The Geometry of Holding Hands

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “The reason why I tell you all this,” Iain said, “is that it is precisely these things that I possess that are causing me anxiety.”

  “That’s not uncommon,” observed Isabel. “The burdens of wealth are well known.”

  “Yes, perhaps. And I know that I could simply divest myself of just about everything I have, and still have enough for myself, of course.”

  “You could,” said Isabel. “A lot of people seem to experience a sense of elation when they give things away. They feel lighter, I’m told. It’s a clearing of the decks.”

  Iain stared at her. “But if I did that,” he said, “I would have to choose among a number of people who all probably think that they are the ones who should get their hands on my place up in Argyll. That choice wouldn’t be an easy one, and it would leave several people very unhappy.”

  “Divide it then,” said Isabel. “Divide it strictly pro rata, or whatever the expression is. Equal shares for everybody.”

  Iain shook his head. “You can do that with money,” he said. “But you can’t do that with land. If you divide it and sell off portions, it ceases to be the thing it was. It won’t work. That’s why primogeniture was invented. Do you get my drift?”

  “Yes. Yes, I do.”

  “And there’s another thing,” he continued. “Running a Highland estate is no picnic financially. These places gobble up money—if you want to run them well.”

  “And you do, don’t you?”

  Iain nodded. “Yes, I want that bit of Scotland—that’s the way I look at it, you see—I want that bit of Scotland to be preserved and cherished. That’s taken a lot of money—most of the money I get from my investments, as it happens. And the woollen mill. It all goes into deer fencing and tree planting and using proper lime to point the walls of the walled garden—and so on. Every penny I’ve earned has been spent on that place. Every penny—more or less.”

  Isabel was familiar with that attitude to land ownership. It was regrettably rare, but it tended to surface when it came to these large Scottish estates. It was an attitude of stewardship that was quite at odds with a profit-based approach to land. You did not mine the land; you nurtured it.

  Iain explained that there were two areas of life in which conflict was almost inevitable: land and succession. “People can fight with one another for generations over those things,” he said. “That’s why I’d prefer the decision as to who gets what to be taken by somebody other than me—and revealed only after my death. I won’t be around to get the flak, and if the decision is made by an outsider, on defensible principles, then it will be better all round.”

  “I think my father ran family trusts like that,” said Isabel. “He had clients who preferred him to make the decisions as to who got what.” She thought of her own trust, and of the role of Hamish MacGeorge and Gordon MacGregor. She remembered how, at the two most important meetings of the trust each year, one of them—she thought it was Gordon—invariably brought a bottle of sherry and a soda-water syphon with him, and how, at the end of the meeting, he would offer everybody a glass of this curious mixture. She always said no; she did not like sherry all that much, although she could drink it when the occasions of politeness demanded it. Hamish beamed at the suggestion and always said, predictably on cue, “One of Spain’s great contributions to civilisation.” To which Gordon would make the same reply, year after year, “Let us not forget about Francisco Pizarro, Hamish. The conquistadores, you know…”

  This brief exchange—which never went any further, at least in Isabel’s presence—was accompanied by the hissing of the soda-water syphon. And then the conversation would drift off in another direction altogether. Both Hamish and Gordon were keen exponents of Scottish country dancing, although their wives were not. This meant that the two of them sometimes went off on country-dancing expeditions as a twosome, sometimes ending up dancing in exotic locations: men could dance with other men in Scottish country dancing and indeed the Reel of the 51st Highland Division, one of the most famous of the Scottish dances, had been devised by Scottish army officers in a German prisoner-of-war camp during the Second World War. They had all been men, of course, and had coped with the tedium of their existence by working out the elaborate steps of a regimental dance. The detailed choreography of this dance had been set out in a letter home written by the reel’s originator, but the Germans had intercepted this letter and spent much time and energy trying to crack the code that they thought it represented.

  Hamish and Gordon had regaled Isabel with an account of the visit of what they called their “dance circle,” an eighty-strong Scottish country-dancing team, to Istanbul, where they had given an exhibition performance at the Pera Palace Hotel. And then there had been the year when they had travelled to Russia and had danced at an event organised by the British Council and the British Embassy. “Scottish country dancing is a good example of what they call soft power,” Gordon had said. “Soft power is all about influence. That’s what they said at the embassy. That’s why they liked us.”

  Hamish nodded his agreement. “The other embassies were green with envy,” he said. “There had been talk of the President of Russia coming along to take part, but it didn’t happen. The First Secretary at the embassy told me that he did that sort of thing—show up at events, anything from biker rallies to the Bolshoi—in order to get a photograph of himself for his annual calendar.”

  “He publishes a calendar, you see,” said Gordon. “It shows him in various places—wrestling with bears and so on…”

  Hamish wagged an admonitory finger. “He would never do that,” he scolded. “He’ll be on very good terms with bears.”

  “And then we went to India,” Gordon went on. “Jaipur, where we danced at the Pink Palace, and made a very big stir—and then that wonderful place on the…What was the name of that holy river, Hamish? The…”

  “Narmada,” supplied Hamish. “We were guests there of that nice man Richard Holkar. You’ll have met him, Isabel.”

  Hamish and Gordon both assumed that Isabel, whom they regarded as well connected, knew everybody.

  Isabel shook her head. “I haven’t, I’m afraid.”

  “You’d like him,” chimed in Gordon. “Richard is the son of the last Maharaja of Indore. The maharaja had a daughter by his first wife—she’s the current maharani—and then he married a second wife, an American. So, Richard is half American and half Indian. He’s one of the most interesting men in India.”

  “The family was fabulously wealthy, of course,” said Hamish. “The maharaja had a very large jewel collection. They loved jewels, those fellows.”

  Gordon was reminded of something. “Who was that Indian prince who had so many jewels he couldn’t possibly wear them all? So he had a servant who walked behind him—wearing the extra jewels for him.”

  Hamish could not remember who that was. “I don’t think it was this maharaja. This one had a rather strange Bauhaus-style palace in Indore itself. That was sold, and the government of India took an awful lot of their stuff under various tax agreements and so on. But Richard is still in this wonderful fort—as a tenant, I believe. He runs it as a really good hotel—very quiet and unfussy. Just perfect in every respect. It was where his great-grandmother lived…”

  “Several more greats-grandmother,” corrected Gordon. “Ahilyabai Holkar. An early feminist—well before the invention of modern feminism.”

  “There have always been powerful women who have spoken up for women,” said Isabel. “It’s nothing new.”

  “Of course not,” said Hamish, hurriedly. “There’s a statue of her at the entrance to Richard’s fort. Pilgrims come every day and bedeck it with flowers. Every day, Isabel. Can you imagine anybody here bothering to do that?”

  “Anyway,” said Gordon. “We danced there and it went down really well. We always take a couple of pipers with us, and they went up to the top of the for
t and played ‘Mist-Covered Mountains.’ The Indians were in floods of tears. They just love that sort of thing.”

  They lapsed into silence. Then Hamish said, “Our last event on that particular trip was up in Nepal. We went up to Pokhara, where they have this big Gurkha recruitment base, Isabel, and we stayed there at Tiger Mountain Lodge. Marcus Cotton runs that—you must know him, Isabel?”

  Isabel shook her head. “Alas, no.”

  “The Gurkhas love Scottish country dancing,” said Gordon. “They sent a team up to the lodge—you can just imagine them, with their kukris and everything. They showed us some of their special Gurkha dances. Many of them were just slightly different versions of the standard dances—Dashing White Sergeant, and so on. But some were new to us.”

  “Marcus invited a Dutch friend of his to come along to our event. George van Driem.”

  “I don’t think I know him,” Isabel said quickly.

  “No, perhaps not. You should meet him, though.”

  “That would be nice,” said Isabel.

  “He became a botanist and then went on to become a linguist,” Gordon continued. “He was appointed to a chair at a Swiss university, which is where he is now.”

  “And he wrote a book on the history of tea,” Gordon interjected. “Not just the history—everything about tea. Everything.”

  “He went to Nepal for his linguistic research rather than as a botanist,” said Hamish. “He had spent a lot of time researching Himalayan languages. He actually discovered two previously unknown languages, Isabel. Two! And wrote grammars for a number of others.”

  “George came to dinner,” said Hamish. “And we had a fascinating conversation…”

  Isabel became aware that Iain Melrose was staring at her.

  “Thinking of something?” he asked.

  She returned to the present moment. Hers was a particular form of consciousness, she thought: not a stream of consciousness but a meandering, deltoid consciousness, in which memories and speculations—fantasies, even—rubbed shoulders with awareness of the present. “Daydreaming,” Jamie had said, smiling. “Not so sexy a name for it, but that’s what it is.”

  Iain became business-like. “I’m taking up too much of your time. I’d like to be specific about my proposal. I’ll nominate you as my executor—if you accept, of course. In return I shall make provision for a reasonable sum, not a vast amount of money—let’s say five thousand pounds—to be—”

  She interrupted him sharply. “I would not do this for payment.”

  “What I was going to say, if you had let me finish…” It was a mild rebuke, and he must have regretted it immediately, as he looked apologetic. “What I wanted to say is that this money would be available for you to donate to whatever cause you wish.”

  She looked at Iain. This was a good man—that was perfectly apparent. He was not a complete stranger to her, as there were shared friends that made their circles of moral proximity intersect. And now there was this additional element to consider: a charity would benefit substantially if she were to agree.

  She decided out of habit. She had been brought up to do the right thing. She had spent years of her life worrying over what was right and what was wrong. This was obviously right. “I’ll do it,” she said. And then she added, “Of course I hope that I shall not be required to act for a very long time.”

  Iain smiled at that; a rueful smile, she thought, and she sensed, immediately, what was coming next. “Unfortunately, that’s not the case,” he said, his voice even. “I’m living on borrowed time, I’m afraid. I won’t burden you with the details, but I have stage-four cancer—fairly widely disseminated. Oddly enough, I’m still pretty much asymptomatic, but it’s still too late for them to do anything, really; they might have been able to do something until a few months ago, but not now.”

  She lowered her eyes. “I’m very sorry,” she said.

  “Thank you. But I’m fairly resolved about it. I’ve had a good life, on the whole. I’ve been fortunate—I had a wonderful marriage. I had the great good fortune of having a circle of amusing and loyal friends. What is there for me to regret?”

  He seemed to be waiting for an answer, and so Isabel said, “Nothing, I suppose, except the thought that you may no longer—” She broke off. It was awkward. It was not easy to talk about somebody’s death when that person was sitting in front of you.

  “No, go on,” he urged. “Say what you wanted to say. I’m not squeamish about death. And you don’t need to creep around the issue with me.”

  “All right. What I was going to say was that you will no longer be here to experience the world that I assume you love. The familiar things of your life. Your friends. Your place up in Argyll. It must be hard to say goodbye to all that.”

  He agreed. “Absolutely, that’s the only hard bit. I think of it as dying when the world still seems precious—when the world still seems beautiful. I know that sounds a bit obscure, but that’s what comes to my mind.”

  “There’s a folk song that puts it rather well, I think. There’s a line about how hard it is to die when all the birds are singing in the sky. I think that says it, don’t you?” said Isabel.

  He looked at her mutely, and she wondered whether, in accepting his invitation to speak freely about death, she had nonetheless crossed some ill-defined border. But she had not, because after a few moments he said that he knew the song and that it rang true. “ ‘Seasons in the Sun.’ Of course, the man who wrote it—and I can’t remember his name—was a young man at the time and can’t have known that particular regret. He had obviously imagined it rather poignantly, but he did not actually know it.”

  “But surely that’s what art is,” said Isabel. “The envisaging of the reality of another.”

  “Possibly.” He glanced at his watch, and she thought: How much more significant does that become when you know your time is limited? “So, I’m afraid accepting this executorship will not be a theoretical undertaking for the future—it’s about some time…” He shrugged. “Some time rather soon.”

  Again, she said, “I’m sorry. I really am very sorry.”

  He became business-like once more. “Now, as to the potential beneficiaries: we had no children, and neither my wife nor I had siblings, so the closest relatives are three cousins—and not very close ones. They are the people for whom the testamentary trust is intended.” He paused. “I’d like you to meet them. They all live in Edinburgh, so there will be no difficulty about anybody being too far away.”

  “All right.”

  “I’ll give you all the details in due course and make some arrangements.” He rose to his feet. Looking about him, he nodded towards a painting on the wall beside one of Isabel’s bookcases.

  “That painting…”

  Isabel followed his gaze. It was a large James Cowie watercolour—a rural scene from north-east Scotland. It had belonged to Isabel’s father, who had been given it by one of Cowie’s pupils. She had grown up with that painting and remembered how, as a small girl, she had been held up to look at it closely by her mother. The painting now had a scent to it, in Isabel’s mind—the scent of her mother’s perfume, which she had experienced as they had both looked at it. That had been a perfume that her mother bought from a small parfumerie in Lyon. Isabel had tried to trace it much later, well after her mother’s death, and had failed. A letter sent to the address she had found in an old address book came back stamped Deceased.

  “It’s a Cowie, isn’t it?” Iain said.

  “Yes. Painted in 1925. It’s an Angus scene, I think, although I don’t know exactly where. Somewhere near Arbroath. He taught at Hospitalfield, as you probably know.”

  Iain nodded. “I love his work. That painting he did—A Portrait Group—in the Gallery of Modern Art, is just so haunting. I can stand in front of it for hours.”

  He looked back at Isabel. “One of
the cousins,” he said, “is an artist. He has an opening coming in a couple of days. Would you like an invitation? It’s at Guy’s gallery, as it happens. Perhaps…” He looked at her enquiringly, and seemed pleased when she agreed to go.

  “The other two are quite different,” Iain said. “One is a property developer. She’s called Sarah. The other is a rather quiet man—I think you’d like him—called John.”

  “Will the cousins know about my being the executor?”

  He replied that they would. “I prefer openness, and so I propose to drop them all a note later on today.” He paused. “As long as you don’t mind.”

  Isabel assured him that she did not. She could not see any reason to conceal what her enquiries were all about. Of course, that meant that some of the beneficiaries might tailor their responses to what they thought would stand them in best stead, but she imagined that would be fairly obvious. Isabel had always prided herself on her ability to sniff out insincerity, and she suspected that she was about to be exposed to a good dose of exactly that. But she had agreed to act—that was the important thing—and she would make the best job of it. As she accompanied Iain to the front door, where they said goodbye, she thought: This is a judgement of Paris.

  The thought amused her. She was Paris, and as in the myth there were three contestants, and she had one golden apple to award. And then she thought of the consequences. The original judgement had led to the Trojan War.