conflict and disagreement, selfishness, the varying types of hatred, and, to top it all, accelerating ecological disaster. People now talked about saving the planet and nobody batted an eyelid. Only a few years ago such language would have been deemed to be wildly alarmist, even risible. But now there was a real threat, and people spoke about it in the same tones as they spoke about the old, well-established threats of drought and floods and the like. Locusts … how friendly a threat they now seemed; but presumably the locusts themselves were suffering and found it difficult to plague people in quite the same way as they had in the past.

She looked at Charlie, whom she had placed in his high chair, ready for his breakfast of porridge and strips of bread on which she would spread runny boiled egg, his soldiers. Was this the first time, she wondered, that parents might think, with good reason, that the world would run out on their children; that it might not see out their natural span? She only had to think for a moment before she realised that it was not the first time; there had been many points at which people had thought that their world was ending, and some of these not very long ago. In the sixties and seventies many people thought just that as they watched two bristling superpowers staring one another down, fingers on the triggers of vast nuclear arsenals. One of Isabel’s aunts had told her about those days during the Cuban Missile Crisis when she had thought that nuclear war was inevitable. She had found herself feeling oddly calm, and had been determined to spend what she imagined were their last days in peace. “I sat and looked at pictures,” she said. “Photographs of college friends. Of our old family house in Mobile. Pictures of the world. I took out our old copies of National Geographic and paged through them, just looking at the world in all its variety; saying goodbye to it, I suppose.”

“And you weren’t frightened?” Isabel had asked.

“Oddly, no. I should have been, perhaps, but I wasn’t. I thought that it would be so quick, you see, and that we wouldn’t really have time to feel the pain. And if there’s no pain, then what is there to fear? I felt regret, yes, but no fear.”

Returning his mother’s stare, Charlie broke into a grin. “Solds,” he demanded.

She reassured him. The egg was ready for spreading on the fingers of bread. “Here. Soldiers. You see—patience is rewarded.”

She helped him with the food. There was no point in thinking about what sort of future Charlie would have, because there was nothing she could do to protect him from it. She could do her best, of course, not to add to the burden we placed on the earth, but she suspected that this would never be enough. Humanity, it seemed, was too irresolute, too greedy, to save itself from destruction.

Charlie opened his mouth to laugh, showering crumbs over his mother. She laughed too. Children had a way of reminding us of the immediate, and that, she felt, was exactly what she needed. She abandoned her morbid thoughts and concentrated on breakfast. Grub first, then ethics. Brecht? Which in her case meant breakfast first, then the Review of Applied Ethics.

Jamie came downstairs and into the kitchen. His hair was uncombed, tousled from the night, and he was still rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

“You could have stayed in bed,” she said.

Charlie looked up from his breakfast, shrieked with pleasure, and waved his arms about. It pleased Isabel to see her son’s love for his father, every bit as much as it pleased her to see Jamie’s love for Charlie.

“I’m de trop,” she said, offering Jamie the plate with its two remaining boiled-egg soldiers. “Here you go.”

Jamie took the plate. “He loves you just as much. It’s just that …”

“A boy loves his father,” said Isabel. “Naturally.”

Jamie bent down and kissed Charlie on the top of his head. The little boy gave another squeal of delight.

“You go and have a shower,” said Jamie. “I’ll take over.” He looked at the clock on the wall. He had nothing to do, he explained, until noon and would look after Charlie until then if Isabel wanted him to.

Isabel sighed. “I’ve got a whole pile of things on my desk. Grace said that she wanted to take him to the Botanical Gardens this afternoon. I could get my work out of the way …”

“You do that,” said Jamie. “Go on.”

She nodded. I could give up working, she thought. I could spend all my time with Charlie, which is what I would love to do. But would I be any happier? And would it make much difference to Charlie? She looked at her son, who was now tackling one of the soldiers given him by Jamie. Being a parent was such a gift, and everybody said that it was a fleeting one. So precious, those years, hang on to them, Isabel. That had been Cousin Mimi from Dallas. They had been talking about what it meant to have children, and Mimi had warned her of how quickly the childhood years went past—not for the child, but for the parent.

It was true. Already she found it hard to remember what Charlie was like as a tiny baby. Again, that was something that people had warned her about: Take photographs and look at them regularly, just to remind yourself. There was a popular song, was there not? She turned to Jamie; he knew about these things and could reel off the lines of the most obscure songs. How do you do it? I don’t know, I just do. I remember songs. I forget lots of other things—the capital of Paraguay, for example—but I remember songs.

She asked him, “Isn’t there a song about it?”

He looked up, and smiled. “About what? Boiled egg?”

“About how children grow up so quickly.”

He thought for a moment. “Fiddler on the Roof. I think the song’s called ‘Sunrise, Sunset.’ It asks how it all happened so quickly, how they grow up, become so tall, while nobody’s watching.”

She remembered. “It’s true, I think.”

Jamie shrugged. “I suppose so. But I don’t think we should worry about it. We’ve got years ahead of us. He’s not all that tall just yet, are you?” He pinched Charlie gently on the cheek and the little boy burst out laughing, as if sharing in some vastly amusing joke.

“The years shall run like rabbits,” she said, remembering what Auden had said, but refraining from telling Jamie, who sometimes sighed when she mentioned WHA.

“Like rabbits?”

Charlie chuckled. “Abbits,” he spluttered.

Hearing this, Isabel thought of its crossword potential. Cockney customs? Abbits. Senior members of monasteries? Abbits. Not the right thing to do? Bad abbits.

She smiled. “What’s the joke?” asked Jamie.

“The loss of a letter changes everything,” she said.

Jamie reflected. The years did run like rabbits, he supposed. Rabbits ran quickly, shot off, and then disappeared, which is what the years did. He dealt with a final piece of egg-smeared bread and then looked up to see that Isabel herself had disappeared …

… INTO HER STUDY. She had a number of letters to deal with, some opened, some still in their envelopes, lying accusingly on her desk. The postman tended to the apologetic, particularly in respect of large parcels, which he knew contained manuscripts or books for review—work, in other words. He had arrived very early that day and had said, “This one’s really heavy,” as he passed her a large padded envelope franked in Utah. He glanced at the customs declaration stuck on the front of the package. “A book,” he said. And then, rather quickly, “I’m sorry, we’re not meant to read anything but the address. It’s just that …”

“Willy,” she said, “you’re the model of discretion. I couldn’t do your job. I’d die of curiosity as to what was in the letters I was delivering.”

Willy looked sheepish. “Yes, it’s tempting, isn’t it? I never look at letters, even if the envelope has been torn and some of the inside is showing. I look the other way.”

“And postcards?” asked Isabel, innocently.

He blushed. “You can’t help but see,” he said. “You have to read the name and address and the message is right there—sometimes just a few words. How can you not see them?”

“You can’t,” agreed Isabel. “And that’s fine. If people write things that are meant to be confidential on a postcard, then it’s their own fault if somebody else reads it. Caveat scriptor—let the writer beware.”

Willy handed her a sheaf of other letters from his bag. “I’ve seen some pretty odd postcards,” he said.

Isabel’s curiosity was piqued. “Such as?”

Willy hesitated. “You won’t tell anybody?”

“Of course not. Except Jamie. Do you mind if I tell Jamie?”

“That’s all right,” said Willy. “Well, I had to deliver this postcard, see. I won’t tell you where. Not far from here—not your street, though. Anyway, it was a plain postcard—no picture—and on the message bit the sender had written, clear as day, ‘I didn’t do it—you’ve got to believe me. It was Tom. I saw him. And he knows I know. So if anything happens to me, make sure to tell Freddie that Tom’s the one they should blame.’ ”

Isabel smiled. “Well, well! So now we know too. Except …”

“Except we don’t know who Tom is.”

“Yes,” she said. “How frustrating. He could be getting away with … with murder, I suppose. It could be, you know.”

Willy nodded. “I thought of that. But what could I do? It could all be about something very ordinary. Something like cheating.”

Isabel considered this. There was an obvious inference that it was not something inconsequential; one did not fear for one’s safety if one knew about something minor. So it had to be something that Tom would go to some lengths to conceal, even to the extent of removing the writer of the message. She pointed this out to Willy, who thought about it for a few moments, and then said that he agreed.

“There is something you could do,” she said. “Do you know the person to whom you delivered the postcard?”

“Of course. I’ve been delivering his mail for years.”

Isabel looked away. She liked Willy, who was an old-fashioned postman: she had nothing to teach him about life, she thought, nor about the obligations we encounter along the way. And yet she was a philosopher, and philosophers should not feel awkward about telling people what to do.

“You could have a word with him,” she ventured. “You could say something about not being able to help but see what was written on that card. You could say that you had been losing sleep over it and could he set your mind at rest.”

Willy started to shake his head even before she had finished speaking. “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry, but no.”

Isabel raised an eyebrow. “It wouldn’t cost you anything.”

Willy’s head started to shake again. “Dangerous,” he said. “He would then know that I know. And what if he told Tom? Then something could happen to me.”

Isabel thought this rather fanciful. “Come on, Willy. This is Edinburgh, not …” She waved a hand in a vaguely southeasterly direction. “Not Palermo.”

“I mean it,” said Willy. “I could be in real danger.”

“Surely not. This person—the person to whom the card was delivered—surely he’s perfectly respectable …” It sounded odd. What was respectability these days? But what other expression was there? she wondered. Law-abiding? That said what she wanted to say, but somehow sounded equally old-fashioned.

Willy smiled. “He’s not, you know. He’s … he’s a criminal.”

At first, Isabel did not know what to say. But then she wondered how Willy knew. One had to have proof to make that sort of allegation, and what proof would he have? She looked at his bag. He carried secrets; he carried people’s lives about in his bag. He knew.

“See?” said Willy. “So I can’t really do anything. Not where I live.”

Isabel understood, and the thought depressed her. She had often speculated on what it must be like to live in a rotten state, where those in power and authority were corrupt and evil. Stalinist Russia must have been like that; the Third Reich; and countless lesser examples of tinpot dictatorships. How trapped one must feel; how dispirited that there was nobody to assert the good. There were courts and investigative journalists and public-spirited politicians who could be turned to, but what if one were powerless or without much of a voice? One needed grammar, and volume, to be heard. What if one lived in an area where the writ that ran in the streets was that of a local gang leader? Or where, if one incurred the disfavour of somebody powerful, a nod could arrange a nasty accident? For many people, that was a reality: the police, the state, could not give them real protection.

“We can’t put everything right,” she said. It was a shameful admission, and contrary to much of what she believed. But it was true, at least for Willy, who sighed and said yes, she was right. We could not put right even a tiny part of what was wrong.

“Compromise,” he said, making ready to leave.

Isabel watched him walk down the path. He was right about compromise; and who amongst us, she thought, did not make compromises, all the time? The answer came without prompting: Charlie. He lived in a world of absolutes, but would learn to compromise soon enough so that he could live in a world that was far, very far, from the peaceable kingdom of our aspiration, of our imagining. Nor had Charlie yet learned to lie; what he said was what he thought. And yet at some stage he would learn to lie and at that point, Isabel thought, would his moral life really begin. The struggle with lies was for many of us the first, most difficult, and most long-lasting battle of our lives. It was not surprising, perhaps, that so many people gave in at an early stage. Only Kant, with his categorical imperative, and George Washington, with his chopped-down and possibly apocryphal cherry tree, and a few others, formed the company of those who were constitutionally incapable of telling a lie. The rest of humanity was, she feared, fairly mendacious.

She imagined, for a moment, Charlie, a few years hence and able to wield an axe, even if a tiny one, cutting down her cherry tree—and there was a small cherry tree in her garden—and then saying, “Didn’t.” That’s what children said: Didn’t. They knew it was not true, and that in most cases they should have said did. But no turkey, when asked the time of year, if speech were possible for turkeys, would say Late November or December 24.

SHE STARTED TO TACKLE THE MAIL, beginning with the package from Utah. She knew who would have sent it: Mike Vause, a professor at a university there, had corresponded with her over the last few years, since she had published an article of his on the subject of mountaineering ethics. From time to time he sent her articles and books that he thought she might like, even though she had never met him. It was typical of Western generosity, she thought; that direct, helpful attitude that made her proud of her half-American ancestry. Her sainted American mother had had that quality too, she reflected; and I love her so much, although her memory is fading. Don’t leave me altogether; don’t leave me.

Isabel took the book out of the package and saw on it a picture of a high mountain ridge, with climbers strung out along it, tiny figures like ants. Tucked into the jacket flap was a note from Mike:

Isabel—I mentioned this book to you once. Now I’ve found a copy that I’d like you to have. This author really saw some of the things we talked about—it’s unbelievable. Or rather, it’s very believable. People can be pretty wicked, can’t they? Are you still disinclined to climb? One of these days I’ll come over to Scotland and show you how to climb Ben Nevis. You can do it, you know. Anybody can. And you never know: you might find that you have a good head for heights after all!Mike

She looked at the description of the book. The author had decided to climb Everest. He had looked forward to an expedition in the company of high-minded people; instead he had found a mountain riddled with all sorts of unattractive characters: thieves, charlatans, ruthless exploiters of would-be summiteers. She frowned, remembering again her conversation with Willy. He had suggested that a criminal lived a few streets away—which should be no great surprise, as criminals, large and small, had to live somewhere, and that had to be next door to somebody; but should criminals infest Everest, of all places? Everest, like any mountain, should be a place of purity, of high driven snow, of clean—if somewhat thin—air.

Isabel sat down in her chair and began to read. The rest of the mail remained ignored and unopened. An hour later, Jamie came in with a cup of coffee.

“I didn’t want to disturb you,” he said. Glancing at the book, he asked whether she was reviewing it.

“No.” She put the book down. “Tell me, Jamie, if you were climbing Everest …”

He laughed. “Yes. Easily imagined. So I’m climbing Everest …”

“And high up—not in the Death Zone yet, but still pretty high …”

He asked her what the Death Zone was.

“Where there’s so little oxygen that you’re likely to die quite quickly.”

Jamie shuddered. “It must be like drowning,” he said. “Drowning in air, like fish taken out of the water.”

“I suppose so. Anyway, there you are, making your way up the mountain, and you see another climber collapsed in the snow. What would you do?”

Jamie shrugged. “I’d stop and ask him how he was.”

“And then?”

“Give him a hand.”

She had not expected anything else. “Help him down the mountain?”

Jamie answered naturally. “If that was what was necessary. I suppose it wouldn’t be practical for me to go and get help, would it?”

Isabel did not think it would.

“In that case,” said Jamie, “I’d help him down to … base camp, isn’t it? There’d be a doctor there, no doubt.”

Along with the thieves and extortionists, thought Isabel. “Yes, there’d probably be a doctor. But you’d probably be alone if you tried to help him, you know.”

Jamie looked at her for explanation. “But I thought that Everest was quite busy. Aren’t there always several hundred people on the mountain—if you include the base camp—all the hangers-on?”

Isabel put down the book. “Yes, so I gather. But very few of them sign up to the old ethic of mountaineering.”

“Which was?”

“One of fellow feeling for other mountaineers. If you came across somebody in need of help, you helped them.”

Jamie was thoughtful. “Like the custom of the sea.”

“I suppose so.”

He remembered a yachtsman friend who had told him that one could not count on that any more. He had mentioned that there had been cases where ships ran down yachts and were suspected of not stopping. “It’s survival of the fittest,” he had said. “These large ships have places to get to and can’t be bothered to lose the time.”

Jamie had been appalled, and Isabel too, as he told her. “So it’s like that on Everest?”

Isabel gestured to the book. “So we are told. It’s a different sport today. Look.” She opened the book to show Jamie a photograph of a mountaineering expedition in the thirties. A group of three men stood on an ice field, roped together. They were wearing tweed jackets, with waistcoats and ties. “Ties!” exclaimed Jamie.

Isabel smiled. “Yes. And plus fours. Look.”

She turned to another picture, this time showing a mountaineer equipped for an assault on Everest. It was difficult to make out his features under the goggles and the breathing apparatus. In his hand he carried a satellite phone. In touch with headquarters six thousand miles away, said the caption. She turned the page to find another photograph, which she showed to Jamie. “That’s him,” she said. “That’s the young mountaineer who was passed by forty other climbers as he lay dying. Nobody helped him.”

Jamie looked at the face. The photograph had been taken at the beginning of the expedition; the man was smiling, looked optimistic. It was the face of a healthy sportsman, but it had the poignancy of being the last photograph, or almost the last photograph. The camera catches somebody in the fullness of life, but the subject’s fate is already decided.

“He could have been saved?”

“It seems so. Or at least given a chance. But that would have meant that the rescuers would have lost their chance of getting to the top.” She reached out to touch the photograph; to put a finger on the mountaineer’s cheek. Live in high places, die in high places.

She stopped. She did not know where that expression had come from. Had she made it up, or had she heard it somewhere? It was difficult to tell; was it just a reworking of Live by the sword, die by the sword?

She touched the photograph again. Jamie was watching.

“Why are you doing that?”

She answered softly. “Because he’s dead.”

Jamie moved to the window. “Those flowers,” he said. “The ones by the wall. What did you call them again?”

She told him, giving the Scots vernacular name as well as the botanical one. But her mind was elsewhere. Guilt. “He walked past somebody,” she whispered.

Jamie turned round. “Who did?”

She closed the book. “I think I know what’s troubling John Fraser,” she said. “He walked past another climber, who was dying. He didn’t help him.”

Jamie looked at her in astonishment. “Isabel! How do you know that? You haven’t got a shred—not a shred—of evidence.”

She just felt it, and told him so. She did not need evidence for hunches—that was what hunches were all about.

He shook his head. “You’re doing it again. Inventing things. Whole stories now. Making them up.”

She got to her feet. “But that’s what the world is all about, Jamie. Stories. Stories explain everything, bring everything together.”

Jamie walked towards the door. “How do you know that John Fraser ever went to Everest?”

“I don’t.”

“Well, it would have had to be somewhere like that,” he pointed out. “It wouldn’t be so dramatic in Scotland. If you left somebody, the mountain rescue people would be there within a couple of hours. Our mountains don’t have Death Zones, Isabel.”

“Yet people die on them,” she pointed out. “Every year. One or two—sometimes more.”

“That’s because they slip.” He paused. He was thinking of a boy he had known at school, a boy called Andrew—and he could not remember his surname. But he could picture him, and saw him now, with his untidy fair hair and his permanent smile. He had been a climber and had died in the Cairngorms when he tumbled headlong into a gully that had been disguised by a fall of snow.

She noticed his expression; he had told her about this. “Your friend? You were thinking about him?”

“Yes.”

“How often do you think about him?” she asked.

He looked surprised. “Why do you ask?”

Because she was interested, she said. Death was such a strange event—simple enough in its essentials, of course, and final enough for the person who dies; but human personality had its echoes. Non omnis moriar, said Horace’s Odes—I shall not wholly die. Yes, and he was right. As long as people remembered, then death was not complete. Only if there were nobody at all left to remember would death be complete.

“I sometimes think of him,” said Jamie. “We were quite close. In fact, we were very close.”

He stopped. She reached out for his hand.

“I think of him a lot,” said Jamie.

Isabel squeezed his hand. “Loved him?”

Jamie nodded. “I suppose so. You know how it is with boys. Those intense friendships you have when you’re young.”

“I think so.”

“I went to the place,” said Jamie. “I climbed up there a year or so later. Just by myself—in summer. It wasn’t a hard climb at all—more of a walk, even if the gully itself was quite deep. I looked over the edge and imagined what he had seen as he fell—he must have seen something, unless he was knocked out straightaway, which they thought had not happened. And then I just cried and cried. I went down the hill, cried all the way down.”

She pressed his hand. “Of course.”

“I think I understand why mountaineering involves such … such passion. Climbers do get passionate, you know. They’re very spiritual people.”

Isabel glanced at the Everest book. “Some of them. Maybe not so much now. I think our world has become harder, you know.”

She did not want that to be true, but she thought it probably was. What had happened? Had the human soul shrunk in some way, become meaner, like a garment that has been in the wash too long and become smaller, more constraining?

CHAPTER EIGHT

HAVE YOU EVER CLIMBED ANYTHING, Charlie?”

It was at a party, a rather noisy one, in the Scotch Malt Whisky Society in Queen Street that Isabel was addressing Charlie Maclean, Master of the Quaich, and Scotland’s greatest expert on whisky. Charlie wore his learning lightly, but everybody in the room knew that if there was one man who could identify a glass of anonymous amber liquid and attribute it to any one of the country’s distilleries, name the man who blended it, and talk at length about the history of the glen from which it came, then it was Charlie.

They were standing at the window of one of the upstairs rooms, and beyond them, swaying in the summer-evening breeze, were the tops of the trees lining Queen Street Gardens. That wind was mild, and had on its breath the scent of the Firth, the river, and of the hills beyond. And of newly cut grass, too, for the gardens had been attended to that day and the smell of the grass was strong.

While Isabel was talking to Charlie, a well-built man in a linen suit and sporting the only monocle still known to be worn in Scotland, Jamie was on the other side of the room, engaged in conversation with a tall man whom Isabel knew well. This was Roddy Martine, a well-liked recorder of social events who kept society, and its doings, in his head. Roddy knew who did what, with whom, and when. He knew, too, who knew what about whom, and why.

Charlie raised his glass to his lips and looked at Isabel across the rim. “Climbed?” he said. “When I was very young I was at school in Dumfriesshire. Until about eleven. Pretty odd place. They used to take us climbing the hills down there—Kirkudbrightshire and so on. Nothing very big. And I climbed a bit when I was at St. Andrews. The occasional Munro. And you?”

“Not really,” said Isabel.

Charlie remembered something about the school. “Funny, I never really think about that place. It’s closed now. It was a pretty dubious institution. One of the masters …”

Isabel imagined that she was about to hear some awful story of cruelty, of the sort that had been surfacing so much—ancient traumas exposed and scratched at, like sores. But no, Charlie’s memories were benign.

“He was called Mr. MacDavid,” Charlie went on. “He was the most unusual teacher. All he ever taught us—for years—was the Boer War. He knew a lot about that. So by the time I was eleven, I knew everything there was to know about the Boer War, but was pretty ignorant about everything else.”

Isabel laughed. “The relief of Ladysmith,” she said. “The siege of Mafeking.”

“Don’t start on that,” said Charlie. “But why did you ask me about climbing?”

Isabel took a sip of her wine. A waiter approached; their host had ordered trays of elaborate canapés and not enough guests were eating them. “Please take something,” pleaded the waiter. “These are very nice.” He indicated a row of miniature haggis pies.

Isabel picked one out; Charlie took two in one hand, popping another one into his mouth. Isabel thanked the waiter before she answered Charlie’s question. “I thought you might know about it. I’ve been reading a book about Everest. I had no idea.”

Charlie, swallowing another tiny haggis, looked interested. “No idea about all those goings-on?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I do,” said Charlie, licking his fingers. “I know somebody who went there a couple of years ago. I met him through Pete Burgess. He went up Everest, but didn’t get to the top. Something went wrong. They’re always dying—once you get past a certain point. Apparently the mountain has got hundreds of bodies on it—they can’t get them down.”

Isabel was thinking. Edinburgh was not a large city. How many people living there would have climbed Everest? One or two, if that. “I think I may know him,” she said. “Or rather, I don’t actually know him, but I know who he is. John Fraser.” And then she added, “I think.”

Charlie was looking across the room as Isabel spoke. She thought at first that he had not heard her, as he started to say something about a woman who stood in the doorway. “I’ve seen her somewhere,” he said. “She’s an actress, I think, and the trouble with actresses is that you think you know them because you’ve seen them …” And then he stopped. “Fraser? Yes. John Fraser. Tall chap. He’s a teacher, I think.”

Isabel felt her heart beat faster. “You said that something went wrong. What?”

“One of them fell. They weren’t all that far up, I gather. This chap fell. I think he was …” He looked away again. The actress was talking to a small, rather neat man; she was taller than him by at least a head.

“Who was he—the one who fell?”

Charlie looked at Isabel again. She found herself studying his moustache—a handlebar affair that seemed to suit him so well. It must have taken years, she thought, to reach that stage of perfection; a generous act, undertaken for the benefit of others, as any act of personal enhancement was, since one did not see it very much oneself.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But I do know that he played rugby for Scotland. They had a minute’s silence for him at Murrayfield Stadium. He was one of the wings.” Then he remembered. “Chris Alexander. That was his name. I recall it now because his father was a director of a distillery I had dealings with. Nice chap. I met him. He was also a good amateur nose. He sometimes nosed for one of the distilleries on Islay. I forget which one.”

Isabel had heard Charlie refer to “noses” before. They were the people who remembered just how to achieve the taste of a particular whisky. He was a nose himself.

“Are you interested in all this?” Charlie said. “You’ve never talked about it before.”

She could not tell him, of course, and so she changed the subject. What she had heard confirmed her conviction that something had happened on the mountain to torment John Fraser. And she was already beginning to imagine what it was: Chris Alexander had fallen and John Fraser had left him to die. That was what John Fraser sought to expunge from his conscience, and that, she imagined, was what the anonymous letter-writer had somehow found out. This was quite possible, even if she had not a shred of evidence to support it. But would this hypothesis—for that was all it was—be enough to justify going to the chairman of the board of governors of Bishop Forbes and suggesting that this was what lay in one of the candidates’ past? He might say—and he would be justified in doing so—that she had jumped to conclusions. But if he did not, and if he proved to be willing to listen, then what did all this reveal? Simple cowardice—or something worse than that? Was it murder to leave somebody to die? No, it was not, but it could still be criminal, if you had an obligation to do something to help somebody and you did not. That was called culpable homicide, she believed, and it was not what one would expect to find in the background of the principal of a school.

So if all this proved to be true, then John Fraser was out of the running for the post, and that meant that Cat’s new boyfriend, Gordon, would have a much higher chance of appointment, particularly if Isabel found something questionable in the background of the third candidate. And that, she reflected, was exactly the way she should not be thinking. If you play a part in a competition for a public job—and a principal’s post was a public job—you should not favour your friends, or the friends of your friends, or the friend of your niece. That was what she reminded herself, but then it occurred to her: Why not? The overwhelming majority of people would without question favour a friend or a relative, if they had the chance, and not think twice about it. Were all these people wrong? Yes, thought Isabel; but then she thought, No. Morality could not be a matter of counting heads; but counting heads was sometimes a useful way of seeing whether a system of morality suited human nature as it actually was. Moral rules should not be devised for saints, but should be within the grasp of ordinary people; and ordinary people preferred those they knew to those they did not know; everyone knew that, but most of all, ordinary people knew it.

THE NEXT MORNING, Isabel took Charlie out in his pram to go shopping in Bruntsfield. It was an outing that he particularly enjoyed, as it inevitably culminated in a visit to Cat’s delicatessen, where Cat would give him a marzipan pig from a small box she kept on a shelf behind the counter. He knew exactly what lay in store and would shout “Pig! Pig!” as they entered. Then, with the treat grasped firmly in his hands, he would bite off the pig’s head, watched in astonishment by Eddie and Cat.