Isabel demurred. “But don’t let me inhibit you,” she said. “If you had some ordinary soda water, though, that would do me fine.”
“Soda water?” said Gordon brightly. “Now, we can always do that—as it happens.”
Hamish left the room and returned with a bottle of sherry and an old-fashioned soda-water syphon on a tray. He passed a glass of unadulterated soda water to Isabel. Then, having poured a small quantity of sherry into the two remaining glasses, he added a good splash of soda to each.
“I suppose we should toast the health of Cat and Leo,” said Isabel. She realised she sounded grudging, and tried to make amends by smiling brightly.
They raised their glasses.
“Soda water is so refreshing,” she said.
“My wife bought me this syphon for my birthday,” said Gordon. “A long time ago. I brought it into the office and it’s never really left the firm.”
Soda water triggered a memory in Isabel’s mind. “Do you know,” she began, “that the Parsis have a lot of occupational surnames?”
Gordon looked blank. Hamish frowned in puzzlement.
“The Parsis were originally Persian,” said Isabel. “They’re still prominent in Mumbai. Successful business types. Accountants. Hoteliers. And they have these lovely surnames: they add walla to things.”
“I know that word,” said Gordon. “Isn’t a walla an expert of some sort?”
“Yes,” said Isabel. “So there are families called Bakerywalla—they must have been bakery people. And then there’s Electricwalla.”
“At least we know what they did,” observed Hamish.
“But,” said Isabel, “the Parsi surname to beat all others is Sodawaterwalla.”
Hamish and Gordon both burst out laughing.
“Could I change my name?” asked Gordon. “I much prefer Gordon Sodawaterwalla.”
“And you, Miss Philosophywalla?” said Hamish.
They laughed again, and Isabel left the office with a smile on her face. She would be quite happy to be Miss Philosophywalla, and Jamie, she decided, would obviously be Jamie Bassoonwalla.
She thought of Cat—Ms. Deliwalla. And then she thought of Leo, Mr. Porscheturbowalla, and she stopped smiling. If her suspicion proved correct, Cat was about to make a serious mistake. Should she, as her aunt, not to mention her trustee, try to prevent the marriage? Surely Cat could see that if Leo was asking for a Porsche at this stage, there would be further requests, and these might not be so easily refused. Perhaps she should throw caution to the wind and say to Cat, “Look, Cat, this man is after your money. It’s plain to see. He’s starting with a Porsche. Stand by for more.”
* * *
—
SHE WAITED until just before dinner to tell Jamie about the meeting with Hamish and Gordon, and the bombshell news about the Porsche. They had both been occupied with putting the boys to bed, and now, with the floor above in silence, they were able to catch up with one another in the kitchen. It was Jamie’s turn to cook and he had proposed a cheese soufflé with an elaborate Lebanese salad. “Your man, Ottolenghi,” said Jamie, arranging the salad ingredients in a line along the kitchen table. “He’s not simple. Look at what he wants here: rose water, preserved lemon, marinated olives.”
Isabel poured them both a glass of Chablis.
“I think I’d like to move to France,” she said. “Or New Zealand, maybe. Anywhere where they make nice white wine like this. A small house at the edge of a village—if it’s France. If it’s New Zealand, a cottage on Golden Bay, maybe, or Marlborough Sound. Somewhere we could watch whales from the veranda.”
Jamie busied himself with a jar of olives. “Houses in New Zealand are very small,” he said. “They have low ceilings and not very big rooms.”
“Does that matter?”
“Maybe; maybe not. I feel uncomfortable in a room with a low ceiling, though. I feel it’s pressing down on me.”
Isabel asked why he thought New Zealand houses were so small. Jamie thought for a moment. “They’re modest people. They don’t make a fuss.”
“Quiet?”
At nineteen, Jamie had spent part of a gap year in New Zealand, teaching music at a boys’ school in Auckland. He hesitated before answering. “For the most part, yes. They don’t go in for shouting. They like small-scale things.” He smiled as he remembered. “I was meant to teach music, you know, but they tried to get me to teach rugby instead. They were far more interested in rugby than in music. They said that since I came from Scotland, I must know how to play rugby.”
“And?”
“And I was very obliging at that age. I said, ‘Sure, I’ll teach rugby—if that’s what you want me to do.’ So, they put me in charge of one of their teams for really young players. These boys were about eight—at the most. I did my best, but the problem was that I didn’t really know the rules and so I made them up.”
Isabel raised an eyebrow. “Made them up? Invented them?”
Jamie nodded. “It would have been fine if they hadn’t arranged a game against another of these boys’ schools. I was to be the referee.”
Isabel laughed. “I’m not sure if I want to hear the end of this story.”
“Neither do I,” said Jamie. “But here goes, anyway. I started to run the game according to the rules I’d invented, but there were a whole lot of parents from the other school who had come along to watch. They couldn’t believe what they were seeing. Their sons complained, and one or two fights broke out amongst the boys. That was the end of my career as a rugby teacher.”
“Brief and distinguished,” said Isabel.
“Anyway, why do you want to go to France or New Zealand? What’s happened?”
She told him, and when she had finished he left the salad and sat down opposite Isabel at the kitchen table. “A Porsche Turbo?” he asked.
“Yes.”
Jamie put his hands to his head. “Oh my God,” he said. “That’s it then.”
Isabel waited.
“He’s after her money.”
Isabel nodded dumbly. “One likes to give people the benefit of the doubt.”
“Isabel,” said Jamie, “there is no doubt. He’s getting her to buy him a Porsche Turbo. He’s been fairly quick off the mark—one has to give him that.” He paused. “It’s a sort of fraud, really. He’s getting this car from the trust. He’s attempting to deceive them.”
There was nothing Isabel could say to disagree with this. “I suppose I’m going to have to tell her outright.”
“That the trust won’t play ball?”
“Yes.”
“Quite right,” said Jamie. “And then tell him to his face—so that the message isn’t watered down. Tell him, so he knows we’re on to him.”
Isabel knew what Cat’s reaction would be. She was not an easy person to persuade about anything, and now that she had made up her mind there would be no changing it. And if there were to be a showdown over Leo, there was no doubt in Isabel’s mind as to which way that would end. And predictably so: people who had to choose between family and a spouse or partner almost always chose the latter. She would do the same, she thought; if she had to choose between Jamie and an alternative, she would choose Jamie. Of course, Jamie was not Leo; in fact, he was very much the opposite, unless there were subtleties to Leo that had so far escaped her. She did not think there were. A man who yearned for Porsche Turbos was…well, the sort of man who yearns for Porsche Turbos. There was no better way of putting it, dismissive though that sounded—condescending, even. She swallowed. She felt miserable.
Jamie put an arm about her. “Let me do it,” he said.
She put her hand on his. “It’s not your problem.”
“It is,” he said. “We share our problems—fifty-fifty. Remember words to that effect when Iain Torrance married us in the Canongate? Remember? Did
n’t he say something about worldly goods and so on? Worldly goods include problems—no doubt about that.”
“She’ll fly off the handle,” said Isabel. “You know what she’s like.”
“I can cope with that,” said Jamie. He glanced at the dinner ingredients. “I’d better cook supper.”
She sat and watched him. How could I possibly deserve him? she asked herself. How had this happened? If one believed in reincarnation, of course, there would be an obvious explanation. In some previous life—presumably the last—she would have done some work of exceptional merit; some act of supererogatory generosity. She might have endowed a temple, perhaps, or helped some holy man in his journey, or just been generally kind. And this would all have been tallied up and her fate dictated: Good husband next time.
The great merit in such systems of belief was that they encouraged good behaviour, just as did our old beliefs in purgatory and hell. The problem, though, was that they were systems of belief that required a credulousness increasingly difficult to sustain. It was too late, Isabel thought, to be innocent.
Do I believe in God? she asked herself. She hated being asked that question by others but was just as uncomfortable asking it of herself. The problem was that sometimes she said yes, and sometimes no. Or answered evasively, in a way that enabled her to continue to believe in spirituality and its importance, and kept her from the soulless desert of atheism. For that, she thought, is what it was; and why should one not believe in something that may not be true, if it made life more bearable, did not make others cry, and gave us a reason to love those whom we needed to love?
The salad was delicious, but the soufflé collapsed before their eyes—like a discredited theory, Isabel thought—the moment Jamie placed it on the table. He was apologetic. “I followed the recipe to the letter,” he protested. “And now look…”
She smiled at him. “It still tastes good,” she said, and thought of “My Funny Valentine” that they had sung together the other night. Perhaps she should suggest some new words:
Do your soufflés end up flat
On the plates where they are sat?
Are they always underdone,
Though making them is fun,
Is it not?
But don’t change the recipe,
Not if you care for me…
He was looking at her. “Why are you smiling, Isabel?”
“I’m thinking about ‘My Funny Valentine’—I’ve thought of some new lyrics.”
She sang them to him. He smiled broadly. “Lovely,” he said, and blew her a kiss. “And they’ll be even better when sung in tune.”
“You’re the musician,” she said. “I’m the philosopher.”
“Perfect,” he agreed. “What we call…”
“Harmony,” she said.
CHAPTER SEVEN
BECAUSE JAMIE had promised to speak to Cat that day, and because Grace had asked if she might take the boys to the museum after their nursery and playgroup, Isabel had a whole day at her disposal. She decided that she would work on the Review, with a view to lowering, if not completely flattening, the accusatory piles in her in-trays, real and metaphorical. That would mean she would be able to go to the opening at the Scottish Gallery that evening without a feeling of having to be elsewhere and doing something else. She would meet Jamie at the opening, and would find out then the outcome of his meeting with Cat. Or confrontation, rather—because Isabel could not imagine it being anything else but that.
She wondered whether she should have allowed Jamie to do this. Messengers were always in peril of being shot, and Jamie would know that. Yet in this case, there was an additional danger that old business between the two of them might complicate matters. Jamie had once been Cat’s boyfriend, even if the affair had lasted only a few months before Cat had broken it off. Isabel had been dismayed at that, as she felt that of all Cat’s boyfriends—and there had been quite a number—Jamie stood out head and shoulders above the rest. Isabel had liked none of the others, try as she might. One or two she had actively disliked—such as Toby, the young man given to wearing crushed-strawberry cord trousers, and expressing strong views on just about every conceivable topic. Jamie had been the opposite of Toby, and when he was dismissed by Cat, Isabel had continued their friendship.
The relationship had changed, in spite of the fourteen years that separated them. The change from being a friend to being a lover is often not a simple one; in this case it was fraught with the additional complication of Cat’s antipathy to the whole idea. In her eyes, although she never said it, there was something vaguely indecent about an aunt—even an aunt not all that much older than the niece—taking up with a discarded boyfriend. She had registered her disapproval through icy silences, should Jamie’s name be mentioned, and through a hundred other small ways in which one person may make another person feel bad. This froideur had eventually thawed, but when Isabel became pregnant, it had returned—a more complex feeling now, combining envy, a sense of injustice, and annoyance that Isabel’s life should seem to be going so well when her own life was not. Isabel knew that there was very little one could do about that feeling, other than to find the German word for it, which was Gluckschmerz—pain in the success or pleasure of another, the opposite of that equally useful term Schadenfreude.
Their relationship had been easier more recently, which was a matter of relief, but the engagement to Leo, and the transparently dishonest request that had followed, now threatened to set things back. The thought depressed her, and by the time she arrived at the Scottish Gallery for the opening she was prepared for the bleakest of reports from Jamie.
He was already there when she arrived. She saw him standing in an alcove, looking at a painting with Tommy Zyw, one of the gallery’s directors. Tommy smiled, and beckoned for Isabel to join them. She liked Tommy, who was a keen and adventurous snow-boarder, and she always quizzed him as to the latest risks he had been taking.
Jamie gave her a welcoming kiss on the cheek, while Tommy fetched her a glass of wine.
“I have to know,” she said. “I wanted to phone you, but I wasn’t quite sure when you were going to be in rehearsal.”
His demeanour was not what she had expected.
“Did you see her?” she asked.
He nodded. “It went very well.”
It took Isabel a moment to deal with this. “You mean…You mean there wasn’t a great scene?”
“That’s right. Sweetness and light. No problem. Hakuna matata, so to speak.”
Isabel gasped. “What happened?”
Tommy returned with Isabel’s glass of wine, and they had to shelve the subject. Tommy enquired whether they knew the artist, and Isabel replied that they did not. They received invitations to all the openings at the gallery, and many of the artists were new to her. She did not explain that they were there that evening at the behest of Iain Melrose.
Tommy began to say something about the painting they were standing in front of, but was called away by one of the staff to deal with an enquiry. Isabel turned immediately to Jamie. “How come?” she asked. “Has Cat had an epiphany?”
Jamie shrugged. “Who knows? But it was a walk in the park compared with what I was expecting.”
Isabel shook her head incredulously. “I’m astonished—I really am.”
“I was too,” said Jamie. “I called in at the deli and spoke to her in her office. I had a great welcome. She flashed her engagement ring all over the place and said that she was tremendously pleased to have found the very best man she had ever met. She repeated that. The very best man she had ever met. That was all before I had the chance to say anything—even congratulations.”
Isabel giggled. “Obviously designed to put you in your place.”
Jamie smiled. “I wouldn’t want to be pushy.” He took a sip of his wine and leaned forward to examine the
painting more closely.
“Come on, Jamie,” Isabel urged. “And then?”
He turned to face her. “I took the bull by the horns. I said that I had seen a letter on the table setting out the trustees’ decision: no Porsche.”
Isabel frowned. “I know it’s an old-fashioned position—ludicrous, even—to disapprove of lying, but did you have to…”
“It just came to me,” said Jamie. “And lies that just come to you aren’t necessarily lies.”
“Nonsense,” said Isabel.
Jamie defended himself. “Well, what would you have me say? Should I have said: Isabel can’t face giving you this news, but your application for a Porsche has been turned down?”
Isabel looked away. He was right, and she now regretted accepting his offer to break the news to Cat. She should have done it herself, which was the more courageous thing to do. Now she should apologise to him—not only for criticising the stratagem to which he had resorted, but also for having allowed him to become involved in the first place.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just that I’ve been a bit jumpy about this. You know I don’t find it all that easy to handle Cat.”
He took her hand. “Of course you don’t. Nobody does. Our friend Leo is going to find the same thing, I suspect.”
“Do you think he knows that?”
Jamie was unsure. “I don’t think he’s the touchiest-feeliest character. I’m not sure if he thinks too much about emotions and the rest.”
Isabel sighed. “I still see him as a…well, as a lion—a sort of half human, half lion. A chimaera, I suppose we’d call it. I know that’s absurd, but that’s the effect he has on me. That great mane of hair—and that’s definitely lion-coloured; tawny.”
“Yes, I suppose it is. Have you looked at its consistency?”
“No. Should I?”
Jamie rubbed a thumb and index finger together. “I wanted to feel it when I was talking to him. But you can’t really do that, can you? You can’t suddenly say, ‘Do you mind if I feel your hair?’ ”
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