The Charming Quirks of Others

For a few brief, delicious moments, Isabel experienced a sense of euphoria. It was akin to the satisfaction felt on solving a difficult crossword puzzle, or seeing the reasoning behind a mathematical proof. This fact established the authorship of the letter beyond question. Alex Mackinlay could not have told his wife that the letter was written in green ink, nor had he shown the letter to her. It was she who wrote it.

He was staring at her. “You look as if you’ve had a brainwave,” he said. “Care to share it?”

Isabel opened her mouth, and then closed it. No, she thought. No, I don’t care to share it.

“Well?”

She handed the letter back to him with a shrug. “The whole point about anonymous letters,” she said calmly, “is that we don’t know who wrote them.”

He took the letter from her and slipped it back into the file. He was losing interest; she could tell. And that, she thought, was the way this man was; he was interested in those who could help him, but not in others. She had a strong intuition to that effect, and this time she decided to trust it.

She looked at her watch. “I really must get back to town,” she said. “I’m sorry that I’ve been unable to help you very much.”

He was polite, even if there was a lack of warmth in his voice. “I’m most grateful to you, Miss Dalhousie. I’m most grateful to you for the time you have spent on this matter, even if we are no further forward than when we began.”

But we are, she thought. We are a great deal further than you imagine.

“I take it, then, that you’ll ask Harold Slade to stay?”

“I shall,” he said. “In fact, I’ve already done that, and he was happy to agree.”

“Temporarily?” she asked.

“No, permanently.”

“But what about Singapore?”

Alex smiled. “Oddly enough, I think they’re going to be quite pleased if Harry doesn’t go—or some of them will be. I had a chat with my counterpart, the chairman of that school’s board. He became quite frank and admitted that they were not exactly of one mind about the appointment. There was a strong faction on their board that wanted an internal appointment—the deputy head. The chairman let slip that he was of that persuasion himself, but had been out-voted. He’ll be pleased when Harry calls off.”

Isabel sighed. “Well, that seems to settle that,” she said. “I must say again that I’m somewhat surprised that you asked me to look into this in the first place. Everything seems to have settled itself rather satisfactorily.”

He said nothing. She turned to face him again. There had been a note of anger in her voice, and he reacted; he looked concerned.

“But I didn’t ask you,” he said. “My wife did. She acted entirely off her own bat and then presented me with a fait accompli. I concurred and let you get on with it.”

Isabel turned away, looking out of the window at the lawn below. Two boys were engaged in what appeared to be a wrestling contest, one throwing the other down and then sitting on his chest. Their hair was dishevelled, their shirts hanging out of the tops of their trousers. The boy on the ground hit the other on the back and rolled him off. Then he kicked him, but only lightly. They were obviously good friends.

“May I ask you,” she said, turning back to face Alex. “May I ask you this: Who does your wife think wrote the letter?”

He hesitated, seemingly unsure as to whether to answer. But then he said, “Janet Carty.”

“And she voiced these suspicions to you?”

“Yes, she said she was pretty sure it was her. She urged me to take action.” He looked bemused. “In fact, she seemed to think that your investigation would back her up.”

Of course she did, thought Isabel. And she remembered the evening at Abbotsford, recalling the sight of Jillian mouthing something across the table at Harold Slade; and the look on his face as he responded. Lovers. Of course they were lovers. And what if Jillian had a rival? And this rival was Janet Carty? It would make perfect sense for her to undermine the secretary and at the same time stop, or at least delay, her lover’s departure for Singapore.

“I’m confident that Janet Carty did not write the letter,” she said. “If there’s one thing that’s clear to me, it’s that.”

He looked interested. “How can you be so sure?”

“Because I know who wrote it.”

She spoke impulsively, and immediately regretted it. I should not have said that. I can’t tell him his wife is having an affair. Why? Because it could bring his whole world down around him, and who am I to do that? The affair might come to an end, fizzle out, and Jillian might return to him. And who am I to preclude that possibility?

He fixed her with an intense gaze. “But you implied a few moments ago that you had no idea.”

She began to move towards the door. “That was then,” she said.

“Then who was it?”

She hesitated. She did not trust this man and she could not trust him not to take his anger out on his wife.

“I choose not to tell you.”

He raised his voice almost to shouting pitch. “You choose not to tell me?”

Perhaps this is why his wife is looking elsewhere, she thought. Perhaps he needs somebody to tell him.

“That is what I said, Mr. Mackinlay. You are an arrogant man, I’m afraid. You are used to demanding that people comply with what you want of them. I shall not.”

She walked past him. She half expected him to try to stop her leaving, but he did not.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I would normally give people the information to which they are entitled, but I do not think you deserve this information. So I shall not.”

She left the room. He said nothing as she opened the door and stepped out into the corridor.

Miss Carty was outside. You have been listening at the door, thought Isabel; it is quite apparent from your demeanour.

ISABEL DROVE BACK even more slowly than she had driven there. The road was quiet, and she felt calmer now as she made her way home under the wide sky of late afternoon. To her right, on the horizon, were the folds of the Lammermuir Hills, blue against blue. Between the road and the hills were rich stretches of green, squared by hedges and drystone walls that marched off into the distance.

I love this country, she thought. I love it because it is soft and green and the sky is a theatre of white and grey and is so heartbreakingly beautiful in all its moods. I love it because of its people, who are frustrating and interesting and full of joy and sorrow, in equal amounts perhaps; who plot and scheme and yet find time to love one another and make songs and music and plant rhododendrons and write poetry and talk Gaelic and catch fish. I love it for all of that.

As her car picked up speed when the road dipped down towards Flotterstone, Isabel thought about what she had done. She had been asked to find things wrong with three people with whom there was essentially not much wrong: they were simply human. But the people who had involved her in this had more substantial faults. They were schemers, she felt; schemers in a small and contained society. But then, were we not all like that, whatever circles we moved in? Were we not all concerned with our reputation? Were we not all intent on securing what we could for ourselves? Did we not all have flaws of greater or less magnitude—all of us?

She had effectively left them to their own devices, but what else could she have done? She could have said to Alex Mackinlay, “Your wife wrote that letter, you know. Your own wife.” And he would have laughed at the very idea, or reacted angrily perhaps and challenged her to justify the accusation. Which she had decided she could not do, because it would have made the whole situation messier and more difficult.

Her thoughts turned to happiness, and its only too common shadow, unhappiness. She hoped that Janet Carty would find happiness somewhere, although she doubted it. She hoped the same for Jillian, whose anguish and anxiety were so vividly attested by the letter she wrote. And poor Tom Simpson, who wanted the job but who would never get it; and John Fraser, in his grief and his guilt; and Gordon, whom she had misjudged in imagining the presence of malice when only ambition was present; and Alex Mackinlay, who was trying his best to defend the reputation of the school, but who could not help, it seemed, being a bit of a bully; and … and … Harold Slade. Isabel hesitated. It was all his fault, simpliciter. But it was never that simple. She made an effort, and eventually she thought: I wish happiness for Harold Slade too. There, I’ve thought it. I’ve thought the thing I knew I should think. And I feel better for it, because although it’s harder to love, it’s always better.

The road ahead curved slowly to the left. Off to the right, the land dipped down towards the plains of the coast, to the cone of Berwick Law and the blue haze of the North Sea. Suddenly she thought of the schoolboy with whom she had spoken; she saw his serious expression, his freckles, his green eyes, and she smiled as she sent him a mental message: Don’t worry. You may think you are in prison right at the moment, but the door will open soon enough. Remember that. It will—it really will.

BACK IN EDINBURGH, and two days later, they did not have far to go for their picnic—only a few paces, really, out on to the lawn behind the house, close to the wooden summerhouse that Isabel had decided she would soon convert into a place for Charlie to play in with his friends, when he eventually found some. There she laid a rubber-backed picnic rug on the grass—a rug in Macpherson tartan—and brought a few of Charlie’s toys to keep him entertained: an old wooden truck, green in body, with red wheels, that had belonged to her father and would not have looked out of place in a museum of childhood; his stuffed fox, who might be a familiar for their resident member of the species, Brother Fox; a vaguely sinister woollen spider, knitted by a Morningside widow and sold for charity at a bring-and-buy sale at Holy Corner. These would keep him entertained for hours, as he loaded the spider and fox into the back of the truck and then unloaded them again; interminably, it seemed; fascinated by the whole process.

“Do you think he knows that his stuffed fox is a fox?” asked Jamie, as Isabel laid out a plate of cucumber sandwiches and a neatly quartered Scotch egg pie. “Or is it just … something else?”

“I’ve been trying to see if he says ‘fo’ when he plays with it,” said Isabel. “He knows that Brother Fox is a fo, as he calls him. But I’m not sure if he knows that this is a fo.”

“Fo!” exclaimed Charlie, pointing to the bushes alongside the garden wall.

“Perhaps,” said Isabel. “He may be there. But I don’t see him, do you, Charlie?”

Isabel passed Jamie a quarter of the pie, and for Charlie she cut off an eighth. “We bank up so many resentments in our children,” she said. “As Mr. Larkin observed in that poem of his.”

“I haven’t read it,” said Jamie. “What does he say?”

Isabel waved a hand in the air. “Oh, something about how your mum and dad confuse you.”

“Confuse?”

“Well, something like that.”

Jamie looked puzzled. “Why do you mention that?”

She pointed to the tiny piece of pie. “Because here I am giving you a large slice of pie, and Charlie gets one-eighth of a pie.”

Jamie snorted. “He won’t notice. The size of one’s pie in this life depends on the size of one’s stomach. Charlie has a small stomach.”

“You’re right,” said Isabel. “He seems happy enough.” Words came to her, unbidden, unplanned. “I never wished for larger pies / A one-eighth pie was very nice / I never yearned for larger pies / My own small slice would quite suffice.”

She looked at Jamie, and they both burst out laughing.

“Don’t expect me to set that to music,” said Jamie.

“I don’t.”

They moved on to cucumber sandwiches. Above them, the sky was pale blue, empty apart from a few stately drifts of high, cotton-wool cumulus. Jamie lay back on the rug and stared up into the void; Isabel followed his gaze. They had more than enough cucumber sandwiches; they had all the elderflower cordial in the world; they had box after box of wafer-thin almond biscuits; they had everything that two people and a child could ever want.

“You’ve been busy, haven’t you?” observed Jamie. “I’ve been worried about you.”

“You don’t need to worry about me,” she said dreamily. “My life seems to tick over in a satisfactory way. Not much happens, I suppose. I run a philosophical review. I have a little boy. I have a hus …”

“… band,” he said. “Or almost. When are we going to get married, Isabel?”

“Soon,” she said. “We can talk about it after this picnic.”

“We mustn’t forget.”

“No, we won’t. I promise.”

He turned on to his stomach and, resting his head on his forearm, looked across the rug at Isabel. “Have you dealt with that business with Professor Lettuce?”

“No,” said Isabel. “And I don’t know what to do. I just don’t.”

“Then let me decide for you. You say that he sent in a dreadful review of Dove’s book?”

“Yes. It arrived yesterday. They must have fallen out with one another. They’ve done that before—like squabbling children. He tore the book to shreds.”

Jamie thought for a moment. “If you don’t publish it, then he’ll think that you’re trying to silence him. He’ll accuse you of personal pique because of what went before with Dove and him.”

“Quite likely.”

“And if you do publish it, then Dove will think that you’re trying to destroy him—for the same reason: what went before.”

“Yes.”

Jamie thought for a moment. “All right. This is what you should do. Write to both of them—the same letter. Say that you will not be party to their private rows and that this is the reason why you will not publish the review. Let Dove read the review, and he can sort it out with Lettuce. Or not. It’ll be up to them.” He paused, judging her response to his suggestion. “In that way, you’ll rise above both of them.”

She nodded her agreement. “That’s the wisdom of Solomon. Thank you. And I have always wanted to rise above Dove and Lettuce.”

“Well, you do. Calmly and elegantly, like a Zeppelin, you rise above them.”

She smiled. She knew it was a compliment. “You’re very kind.”

“Because I love you so much,” he said. “That is why I like to be kind to you.”

“And that is why I shall bring you all the flowers of the mountain,” said Isabel. “For the self-same reason.”

She went on to say something else, but Jamie found his attention drifting. He was feeling sleepy, for it was warm, and he could lie there for ever, he thought, listening to the sound of Isabel’s voice, in the way one listens to the conversations of birds, or the sound of a waterfall descending the side of a Scottish mountain; sounds for which we cannot come up with a meaning, but which we love dearly with all our heart, and loving anything with all your heart always brings understanding, in time.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alexander McCall Smith is the author of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, the Isabel Dalhousie series, the Portuguese Irregular Verbs series, and the 44 Scotland Street series. He is professor emeritus of medical law at the University of Edinburgh and has served on many national and international bodies concerned with bioethics. He was born in what is now known as Zimbabwe and taught law at the University of Botswana. He lives in Scotland.