The Comfort of Saturdays

by Alexander McCall Smith

  They began their walk, following the narrow road that worked its way up between the fold of the hills. The road, which was not used by ordinary traffic, was bordered on either side by an undulating stone dyke. To their left, all the way down to the bed of a small river, the throaty gurgling of whose waters could just be heard, was a slope on which Scots pines grew, their branches host to crows, which cawed and flew away. On the other side of the road, beyond the lichen-covered stones of the dyke, fields swept up the hillside; fields interrupted here and there by clumps of gorse, in flower at this time of year, the dark green foliage spiked with small clusters of yellow. Blackface sheep, hardy enough for the Scottish hills, dotted the fields, paused in their grazing and stared vacantly at Isabel and Jamie as they walked past, then dropped their heads again, unconcerned, and moved away.

  ‘Charlie’s asleep,’ whispered Jamie. ‘Off like a top.’

  She peeked at him. ‘It must be the most wonderful feeling, being carried like this. Warm and secure. Why would one want to grow up?’

  Jamie laughed. ‘Why indeed?’

  They walked on. They were now drawing level with the reservoir which covered the flooded floor of the glen. The road they were following traced a route round the side of it before making its way up to the head of the glen, to peter out at the just-visible buildings of an isolated sheep farm. The surface of the loch was still, as there was no wind, no breeze, and the sky ahead, high and empty, was reflected on the water; no clouds, just blue. She turned to Jamie and took his hand, easily, unself-consciously. The touch of him thrilled her, and she shivered.

  ‘I met Stella Moncrieff for coffee this morning,’ she said. ‘Remember, I said I was going to do that.’

  He was looking up, trying to make out something halfway up the hill. ‘And?’

  ‘Well, she wanted to see me. She’s asked me to help her with something.’

  As Isabel expected, this caught Jamie’s attention. He turned to her. ‘Isabel . . .’ There was an unmistakable note of warning in his voice. Jamie did not approve of Isabel’s getting involved in matters that did not concern her and had told her as much, on numerous occasions.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes.’ And then, after a few moments, ‘I could hardly refuse.’

  Jamie shook his head. ‘But that’s exactly what you could do,’ he said. ‘Life consists of refusing things we shouldn’t be doing.’

  Isabel reflected on this for a moment. Perhaps for some people life did indeed consist of refusing to do things – there were those who were adept at that. But she was not one of them. Her problem, rather, was one of deciding which claims on her moral attention to respond to and which to ignore; and it seemed, for some reason, that there were always more of the former than the latter. How can we ignore a cry for help? she asked herself. By steeling our hearts? By closing them?

  She stopped and turned to Jamie, placing a hand on his forearm. Behind him, above the hill, a bird of prey circled watchfully; the evening sun, still with a touch of summer warmth in it, touched the heather with gold. At this time of year in Scotland it would be light until eleven at night; further north, in the Shetlands, it would never get dark at all. At midnight the simmer din would make it possible to read a newspaper outside without strain to the eyes.

  ‘Don’t you want to know what she asked me to do?’ He could hardly say no, she thought.

  He sighed. ‘All right.’ They began to walk again, and he added, ‘But I don’t approve. You know that, don’t you?’

  She held his arm lightly, and began to tell him about her conversation with Stella. Marcus, Stella’s husband, was a doctor.

  ‘What sort?’ asked Jamie. ‘Everybody’s a doctor in Edinburgh. Or a lawyer.’

  ‘An infectious diseases specialist – a very highly regarded one, apparently. Or he used to be highly regarded.’ She went on to explain what Stella had told her. Marcus, she said, had been at the forefront of work on MRSA, the so-called Super Bug, which had been the cause of a growing number of deaths in hospitals.

  ‘Apparently quite a few people are carriers of this,’ said Isabel. ‘You or I might quite innocently have it. In our noses, I’m sorry to say. Our systems keep it under control, but we can pass it on to others, who can’t cope with it.’

  Jamie looked down at Charlie, at his tiny nose. ‘And?’

  ‘And he was doing a trial on a new antibiotic,’ Isabel continued. ‘One that can knock this MRSA on the head. A drug company has come up with a pretty good candidate and has been given a licence to produce it in this country. Marcus had been involved in the clinical trials and was monitoring its use in patients.

  ‘Everything was going perfectly well, and then, very much to his surprise, a patient who had taken the drug developed pretty serious side effects. Heart palpitations, Stella said. And another one turned up with the same sort of thing. Alarm bells started to ring.’

  If Jamie had been indifferent to the story at the beginning, he no longer was. ‘What was that drug that was so disastrous? The one that people used before they realised that it caused terrible birth defects?’

  ‘Thalidomide. I suppose this was a bit different. The patients were all right, even if things were a bit scary for them. Anyway, Marcus was asked by the health authorities to look into these cases. He did that, and he also published a report in a medical journal in which he showed that both of these patients had been given a massive overdose of the drug: one was a drug addict and had self-administered it in the deluded belief that he would get some sort of hit from it; the other was the victim of a nursing error. So he claimed that everything was fine and that the drug was perfectly safe within the limits they set for this sort of thing.’

  She sensed Jamie’s absorption in the story, and was pleased. ‘But,’ Isabel went on, ‘there was an unpleasant surprise around the corner. A few weeks later he published his findings, in the form of a letter in one of the big medical journals, and a few weeks after he had said everything was perfectly safe, a man up in Perthshire was given the drug and promptly died. There was an enquiry and the hospital authorities took a closer look at Marcus’s original report – the one that said that everything was perfectly all right. And what did they find?’

  Jamie frowned. ‘That he’d made a mistake?’

  ‘Yes. But more than that. The data in his original paper was shown to have been falsified. It was something to do with the level of the dosage.’

  They walked on. Jamie was lost in thought; then he spoke. ‘I see where this is going. The implication was that he had an interest in keeping the drug manufacturers happy and that he falsified the figures for their sake. For money.’

  That was not what Stella had suggested, Isabel explained. She had said that although the press had had a field day and blamed Marcus for the death, they had not accused him of doing it for money. But he had been reported to the General Medical Council and he had been heavily censured for issuing a misleading report. He resigned from his university chair too and stopped all medical work.

  ‘A rather sad story,’ said Jamie. ‘Sad for everybody.’ He paused. ‘And she wants you to . . .’ He looked at Isabel. ‘She wants you to clear her husband’s name? Is that it?’

  Isabel nodded.

  ‘Oh, Isabel!’ exclaimed Jamie. ‘What’s this got to do with you? What’s this got to do with being the editor of the Review of Applied Ethics, for heaven’s sake?’

  ‘Everything,’ said Isabel.

  Jamie looked puzzled. ‘I’m sorry . . . ?’

  ‘She says that he’s completely innocent. That’s what it’s got to do with me. An innocent man is now consumed with shame for something he didn’t do. That has something to do with all of us, I would have thought. And it just so happens that I have been asked by his wife to do something about it. That brings me into a relationship of—’

  ‘Moral proximity with him,’ said Jamie. ‘Yes, I know all about that. You’ve told me about moral proximity.’

  ‘Well, then,’ said Isabel. ‘There you
have it.’

  ‘But how can you believe her – just like that?’

  ‘She seemed to me to be telling the truth.’

  ‘But what wife wouldn’t? Of course spouses protest that their spouses are innocent. Mothers do it too. Presumably Mrs Stalin took the view that her son Joe was widely misjudged. That he would never have run a terror.’

  Isabel laughed. ‘One cannot expect objectivity from a spouse, I suppose. But then I have somebody else’s view to go on as well. That cardiologist I sat next to at the dinner told me that he was convinced that Marcus was innocent. He didn’t tell me at the time what it was that he was supposed to have done, but he did tell me that he thought he didn’t do it. That’s two views in favour of innocence.’

  They had reached the end of the reservoir, and Jamie now glanced at his watch. ‘We should go back now,’ he said. ‘We’ll need to settle him.’ He planted a kiss on the top of Charlie’s head, on the tiny tam-o’-shanter he was wearing. Then, when they had started to retrace their steps, he said to Isabel, ‘I’m sorry I sounded so discouraging. You want to do this, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Isabel. ‘I do.’

  ‘Then I’m proud of you,’ said Jamie. ‘Really proud.’

  And with that he leaned over towards her and kissed her. She touched his hair. She breathed in. I am so in love, she thought, so deeply in love; and love of one is love of another, and another, until all humanity is embraced and the heavenly city realised, which will never happen, not even in your lifetime, Charlie, she thought.

  With Charlie put to bed, Jamie said, ‘I’ll cook.’

  It was now almost nine in the evening and Isabel had not thought much about supper. She had a vague idea that they might have a plate of the moussaka that she had made the previous day and which needed to be finished off, but she had done nothing about it and Jamie’s offer was particularly welcome. He would make pasta, he said; he had discovered some porcini mushrooms in the larder and some cream. ‘Not very adventurous,’ he said.

  ‘Delicious,’ said Isabel. ‘And thank you. I want to look at some things in my study.’

  She left him in the kitchen and went through to her study at the front of the house. She had a fax machine there, and there was often a small pile of papers disgorged from it at the end of the day, waiting for her attention: scribbled notes from the printers, queries from the copy editor, and, in this case, a report from a reader. That was what she had hoped for, and she caught her breath when she saw it.

  She had sent Dove’s paper on the Trolley Problem to two referees, as was normal with any unsolicited paper. She had been scrupulously careful in her choice of referee; it would have been easy to pick a harsh one – and she knew at least one professor of philosophy, himself seldom published, who delighted in finding fault with the work of others and recommending against publication. Isabel would not use him as a referee, although when Professor Lettuce had been in charge of the board he had taken to doing so off his own bat. This man, whom Isabel had nicknamed the Harsh Critic, was friendly with Lettuce. Two peas from the same pod, thought Isabel; Lettuce seemed to attract vegetable metaphors, she admitted – the great turnip. No, she would not send it to the Harsh Critic because he would reject it more or less automatically – or would he? If he, the Harsh Critic, was friendly with Lettuce, then might it not be possible that he would be on good terms with Lettuce’s acolyte, Dove, the oleaginous one? In which case he would probably recommend in favour of publication, as he would not like to cause Lettuce to wilt. This made matters more complex. If she decided against the Harsh Critic, then she was taking away from Dove a chance that he would otherwise have, and she wanted to treat him with scrupulous fairness. But no, he would get a random referee, one chosen by her when she opened her address book at random . . . like this, and there he was, the obvious choice, her friend Iain Torrance. Iain, a theologian with a philosophical background, was as fair-minded a man as one could meet, and, what was more, he had a reputation for working quickly, as he had done now. Lying on the floor, having slid off the desk on which the fax machine was placed, was his faxed report – a neatly typed page subscribed at the bottom with his signature: Iain.

  She reached down to pick it up. Her hand, she noticed, was shaking. She perched on the arm of one of her library chairs; the seat itself was stacked with papers, the chair having long since ceased to be anything but part of her filing system. There were three paragraphs; two lengthy ones and a final, short one. She skimmed through the first two and then came to the third. It could not have been clearer.

  ‘I much regret,’ wrote Iain, ‘that I find no original insights in this paper. The arguments advanced by previous participants in the discussion are repeated, but not developed. And that part of the paper which purports to be a further refinement of the original conditions of the bystander’s plight do not add anything. Try as I might, I cannot think of any respect in which this paper helps a problem which already has a certain hoariness to it. Paper and ink are finite. I cannot recommend they be squandered on this article.’

  She put down the report and closed her eyes briefly, as if to order her thoughts. She left her study and went back into the kitchen. The pasta was simmering on the stove, misting up the windows, but there was no sign of Jamie. Then she heard the piano, and smiled. They sometimes sang together, or he sang for her; now she heard him.

  He stopped as she came into the morning room. He laid his hands gently on the keyboard, at rest, and smiled at her. She wanted to run to him, to hug him to her, this young man who had come to her so unexpectedly, who brought music, a child, beauty, all these things into her life. But she contained herself, and asked, ‘What was that again? It was so haunting.’ It was.

  ‘“The Parting Glass”,’ he said. ‘It’s one of those songs that has a complicated history. There are Irish versions and Scottish versions. Burns joined in and did a version too.’

  ‘Of course. I’ve heard it before. Could I hear it again?’

  ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Take this glass of wine. And hold it. That’s how you should listen to it. Take a sip.’

  She took the glass of white wine from him. It was still chilled, with tiny drops on the outside. She moved it in her hand, feeling the cool of it, the wetness.

  Jamie said, ‘This song makes me feel sad.’

  She watched him.

  He began to sing, and the words, which he enunciated so carefully, and the slow movement of the melody, touched at her heart:

  Oh, all the comrades that ere I had

  Are sorry for my going away

  And all the sweethearts that ere I had

  Would wish me one more day to stay

  But since it falls unto my lot

  That I should rise and you should not

  I’ll gently rise and I’ll softly call

  Good night and joy be with you all.

  He finished and gently closed the lid of the piano. She did not move.

  ‘Why did you sing that?’ she asked.

  Jamie looked up. ‘Sometimes I just feel that way,’ he said. ‘I feel sad when I’m happy. It’s strange, isn’t it?’

  She thought of the words: But since it falls unto my lot/That I should rise and you should not – words of leave-taking, every bit as moving as those used by Burns in ‘Auld Lang Syne’, and with perhaps an even greater poignancy to them. Why, she wondered, did we need loss and parting to remind us of how much friendship, and indeed love, meant to us? Yet we did.

  6

  She did not tell Jamie that she was going to see Marcus Moncrieff the next morning. It was true that he had accepted her involvement, but she suspected that his acceptance was a reluctant one and that he would not really want any further details. Perhaps he had come to the realisation that this is what she did: she became involved, and he had simply decided that he might as well let her get on with it. She wondered whether it was the same as accepting that one’s partner smoked, or drank rather too enthusiastically, or read frivolous novels; bad habits
all, but ones with which one might just have to live. She found herself using the word partner against her will; it insinuated itself into her thoughts; linguistic resistance was difficult, and ultimately futile: there was no point in continuing to call Beijing by its long-established anglophone homonym when a whole generation had forgotten that it was once Peking.

  She thought that it was a good sign that Jamie was becoming more tolerant of her involvement in the affairs of others; it showed, she thought, that he accepted her for what she was. Isabel had been perfectly self-assured in all areas of her life until that fateful night when she and Jamie had made the transition from friends to lovers. We can be confident in our dealings with the world when what the world sees is the outer person, with all the outer person’s defences: the intimacy of a love affair is a different matter altogether. And who might not feel just the slightest bit insecure under the gaze of a lover – a gaze which falls on birthmarks, on blemishes physical and psychological, on our imperfections and impatience, on our human vulnerability? And how more so when one is older and the lover is younger.

  Jamie made everything different, and she was blessed by his presence. But by accepting him into her life she had given a hostage to fortune: he could become bored with her; he could leave her; he could suddenly find her ridiculous. None of which she thought would necessarily happen, but it could. So this sign that he approved of her was important. Yet I am not to think about this, she reminded herself.

  Peter Stevenson, her friend whose advice she sought on all sorts of matters, had been explicit. ‘Isabel, you must stop fussing about this!’ he had said, his voice revealing his irritation. ‘You and Jamie are together. The age gap is a little unusual. But so long as you are both happy, which you are, it doesn’t matter. And Charlie’s arrival has created a bond between you which will last for the rest of your lives. So stop fussing, for heaven’s sake.’