The Comfort of Saturdays

by Alexander McCall Smith

  She went inside. Although two of the four coffee tables in the corner were vacant, there were quite a few other customers examining or ordering food from the counter. Cat, who was serving cheese to a tall, rather angular woman, looked up when Isabel came in and smiled a greeting. Isabel smiled back; the days of open warfare in her relationship with Cat were over now, or so she hoped. Even if she seemed slightly remote from him, Cat had accepted the existence of Charlie and had forgiven Isabel for having him with Jamie, her former boyfriend. Nor did Cat resent Jamie’s presence in her aunt’s life, although Isabel was careful to avoid situations where she was together with Jamie in Cat’s presence, just to be on the safe side.

  Isabel decided that Cat would be too busy over the next little while for them to talk, and so she made her way directly to one of the vacant tables and sat down. There were always interesting overseas newspapers in Cat’s delicatessen, often Corriere della Sera, but sometimes examples that were more recondite, for Scotland at least: the Straits Times, the Globe and Mail, The Age, several days old, perhaps, but none the less interesting for that. Today she found a copy of the Washington Post dated four days previously, and she began to page through it, skipping over the news of electoral campaigns that seemed to go on and on for ever. There was a review of a new opera at the Kennedy Center, together with a picture of the composer and librettist at the premiere, alongside various society figures. The society figures dressed as expected, one of the women sporting a tiara and all the men having that air of slick grooming and benevolence that accompanies real wealth. Rich people, thought Isabel, never looked anxious in photographs; they looked relaxed, assured, untouchable by the worries of lesser mortals.

  ‘Isabel?’

  She looked up. Eddie, Cat’s timid assistant in the delicatessen, the damaged boy who had been taken on and nurtured, was standing before her, wiping his hands on the floury apron he was wearing. More progress, thought Isabel; there had been a time when Eddie had been unwilling to don the apron on the unexpressed grounds that it was unmasculine; or those were the grounds that Cat and Isabel had inferred. Now he felt sufficiently sure of himself to wear it, and Isabel felt pleased. Little by little, whatever trauma it was that Eddie had experienced – and she had a good idea of its nature – was receding in the face of his increased confidence.

  ‘Nice apron,’ she said.

  The words came out automatically, but it occurred to her just as automatically that she should not have said anything.

  Eddie hesitated. He looked down at the apron and then looked up again. He smiled.

  ‘It’s really for lassies.’

  Isabel shook a finger at him playfully. ‘No, Eddie. We don’t say that sort of thing any more. Men do women’s work, or what used to be women’s work, and vice versa. It’s the same with clothes.’

  Eddie looked at her disbelievingly. ‘You mean that men wear women’s clothes? Dresses?’

  Isabel shrugged. ‘Some do,’ she began, and then laughed. ‘No, I didn’t mean that. I meant to say that the categories of what’s for men and what’s for women have blurred. We share so much now.’

  Eddie decided that the conversation had gone far enough. ‘Are you going to have coffee?’ he asked. ‘Cat said I wasn’t to keep you waiting.’

  Isabel explained that she was expecting to be joined by somebody, but that he could bring her a coffee anyway if he did not mind coming back for a second order once her guest arrived. Eddie nodded.

  ‘And what are you up to these days, Eddie?’ she asked.

  ‘The usual.’ He paused. ‘Well, the usual, and something else. I’m taking a course.’

  Isabel expressed her pleasure. She had hoped that Eddie would eventually get round to obtaining some sort of qualification. He was intelligent enough, she thought; once again it all came down to confidence. She enquired what the course was. He had once mentioned a catering certificate that one could start by post and then go on to finish at catering college. Was it that?

  ‘Hypnotism,’ announced Eddie.

  Isabel stared at him. ‘Hypnotism?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve been doing it for six weeks now. There’s one lecture a week, Thursday nights, at college. You don’t get an actual certificate, but you do get a bit of paper at the end saying that you’re licensed to hypnotise people.’

  Isabel thought this unlikely. ‘A licence? Surely not.’

  Her disbelief took Eddie aback, and he started to become defensive. ‘It’s not the sort of hypnotism you see at those shows,’ he said. ‘We don’t make people eat an onion and think that they’re eating an apple. We don’t make them see things that aren’t there.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Isabel. ‘I should hate to find myself eating a raw onion at your behest, Eddie.’

  ‘It’s about hypnotising people to help them stop smoking or . . . or doing other things that they don’t want to. Bad habits. Hypnotism can cure bad habits.’

  ‘I’m sure it can,’ said Isabel.

  ‘And past lives,’ Eddie went on. ‘You can take people back to their past lives.’

  Isabel thought: We’re in Grace’s territory now. Had Eddie been put up to this by Grace? ‘Are you sure?’ She looked at him enquiringly and he inclined his head. He was perfectly serious.

  ‘My friend Phil is in the class too,’ said Eddie. ‘He allowed one of the girls – I forget her name – to regress him. I was there. I watched it. It was at Phil’s place after the class. We’d gone back there and Phil asked to be regressed.’

  Intrigued in spite of herself, Isabel asked what Phil had been in his previous life. ‘A coal miner,’ said Eddie. ‘A coal miner up in Fife. Somewhere near Lochgelly.’

  That, thought Isabel, is progress. There were too many exotic previous incarnations; too many Egyptian princesses, too many figures of minor royalty, too many Napoleons, no doubt. A coal miner from Fife had the ring of authenticity about it.

  ‘And then,’ Eddie continued, ‘she took Phil one life further back.’

  ‘And what was he then?’ asked Isabel.

  ‘Robert the Bruce,’ said Eddie. ‘I’m not making this up, Isabel. I swear. He was Robert the Bruce. Phil was. He didn’t open his eyes or anything. He just said “I’m Robert the Bruce” when we asked him who he was.’

  ‘Fancy that!’ said Isabel. ‘Phil, of all people! Robert the Bruce.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Eddie. ‘It was dead spooky, Isabel. He started talking about a battle and how he was going to defeat the English.’

  Isabel opened her mouth to say something, but the door opened and Stella Moncrieff walked in. She looked across the room, searching for Isabel, and Isabel gave her a wave.

  ‘My friend,’ Isabel said to Eddie. ‘Could we carry on our conversation some other time?’

  Eddie nodded. ‘Any time, Isabel. And I’ll regress you too, if you like.’

  ‘All right,’ said Isabel. ‘But you do realise, don’t you, that I’m likely to be Bonnie Prince Charlie? Or possibly Louis the Fourteenth?’

  Eddie looked at her with the air of one about to disabuse another of a fondly held notion. ‘No you won’t,’ he said. ‘Women are women in their previous lives and men are men. You’ll just be a woman, Isabel. Same as you are now.’

  Stella Moncrieff began with an apology. ‘I haven’t kept you waiting too long, I hope.’

  Isabel indicated the chair on the other side of the table. ‘No, you haven’t. I arrived just a few minutes ago.’

  Isabel glanced at Stella as she sat down. She was one of those people it was difficult to place in age terms, but Isabel thought that she was probably somewhere in her early fifties. The trouble, of course, was that clothing no longer provided a cue; middle-aged clothing still existed, but the middle-aged no longer wore it; jeans had liberated them from all that. So now the only way of distinguishing between those who were twenty and those who were forty was by the age of the fabric of the jeans: threadbare cloth meant twenty, cloth integral meant forty, the reversal of what one might expec
t. Until you looked at the face, of course, or, more tellingly, directly beneath it, at the neck, and then you could tell. That’s where the years showed, like rings in the trunks of trees. And no trick of the surgeon could deal with that; Isabel wondered why people bothered with plastic surgery, with the nips and tucks, the stretching and plastering that left the victim looking like the mask of a Japanese Noh actor, flattened, pinned back in perpetual discomfort. Who was that unfortunate queen, she asked herself – an earlier queen of the Netherlands, was it not – who was one of the first to have plastic surgery and had been left with a perpetual smile? And then her husband had died and the surgeons had been obliged to perform frantic corrective surgery so that the queen should not appear to be too cheerful about her husband’s death.

  Isabel smiled at the thought, and Stella Moncrieff returned the smile.

  ‘It’s good of you to see me,’ she said. ‘I sat at the telephone for ages, plucking up the courage to call you.’

  The frankness of this remark struck Isabel. ‘But why? Why worry about phoning me? I’m not . . .’ She trailed off. None of us is.

  ‘Oh, you know how it is. You meet somebody briefly, and you wonder whether they want to hear from you.’

  ‘I was delighted to hear from you. I hoped that we might have had a longer conversation the other evening. But dinner parties of that size . . .’

  Stella nodded. ‘You know, I had asked them to invite you . . . I wanted to meet you, you see.’

  Well, thought Isabel, that at least explained the invitation; it was nothing to do with Jamie. She hesitated for a moment, and then decided to be as frank with Stella as Stella was being with her. There was something about the moment which prompted confession. ‘Well, I was wrong about that,’ she mused. ‘I thought that they had invited me because of Jamie.’

  Stella looked blank.

  ‘The young man I was with,’ Isabel said.

  For a moment Stella’s puzzlement continued. ‘The young man with . . . with the dark hair? That lovely looking one?’

  Isabel felt an intense flush of pleasure. He was lovely looking. It was not just a case of her looking upon him with a lover’s eyes; lovers will make anything lovely. ‘Well, yes,’ she said. ‘I suppose he is.’

  There was still something Stella did not seem to understand. ‘You were with him?’

  Isabel’s pleasure began to turn into annoyance. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We have a child together.’

  The disclosure unnerved Stella, who struggled to maintain her composure. ‘Of course . . . But, why would they have invited you because of him?’

  ‘To see him. To inspect him. It’s fairly recent. And, well, people have talked about it a bit. He’s a few years younger than I am.’

  ‘I could tell that.’ It slipped out, and could not be retracted. But Isabel did not care. She had decided that she liked Stella.

  ‘Anyway, from what you tell me it had nothing to do with Jamie.’

  ‘No. It was me. I wanted to meet you, you see. And I’m afraid I seem to have very little confidence these days. I know it’s silly, but it’s just the way things are.’

  Isabel decided to take the initiative. ‘I heard something,’ she said. ‘That doctor I was sitting next to, the cardiologist, he said that there had been some issue with your husband.’

  Stella looked away. ‘That’s one way of putting it.’ She paused and looked back up at Isabel. ‘The truth of the matter, Isabel, is that I want you to help him. I know that you don’t know me. I know that our troubles have got nothing to do with you, but that’s the problem, you see, our troubles have got nothing to do with anybody. Except us.’ She made a gesture of despair. ‘So what am I to do? I can’t do anything myself, and Marcus, that’s my husband . . . he’s paralysed with guilt and self-reproach. With shame, too. He’ll hardly leave the house. Won’t talk to his old friends.’

  Isabel listened carefully. It was not clear to her why Stella had chosen her. She decided to ask.

  ‘Because I’ve heard about you,’ said Stella. ‘I knew somebody you helped a couple of years ago. Nobody asked you. You just helped. And you made a difference.’

  Isabel noticed that Eddie was signalling from the counter, making a gesture towards the coffee machine. She nodded to him and then said to Stella, ‘They make a particularly good cappuccino here. Would you . . .’

  ‘Yes. Please.’

  ‘And then you can tell me exactly what the problem is. I can’t imagine that I’ll be of any use, but tell me anyway, and I’ll do what I can.’

  It sounded so trite to her, even as she said it; the stock scene from the detective novel. The investigator reassures the distraught wife. Find out who’s blackmailing/having an affair with/holding prisoner my husband, please. Don’t worry, I’ll do what I can. And then the relief on the face of the supplicant.

  Stella looked relieved.

  Isabel stopped herself short. Don’t make light of human pain, she told herself. It’s not funny.

  5

  That evening, on impulse, Isabel said to Jamie, ‘Look, it’s five o’clock, or just about. If we bathed Charlie now and gave him his—’

  ‘Tea,’ supplied Jamie, pointedly, but smiling as he said it. He wanted to use the popular Scottish word for what Isabel would have called dinner, or possibly supper.

  ‘If you like,’ said Isabel. ‘I was going to say dinner, as you well know. But then, if you’re going to be all down and demotic, dinner means lunch in such circles, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Feed,’ suggested Jamie. ‘How about that as a compromise?’

  Isabel did not think so. ‘Give him his feed? It sounds like agriculture to me. You give feed to cattle, don’t you? Anyway, after he’s had his—’

  ‘Grub.’

  ‘All right, after he’s had his grub, why don’t we . . .’ She paused. ‘Grub first, then ethics. You know who said that?’ It was an accurate description, perhaps, of the daily routine of the editor of the Review of Applied Ethics, which did indeed begin with breakfast and proceed to ethics.

  Jamie did not hesitate. ‘Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral. Brecht.’

  Isabel bowed her head in mock homage. ‘I’m impressed.’

  ‘My German teacher at school went on about that,’ said Jamie. ‘He said that Fressen was appropriate for animals rather than people. Brecht was showing his low opinion of humanity by choosing to say Fressen rather than Essen. That’s why grub is a better translation than food. Grub is messy, animal stuff. He was very clever.’

  ‘He was a hypocrite,’ said Isabel. ‘He lived very comfortably in the GDR. No belching Trabbi for him. And he supported those horrific people who ran the place.’

  Jamie shrugged. ‘He believed in communism, didn’t he?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Isabel. ‘But he enjoyed what other writers in the GDR were denied. Freedom.’ It was tawdry, that shabby republic, with its legions of informers and its unremitting greyness, its rotten, crumbling concrete. And then it had all gone so quickly, as in a puff of smoke; the whole Soviet empire, with its deadening tentacles of fear, collapsed and discredited, vanished like a confidence trickster who has been exposed. And yet there had been so many who had connived in it, had derided its opponents; what had they to say now? Her thoughts turned to Professor Lettuce, who had been a founder of something called the East-West Philosophical Engagement Committee. He had gone to East Berlin, as had Dove, and had publicly complained about reactionaries, as he described them, who had questioned the visit on the grounds that meetings would be restricted to those with posts in the universities, Party men every one of them. Dove . . . She thought of his paper on the Trolley Problem; she felt a vague unease about that, and she felt that there would be more to come.

  But Brecht and the GDR, and even Dove and Lettuce, seemed far away. ‘Let’s leave Brecht out of it for a moment,’ she said. ‘After Charlie has been fed, I thought we could go out to the Pentlands and just . . . just go for a walk. Up past the reservoir. Charlie could go in the sling
. He’s getting a bit heavy for that, but you can carry him. He’ll probably just nod straight off. It’s such a lovely evening.’ And I want to talk to you, she thought. I want to be with you.

  They drove out on to the Biggar Road, leaving the last of the town behind them. Isabel was at the wheel of her green Swedish car and Jamie sat in the back, to keep Charlie company in his car seat. At Flotterstone, a few miles round the back of the Pentland Hills, they turned off the main road and parked in the small car park set aside for hikers. Then, Charlie safely installed in the sling affixed to Jamie, they set off up the winding road into the hills. Jamie gave Charlie a finger, and the child gripped it tightly. ‘Look,’ said Jamie, nodding in the direction of the little fist around his index finger. ‘Look.’

  Isabel smiled at the sight. She had watched the process of Jamie’s falling in love with Charlie, watched every step, from the first surprise and discovery to this emblematic moment, each act of tenderness by Jamie confirming the diagnosis of deepening love. Nothing had been said, and she thought that it was right that this should be so; the declaration of love could weaken its mystery, reduce it to the mundane. To say on the telephone, love you, as she heard people doing, was dangerous, or so Isabel thought, because it made the extraordinary ordinary, and possibly meaningless. Good day meant nothing now because it had become an empty formula; love you could go the same way. It was significant that it had already been shortened, and the I had been dropped. What did that mean? That people were too busy to say I love you, or too embarrassed by the subjectivity of the full expression?