The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday id-5

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “Disgrace?”

  “You could call it that. And I suppose that’s what it was.”

  The waitress came and took their order. Norrie, she noticed, chose a salad and a diet drink. “I’m training as a gastroenterologist now,” he said. “I see what people put in their stomachs. It’s enough to put one off eating altogether.”

  She smiled. “But you won’t disapprove of what I have.”

  He laughed. “Probably. But I won’t say anything. An Italian diet is reasonably healthy, anyway. It’s the stuff they eat in Glasgow that does the damage. The fries. The red meat. The fried fish. My cardiac colleagues could keep you entertained for hours on the subject.”

  Isabel steered the conversation back to Marcus. “The incident,” she began. “The incident that led to the complaint. Do you think it was his fault?”

  Norrie said nothing for a moment, but fingered the stem of an empty glass in front of him. When he eventually spoke, he seemed to be choosing his words with care. “The finding against him was clear,” he said. “He was negligent. The figures of the dosage were far too high. He should have checked. He didn’t.”

  “Where did those figures come from?”

  “From the lab.”

  Isabel watched Norrie carefully. His manner was very matter-of-fact, as if he were relating everyday events, rather than ones that had brought a career to an end.

  “And what did you think? What did you think of the figures?”

  Again he took his time to answer, and again, when he did, his words were careful. “I just took note of them and passed them on.”

  “That’s all?”

  He held her gaze. He neither blinked nor looked away. “It wasn’t for me to say anything. I was—am—a junior doctor. I came to medicine late, you see. I did a degree in engineering and then changed my mind. It’s going to be some time before I catch up.”

  “It wasn’t for you to say anything?”

  “No. That’s what I’ve just told you.”

  She persisted. “Even if you thought they were high?”

  His self-controlled manner slipped a little. “Listen,” he said, an edge appearing in his voice. “I didn’t have a clue.”

  She made a calming gesture with a hand. “All right. Sorry, I’m not accusing you of anything. I just think that Marcus may have been harshly treated. I was hoping that we could find out something which puts him in a better light.”

  This remark seemed to take him by surprise. “Harshly treated?”

  She explained that she felt that a momentary lapse of judgement should not, in her view, end a career. Anybody could make a mistake—indeed everybody made mistakes. But that did not make them culpable. “So,” she concluded. “I was wondering whether I could come up with something that could help him to establish that he was not blameworthy. I wondered if I could get him off this awful hook of blame.”

  Norrie stared at her, almost incredulously. “You want it reopened?”

  “Yes,” said Isabel. “If need be.”

  The waitress now brought his salad and Isabel’s pasta, and laid the plates before them. Norrie took up a fork and began to pick at the meal. “If I were you,” he said quietly, “I’d leave well enough alone. Don’t try to open anything up. Just don’t.”

  Isabel speared a shell of pasta with her fork, and then another. “But if there is anything which could help him,” she said, “surely it should be brought up.”

  Norrie seemed to weigh this for a while. “All right,” he said at last. “If I tell you something, will you give me your word that you won’t use it publicly in any way?”

  She considered this. It would not be easy to give an assurance of confidentiality if he was going to come up with some information that could exculpate Marcus. But if she did not agree, then she would not hear it. She decided that she had no alternative.

  “Very well. I give you my word. Even if it’s going to hamper me.”

  “It won’t hamper you,” Norrie said quickly. “And it won’t be to Marcus’s disadvantage. Quite the opposite.”

  “I don’t see—”

  But he cut her short. He had abandoned his salad now, and there was light in his eyes. “Marcus Moncrieff is even more guilty than you imagine. He got off lightly.”

  She sat back in her seat. “I don’t see—”

  “No,” he said quickly. “You don’t, do you? You don’t because you don’t know the first thing about it. Sorry to be so frank, but these things are very complex. The truth of the matter, you see, is that I warned him that the figures were high. I said to him that he should go and check the figures and see whether they really reflected what that patient had taken. And he didn’t. He said no, it wasn’t necessary. And then I spoke to him a second time, and asked him to note my reservations, but he told me not to be such a fusspot and he didn’t note anything.”

  He attacked his salad. “So, you see,” he said. “Not so simple. If that had come out at the enquiry it would have looked even worse for him.”

  “But you didn’t mention it?”

  “No. I wasn’t even asked to make a statement. I kept quiet. I didn’t want things to get even worse for him. He’s a good doctor, you see.”

  “You protected him?”

  He stared at her. “You could put it that way. But let me say something else. If you mention this at all, and in particular if you suggest to anybody that I protected him, I shall simply deny that this conversation took place.”

  She was puzzled. “Then why tell me?”

  “To protect him again,” he said. “To protect him from you.” He pointed at her with his fork, on which half an olive was balanced. The olive tumbled down into the thick of the salad and was lost. “The last thing he needs is anybody opening up the whole can of worms. If you’re really concerned for him, then you’ll back off now that you know you only risk making it worse.”

  They both ate in silence for a while. Then he spoke again. “And there’s another thing which nobody knows. In the case of the second patient, there was nothing wrong with the figures from the lab. And the dosage was not nearly as high. Yet the lab report, when it came to be looked at again, had much higher figures. Somebody had altered them.”

  He looked at her knowingly.

  “You’re saying that Marcus did?”

  “Well, I didn’t change them,” he said.

  “And you didn’t do anything about it?”

  “By then it was too late. I noticed it only when the whole thing started to be investigated.”

  It did not make sense to Isabel. She could understand sloppiness and not bothering to check up on suspect figures, but why should Marcus have deliberately falsified data?

  Norrie sensed the reasons for her puzzlement. “Because he didn’t want the drug to be compromised,” he said. “Because he didn’t want its use to be stopped because of some awkward side effects at relatively low doses. If these things happened with absolutely sky-high doses, then that would not be the fault of the drug, it would be a sort of freak—the sort of risk that people will live with precisely because hardly anybody is ever going to swallow enough of the stuff for that sort of thing to happen.”

  Isabel digested this. It certainly made sense. But why, she wondered, would he have such a stake in the continued use of the drug?

  Norrie put down his fork. He had finished his salad, although a small piece of dark lettuce was stuck to the front of his teeth. His tongue moved round as he tried to dislodge it, and Isabel stared in awful fascination.

  “Excuse me,” he said, picking at his teeth with a fingernail. “There. That’s better. What do they say about these things? Follow the money. Isn’t that it?”

  “He had a financial interest in the company?”

  “Not directly,” said Norrie. “He wouldn’t have had shares—that would have been too obvious. But that same company had backed his research. He was beholden to them. He probably wanted them to back him in the future. So…”

  Isabel listened carefully. W
hat was occupying her now was the question of why Norrie should have so readily covered for Marcus. Was this the way that the medical profession looked after its own? She had been under the impression that all that had changed. It was difficult to understand.

  “But what I can’t work out,” she said, “is this: Why did you not say something? Why did you not reveal your suspicions that he had actually gone so far as to change data?”

  Norrie pushed his plate away from him and glanced at his watch. “I’m going to have to dash,” he said. “I’m doing a couple of endoscopies this afternoon in an hour or so.” He paused, as if weighing whether to say something. Then he did. “All right, bearing in mind that this conversation is completely deniable: Marcus Moncrieff is my uncle. He’s my mother’s brother.”

  He looked at her in a way that she thought said: You are admitted to a conspiracy; I think you understand. Then he signalled to the waitress to bring the bill.

  “Edinburgh’s a bit like that,” he said.

  CHAPTER TEN

  J AMIE WAS PLAYING that evening at the Festival Theatre. Scottish Opera was doing Don Pasquale, and although Isabel had seen the production when they had first performed it in Glasgow, she had been invited to the opera, and a reception beforehand, by Turcan Connel, the firm of lawyers who represented her in such legal business as she had. It was one of their partners, Simon Mackintosh, who had purchased the Review of Applied Ethics for her the previous year, and he said that this transaction entitled her to at least some corporate hospitality.

  Champagne was served in one of the suites alongside the grand circle. Isabel looked about her: she knew a number of the guests, but for some reason she did not feel much like socialising, so she busied herself looking at the framed theatrical memorabilia on the wall. There was the programme for a concert by Harry Lauder, the Scottish vaudeville artist of the 1920s, with a picture of the famous bekilted figure with one of the twisted walking sticks that became his trademark. He had opened the show with “Will Ye Stop Your Tickling, Jock” and had ended it with “Keep Right on to the End of the Road.” Isabel smiled; her father had loved Harry Lauder and had sung his songs to Isabel and her brother when they were children. “Keep Right on to the End of the Road” moved her still, mawkish though the words were in cold print. “Every road through life is a long, long road, / Filled with joys and sorrows too.” Trite? Yes, it was, but then the truth was often trite, but nonetheless true for that. And had Harry Lauder not sung that on the very day that he had heard of the death of his only son in the trenches of France? And he had insisted on going onstage to sing it when his heart must have been broken within him. People did that then. They were brave.

  Or were they too brave, Isabel thought; too brave, with the result that they were imposed upon in the name of vainglorious patriotism, chauvinism, easily led to the slaughter? Should one be brave about the loss of one’s only son, or should one break down and weep for the waste, the pointlessness of the loss; rail against the whole monstrous system that sent young men off in droves to climb up those ladders and stumble through the mud into veils of machine-gun fire? Why should anyone be brave about that?

  She remembered the Latin teacher at school translating “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori”—it is a sweet and decorous thing to die for one’s country. “Horace, girls,” she said. “That’s from Horace’s Odes. Horace was a poet who wrote about the pleasures of living in the country.”

  “Who died for his country?” asked one of the girls.

  And the teacher had said, “No. He was talking about other people.” And left it at that.

  She turned away from the Lauder programme and raised her champagne glass to her lips. Simon, who was standing with a knot of people near the door, saw her and came across to speak to her.

  “Do you want to meet anybody?” he asked.

  “No. Not really.”

  He smiled. “I thought so. I know how you feel. Has it been one of those days?”

  Isabel took another sip of champagne. “Yes,” she said. “But this helps.”

  “The Review? Problems with that?”

  Isabel shook her head. “I’m looking after Cat’s delicatessen, and I was worked off my feet. Then I had lunch with somebody who revealed something which made me think. Nothing personal, but something which, well, which shocked me. So I just feel a bit…”

  Simon put a finger to his lips. “You don’t need to tell me,” he said. “I understand. Why don’t you just slip through to your seat. We won’t be offended. Catriona will come through in a moment and sit next to you.”

  Isabel did as he suggested and left the reception to find her way to her seat in the grand circle. The house was filling up, and there was that low hum of conversation that precedes the curtain: people waved to one another here and there, programmes were studied in the half-light, jackets were taken off and draped around the backs of seats.

  Isabel read the biographies in her programme. There was a Russian tenor, appearing in Scotland for the first time; there was a young singer fresh out of the Royal Scottish Academy in Glasgow; Don Pasquale himself had sung the role at Covent Garden and was shortly going off to Sydney. She turned to the summary; it was always helpful to refresh one’s memory as to the argument of an opera. Don Pasquale plans for Ernesto to marry a candidate of his choice, but Ernesto is really in love with Norina… Her attention wandered, and she looked about her. The man in the seat in front of her was whispering to his wife, pointing, discreetly enough, to a couple at the other end of the row. Isabel wondered what that was about. The wife shook her head. Disapproval? Or misidentification?

  Her gaze wandered. Over to her right, she saw her friends Willy and Vanessa Prosser; they had not seen her, but she would go and have a word with them in the interval. And behind them…she stopped. A few seats away from her, but two rows behind, was Nick Smart—and he was looking directly at her.

  She could hardly pretend not to see him, as she was half turned in her seat and looking directly at him. So she lifted a hand and gave him a halfhearted wave. He smiled, and rose to his feet. He was making his way over to speak to her.

  He crouched down in the aisle, beside her seat. “How nice to see you,” he said.

  “Yes. Likewise.” She sounded forced; she could tell. And so could he, she imagined.

  “You enjoy Donizetti?”

  “Of course. Yes. I’ve seen this production in Glasgow.”

  He had seen it at the Met.

  “Ah.”

  “Yes. And on the evening I saw it,” he continued, “the singer in the title role had an allergic attack—during the final interval. Somebody popped his head round the curtain and said, ‘Give us four minutes, ladies and gentlemen.’ That’s all they needed to get the understudy into his costume and push him on. Four minutes. And he sang beautifully. Brought the house down at the end.”

  “My goodness.”

  “Yes.” He had rolled his programme up and was tapping it gently on the back of the seat in front of Isabel. She noticed that he was wearing a velvet jacket and that the cuffs of his shirt were secured with fancy cuff links: a flash of gold. “Tell me, how’s Jamie?”

  “He’s playing tonight.”

  “Yes, I know. I’m seeing him later.”

  She felt a sudden lightness in her stomach; a strange sensation, almost like that which one experiences when driving a car over a hump. And then an emptiness.

  “Yes,” he said. “Later.” He looked at his watch. “Well, I guess I’d better get back to my seat. It’ll be starting in a moment.”

  She heard herself mutter something, but she did not look at him. Her eyes were fixed on the curtains of the stage, but she was not taking them in. Catriona Mackintosh and her fellow guests had joined her now, and Isabel greeted Catriona, but in a distracted way.

  “Are you all right?” whispered Catriona. “Simon said you were feeling a bit low.”

  Far more now, thought Isabel. “No, I’m all right. A bit tired.”

  �
�I won’t notice if you drop off,” said Catriona.

  There was little chance of that, thought Isabel. Where was he seeing him? And why had Jamie not mentioned it to her? She went over in her mind exactly what he had said about this evening. She had assumed that he was coming back to the house—he usually did on a Wednesday; in fact, he spent few evenings at his flat these days. Sometimes he went there when he taught late at the Academy, or when there was a concert on that side of town. But that was rare.

  From where she was sitting she could, by leaning forward, see into the orchestra pit. She had not done so before now, because she had been reading the programme. Now she did, and she saw him sitting almost under the ledge of the stage. He looked up, but he would not see her; looking up into the theatre from down there one would see just black, just a sea of darkness behind the lights shining down upon the stage. He moved the neck of the bassoon, swivelling it round, and slipped the reed into his mouth to soften it. She saw all this. You are mine, she thought. You are mine.

  AFTER THE PERFORMANCE she lingered in the glass-fronted hall at the entrance to the theatre. There was a large throng of people; off to the side, the bar did roaring business. People were talking, laughing at shared jokes, struggling into coats. Taxis lined up in the street outside; the occasional chauffeur-driven car, its engine purring, its driver casting his eye anxiously over the crowd; a bus to take a group of people back to Stirling; a school outing congregating just outside the door, shepherded by a pair of teachers who had that look that teachers always have on such occasions—that counting look.

  Isabel suddenly felt very lonely. There was nobody else, she thought, standing by herself; everybody was with somebody. She looked at her watch, more to give herself something to do than to find out the time. Jamie had said nothing about meeting her afterwards, and yet they usually did. He would suddenly materialise, carrying his bassoon case, and they would leave the concert hall together; except last time at the Queen’s Hall, when he had gone for a drink with Nick Smart, and this time, she assumed, when he was planning to do the same.