The Geometry of Holding Hands

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “But we told him,” Leo protested. “I told Jonny—to his face—that he could have the place. I promised him.”

  Isabel saw Cat stiffen. “You told him? But I’m the owner, Leo—or I was, last time I looked at the deeds.”

  Leo was not to be put down. “Yeah, sure, but who’s been doing the negotiation? Me. Who organised the survey? Me. Who spoke to the agents? And so on.”

  “But it’s my place,” said Cat.

  They stared at one another while Isabel, embarrassed but still secretly pleased by this sign of disagreement, looked on.

  Cat turned to face Isabel. “I think we can get out of this deal with Jonny—as long as the trust can meet the price he’s offered.”

  “We can,” said Isabel. “Plus some, if necessary.”

  This caught Leo’s attention. “Plus some? Plus how much?”

  Isabel bit her lip. Leo’s venality was so evident—surely Cat could notice it.

  “Plus ten thousand,” she said. She would square that with Hamish and Gordon; if there were any objection, then she would pay the extra from her own pocket.

  Leo, who had been perched on a stool near the kitchen door, now rose to his feet and stood before the window, looking out. Isabel noticed the breadth of his shoulders, silhouetted against the sky. Cat saw her looking, and smiled conspiratorially. Isabel diverted her gaze.

  “We can do that,” said Leo. “I can phone the lawyer and tell him not to confirm.”

  “Good,” said Cat. “And I’m quite pleased it’s going to remain a delicatessen, and I’m pleased that Eddie can keep his job.” She paused. “Poor Eddie.”

  “Nothing poor about him,” muttered Leo, from the window. “He’s a wimp—that’s all.”

  Isabel looked at Cat. Her look said: Is this what you want?

  Cat remained calm. “Eddie’s not a wimp,” she said to Leo. “He’s vulnerable.”

  Leo made a dismissive noise.

  “I mean it,” said Cat. “Eddie was traumatised when he first came to work in the deli.” She turned to Isabel. “You remember, Isabel? Remember what he was like?”

  “Yes,” said Isabel. “And he’s made terrific progress. He’s much happier now.”

  Leo snorted. “So he’s traumatised…Who isn’t? We all have stuff we carry with us—and we don’t all let it turn us into snivelling wimps. Anyway, what happened? His father shouted at him? Some teacher was nasty about his homework?”

  Isabel caught her breath. She watched Cat’s reaction. It was not anger she saw, but a sort of resigned tolerance.

  “Something shocking happened to Eddie,” Cat said suddenly. “Do I have to spell it out, Leo?”

  Leo’s gaze seemed fixed on something outside. They waited, and eventually he said, “Well, those things happen. They just do.”

  Isabel wanted to intervene. She wanted to shake Leo, but she controlled herself. She said nothing. And Cat, she saw, was not going to do anything.

  Cat broke the silence. “I’ll phone the lawyer,” she said to Isabel. “I’ll ask him to speak to Hamish and Gordon. Will that do?”

  “It will,” said Isabel.

  She leaned across the sofa, took Cat’s hand and pressed it gently. “Thank you,” she said.

  She moved towards the door. Leo was still staring out of the window. She did not say goodbye to him, but once out of the door regretted that and came back in to do so. He did not seem to hear her, and she left it at that, but at least she had done what comity required.

  * * *

  —

  SHE WALKED HOME across the Bruntsfield Links. Passing the local newsagent, she bought a copy of that day’s Scotsman, the latest issue of the London Review of Books and a copy of Edinburgh Life. This was a glossy magazine that featured events and places around Edinburgh. Isabel enjoyed the social pages at the back—a record of charity balls and drinks parties in the form of photographs of people smiling at the camera. She recognised the same faces in many of the pictures—tireless attendees who went from one function to another, bravely appearing to enjoy themselves. We are such a social species, Isabel thought; it doesn’t really matter what the occasion—we are a species that likes to cluster together for shelter, just as we did all those ages ago, in our caves, while creatures larger and stronger than ourselves prowled about outside. We liked company, and fire, and the warmth that both gave.

  With the boys due to be collected from school and from playgroup in just over an hour’s time, Isabel could not settle to anything. Grace was tackling a pile of ironing upstairs—Isabel heard the sound of a podcast drifting down from the laundry room. Grace listened to podcasts when she ironed and could sometimes be heard volubly disagreeing with the speaker. Isabel felt unsettled: the meeting with Cat had gone as smoothly as she could have hoped—at least in that Cat seemed immediately to have been attracted by the idea of selling the deli to the trust. There was still the issue of Jonny Mustique’s offer, but if Cat’s understanding of the position was correct, then that did not threaten to be a major stumbling block. Everybody knew that contracts relating to land and building had to be in writing—at least in Scots law—and until that was done, nothing was definite. But the thought occurred to her that what she had done, perhaps unwittingly, was to have gazumped the hairdresser by offering more than the price he had agreed with Leo. On the other hand, it was Cat’s business, not Leo’s, and if Cat decided that she wanted a deal with a family trust—especially one that promised to look after her young employee—then that surely was her prerogative.

  Isabel went into the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea. She was thinking of Leo, and she felt flustered and annoyed. His conversation with her had been an uncomfortable one in so many respects, straying, she thought, into that territory of unease that accompanies sexual suggestiveness. There were some men who took pleasure in testing a woman’s sense of the private. They made allusions which, although innocent on the face of it, nonetheless pointed in a sexual direction. The entire tenor of her encounter with Leo had been like that, starting with semi-nakedness. There was exposure of the body, and then there was exposure of the body: a man might be bare-chested on the beach without any innuendo; in another setting, though, there could be an inference of intimacy—an invitation to look. What Leo should have done was to put on a shirt when she arrived; he had not. And then, when he had talked about wandering around the flat naked, he had effectively invited Isabel into a sexual confidence. And then, on top of all that, there had been the gross insensitivity of his remarks about Eddie.

  Isabel felt dirtied by the whole experience. Leo was crude. He was exactly the sort of man whom women were now determined to expose—the sort who thought he could get away with sexual imposition. And, thought Isabel, I am his fiancée’s aunt. If he was like that with an aunt, even one not all that much older than he was, then what would he be like with some more vulnerable younger woman?

  She tried to put him out of her mind while she waited for the kettle to boil. Then Grace came in, carrying a plastic washing basket stacked high with neatly ironed tea towels and tablecloths.

  “I didn’t hear you,” said Grace. “I was upstairs.”

  “I heard your podcast,” said Isabel.

  Grace put the basket down on the table. “Did you hear what he said?”

  Isabel shook her head. “No, I didn’t. Who was it?”

  “I don’t know,” Grace answered. “They gave his name at the beginning, but I didn’t hear it. He was either Irish or American—I couldn’t tell which. He might have been both, of course.”

  “And the subject?” asked Isabel.

  “It was all about psychopaths,” said Grace. “This fellow—the speaker—was some sort of doctor; a psychiatrist, I think. He looks after loonies.”

  Isabel smiled. “They’re not loonies any longer, Grace. I don’t think they use that term.”

  “Well, t
hey sound like loonies to me,” she said. “Crazies, then.”

  “I don’t think they say that either.”

  “Well, whatever they say, he deals with them. And he knows a lot about what makes them tick. He says that you can X-ray their brains these days and see what’s going on inside. Bits light up, apparently, and they can tell what’s going on.”

  “Imaging,” said Isabel.

  “You know about the London taxi drivers and their enlarged brains?” Grace asked. “He mentioned that. He said that they’ve discovered that London taxi drivers, who have to spend three years studying the best way from A to B, have enlarged hippo…”

  “Hippocampuses.”

  “That’s it. And it’s the same with psychopaths—not their hippocampuses, of course, but other bits where we keep our feelings—empathy, he said. Apparently, a psychopath doesn’t have the same ability to feel empathy that we have. They can prove it now by doing a brain scan.”

  Isabel said that she thought that would make it easier for psychiatrists to be certain.

  “Yes,” said Grace. “But would you go in for a test like that? How would you feel?”

  “I suppose it would depend on whether you thought you were a possible psychopath or not. I suspect that I’m not, thank goodness. And you aren’t either.”

  Grace began to stack the tea towels in a drawer. “Do you know any?” she asked.

  “Psychopaths?”

  “Yes. Do you know anybody who’s definitely a psychopath?”

  Isabel tried to remember what she had read about the incidence of psychopathy. Was it two per cent of the population? It was something like that, she thought. Statistically, everyone would know at least one.

  She thought of Professor Lettuce. He had some of the attributes of the psychopath—the cunning, the lack of empathy, the indifference to others. And yet he had lasting friendships, which psychopaths tended not to have. He was loyal to Christopher Dove, as Dove was loyal to him. Mind you, Dove was another potential psychopath—perhaps he and Lettuce were psychopaths together, drawn to one another by their particular psychopathology.

  And then she thought of Leo. Yes! She remembered the incident with the champagne cork and Eddie’s eye. Surely a normal person would have been alarmed—and regretful—when he saw that he had hit somebody in the eye with a cork. And there had been blood. Leo had seen all that, and yet his reaction had been to laugh. And then, only a few hours ago, he had described Eddie as a wimp, in a cold and unfeeling way. Surely that was psychopathic.

  “Do you?” Grace pressed.

  “I think I do,” said Isabel.

  “Who?” asked Grace.

  “I may be wrong,” said Isabel. “I shouldn’t bandy names about if I may be wrong.”

  Grace picked up a tablecloth and started to refold it, holding one end of it under her chin. “I won’t tell anybody else,” she said. “You can tell me.”

  “I feel uncomfortable about it,” said Isabel. “Even though I know I can trust you.” And she could: Grace understood confidentiality, and Isabel had never known her to tell anybody anything she had learned or seen in the house. It was innate.

  “All right,” said Isabel. “Leo. Cat’s Leo.”

  Grace dropped the tablecloth. “Yes,” she said, her voice lowered. “Him! You know something? While I was listening upstairs, I found myself thinking: That Leo—he’s a psychopath if ever there was one. You can tell—you really can.”

  “I’m not sure we can be certain,” said Isabel. “It’s just a feeling—and we might be quite wrong.”

  “We aren’t,” said Grace. “Have you seen his eyes? They’re that odd yellow colour—or maybe yellow isn’t the right word…tawny, perhaps. They’re that colour. Just like a lion’s eyes.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “And the way he looks at you,” Grace continued. “As if sizing you up. Have you noticed that?”

  “I suppose I have.”

  Grace shook her head sadly. “Cat had better watch out. And now she’s gone and got engaged to him. Can you believe it? Getting engaged to a man like that.”

  “She seems happy,” said Isabel.

  “So do lots of women who marry men like that,” retorted Grace. “They’re happy because he gives them something they want, and then the scales fall from their eyes and they realise what they’ve ended up with.”

  “Possibly,” said Isabel.

  “Not possibly—definitely.” Grace paused, before continuing with increased vigour: “Cat’s going to live to regret this. Maybe not immediately, but sooner or later. Give it a year, maybe two. At the most.”

  Isabel did not contradict Grace, and for the next few minutes the two women were together in the kitchen in silence, and in the agreement that sometimes—though not always—lies behind silence.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  OVER THE NEXT TWO WEEKS, Isabel spoke to Hamish and Gordon virtually every day. As she had promised to do, Cat had been in touch with her own lawyer immediately after Isabel had raised the possibility of buying the deli. Leo had not attempted to dissuade her from reneging on the verbal undertaking he had given to the hairdresser Jonny Mustique, who had, anyway, appeared to have gone slightly cold on the project. “I think he was quite relieved to get out of it,” Leo said to Cat. “Just goes to show, doesn’t it? People say things they don’t mean.” To which Cat had added, “And mean things they don’t say,” but had not explored the implications of this neat inversion. Both she and Leo were happy with the arrangement, she because it enabled her to face Eddie—of whom she was fond—and he because he felt that he had obtained an extra ten thousand pounds from the trust. “They must have money coming out of their ears,” he remarked to Cat. She, intoxicated by her feelings for this virile, leonine man, did not bother to think of the implications of this remark.

  Hamish and Gordon took a close interest in the purchase of the deli. They picked over details of the inventory, scrutinised the accounts with the zeal of the forensic accountant and spent some time on plans for the future of the business. Hamish’s wife, Hannah, who was interested in charcuterie and who made her own bacon from pork loin she obtained from the local butcher, volunteered to help behind the counter. For her part, Cat rapidly became detached from day-to-day tasks associated with the running of the deli, now leaving most decisions to Eddie or Isabel.

  Eddie had initially almost panicked when told of what was planned. Cat and the deli were synonymous in his mind; she had always been there, ever since he had first been engaged, and he found it difficult to contemplate carrying on without her.

  “But who’s going to do the ordering?” he asked Isabel. “I don’t know where things come from. She gets them all. She talks on the phone to these people, but I haven’t got a clue who they are.”

  Isabel was patient with him. “Their details are all there, Eddie. And it’s not complicated—not really. Eggs come from the egg supplier near Longniddry. We have their telephone number on their invoices. I’ve spoken to them already. They have plenty of eggs and will send us whatever we want.”

  “And duck eggs?” challenged Eddie. “What about duck eggs?”

  “They come from a woman in Dalkeith. Once again, if you look in the filing cabinet, there’s a folder named ‘Duck Eggs.’ Her invoices are in there.”

  “And cheese?” Eddie persisted. “Look at all the different cheese. How do we know which to get?”

  “You know which ones sell, Eddie,” said Isabel. “You sell them yourself.”

  Gradually the level of the young man’s insecurity dropped, and he began to make decisions himself. Isabel encouraged him gently, and found a useful ally in Hannah.

  “He’s so lost, that poor boy,” Hannah said to Isabel. “I know you shouldn’t go around mothering young men, but that’s what I want to do with him. I want to wrap my arms around him. I want to tell him not
to worry so.”

  “That’s exactly what you should do,” urged Isabel. “Hold his hand.”

  Hannah was tactful, and Eddie seemed to flourish under her care. After ten days of the new regime, before the transaction had been finalised but when Cat had virtually stopped coming into the deli in the mornings, Isabel approached Hannah with her proposition.

  “Could you manage this place?” she asked. “I mean not just now, but on a permanent basis?”

  As it happened, Hannah was about to see their only child, a daughter, off to university at Stirling. Hamish was at the office all day, and had his country dancing. She was a member of a book club that met infrequently. She ran the house in Morningside with such efficiency that all domestic chores were done by nine-thirty each morning. The idea of a full-time job running a deli suited her perfectly, and she accepted.

  Eddie was relieved. “I like that lady,” he confessed to Isabel. “She keeps putting her arm around me, but I don’t mind too much. I like her perfume.”

  “That’s good, Eddie,” said Isabel. “That’s kind of you.”

  Hamish was pleased at his wife’s decision. “Hannah has a great deal of energy,” he said to Isabel. “And she has a good business head on her. She’s very careful not to waste money. She’s from Aberdeen, you know.”

  Isabel smiled. “They have that reputation, don’t they?”

  “They certainly do,” said Hamish. “And it’s well deserved. I don’t know if I ever told you about my father’s cousin, Laurence. He was from Aberdeen. He used to repair hot-water bottles with a bicycle-tube repair outfit when the rubber perished. He made one last thirty-three years.”

  “A very fine man,” said Gordon. “Nowadays people just throw things away.”

  Within a couple of days, Hannah had transformed Cat’s office. Large planning charts appeared on the walls; ancient invoices were disposed of; boxes of superior latex gloves—with adequate talcum powder—were ordered, along with a whole set of personalised aprons on which the name of the deli was prominently printed. A blue-striped cap was ordered for Eddie, and he wore this at a jaunty angle. Four different types of bacon replaced the previous single variety; trays of large cheese scones, baked by Hannah herself, were placed temptingly on the counter and sold out within hours.