Alexander Mccall Smith - Isabel Dalhousie 05

by The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday

  “A waiting list?”

  “Yes.”

  A year of pain. That was what socialised medicine meant; sometimes pain had to be endured if nobody was to go without the basics.

  “So you wanted to get it done privately? To pay for it?”

  He nodded, and she watched him closely. He did not look away; his eyes moved slightly, the normal flicker of movement that comes with consciousness, but he did not look away.

  “Do you know how much it costs?” she asked. “Do you know how much it costs to have it done at the Murrayfield Hospital? The surgeon’s fees? The anaesthetist? The physiotherapy, and so on?”

  Now he looked away. “Five hundred,” he muttered. “Something like that.”

  “Oh, Eddie…” She was about to say that five hundred pounds was not very much, but she realised in time that this was exactly what she should not say. So she said instead, “It’s much more expensive than that.”

  He said nothing. He was fiddling with the strings of his apron, twisting them round a finger. She watched him for a moment, and then made her decision. “I can pay for this, you know. I can pay for the whole thing. I can do that for your father.”

  Her words had an immediate effect. The twirling of the apron string stopped as Eddie froze. He did not move.

  “Yes,” said Isabel. “I can easily do it. You see, I have a special fund that allows me to do things like that. I give grants, or rather the lawyer gives them. We can do this very easily.”

  “You can’t pay for other people’s operations,” said Eddie.

  “Why not? If they need them. Why not?”

  “Because it’s their own business.” It was crudely put, but she knew exactly what he meant. In philosophical terms she would have referred to it as individual autonomy, or the sphere of private decision. But what Eddie had said summed it up very well.

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll keep out of it. But if you change your mind, then I’ll do it. You just let me know.”

  She realised that she had said nothing about the return of the five hundred pounds. If that was not going to be anywhere near the sum required for the operation, then Eddie should surely offer to return it. Indeed, he had to return it. But he said nothing about it, and just turned away, to get on with his work. And that was the point at which she realised that the whole business about the father’s hip replacement was a complete lie.

  It hurt her, being lied to by Eddie, and it made her reflect on why exactly it was that we were harmed by lies. Sometimes, of course, lies harmed us because we acted on them, and this proved to be to our detriment. That was straightforward and understandable. The person falsely directed onto the cliff path by the mischievous passerby is harmed by the lie when he falls over the edge. The fraudster’s victim is harmed when he sends money for the nonexistent benefit that will never materialise. He suffers loss. But what of other lies—lies which did not necessarily make us act to our disadvantage, nor took anything from us, but which just misled us? Why should we be hurt by them?

  It is all because of trust, she decided. We trusted others to tell us the truth and were let down by their failure to do so. We were hoodwinked, shown to be credulous, which is all about loss of face. And then she decided that it was nothing to do with trust, or pride. It was something to do with the moral value of things as they really were. Truth was built into the world; it informed the laws of physics; truth was the world. And if we lied about something, we disrupted, destabilized that essential truth; a lie was wrong simply because it was that which was not. A lie was contra naturam. Truth was beauty, beauty truth. But was Keats right about that? If truth and beauty were one and the same thing, then why have two different terms to describe it? Ideas expressed in poetry could be beguiling, but philosophically misleading, even vacuous, like the rhetoric of politicians who uttered the most beautiful-sounding platitudes about scraps of dreams, scraps of ideas.

  BUT BY FRIDAY she had stopped thinking about Eddie and the lies he had told her. Isabel had a way of protecting herself against the discomforts of the world: she could make a decision to put them out of her mind and then do precisely that; it was of limited effect—things denied have a habit of coming back eventually, but as a temporary expedient it was effective enough. So, by Thursday, she and Eddie had been perfectly easy with one another; he had stopped thinking about the five hundred pounds, and the lie, as had she. It was as if nothing had happened.

  Friday morning was devoted to editorial tasks, as she had planned, but not before she had spent a couple of hours with Charlie down on the canal towpath, feeding the ducks. Charlie watched in fascination, pointing and squealing with delight as the ducks swam for the crumbs Isabel tossed in their direction. I’m casting bread upon the waters, she thought. And then? Such bread was meant to return tenfold, but that was the difference between a metaphor and life: metaphors did not work when acted out. In the world of metaphor, the bread returned; in the world of ducks, it was eaten.

  They returned from the canal and Isabel handed Charlie over to Grace. This was one area where denial did not work: I am not giving him as much time as he deserves, she thought. He wants all my time, and I am not giving it to him. But I am simply a working mother, she told herself, no different from anybody who takes her child to a nursery while she goes off to the office or the shop, or wherever she works. I should not feel guilty. But she did.

  Her standing in for Cat in the delicatessen meant that her Review work had piled up. And that, she thought, is no metaphor: the work indeed stood in piles on her desk. The next issue was almost ready to go off to the printer, but behind that there stood submissions for the issue after that, including Dove’s paper. Of the two articles for the next issue that still required her final attention, Isabel disposed of one within minutes; a few tiny points, mostly of a typographical nature, were dealt with and given the tick in green ink that Isabel used to show that it was finally ready. Then there was a piece by an American philosopher on the ethics of using traditional recipes from indigenous people (for want of a better term, thought Isabel: we are all indigenous to somewhere. She had never discovered anybody who was not). We took from people when we used their recipes, she wrote; we took their knowledge. It was not quite theft, but it was a taking. Isabel stopped reading and looked out of the window. Yes, but we were imitative creatures; we copied one another all the time, and it would be difficult to control such copying. But then she thought: Our drugs. We stop people from copying our drugs, even if they’re dying. That’s one sort of recipe we definitely do not share.

  She was so engrossed in her work that she did not notice that midday had crept up on her, and then the grandfather clock in the hall struck and brought her back from the world of traditional recipes and exploitation, of out-of-control trolley cars and moral dilemmas, and back into the present world of lunch appointments. She had arranged to meet Stella Moncrieff in Glass and Thompson, the café at the top of Dundas Street that she liked to frequent. It was on the other side of town for both her and Stella—Princes Street being the divider, every bit as effective as a swift-flowing river, that split the city in two—but she liked that part of town, with its galleries and views of the Fife hills. There was a pure, northern light there, she thought, a light that brought with it a sense of being on the edge of something, on the edge of silences and the wide plains of the North Sea.

  Stella was waiting for her when she arrived, sitting at the table in the window.

  “I’ve already ordered,” she said. She looked anxious, as if she feared that lunch might run out.

  Isabel glanced at the menu on the board above the counter and placed her order. Then she joined Stella. She thought: The wives suffer in a very particular way.

  Stella smiled at her, but the smile was clearly an effort. “I don’t know this place. I don’t get out much these days…” She checked herself.

  “I can imagine,” said Isabel quickly. She did not think that Stella wanted to sound self-pitying, and it was true: she did understand.
Wives did not join the angry ranks of denouncers; they stood by their erring husbands, braving the photographers, although it was not hard to picture the scene behind the scenes, the rows and recriminations, the tears.

  “Can you?” asked Stella. “Can you imagine it?”

  “I think I can,” said Isabel. “I can imagine what it’s like, with people thinking that your husband—”

  “Was responsible for somebody’s death,” Stella interjected. “Because that’s what they think.”

  “Memory is short,” said Isabel. “Disgrace doesn’t always last very long. I know people in this city who have been disgraced over one thing or another. They thought it would last forever; it doesn’t. The press moves on to its next victim. Predators don’t hang around the old kill too long.”

  Stella attended closely to what she said. As if my words are particularly wise, thought Isabel. And I am only uttering platitudes; the obvious.

  “Have you managed to do anything?” asked Stella when Isabel finished speaking; it was as if she had rapidly weighed, and discarded, Isabel’s reassurances.

  “A little,” said Isabel. “I had lunch with your husband’s assistant, Dr. Brown. Norrie.”

  Stella’s eyes flickered, just briefly. “I haven’t seen him for some time,” she said. “He’s Marcus’s nephew. His mother was Marcus’s sister. Diana Moncrieff.”

  “He told me that,” said Isabel.

  Stella looked at Isabel expectantly. “And what else did he say?”

  The waiter brought two plates over to the table—Isabel’s mozzarella and tomato salad and Stella’s quiche. He put them down in front of them and asked if everything was all right. Isabel nodded, and he left.

  Isabel drizzled olive oil over the tomatoes. Little islands of pesto floated in the clear pools of the oil; she saw the slices of mozzarella, domed, as tiny snow-covered mountains behind these islands. When you look closely at the small details, she thought, the world is different, more complex.

  She had decided that she would tell Stella exactly what she had learned from Norrie Brown. She had no alternative really, as she could hardly lie to her and even if it would be hard for her to hear that her husband had deliberately falsified results, it might be better, in the long run, for her to confront this uncomfortable fact. People learned things like that about their spouses, and then forgave them. In a way it was easier; such knowledge could remove the sense of injustice that would otherwise linger, eating away at one’s peace of mind. At least Stella would know the worst, could look it in the face, and then get on with life.

  “This isn’t very easy for me,” Isabel began.

  Stella put down her fork and stared across the table. Isabel noticed that there were small lines radiating out from the corners of Stella’s eyes, and that tiny fragments of makeup, flesh-coloured powder, had lodged in these little crevasses. The observation seemed to underline the humanity of the woman before her: we all put our best face to the world, comb our hair, tidy ourselves up; we all do that, because we want others to like us, to approve of how we look. And yet, at the heart of it was, in this case, a blot of shame, like a mark on the forehead: the wife of that doctor who killed that other man because he cut corners.

  “What isn’t easy for you?” Stella asked. She looked at Isabel reproachfully. “Having lunch with me?”

  “No. No. Not that. It’s what I have to say that isn’t particularly easy.”

  For a few moments, Stella was silent. Then she said, “You found something out?”

  Isabel looked down at her plate. The other woman would want to know the opposite of what she was about to tell her. “Yes, I’m sorry. I learned something from him.”

  She related what Norrie had told her. Stella listened intently, with only slight signs of emotion—a reddening of her complexion, a movement of the mouth—when Isabel revealed the accusation of deliberate wrongdoing. Then, when Isabel had finished, they both sat quietly while Stella digested what had been said.

  “So,” said Isabel. “So what he suggested is that we leave well enough alone. And he’s probably right, don’t you think? Leave well enough alone. Your husband has been sufficiently punished: he’s lost his job; it’s the end of his career. Surely nobody would want him to suffer more than he has already.”

  The control which Stella had shown now evaporated. She leaned forward across the table; her face flushed again, more angrily. “And you believed him? You believed what Norrie told you? That nonsense? How can you be so naïve?”

  It took Isabel a moment to deal with the insult and to recover her composure. But by then Stella had recanted. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to say that. I’m sure that you’re not naïve.” She paused; this was to be an apology, not a retraction. “But I still don’t think that you should have believed him.”

  Isabel replied that she did not see any reason to disbelieve Norrie. People may lie when accused of wrongdoing, but the junior doctor had never been in the firing line. And what reason would he have to lie about a matter which had already been put to rest?

  Stella listened, but started to shake her head vigorously before Isabel had finished speaking. “But you don’t know the background. You don’t see how it all fits together.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Isabel. “You’ve lost me.”

  Stella took a deep breath. “Norrie Brown’s mother, Diana Moncrieff, was a very difficult woman. She and Marcus had a great-aunt, Maggie, up in Inverness, an extremely wealthy woman who had a large farm on the Black Isle, a lovely place. Marcus and his sister used to go up there during school holidays every year. Maggie was childless and there was an understanding—which everybody spoke about quite openly—that she would leave the farm to Marcus and Diana jointly, on the understanding that it would not be split up but would be a sort of family base for both of them. That was very clearly understood, and Maggie herself talked about it. But when the old girl died, they found that she had not done this at all, but had left it to Marcus. It transpired that she had taken against Diana’s husband for some reason or other. I have my theories. He was an Irishman, and they differed about Ulster. Maggie had some uncle on her mother’s side who had been a relative of Carson’s and was an ardent loyalist. She thought of Ulstermen as stranded Scots. These things last generations in Ireland.”

  Isabel listened. There were issues like this in virtually every family, even if the stakes were rarely quite so high. It could be something quite small: a photograph, a keepsake, a small amount of money.

  “Diana was devastated,” Stella continued. “She confronted Marcus at the funeral, at the wake afterwards, one of those Highland affairs with lots of whisky and formal black suits. She told him that she expected him to keep to the understanding and share the farm with her. Marcus said no. He’s not a greedy man, but it was the way she laid into him that made him dig in. He thought that had she asked politely, then he would probably have agreed. But he was not going to be dictated to like that. And after that, they never spoke again, directly, that is.

  “Then Diana died. She was killed in a car crash driving down from Inverness, just near Dalwhinnie. It’s a lethal road that—it always has been. Marcus felt very bad about the row between him and Diana, and he tried to make it up to Norrie. When Norrie decided to do medicine, Marcus did what he could for him, including taking him under his wing. But I always suspected that Norrie resented him. I was convinced that Diana had poisoned him against Marcus; had spun him nonsense about being cheated out of the farm, and so on. I always thought that was there. Feelings of resentment like that never really go away, do they? They linger on.”

  Yes, thought Isabel; and she reflected on her own family, where Cat had entertained feelings of intense jealousy over Jamie, forgiven her, patched up, and then relapsed. Those feelings were always there, she thought, in spite of our best efforts to dispel them. Resentment lingers: it sounded like the name of a racehorse—not a successful one of course; racehorses should not linger unduly.

  “You’re smil
ing?”

  She could not help herself; it is a concomitant of my allowing my thoughts to wander excessively, she thought. Then I smile or even say something. “I’m sorry. It’s nothing to do with what you’ve told me. It was just an odd thought—about something else. About a racehorse…”

  Stella stared at her intently. “A racehorse?”

  “Nothing,” said Isabel. “It really has nothing to do with what we were talking about. Sometimes my mind wanders off. I’m sorry; you now have my full attention.”

  Stella was silent, staring out of the window, out past Isabel, who was seated with her back to the street. Then, quite suddenly, her gaze shifted back to Isabel. “Yes,” she said. “Yes. That must be it. Norrie.”

  Isabel looked at her expectantly.

  “Norrie,” Stella went on, her tone becoming more forceful. “What a perfect way of getting back at us. Perfect.”

  Isabel understood. However, she could not help but sound incredulous; real life simply did not involve plots like that; real life was disappointingly mundane. “Revenge? Do you really think so? Do you think that he…any doctor would do that sort of thing? Risk people’s lives?”

  “Doctors do odd things,” snapped Stella. “They’re exactly the same as the rest of us.”

  Isabel wrestled with the possibility. Stella was right about the frailty of doctors; they had extramarital affairs, cheated on their tax returns, involved themselves in dirty politics. And there were spectacularly wicked doctors—doctors like Mengele—to show that for some the Hippocratic oath meant nothing. Anything was possible—from anyone. “You’re suggesting that Norrie altered the data? You’re suggesting that he did this to ruin Marcus? To ruin his uncle over some long-running sense of being deprived of something that his mother thought should be his?”

  Stella’s answer was simple. “Yes. Exactly.”

  Isabel, looking away from Stella, gazed out of the window. A man was walking up Dundas Street; a man wearing a chocolate-brown corduroy jacket of the fusty, vaguely raffish sort once worn by art teachers. He stopped and patted the pockets of his jacket, as if feeling for something that he hoped he had brought with him, before glancing in through the café window. His eyes met Isabel’s, and he seemed to hesitate. There was recognition, but no recognition. We have met one another before, thought Isabel, and we both understand that. But we do not know who the other is, which speaks eloquently, she thought, of the way we live now, knowing more and more, but less and less.