Jamie glowered. “You see. You see what it’s like. People think that gout’s a joke.”
She made a supreme effort. “I don’t. I really don’t.”
“Then why did you laugh?” he asked accusingly.
She found it difficult to explain. It was not so much the comic aspects of toes that had amused her, but the words she herself had used: It’s not at all funny. For most people, to have to say that something is unfunny raises an often irresistible temptation to smile or laugh. That might be because we know that the statement It’s not at all funny is in itself funny, the humour being in our need to conceal our true feelings.
Jamie waited for his answer.
“It was spontaneous,” she said. “Something serious can provoke a laugh. It’s something to do with having to keep a straight face. The moment you do that, you lose your control and smile.”
“I don’t see it.”
“Well, it happens,” she said. “Haven’t you seen those clips of newsreaders losing their self-control when reading the news on television? They have to report some dreadful event—a natural disaster, or something like that—and then they start to giggle uncontrollably.” She paused. She remembered seeing a film clip of a Dutch television presenter chairing a discussion of people who had been the victims of medical accidents and starting to laugh at the strange voice of a man he was interviewing. It was not at all funny: his guest had been left with a falsetto, and when he remonstrated with the interviewer, pointing out that he saw nothing funny about the situation, this had only made matters worse. It had cost the interviewer his job, but in one sense it had not been his fault—at times we cannot control laughter, and one might as well fire somebody for sneezing at the wrong time.
Jamie sighed. “All right, sorry. You didn’t mean to laugh. But that’s the whole problem: people smile when you say the word gout. It’s an old man’s disease—and they think it’s punishment for eating too much rich food and drinking too much wine.”
“And is it?”
He looked at her incredulously. “Is it a punishment?”
“No, I didn’t mean that. I meant: Is that what causes it?”
Jamie shrugged. “I read up a little bit. It’s to do with an excessively high level of uric acid in the blood. That’s to do with diet. There are high levels of things called purines in some foods.”
“And if you eat those, you can get gout?”
“Yes. They make crystals which lodge in a joint. They’re like tiny razor needles. Hence the pain.”
Isabel winced. “I’m sorry. I was very insensitive.”
He seemed to accept her apology, and went further than that. “I’m the one who should apologise. It was ridiculous not to tell you right at the beginning.”
“I thought you had something terrible. I thought it was cancer.”
He took her hand, holding it, pressing it gently. “I wasn’t thinking straight. I suppose I’ve been ashamed. I’ve never been really ill, you see. I’m used to being very fit, and now…”
Isabel could understand how he felt. Jamie, not yet thirty, was at an age at which physical imperfection was more often than not the problem of others. He took pride in his fitness—he went for regular runs along the canal towpath, he played squash with an old university friend a couple of times a month, and he occasionally went to the gym at Craiglockhart. He carried not an ounce of spare flesh, and he never needed to consult the doctor—and now, gout…
“You don’t need to feel ashamed,” she said.
He nodded. “I know. And yet, I’ve been dreading what you’d think—and what other people would think too.”
“Unnecessary.”
“I know it’s unnecessary, but…but I don’t want to have gout.”
She asked him how they treated it.
“There’s a pill that stops the action of purines. But you may have to take the pill for ages. Forever—if you want to avoid future attacks.”
She glanced down at his feet. “I didn’t see you limping.”
“I tried to conceal it, but it was very sore when I walked. It still is.”
“My darling…”
He brushed aside her concern. “Let’s not talk about it any longer. I want to go and listen to…”
“Stravinsky?”
“No. I don’t know why I said Stravinsky.”
Jamie began to make his way towards the door. She watched his gait; was there anything different about it? She decided that there was.
“You still don’t want dinner?”
He shook his head. “I’m not hungry. I hope you don’t mind.”
She did, but she did not tell him. Instead, she said, “I’m so sorry you’ve been upset. Can we talk about it later? Tomorrow, maybe?”
He nodded. “Yes. Meantime…”
She waited.
“Meantime, I’ll go and listen to some Arvo Pärt.”
She asked him whether he would like her to listen with him. Again he shook his head. “You go ahead and have dinner. I’ll be all right—really I will. And I’m sorry I was so touchy.”
He turned to kiss her—a light kiss on the cheek. She appreciated the gesture, but it was not enough. He might have come to sit in the kitchen with her, as he usually did when it was her turn to cook. But he did not suggest that, and she felt rebuffed—and saddened. They very rarely, if ever, had any sort of disagreement or fight. This exchange between them left her feeling raw; Jamie was worried and upset, yet she did not feel she could do anything to help him. He would have to work through his feelings on his gout; he would need to come to terms with it. She could not make that any easier, she suspected.
She would never have expected that he would react so badly to being ill. This, she decided, was his Achilles heel—his particular vulnerability. He had always seemed so strong, so unassailable, and now a weakness—an ordinary human weakness—had been exposed. The shock of the sudden row began to abate. Jamie, in her eyes, was so overwhelmingly perfect that this little thing, this flash of petulance, would soon be forgotten. He had not shown himself to be selfish or greedy, or anything of that sort; she could be grateful for that. And there were plenty of women who made much more unsettling discoveries about their lovers or husbands—who discovered that they had done something appalling, that they had a murky past, or were seeing somebody else: at least this was nothing like that. The thought brought relief; men were peculiar—that was all there was to it. You thought you understood the male psyche, and then suddenly and quite unexpectedly it revealed a quirk you would never have imagined: in this case, a concealed pride in physical perfection. She smiled at the thought: the key to understanding men, a friend had once said to her, is to remember that the boundaries between the man and the boy within were often blurred, and not every woman knew where they were. Once you knew, then you would understand much more, and could look benevolently on the more difficult ways of men—on their moods, their silences, their need to spend time together in the pursuit of their male pastimes. You could even begin to understand rugby and football, and other things that made up the secret life of men.
She went into the kitchen. The secret life of men…Why was it that women were so keen to shine a light on that life, to force men out into the open? Why drive men out of their sheds and into the light, where their secret pursuits would be exposed for what they were—boyish enthusiasms that meant nothing very much and were never a threat to women. She found herself shaking her head. It was hard being a man—having to pretend to be strong, having to bottle up your feelings, having to be afraid to cry. Poor men.
She opened the fridge and took out cold roast chicken that she had bought that morning from the butcher in Bruntsfield. She would have some of this, she thought, with a salad and some new potatoes. She would pour herself a glass of New Zealand white wine and sit at the table, her plate of chicken before her, and let things return to normal. Then she would look up gout online and see what was said about it.
She glanced out of the window. A movement
in the garden directly outside had caught her eye; the swaying of the boughs of a shrub in the wind, she thought, but no, it was a flash of red-brown fur, the swing of a bushy tail, a brief hesitation.
Isabel stood quite still. Brother Fox seemed to notice movement more than anything else, and now she saw his eyes, two small buttons of intelligent black looking directly into the kitchen. What did he see? A table? Something behind the table—another piece of furniture in his eyes, perhaps, but one supporting a plate on which something intriguing lay.
She wondered whether he could smell the chicken. Air entered the kitchen through the window sashes—she knew that because draughts could be felt if one sat too close to the glass—and if that were the case, then surely smells could drift to the outside. Olfactory porosity, she thought, and wondered if such a term existed. The mingling of smells was another way of putting it…As if in confirmation, she saw Brother Fox raise his nose to the air and sniff.
“Roast chicken,” she whispered.
She did not feed Brother Fox because there was opposition amongst the neighbours. “We don’t want to encourage them” was a common point of view; foxes, they felt, did not belong in towns, and feeding them was an interference in the natural order of things. “Nobody feeds them in the wild…”
Isabel did not share this animosity towards foxes. They led difficult lives, she felt; harried by farmers who accused them of taking their lambs and chickens—which they did, of course; seen off by dogs; pursued across hillsides by mounted huntsmen; chased away by householders; few people seemed to welcome them, although Isabel did. Animals, like people, did not ask to be who or what they were, and to make life difficult for others simply for being what they were seemed to her to be fundamentally unkind. Of course there were times when interests came into stark conflict—as when a great white shark attacked a surfer or a grizzly bear mauled a hiker—but these were the results of territorial incursions and could hardly be unexpected. Surfers, she had noticed, tended to recognise this and would show surprising understanding of the sharks that nibbled at their surfboards. She had seen a report of one young Australian saying, from his hospital bed, the punctures from the shark’s teeth vivid on his calf, “I was in his element—what can one expect?”
She was sure that Brother Fox would never bite anybody unless provoked. She had seen his teeth, and she imagined he could administer a sharp enough nip, but why would he do that unless cornered and forced to defend himself?
“You wouldn’t…,” she heard herself whispering.
The fox had taken a step forward and was now closer to the window. Again he lifted his nose and sniffed.
“You know, don’t you?” said Isabel. “And yes, it smells delicious, doesn’t it?”
It came upon her quickly, and without announcement: a sudden surge of sympathy for Brother Fox in his foxness. It was more than a simple understanding: it was a sense of being somehow with him, a sense of having been vouchsafed an insight into what had been an utterly alien world; she recalled Thomas Nagel’s philosophical essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” One might ask the same question here, she thought: What is it like to be a fox? Somehow, she felt she knew the answer. She would never be able to explain it, of course, but she was sure that she felt it.
She made up her mind. Moving slowly, so as not to disturb her visitor, she edged towards the kitchen door. This gave out directly onto the garden, and she pushed at it gently, hoping not to alarm Brother Fox. He was just around the corner, and when Isabel stepped out, holding before her a large and greasy chicken drumstick, it was as if she were presenting to him a peace offering—something to reassure him that her intentions were pacific.
When Brother Fox saw her, he lowered his head in a cringe and then, almost immediately, raised it again. He had picked up the whiff of chicken, and was interested.
“For you,” whispered Isabel, holding out her offering.
She waved it about, and then dropped it to the ground in front of her. Brother Fox watched. He looked at her again, as if assessing her intentions, and then suddenly darted forward to snatch the manna before him. There was a crunching sound as his teeth bit into the bone, and then he vanished into the undergrowth, as quickly and unceremoniously as he had made his first appearance.
Isabel returned to the kitchen, pleased that she had been able to relieve Brother Fox’s hunger. It was a small part of her meal, but for him it must have been an immense treat, a succulent addition to a diet that must have consisted, for the most part, of small rodents and sundry scraps. The encounter had pleased her—not only because she always liked to see Brother Fox, but also because she felt that the simple act of sharing had somehow diminished the pain of this world; it was not much to throw a chicken bone on the ground, and yet what an effect it had. She did not think this as one who might congratulate herself on having done a good act; rather she thought of it as might one who simply kept a tally of good and evil, the simplest of all possible Benthamites, and rejoiced in any diminution of suffering, whether animal or human. That seemed to justify the sacrifice of a single chicken drumstick.
There was no thanks from Brother Fox, and for a moment she felt resentful at his matter-of-fact indifference to her gift. But that was an absurd feeling—animals could not be expected to understand the notion of gift; or could they…She thought of the many instances where animals showed affection for humans for what they had done for them. Was that not gratitude? She thought of St. Jerome and the lion; the lion could so easily have eaten the saint—and many saints had suffered that fate, dispatched and consumed by lions; she thought of Greyfriars Bobby, that great-hearted Edinburgh terrier who had refused to leave his master’s grave for years after his death; she thought of elephants said to have remembered those who had shown them kindness. Brother Fox was not in that league; like all foxes, he would behave much as foxes in traditional stories behaved—deceptively, slyly and with consummate style—although she felt that somewhere, beneath his shy glances, there lay a recognition on his part that she meant him well.
She went back inside and ate her solitary meal, briskly and without relish. She reproached herself for not giving more chicken to Brother Fox; he had made such quick work of the drumstick, and it would hardly have done much to fill his stomach. She had more than enough for herself, as Jamie had said that he would not have any. Jamie…She tried to put out of her mind their earlier conversation—it had been so out of character on his part, she told herself, that she should dismiss it altogether. His visit to the doctor had touched a raw nerve—that was all—and everything would be back to normal the next morning. Yet she found herself dwelling on his sudden touchiness about his physical limitations and wondering why she had never guessed that it existed. Were there other things about him—other secrets—that she knew nothing about?
After her dinner, she went into her study. Unread papers, each submitted to the Review with the silent prayers of its authors, were scattered on her desk. There was Professor van der Pompe’s unrealistic proposals; there was a book review by none other than Professor Lettuce, signed at the foot of the page with the magisterial Lettuce with which he concluded all missives…It was a ridiculous affectation, thought Isabel; bishops signed themselves by the name of their diocese, but that was a long tradition, and things done out of respect for tradition were in a different category. And bishops, of course, would add their first name, which made it seem rather friendly. Dukes, too, signed themselves with the name of their dukedom, as in Montrose or Argyll, but this was no encouragement for mere professors of philosophy, such as Lettuce was, to call themselves Lettuce and nothing else. She smiled as she remembered the professor of history from that academic novel who answered the telephone with “History speaking.” Perhaps Lettuce could do something similar, saying “Reason” or “Logic” when he picked up the telephone.
She sat down at her desk, pushing aside the pile of papers as she did so, but immediately retrieving them out of guilt. Papers may hang over you, may hedge you in, but you
could not dispose of them by simply pushing them aside like some remote and unaccountable bureaucrat.
She had noted Rob McLaren’s telephone number on a back page of her diary, and she now dialled it. He answered quickly—after little more than an initial ring—and she imagined him at a desk somewhere, waiting for a phone call. She had felt that he was lonely, and this quick answer seemed to confirm that. Lonely people sat by their telephones, she imagined, waiting for calls that in most cases never came.
He seemed pleased to hear from her. “I’d hoped you might get in touch,” he said.
At first she found this strange, but then she remembered that she had said something about letting him know how she got on with her enquiries.
“I wanted to contact somebody we talked about,” she said. “Andrea Murray. I wondered if you had her address.”
There was a silence at the other end of the line. Then he said, “Her address?”
“Yes. You said that you saw her from time to time.”
Again there was a pause before he said, “Why do you want to get in touch with her?”
Isabel thought she had made it clear to him why she was taking an interest in Tony MacUspaig, but she told him again. Halfway through, he interrupted her.
“I can give you an address,” he said. “I’m not sure if it’s current, but I do have one.”
She thanked him. “Do you have it to hand?” she asked.
“No,” he replied. “But I could find it.”
“Could you get back to me?” asked Isabel.
He seemed to hesitate. “I tell you what: Could you meet me tomorrow?”
“I suppose I could. But wouldn’t it be easier to do this over the phone?”
His reply came quickly. “I’d prefer to meet,” he said. “If that’s all right with you. What about lunch?”
Isabel reached out with her free hand to fiddle with one of the papers on her desk. Lunch? She saw no reason for them to meet for lunch simply to exchange an address. But then she reminded herself that Rob was doing her a favour, and that if he felt they needed to meet for lunch, then she should accept gracefully. He seemed pleased with this, and suggested the Café St. Honoré, a small French restaurant tucked away in a lane off Thistle Street.
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