The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday id-5

by Alexander McCall Smith

  She smiled at Jamie. “You make it sound so simple,” she said. And then she was about to say, “And as for marriage, well…” But Jamie, looking down at the menu again, said, “What exactly is the difference between langoustines and crayfish?” and again the moment passed.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  J AMIE SAID TO ISABEL the next morning, “You’re going to go and see Marcus Moncrieff this morning. Remember?”

  He was standing in his pyjamas in the kitchen, and Isabel, seeing that the pyjamas were immodest, said, “Grace could come in, you know.”

  Jamie hitched up the pyjama trousers, struggling with the cord, and Grace arrived, having let herself in silently. She looked away, but Jamie caught Isabel’s eye.

  “The bus was late again,” said Grace. “And there was that man at the bus stop again. The peculiar one. The one who hands out leaflets about the second coming.”

  Isabel rose from her seat. “I’ll go tomorrow,” she said, taking up the thread of their conversation. “I’ll phone and ask them if they’re going to be in.”

  “Of course they’re going to be in,” said Jamie. “He never goes out. You told me.” He paused, looking at her knowingly. “You’re putting it off, aren’t you, Isabel?”

  “What?” asked Grace.

  “A visit to an unhappy man,” said Jamie.

  Isabel grimaced. “This morning then?”

  “I’ll drive you,” said Jamie. “Charlie and I will drive you, and then we can wait in the car on Johnston Terrace. Afterwards we can go somewhere. The Botanics, maybe.”

  Isabel agreed. Jamie was right; she had been putting it off because she felt reluctant to face Marcus with bad news about his nephew. Should she go? Or should she just forget about the whole affair? She could do that; she was under no moral obligation to tell Marcus that he was the victim of deliberate manipulation by a pharmaceutical company. And yet, even as she thought this, she knew that she would not be able to rest until she had done all that she could to lighten his burden of shame. So she would go; she had to.

  Charlie was still sleeping, and it was not until ten thirty that they were in the green Swedish car and ready to leave. Grace had hinted broadly that she would be quite happy to look after Charlie and that he would surely enjoy himself more at home.

  “I don’t think so,” said Jamie.

  Grace looked at him reproachfully. “Being cooped up in the car—” she began.

  “I don’t think so,” Jamie said again. “Thank you anyway, Grace.”

  Outside, Isabel whispered, “Well done!”

  “He’s my son,” said Jamie.

  Isabel nodded her agreement. Grace meant well, but she had a tendency to assume that she knew best about most things, including Charlie’s welfare. She felt proud of Jamie for sticking up for himself; she wanted him to do that, to be more assertive—within limits, of course.

  “It’s a very effective thing to say,” she remarked as they loaded Charlie into his car seat. “ ‘I don’t think so.’ It has a magisterial quality to it. I don’t think so. And that’s the end of the matter.”

  “My mother used to say ‘argument over’ a lot,” said Jamie. “Sometimes she’d say it before we had the chance to open our mouths. Argument over. And that was it.”

  Isabel went round to the passenger side of the car and opened the door. Jamie very rarely spoke about his family. His parents, she understood, were divorced, and his mother had left Scotland to live in London with a new husband, whom Jamie did not get on with. His father had left the country altogether and lived in Spain. There had been a sister, who had married a naval officer, but he said that he very rarely heard from her.

  “Do you miss them?” she had once asked.

  He had replied, “No. Not really. We’ve all grown apart, I suppose.” And then he had changed the subject, and she had seen this as a sign that he did not want to talk more about it. But it was also for her a confirmation that he did miss them.

  “Will you say ‘argument over’ to Charlie, do you think?” she asked.

  He was dismissive. “Of course not.”

  Isabel reached for her seat belt and draped it over her shoulder. The green Swedish car was a safe car, but Swedish glass made the same impression on the human head as any lesser glass. “And yet people do tend to say the things that their parents said, don’t they? We become our parents, you know. We think that we never will, but we do. We start talking like them, acting like them, holding the same views that they held, no matter how much we think that we don’t.” Her sainted American mother had been a model to her, and she would willingly have emulated her—except perhaps for her little failing, her affair.

  Jamie thought about this as he slipped the key into the ignition. “Do we? No, I don’t think we do.” And then he added, “Argument over.”

  ISABEL HAD TELEPHONED AHEAD, and Stella was expecting her.

  “I told him,” she said, as she met Isabel at the door.

  “That I was coming?”

  Stella shook her head. “No. I told him that I thought that Norrie was responsible. That he had changed the figures.”

  Isabel raised an eyebrow. “And what did he say to that?”

  Stella looked pained. “He went off the deep end. He told me that it was absolute nonsense. He said that Norrie had never had any interest in the place up north and that the whole idea was ridiculous.” She sighed. “He just refused to listen to what I had to say. He refused point-blank.”

  Isabel frowned. “Well, I can’t imagine that he’s going to take it from me, either.”

  “Please try,” said Stella. “At least try. Even if he won’t listen to me, then he might pay attention to somebody who’s more or less a stranger. He can hardly be as rude to you as he was to me.”

  “I’ll try,” said Isabel. But she felt it was hopeless. All that she had to back up her theory that Norrie and the drug manufacturers had acted together was the dubious evidence of her visit from David McLean—and that was hardly evidence. And then there was the question of Marcus’s depression. People in a state of depression often did not listen, being so caught up in their misery, their preoccupations. Marcus was not suddenly going to become open, become rational, just because of a few facts put before him by Isabel.

  She followed Stella through to the drawing room with the wide window. Marcus was sitting exactly where he had been when she had last visited him; it was as if he had not moved at all. And he had probably moved very little. Perhaps he slept in that chair, she thought. Day in, day out, he sat there, virtually immobile. If this was shame, or guilt, then it was as vivid an instance of it as one might imagine.

  “Isabel Dalhousie has come to see you,” announced Stella in a loud voice. She spoke as if she was addressing a child, or someone hard of hearing.

  Marcus Moncrieff looked up and stared at Isabel. His expression was flat, but for a moment there was a flicker of a smile, a wan smile, produced, thought Isabel, through great effort. “Miss Dalhousie? Good morning.” It was said without enthusiasm, but Isabel thought the instinctive good manners of the Edinburgh doctor had not deserted him. Some of that was still there—fragments of personality surviving the onslaught of the clinical depression.

  He tried to rise to his feet out of politeness, but Stella put a hand on his shoulder and gently pressed him back into his chair. “She won’t mind if you don’t get up,” she said. “She can sit here.”

  She gestured to a chair in front of the window. Isabel shook hands with Marcus before she sat down opposite him. She glanced through the window; down below, far below, the buses crawled along Princes Street; flags fluttered from the top of the Scottish National Gallery, a Union flag and a Scottish saltire. Beyond the gallery, the curious spire of the Scott Monument, blackened by ancient soot, poked at the sky. Walter Scott in his chair looking upon a street that would be recognisable to him in some ways even today, but in others so alien; a street taken over by strangers.

  Marcus interrupted her thoughts. “You’ve come
to see me about this business of my nephew,” he said. “Or I assume that’s what you’ve come about.”

  Isabel fixed him in the eye. “Yes. I have.”

  He turned away, to face the window; he was not looking at the city below, but at the sky somewhere over Fife. “Norrie had nothing to do with it. I’ve told Stella. It had absolutely nothing to do with him.” He turned to face her. “I give you my word on that, you know. Nothing to do with it.” He paused. “How do I make you believe that? What does it take?”

  Nothing more than you are doing at the moment, thought Isabel. Nothing more than the truth that you are so evidently telling me. He was not lying; she could tell that from his demeanour. And she made her decision.

  “I believe you,” she said. “All right, let’s say that Norrie had nothing to do with it. But that doesn’t mean that there might not have been others who deliberately altered that data. People who stood to gain from it.”

  “Such as?” he snapped.

  “The people who made the drugs. The pharmaceutical company.”

  He looked at her almost with pity. “Are you one of those people who believe the worst of pharmaceutical companies? Who thinks that everything they do—everything—is selfish, exploitative, wicked? Is that what you really believe?”

  She defended herself. “No, I’m not one of those people, as you put it. But you can’t deny that some pharmaceutical companies have played fast and loose with people on occasion. Have tried to get doctors to prescribe useless or marginally useful drugs. Who have charged too much. Who have sometimes concealed evidence that doesn’t suit them. You can’t deny that.”

  “Sometimes,” he said, begrudgingly. “Sometimes. But you’re always going to get some rotten apples. That’s human nature. They’re probably no better or worse than any other businesses. It’s called capitalism, Miss Dalhousie. But the real point, surely, is that they invent and make drugs that save lives. Look at AIDS. How long ago was that a sure and certain death sentence? And now? Something you can live with for years and years. And who do we thank for that? The pharmaceutical companies who produce the ARVs. That’s who.”

  He looked at her triumphantly, as if challenging her to refute the irrefutable. Isabel merely nodded. “Of course. But what if your case was one where the bad apples were at work? How would you feel if I were to demonstrate to you that they had a role in distorting those figures? And then you took the blame?”

  For a while he said nothing. She watched him, and she thought that he looked like a man in the grip of some awful internal struggle. And when he spoke, it became clear that he was.

  “You could never demonstrate that to me,” he said. “For a very simple reason. I did it.”

  “You told me that already. You admitted that you failed to check the results. You told me that when we first met.”

  He became agitated. “Oh no, I didn’t tell you. I didn’t tell you what I did.” He stopped, closed his eyes, and turned away, so that she might not see his face. His hands, Isabel saw, were shaking. “I altered the figures myself.” There was a pause. Had she heard correctly? The words were like the stones of a wall—physical things. And then, “The original reports from the lab indicated relatively small overdoses. I changed them and made it seem that the overdoses had been massive. I did it, and it was very easy. I just tore up the original forms and filled in new ones. Simple.”

  He spoke slowly and clearly, enunciating each word. The shock that Isabel felt on hearing this did not stop her from watching his face as he spoke. It was a face that reflected pain in every word of the confession. And again she realised that he was telling the truth.

  She was silent for a time after he had finished. Then she said, quite gently, “Why did you do it, Dr. Moncrieff?”

  He answered quickly. “Because I believed it was the right thing to do.”

  “How could it be? How could it be right to mislead people on this?”

  He sat back in his chair and opened his eyes. “Because I really believed in the drug. I thought that the reaction in each case was probably triggered by something that had nothing to do with the drug—especially in the case of the addict. They take God knows how many different things. I thought that those two cases were completely freak events: one caused by a whole cocktail of stuff which an addict had taken; another caused by a nurse who got things dramatically wrong, or a patient who secretly stuffed himself with pills. I thought the drug was completely safe and that this was just nonsense that would set us all back five years. People were dying, remember. I wanted to stop that. That drug was our best hope and the last thing we wanted was a scare over it. We’re never…” He seemed to struggle to find the right words. “We’re never going to get anywhere if we allow this absurd safety culture to inhibit us. You have to take some risks to get somewhere. You just have to. But try telling that to the assorted bureaucrats and lawyers and ethics people, not one of whom, may I say, has ever done anything but inhibit new treatments. Try getting through to that bunch. What about Lister?” He pointed out of the window, in the direction of the Queen Street drawing room where Lister and his friends had taken chloroform at the dining-room table. “Would Lister ever have been allowed to self-experiment like that today?” He laughed. “You can bet your bottom dollar he would not. Health and safety. Informed consent. All that claptrap, all while people are dying.”

  He stopped and looked at Isabel. “So there you have it,” he said. “I did it because I thought I knew best. And then…then that poor man died.”

  “You didn’t want that,” said Isabel.

  “Didn’t want it? Of course I didn’t want it. But I’m responsible for it. If I had blown the whistle on the drug, then it wouldn’t have happened. So what do you want me to say, Miss Dalhousie? That I was wrong? Right, I’ve said it. I was wrong. I was proud. I thought I knew best.”

  They sat in silence. It was a curious silence, one that neither felt he or she needed to bring to an end. It was a silence that comes when the worst has been said and there is nothing more to be added.

  But Isabel said to herself: If he thought there was no risk, then where exactly was the wrongdoing—in the moral sense? He had not taken a deliberate risk, because a deliberate risk implies knowledge that harm might materialise; he thought that what he did was safe. It was not. He had been arrogant in thinking that he knew better than those who had set in place all the precautions that protected patients. They were right; he was wrong. But he had thought it was the other way round.

  “So what now?” he suddenly said.

  Isabel said nothing. She was still thinking.

  “So you report me?”

  She shook her head. “No. I don’t report you.”

  He seemed surprised. “Why? Don’t I deserve it?”

  “I think that you’ve already been punished,” she said. “You resigned. You lost your position—and your reputation. You feel all this shame.” She paused, watching him, watching the effect of her words. “And anyway, if I reported you, or if I urged you to report yourself, it would merely lead to more proceedings against you. You’d be struck off the medical register. And I’m afraid that you would kill yourself.”

  He said nothing. He did nothing to confirm or deny what she had said, and that convinced her that she was right. The question over which this man ponders, she thought, sitting in that chair of his, is whether to kill himself.

  “I don’t think that you could take any more shaming, could you?”

  He moved his head slightly, but it was assent.

  “And if you kill yourself, then what purpose does that serve? Stella is left behind. Her life is ruined. And we all lose a man who had a good few useful years ahead of him. So—in my view—there’s no point at all in more punishment. There’s such a thing as a just measure of punishment, and I think you’ve had it.”

  He watched her closely. “You don’t think that I’m responsible for that man’s death?”

  “No,” said Isabel. “On balance, I don’t. Not in any sense
that really counts. And I think that because you had no idea that what you did could kill somebody. In your…your arrogance, you thought that you knew best whether it was safe to do what you did. You betrayed your training, your oath, everything; but you didn’t think that it would kill anybody.”

  “I didn’t,” he said quietly. “I really didn’t.”

  “No,” said Isabel. “And I believe you.” She hesitated. He was watching her, willing her to say something; but what?

  “What do you think you can do now to make up for all this?” she said.

  He looked perplexed. “I don’t see what I can do.”

  “Couldn’t you get back to medicine?” she asked. “Not here, obviously. But somewhere where they might be glad of your services. Somewhere where they really need you?”

  He sat quite still. “I never thought…”

  “No,” she said. “But why don’t you think now? Why don’t you set yourself a penance? Penance comes in different forms—not just the mortification of the transgressor. It comes in doing something good for somebody else.” It was ancient language; people did not set themselves penances anymore. But did that mean that penance was no longer needed? Here, she thought, is a case which disproves that. And it disproves, too, the proposition that I am capable of finding things out. I’m not. I get everything wrong.

  She made to leave him, and he rose to his feet. There had been crumbs of food on his jacket, and they fell to the ground like tiny hailstones. He called for Stella, and began to walk with Isabel.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “You don’t have to thank me,” she said. “I found nothing out, and what I did find out I got wrong.”

  He smiled. This time it was not weak, nor was it forced. “But you gave me the chance to confess,” he said.