“They said that it could be either morning or afternoon,” said Cat. “And they wouldn’t budge. So I have to stay in all day to let them in.”
“Frustrating,” said Isabel. “Of course I’ll help. What about Eddie?”
Eddie was a rather vulnerable young man who lacked the confidence to look after the delicatessen on his own. Isabel believed that he was perfectly capable of doing so, and Cat did, too, but his anxiety had been acute on the few occasions on which he had been left in charge by himself.
“He’ll be there,” said Cat. “But you know the problem.”
Isabel said that she did, and the arrangements were made. Isabel had a key to the business and would open it up at ten to nine, to be ready for Eddie’s arrival. Cat promised that in the unlikely event of the gas engineer arriving early she would come straight in to work; Isabel, however, put her off. “Take a day off,” she said. “That’s what aunts are for.”
Her own words struck her. That’s what aunts are for. It was true, of course: aunts were for coming to the rescue, and she always tried to do just that. But were aunts for helping themselves to their nieces’ discarded boyfriends? It was Cat who had got rid of Jamie—an act that betrayed appalling judgement, Isabel felt—and so she could hardly complain when Isabel took up with him. But she had complained, and had done so bitterly. Things were slightly better now, but there was still a touchiness on Cat’s part that could flare up at any time—and it did.
Jamie was not yet up, and so Isabel took him a cup of tea and the copy of the Scotsman that came through the door early each morning. When she told him that she would be spending the day in the delicatessen, for a moment she saw a shadow cross his face. She hesitated; they did not talk about Cat because she was an unseen third person in their relationship, as a former lover sometimes can be. It was akin to a past act of unfaithfulness that can stand, a painful monument, in the history of a marriage—a forbidden memory, cauterised and sealed off, but still with the power to hurt.
“We could see whether Grace could come in,” said Isabel. “She tends to be free on Saturday, so you needn’t have Charlie all day.”
Jamie looked at her reproachfully. “I like having Charlie all day,” he said.
She was emollient. “That’s fine then. He loves being with you.” She bent down and kissed him on the cheek, gently tousling his hair as she did so.
“Don’t do that.” But he did not mean it.
She sat down on the bed. “You don’t resent my helping Cat, do you?”
He looked away. “No, not really.” A small rectangle of sunlight streamed in through a chink in the curtains, across Jamie’s shoulder.
Isabel reached forward and placed her hand against his chest. “I think you do, you know. But I can’t just … just cut Cat out. She’s family. I can’t.”
He looked at her. “I never wanted you to do that.” He hesitated for a moment, and then took Isabel’s hand in his. “I’m the one who feels awkward about this. I know I don’t need to, but I do. I feel embarrassed, I suppose, that I’ve …”
She waited, but he did not complete the sentence. “Embarrassed that you’ve what?”
“That I slept with her, and now I’m sleeping with you.”
He spoke with transparent honesty, but the pain his words caused him was laid quite bare. Isabel pressed his hand. “But that’s …” She found herself at a loss as to what to say.
“Nothing?” said Jamie.
“No, of course it’s not nothing.”
“Then what is it?”
Isabel took a deep breath. “What I mean is that it’s something you simply don’t need to think about.”
He sighed. “You can’t just deny these things.”
“I’m not saying that you should deny it. What I’m saying is that you should forget it. That’s quite different.” She watched him. He had a way of looking at her when something she was saying interested him profoundly—it was a sort of searching look—and she saw it now. “Do you really want me to discuss it with you?”
“Of course. Why not?”
She pressed his hand again. “Because I sound like a philosopher, and I don’t always like that. Not when I’m with you. It’s just the way it is.”
He had not been returning the pressure of her hand; now he did so. “But that’s what I like,” he said. “It’s like being … like being married to Socrates.”
The analogy was so unexpected that Isabel burst into laughter. “Thank you! Socrates …”
Jamie grinned. “In a purely mental sense, of course. You’re far more beautiful than Socrates.”
“Poor Socrates—just about everybody is.”
Jamie steered the conversation back to its original subject. “But what about forgetting? How can you forget on purpose?”
She acknowledged the difficulty. “All right, I know that forgetting is normally something over which you have no control. But you can tell yourself to forget, you know. You say to yourself that you are not going to dwell on something and then the mind—the bits of the mind that are in charge of forgetting, so to speak—do the rest. The memory is suppressed, I suppose.”
“So?”
“So you tell yourself that the fact that you and Cat had the relationship that you did is something you are not going to think about—that you’re going to forget it. And then you will.”
For a few moments Jamie said nothing. He was looking up at the ceiling now, thinking; or perhaps trying to forget.
“Maybe I don’t want to,” he muttered.
She gently withdrew her hand. “Then don’t.”
She felt a stab of disappointment, and she wished that she had not started to discuss the subject with him. Perhaps his instinct had been better: to say nothing, to leave it where it lay. The past was so powerful that sometimes when we chose to deny its potency it reminded us just who we were—its creatures.
She crossed the room and drew open the curtains, flooding the room with morning light. “Let me make you something special for breakfast,” she said.
He sat up in bed, reaching for the cup of tea she had brought him. “Mushrooms,” he said. “And scrambled eggs with some of that truffle oil in them—not a lot, just a few drops.”
“And?”
“And a piece of very thin toast.”
“And?”
“And a mug of Jamaican coffee with really hot milk. Not milk heated up in the microwave but scalded in a pan.”
She smiled, and watched him get out of bed, his limbs caught in the sunlight. I do not deserve somebody so beautiful, she thought, or so gentle; but none of us deserves good fortune, perhaps—it comes our way, dispensed at random, irrespective of what prayer flags we string across our mountain passes, what chants and imprecations we devise; it simply comes.
She stopped herself. Do I really believe that? I do not, and never have; in thinking it I have simply succumbed to a defeatist impulse. Even young children understand that often, if not always, we get what we deserve; Charlie, at his tender age, is beginning to learn that good behaviour is rewarded with a treat. And there was no reason why she should not have been given Jamie: she was attractive and she had looked after herself. Jamie himself had referred to what he called her Pre-Raphaelite beauty; “Holman Hunt might have painted you,” he had said. She had protested that she found this most unlikely, but she had been flattered, and she had filed the remark away in her memory, to be taken out and reflected upon, as such compliments should be, when one was feeling one’s worst, on a bad-hair day.
ISABEL HAD OPENED UP the delicatessen by the time Eddie arrived. Eddie always looked sleepy when he turned up for work. He was rarely late, but he still managed to look as if he had tumbled out of bed only a few minutes ago—which he might well have done. Isabel knew that Eddie did not eat breakfast. “I’m not hungry,” he had said when she asked him. “The thought of breakfast makes me ill.” But within half an hour or so she would see him pop a piece of cheese or a slice of Parma ham into his mouth.
“Breakfast?” she asked.
“It’s different,” said Eddie, slicing off another sliver of cheese.
“There’s nothing wrong with having a snack.”
When Eddie came in that morning Isabel noticed that he had a scratch on his face—a line of punctured red that ran down from the cheekbone and ended just above the edge of the jaw. Her eye went straight to it, and he noticed that, as he instinctively reached up to touch his cheek.
Isabel caught his eye. “Have you washed that?”
Eddie looked away. “Washed what?” he mumbled.
Isabel touched her own cheek, as if in sympathy. “That scratch. Let me take a look at it. Cat keeps some disinfectant in the cupboard.”
She took a step towards Eddie to get a better view of the scratch, but he withdrew sharply. “I only wanted to look at it,” said Isabel. “It won’t hurt to put something on it. It looks a bit angry to me.”
“You can’t just go round putting disinfectant on people,” said Eddie.
Isabel smiled. “I suppose you can’t. Or at least not on people you don’t know …” She imagined herself in the street, dabbing disinfectant on passers-by, as a religious proselyte might thrust a tract into a stranger’s hand; absurd thought. But surely it was just as intrusive for people to buttonhole others with a view to converting them to a religion. She had often thought of the massive presumption of such earnest missionaries, that they should imagine that a few words from them should be able to overturn another’s whole theology or philosophy of life. Did they really expect that one would say, “My goodness, so I’ve got it wrong all my life!” The offensive presumption here was that the one’s world-view should be so shallow as to fold up in the face of the approach of the other. But that is how ideas spread, she supposed, and sooner or later if you put your proposition to total strangers you would come across one who was ready for plucking by the first person of conviction who crossed his path.
Isabel remembered the circumstances of a well-known essayist’s conversion to communism. He had gone to a party and drunk too much. He had woken up in the company of a woman he did not really like. And when he went to the window to look out on to the street, he saw that the weather was freezing; subsequently he found out that the engine of the car he had borrowed from a friend had frozen and was ruined—he had forgotten to put in antifreeze. In such circumstances communism offered a fresh start—a cleaning of the old slate—and he converted.
She became aware that Eddie was looking at her resentfully. “All right,” she said. “It’s your own business.”
“It is.”
Isabel felt momentary annoyance. All she had done was to offer help, and yet he was treating her as if she had proposed some sweeping infringement of his autonomy. “As a matter of interest, Eddie,” she said, “if you saw me coming in with a scratch on my face, would you ask me what happened? Would you want to help?”
He continued to stare at her.
“Well?” pressed Isabel.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe.”
Isabel felt that she had proved her point. “So you understand, then, why I offered. You’d do the same for me.” She paused. “How did it happen, Eddie?”
Eddie turned away. “A branch. I was down near the canal and I walked past this bush—you know, one of those fruit ones, blackberries—and it scratched me. The council should cut those things.”
“Oh well,” said Isabel. “A scratch from a thorn shouldn’t be too dangerous. But you should watch it. If it starts to throb, then that means that it’s infected and you should go to the doctor.”
Eddie seemed relieved that the interrogation was over. He went behind the counter and placed the cheese-cutting boards in position. Then, while he filled the large espresso machine with water from a jug and ran a cloth over the steam nozzle, Isabel went through to Cat’s office to retrieve the cash float from the lock-up cupboard. She noticed the disinfectant on the shelf—the label showed a picture of a boy having his knee attended to by a concerned mother—-for minor day-to-day cuts and bruises. They were innocent, those day-to-day cuts and bruises; Eddie had been scratched, and although she had initially believed his explanation of how the scratch came about, suddenly she began to doubt him. It was the same with those black eyes that people claimed were the result of walking into a door; usually they were the result of domestic violence, or of a brawl somewhere. Somebody had scratched Eddie—a girlfriend? Isabel wondered. Probably—Eddie had had that rather sinister-looking girl and although she was no longer with him, he might well have replaced her with somebody similar.
She went to the counter and put the float in the till. It was now nine o’clock, the delicatessen’s official opening time, and she nodded to Eddie to take the door off the latch. It was not unusual for customers to appear within minutes of their opening—these were people who called in for a cup of coffee on their way to work, and would spend a few minutes reading the papers at one of the small tables at the far end of the delicatessen.
It proved to be a busy morning. Shortly after eleven Cat telephoned to say that the gas board engineers had not come yet and that she was sure now that they would not arrive until much later that afternoon.
“What if we have an explosion?” she complained. “What then?”
“We must just hope that you don’t explode,” said Isabel. “That is all we can do.”
“It’s no laughing matter,” snapped Cat.
Isabel apologised. It had not been a joke; she had meant that she did not want the flat to explode. Cat was being unduly literal in assuming that the reference to her home was a reference to her. She had offended Eddie, and now Cat. Yet on neither occasion did she think that the offence was warranted; they were both too sensitive, she decided, or—and it was a worrying thought—was she the insensitive one?
They did not stop for lunch, as the delicatessen was at its busiest between noon and two in the afternoon. Then it slackened off, and Isabel provided cover at the counter while Eddie ate a sandwich in Cat’s office, his feet up on the table. She said nothing about that; when Cat was away it was understandable that mice would play.
Eddie finished his lunch and it was Isabel’s turn for a break. She poured herself a cup of coffee, telephoned Jamie to check that Charlie was all right and then sat down with her coffee and a cheese roll at one of the tables. A customer had left an early copy of the Evening News, the local paper, on the desk, and she paged through this. It was a parochial paper, as local papers should be, and Isabel rarely found anything of interest in it. On this occasion, though, a small headline on an inner page caught her eye: Woman Attacked in Morningside. She began to read the text below. A young woman, it reported, had been attacked the previous night near the Royal Edinburgh Hospital; she had fought with her assailant and he had run off. He was a slight man, she said, but that was all the description she managed. It had been dark.
Isabel read the article again and then looked up towards the counter. Eddie smiled at her.
No, this was completely inconceivable; it was ridiculous. Eddie was a gentle young man who would never attack anybody. He was more likely to be attacked himself, she thought, and indeed she believed that he had been, some time ago. Plenty of people were scratched, one way or another, and even if Eddie was making up the story of the bramble bush, and even if the scratch came from a set of fingernails, it was unthinkable that the attacker could be him. But then she remembered the expression: someone’s brother, someone’s son. Those who committed horrendous crimes were still someone’s brother, someone’s son; or someone’s mild, inoffensive assistant at someone’s delicatessen.
Isabel drained her coffee cup and rose to her feet. A woman had come in and was fingering the avocado pears, surreptitiously giving them a squeeze.
“Please don’t do that,” said Isabel mildly, as she came up behind the customer. “It bruises them.”
The woman turned round and looked defiantly at Isabel. “How do you expect me to tell if they’re ripe?”
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“You can feel them very gently. Tap them if you must—use a finger. But don’t squeeze them hard.”
The woman’s nostrils flared. “I have never been so insulted in my life,” she said.
Isabel recoiled. “Oh, please! I’m not insulting you. I merely asked you not to squeeze the fruit. We have to throw out an awful lot, you know, because people have done what you’ve done.”
The woman turned on her heel. “There are plenty of other places to buy things,” she said. “Places where the assistants don’t insult you quite so much.” She spat out the word assistants.
Isabel resisted the temptation to laugh. “I’m very sorry …,” she began. But the woman was not listening. She looked helplessly at Eddie, who was smirking.
“What did you say to her?” Eddie asked, after the woman had left.
“I simply asked her not to squeeze the avocados,” said Isabel. “And she flew off the handle.”
“You must have offended her,” said Eddie. “People are so touchy.”
Isabel raised an eyebrow. We see the touchiness of others and not our own—obviously. Eddie watched her with the air of somebody who had seen another disgrace herself through impetuosity or sheer foolishness.
I don’t have to do this, thought Isabel. I really don’t have to put up with all these hypersensitive people. This was Cat’s business, and Eddie and all these difficult customers were her problem and not Isabel’s. She saw that Eddie was still looking at her. There was something odd about his stare, and for a moment Isabel thought: What if he knows that I know? What if he knows that I’ve read the report about the attack? What if he realises that now that I know, I’m a danger to him—a danger that can only be solved by … She brought this train of thought to an end. It was absurd, and she would not entertain any such absurd, fanciful thoughts about Eddie; she simply would not.
BY THE END OF THE DAY, Eddie had become quite talkative. His earlier surliness had disappeared, and even the scratch on his face looked as if it had calmed down. Isabel tried not to think about that, and largely succeeded: her imaginings had been ridiculous, anyway, and she felt not unlike one of those nervous women who keep phoning the police about the men they were convinced were hiding under their beds. Wishful thinking, the police might say, although they were always so tactful in such cases.
The Lost Art of Gratitude Page 5