The Geometry of Holding Hands

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “Of course.”

  They took the pieces of paper that the young woman at the desk, who had listened discreetly to their conversation, tore out of a notebook and gave them. Each wrote out their details and passed them to the other.

  “I can’t believe this is happening,” said Jean. “I really can’t.”

  Isabel smiled. “I find it a bit difficult to believe too,” she said.

  After she had walked back up from the salon, she drove across town to Dundas Street. She had called Guy Peploe on her mobile and he had invited her to meet him at his flat round the corner. Guy’s son let her in. “You’re the philosopher, aren’t you?” he said.

  “I am,” she said. “Your father tells me that philosophy is one of your favourite subjects.”

  “My absolute favourite,” he said. “Have you read Dennett?”

  Isabel said she had. “Not recently, though.”

  “And Roger Scruton?”

  “Again, not for some time.”

  Guy appeared in the hall. “Enough philosophy. Isabel and I need to talk.”

  “It’s refreshing,” said Isabel.

  “It’s been his thing for some three years now,” said Guy. “He loves it.”

  “Perhaps he’ll review some books for us,” said Isabel.

  Guy smiled. “Ask him,” he said. “But not this evening. You said you wanted to show me something.”

  They went into the drawing room, where Isabel extracted the picture and showed it to Guy.

  “I’ve seen this before,” said Guy. “He didn’t put it in the exhibition, but I know he had it; I tried to get him to put it on the market, but he’s been holding on to it for some reason. It’s a real beauty.”

  He gave Isabel an enquiring look. “Where did you get this? From his studio?”

  “It’s a very unusual story,” replied Isabel. “Do you mind if I tell you the whole thing—from start to finish?”

  “I’m listening,” said Guy.

  When Isabel had finished, Guy looked at her with a mixture of admiration and bemusement. “What an extraordinary set of events,” he said. “But then, I’ve always known that your life was somewhat unconventional.”

  “My question is this,” said Isabel. “Could you sell this for me—and if so, what could I expect? As I said, the money would go to this woman, Jean.”

  “I understand,” said Guy. “And it seems a very fine idea, if I may say so. This painting is definitely your property. That woman is right out of line on this. I’ve always thought she had Jack under her thumb—she’s a sort of Lady Macbeth, in my view. Just between ourselves. On balance, I think he’s crossed over to her side, I’m afraid.”

  “So?” pressed Isabel. “Would it sell?”

  “Of course it would,” said Guy. “You may not know, but every single picture in the current show sold. I have a list of eight or nine collectors who are pretty keen to get their hands on anything of his. He’s been on the up for years now.”

  “Would one of them take it?” asked Isabel.

  “Like a shot,” said Guy.

  “And how much would we get?”

  Guy hesitated. “It’s difficult. But I can tell you one thing—we won’t take our normal commission on this. This is clearly pro bono. I’ll pass on every penny.” He paused. “I’d say about twenty-two thousand.”

  “Jean lost thirty,” said Isabel. She was about to add that twenty-two would be more than enough to redress the wrong, but Guy had something to add.

  “In that case, I’ll ask for twenty-five,” he said. “And I wouldn’t be surprised if we got it.”

  “When?” asked Isabel.

  Guy looked at his watch. “By ten-thirty?”

  Isabel laughed.

  “All right,” said Guy. “That’s perhaps a bit ambitious. But what about next week? I know one of these collectors well. He lives up in Perthshire. I can get him on the phone tomorrow. He doesn’t hang around—I suspect we can tie it up. Leave the painting with me and I’ll send him an image.”

  Isabel rose to her feet. “This is marvellous,” she said.

  “I agree,” said Guy. “But then I’ve heard that this is the sort of thing you do.”

  Isabel was modest. “Not really,” she said. “I usually make a mess of things, but every so often the unexpected occurs and things work out well.”

  She made her way downstairs and into the summer evening. In a few weeks’ time the solstice would be with them, that perfect moment between what had been and what was to come. It would barely get dark then at these northern latitudes, even at midnight; now the sun was still painting the roofs golden at eight o’clock, a gentle presence, a visitor to a Scotland that was more accustomed to short days and wind and drifting, omnipresent rain. And yet was so beautiful, thought Isabel; so beautiful as to break the heart.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CAT HAD MOVED within the last few months to a new flat on Warrender Park Terrace, overlooking the Meadows, the rolling park that divided the old city from its Victorian residential hinterland. The Meadows had been all things to all: a plague burial ground, a loch that provided the city with its drinking water, a golf links, a football ground, a patch of ground for the wartime cultivation of vegetables. Now, lined and intersected by elms and flowering trees, it was a place of summer picnics, festival circuses, snatched moments of courtship, cricket and ecstatic urban dogs released from their leads. Cat’s terrace, a towering six-storey Victorian building, topped by crenellations and spikes, was popular with students, who could see the university on the other side of the park, and with young families who liked the generosity of the flats’ proportions. Cat had moved to it for the light and for the storage space afforded by its four large bedrooms.

  Isabel had heard all about the flat, of course, but the promised invitation to dinner had never materialised. She had not taken that personally—nor had it been intended in that way: Cat’s private life had always been slightly chaotic, Isabel thought. There were always crises with deliveries or with the coming and going of tradesmen. The plumber seemed to be in and out, and Cat needed to be there to let him in: Would Isabel mind giving Eddie a hand while she went off to attend to the plumber? And then the painter would be coming to look at the redecoration of the kitchen, and he could only give a rough indication of when he might arrive: Would Isabel mind? And then there were people, friends of Cat’s from university days, who were coming to stay, or who suddenly were not because their plans had changed and they would be going to Glasgow instead. And now, of course, there was Leo, who possibly lived with Cat, or possibly did not. Cat had mentioned a flat that she said Leo had down in Leith, but then, a few days later, it was in Newington. If an invitation to dinner did come, Isabel thought, it could quite easily be cancelled because something else had turned up and Cat had to be somewhere else altogether. So Isabel reconciled herself to never seeing the flat in Warrender Park Terrace, even if she had a fairly good theoretical idea of what it was like.

  But that morning, having telephoned Eddie and been told that Cat was not in the deli as she was expecting a new washing machine to be installed, Isabel made a decision. Cat had said that she would be in at lunchtime, Eddie said, and that if he needed her he could call her at the flat. Isabel knew that if she arranged a meeting with Cat it would be unlikely to be that day. She did not want to see her in the deli, as she was unwilling to have the discussion she was planning to have with Cat within earshot of Eddie. This discussion, after all, was all about Eddie and his future, and she did not want to raise his hopes before anything firmer had been arranged.

  So she decided to visit Cat, unannounced, in her flat on Warrender Park Terrace. She had the address, and it was barely fifteen minutes’ walk away from La Barantine, where she had her morning coffee and bought the day’s baguette and French country loaf.

  Now she stood in front of a d
ark red door on the fourth floor of Cat’s tenement building. The original door furniture had been well preserved: a heavy Victorian door handle, a brass knocker in the shape of a thistle, and, although a recent addition, no doubt a replacement for a dynasty of similar pieces—a gleaming brass plate with the name DALHOUSIE in capitals in its centre. To the right of the door, inlaid in the jamb, was a small, modern bell-button. Isabel pushed this, and heard a chime somewhere within the flat. Then silence. After a minute or so, she pressed the button once again.

  There were footsteps followed by the sound of the unlatching of a chain. Then the door opened and Isabel was greeted by the sight of Leo, wearing a pair of khaki shorts, but bare-chested. On his feet he had a pair of Moroccan slippers made of what looked like carpet material.

  She was taken aback. “Oh…I…”

  Leo laughed. “Hey, Isabel, come in. We were expecting somebody else.”

  Isabel wondered who that might be. Was this Leo’s normal, minimalist garb when at home, even if visitors were expected?

  She followed him into a large entrance hall. This was tidily kept, with a coat stand on one side, and on the other a couple of straight-backed dining-room chairs, a console table, and a Chinese ceramic umbrella vase into which a number of fly-fishing rods had been inserted.

  “Cat’s in the bath,” said Leo. “She’ll be out in a few minutes. Can I make you coffee?”

  Isabel accepted, and Leo showed her into a large sitting room with windows overlooking the Meadows.

  “Some view, hey?” said Leo. “That’s the old Infirmary over there, and that’s the university. And if you look over to that side, over there, you can see the Salisbury Crags. See them?”

  Isabel looked, and nodded. “You get the northern light,” she said.

  “Light’s light,” said Leo. “I don’t see much difference.”

  Isabel thought: Was someone like Leo susceptible to such things? “Northern light is colder,” she said. “It’s clearer too. Sharper. That’s why artists prefer their studios to face north.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Yes. Have you been in the Art College? Have you seen those large studios they have on the northern side?”

  Leo shook his mane of hair. “No. Never.”

  She had avoided looking at him directly, having been unprepared for his semi-nakedness. Now she glanced at him, at his powerful shoulders and muscular arms, at the abdomen that seemed, in this light, to be striated by lines of muscle just below the surface. She did not find him attractive: no muscle-bound male torso appealed to her. But she saw how, according to one aesthetic at least, he was the perfect specimen. And of course he was like a lion: this was how a lion looked from the side—smooth, muscled flanks, powerful, rippling, ready to spring.

  She imagined for a moment what it would be like to hold him. It would be like embracing something powerful and dangerous—something that would suddenly overpower you, unleash a hidden, overwhelming force.

  He was looking at her. “Excuse my undress,” he said, smiling—provocatively, she thought. “In the flat, in this warm weather, we don’t bother much. In fact, Cat and I often don’t bother at all—it’s rather comfortable walking round with nothing on.”

  Isabel turned away. She felt a physical revulsion at Leo’s sheer animality. And she thought, reluctantly, of Leo and Cat prowling around—because that was how she imagined Leo moving—prowling around like two caged animals in this flat, naked, with Cat purring and Leo making that strange, growling sound that she imagined lions made when they breathed; that thought was so distasteful that she struggled to put it out of her mind. But we cannot unthink, she reminded herself; that was why psychologists had a whole category of “unwelcome” thoughts—thoughts, or images, that came into the mind unbidden and were the object of shame or distaste, even of horror.

  “You don’t approve,” Leo suddenly said.

  She spun round. Was he suggesting that she did not approve of him? She did not, of course, although that was the last thing she wanted to say. You could not tell people you disliked them—you might show it, but you could not say it.

  Isabel struggled to respond. “Don’t approve of what?”

  “Of going round in the nude.”

  Isabel was immediately relieved. “Oh, that. I don’t give it much thought,” she said. “Some people like it—that’s up to them.”

  “But you and Jamie,” said Leo. “Do you ever wander around with no clothes on?”

  Isabel fixed him with a stare. The intrusiveness of the question had shocked her. She was no prude, but she believed strongly that one did not talk about private matters of that sort. There were plenty of exhibitionists, of course—social media seemed to encourage people to lead their lives in public, even those parts of life that were conventionally private. But Isabel would never dream of asking anybody to reveal the secrets of the bedroom. For that is what they were—no matter how unsurprising or simply human they were, they fell into the category of the quintessentially personal. They were not to be paraded before others.

  All she managed now was a curt “That’s our affair.”

  Leo seemed unfazed by the brush-off. “You should try it,” he said. “It’s very liberating.”

  She noticed that he was looking down at his body as he spoke, pensively, as if reflecting on its merits.

  Then he said, “I have very little body hair, you know. I mean, I have this big head of hair, but look at my chest—nothing. What’s the thing in the Bible? Isn’t it Jacob who says, ‘My brother Esau is a hairy man, but I am a smooth man’? I always loved that. ‘A hairy man!’ I’m Jacob, I think—not Esau.”

  Isabel looked out of the window. She wondered when Cat was going to finish her bath, so that this intrusive, vaguely suggestive conversation with Leo could be brought to an end.

  Her irritation got the better of her. “I don’t like to talk about other people’s body hair,” she said. “Sorry, maybe I’m just old-fashioned. Maybe that’s the topic that most people talk about these days. Maybe I’m out of touch.”

  Leo liked that, and laughed. “Oh, that’s great. No, they don’t talk about it very much. Most people are still too uptight.”

  The word uptight stood out. It was some time since she had heard the word. She knew it had been popular once, in the late sixties and the seventies, at the time of the overturning of the old, stuffy world and its deadening conventions. You were uptight if you held on to the reservations of a more inhibited age. But people no longer seemed to say much about that.

  “I haven’t heard anybody say uptight recently,” said Isabel. “You sound very old-fashioned, Leo. No offence, of course.”

  He defended himself. “I hear it all the time.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  There came the sound of an opening door, and then Cat came into the room. She was wearing a bathrobe, and her hair, still wet, was slicked back. She seemed surprised, but not displeased, to see Isabel.

  “Has Leo made you some of his legendary coffee?” she asked.

  “He offered,” said Isabel.

  “I’m on my way,” said Leo, making for the door to the kitchen.

  Cat settled herself on a sofa and invited Isabel to join her. “I’ve been meaning to have you and Jamie round for ages,” she said. “What do you think of my new flat?”

  “I like it,” said Isabel. “They’re a good size, these places.”

  “Yes,” said Cat. “But I suppose I’m going to have to get used to living on a boat. There’s far less room, even on one of those big yachts.”

  “I’m sure you’ll get used to it,” Isabel said.

  “Of course I’ll keep this flat—for when I’m back in Edinburgh.”

  They talked about the move until Leo returned with coffee for Cat and Isabel. Isabel noticed that he had sweetened hers with vanilla syrup.
The taste was cloying and unpleasant.

  She looked at Cat and smiled. “I’ve come with a proposition,” she said.

  Cat’s eyes widened. “I’m always interested in propositions.”

  “I wonder if you would consider selling the deli to the trust.”

  Cat sat back on the sofa, pulling a cushion onto her lap. “Hold on,” she said. “Sell to Tweedledum and Tweedledee? To them?”

  “To the trust,” said Isabel. “Hamish and Gordon would do the legal bit, but it would be to the trust.”

  “Why?” asked Cat. “Why would the trust want to buy a deli?”

  “As an investment,” Isabel replied. “The trust already owns a lot of actual property—not just shares, but bricks and mortar. And besides, it would mean that Eddie’s job would be secure. That’s really why I’m suggesting it.”

  The mention of Eddie had an immediate effect. “That would be nice,” said Cat. “I like Eddie.”

  “He’s worked for you for years,” said Isabel. “It would be good to do something for him.”

  Leo had been observing this; now he joined in. “Great idea,” he said. “But a bit late, I’m afraid.”

  Isabel turned to face him. “Why too late? You haven’t already sold it, have you?”

  Cat was looking to Leo for the answer to this. “Have we, Leo? I thought that the lawyer was waiting for Jonny’s offer. I don’t think it was in yet, was it?”

  “First thing yesterday,” said Leo. “It came in before ten. The lawyer phoned. Remember? We told him that he could accept it.”

  “Oh yes,” said Cat. “I’d forgotten about that.”

  Isabel felt a wave of disappointment. “So it’s all done and dusted?”

  “Verbally,” said Leo. “The lawyer was going to get the acceptance over to them in writing tomorrow, I think. He wanted to check up on something before he did that.”

  “So perhaps it’s not too late,” said Isabel.

  Rather to her surprise, Cat rallied to her defence. “No, it may not be. If we haven’t put it in writing, we can pull out, I think.”