His enthusiasm visibly waned. ‘I was. I was very interested in a new antibiotic that had just been licensed. I knew the people who made it – one of the smaller drug companies, a bit of an outsider. They had a veterinary preparation and an antifungal cream, and then this very clever bit of chemistry. It was like finding oil for them.
‘Anyway, any cases of MRSA infection in Scotland were more or less referred to me and I monitored the use of this drug. Everything was fine. Then, by highly unlikely coincidence, two cases turned up in Edinburgh, one after the other, of patients who had taken the drug experiencing fairly serious side effects. Heart issues. I was asked by the Scottish government health people to look into it. The chief medical officer was concerned.
‘I did it. I got hold of the records and had blood samples sent back for analysis. I tried to find out what happened.’ He paused. ‘Are you following me?’
Isabel smiled. ‘So far. You’ve been very clear.’
He ignored the compliment, turning to stare out of the window. ‘We looked at the two patients. There was an interesting thing about one of them. He was a drug addict. He had got hold of our antibiotic from some pusher who said that it was a new drug that would give an unusual hit. How the pusher got his hands on it is beyond me, but it was probably theft from a pharmacy somewhere. These people will steal anything, sell anything, and take anything. As long as it’s a pill. And then word gets out on the street that something works and you have all sorts of people overdosing on the most peculiar substances. Laxatives even. Vitamins.
‘I spoke to this patient and asked him how much he had taken. He gave me an answer which worried me, as it was not all that much in terms of an overdose. Ten times the therapeutic dose, in fact, but that will be well within the limits of tolerance of that particular drug. Those limits are pretty large.’
He looked back at Isabel. ‘I don’t know if you’ve had any dealings with addicts. Have you? Do you know what they’re like?’
Isabel thought. There had been a student in her college at Cambridge who stayed in bed all day and made no sense most of the time. There had been a person in the apartment next to hers when she had been on that fellowship in Georgetown. He was an addict, she had been told, but he appeared perfectly inoffensive. A bit thin, perhaps, but inoffensive. I have had a sheltered life, she thought.
‘No. I can’t claim vast experience.’
‘Well, I’ll tell you something about them,’ said Marcus. ‘Everything they say has to be distrusted. Everything. And so although I was worried, I thought that the chances were that he was lying. So I got hold of the blood that had been taken from him when he was admitted and sent it off to the lab for re-analysis. And when it came back, the result showed an overdose of about one hundred and fifty times the therapeutic dose. So this patient had swallowed a whole carton of the drug. But then that’s what they do. When they’re desperate, they pump the stuff in with reckless abandon.’
Isabel wondered what happened to the patient. She could not see him in her mind’s eye, for some reason. He was just a story.
‘He recovered,’ said Marcus. ‘He was discharged and went back to wherever he came from. Fife, I think. He’s probably overdosed on something else since then. Poor man. He won’t be long for this world, I suspect. But no sooner had we sorted him out than another one turned up. In this case the patient had been given a dose of the drug by a nurse here in Edinburgh. The nurse swore blind that the dose had been the normal one, but again the blood showed a massive overdose. Not as big as in the addict’s case, but pretty massive. Nobody could work out how on earth it happened, as the patient sided with the nurse and confirmed her story.’
‘So somebody was lying?’
He thought for a moment. ‘Not necessarily. Errors can be made in how things are written down. Inadvertently move a decimal point one place in either direction and you get very different results, don’t you? But something had gone spectacularly wrong. Again, we were able to sort things out and the patient recovered reasonably well. She was a nice young woman, actually. A student at one of the universities, as I recall.’
‘So you wrote up these results?’
‘Yes. I made a report to the chief medical officer. I effectively gave the drug a clean bill of health. Then I wrote the two cases up as a case note for one of the medical journals. They published it. It was just a couple of paragraphs describing what had happened.’
‘Then?’
Marcus was silent for a while. Isabel noticed that his hands, clasped together in his lap, were white at the knuckles. His voice, when he spoke again, sounded strained.
‘A month later a man in Glasgow was admitted to hospital. He had been treated with the antibiotic. He . . . I’m sorry to say that he died from heart complications. He had not received an overdose – that was established. The press got hold of the case and they asked how somebody could die from taking a licensed medicine. Well, I could have given them an answer to that, but they were not in the slightest bit interested in a rational explanation about inevitable risk. They put pressure on the minister and they took another look at my report. They discovered that the doses I had described did not match a new set of lab reports on the blood. The figures were way out. And they also discovered that I had not declared a conflict of interest when I published that case note. I should have told them that I had received a research grant from the company that made the drug. And they were right: I should have done that. I don’t know why I didn’t. It was some years ago. It must have slipped my mind.
‘There was an internal enquiry and I was censured. They said that I had been negligent in not checking the blood results when they were so obviously exceptionally high. They said that a prudent doctor would have had the samples tested again. They censured me too for not disclosing the conflict of interest and the journal published a withdrawal of my case note.’
He stopped and looked at Isabel. The air of defeat had returned. He seemed flattened, almost as if the breath had been knocked out of him – winded.
Isabel felt that she needed to think. She rose to her feet and stood before the window, looking out over Princes Street below. A train had emerged from the tunnel underneath the National Gallery and was moving slowly west. She looked at her watch. That was the Glasgow train, which left every fifteen minutes.
‘So what they did,’ she said, ‘is to conclude that you were negligent. Is that it? They didn’t conclude that you had deliberately falsified anything?’
Her question seemed to unsettle him. He looked down at his hands for a few moments before he replied.
‘There was no falsification,’ he said. ‘There was an error in the transcription of the results somewhere along the line. It’s possible that it was a slip by a medical student who was attached to my unit at the time. They accepted that. They said, though, that I should have rechecked and should not have relied on a medical student. They said that I was careless. That was the actual word used: careless.’
‘And do you think you were?’ asked Isabel.
He closed his eyes. She noticed that his right eyelid was twitching. ‘Yes. I should have checked. And I should have declared the conflict of interest. I failed to meet the standards expected of a doctor of my experience.’
There was something that Isabel was unsure about. Was this failure directly linked with the Glasgow case? She asked him this, and again he took a little while to answer.
‘According to the press it was,’ he said. ‘One or two of the papers went so far as to accuse me of . . .’ He faltered. ‘Of killing the patient in Glasgow. They said that if I had done my work properly, safeguards would have been put in place. The drug would not have been given to somebody with a history of heart problems – which that man had. They blamed me for his death.’ The next words were chiselled out. ‘Publicly. Unambiguously.’
Isabel reached out and put her hand on top of his clasped hands. ‘But you weren’t responsible for that,’ she said. ‘Somebody made a mistake. That’s all.’
/> But there was something she still needed to know. Why had he not checked the results, if they were so out of line with what might have been expected?
His answer came quickly, and Isabel thought that it sounded rehearsed. But then she realised that repetition may have the same effect as rehearsal. He would have had to explain himself a hundred times before, sometimes, perhaps, even to himself; of course it would sound rehearsed. ‘It didn’t cross my mind,’ he said. ‘It didn’t occur to me that the results could be wrong. I took them at face value.’
They spoke for a few more minutes. Isabel asked him the name of the assistant who had worked with him, and he gave it to her. But he added, ‘It was definitely not his fault. It really wasn’t.’ Then Stella appeared, hovering anxiously about the door. Isabel said goodbye to Marcus, who had sunk back in his chair and started to stare out of the window again.
Glancing behind her, Isabel whispered to Stella. ‘He looks very depressed,’ she said. ‘Has he seen a doctor?’
‘He won’t,’ Stella replied. ‘I’ve tried. I’ve tried everything.’
‘All right,’ said Isabel. ‘Give me a week. Maybe ten days. Then telephone.’
Stella reached out and briefly held Isabel’s arm. ‘You’re a saint,’ she said.
The compliment surprised Isabel. She did not conceive of herself in those terms at all; it simply would never have occurred to her to do so. A saint with a young boyfriend, she thought. And a taste for New Zealand white wine. And a tendency to think uncharitable thoughts about people like Dove and Lettuce. That sort of saint.
7
‘People don’t realise,’ Cat said. ‘They don’t realise what running your own business is like. It’s always there. Day in, day out. And you can’t get away when you like. You’re tied down.’
‘Like having a baby,’ said Isabel.
She had not intended to make the comparison, but it had slipped out. And she acknowledged that even if this was true for most women who had babies, it was hardly true for her, with her resources, with Grace to support her. While tact required that one should not complain about those respects in which one is better off than others, it also required that one should not complain about things that others did not have at all – such as children. Isabel was unsure about how Cat felt about not having a child herself, although she had a boyfriend now – ‘the one after the last’ as Grace had called him.
The last had been an apprentice stonemason, although Isabel still thought of him as a bouncer, the job he had been doing before he started to work with stone. He had the physique of a bouncer, and the physiognomy too, including a protruding jaw that must have been a very tempting target for those whom he was called to expel from the noisy subterranean club on Lothian Road that employed him. Isabel had met him a couple of times and had suppressed the urge to stare at him in a way which would have revealed her astonishment that such a man should be the choice of her niece. As if Cat’s choices said anything about Isabel – of course they did not, she told herself, but still . . .
In fact she knew exactly what it was that attracted Cat. It was the same thing that she had seen in Toby, her skiing wine-dealer boyfriend; that she had seen in the one who followed him, the one to whom Isabel had never been introduced but whom she had spotted Cat with, arm-in-arm, walking along George Street one Saturday; and that she had seen in Christopher Dove – Dove of all people! – when she had had that brief flirtation with him. Cat was attracted to tall, well-built men; it was as simple as that.
It may have been simple, but Isabel thought that it was also incomprehensible. She understood that everyone had their preferred physical type, but she found it odd that this could be the sole factor in somebody’s choice. One may find the combination of dark hair and blue eyes, for example, a heart-stopping one, but would one want to spend time in the company of dark-haired, blue-eyed people who had nothing to say, or, if they did have something to say, it was trite or even distasteful? She thought not. The problem was that the search for beauty was something that we were destined to conduct, in spite of ourselves; we wanted to be in the presence of beauty because somehow we felt it rubbed off on us, enriched our lives, made us more attractive. This was felt even by those who themselves were attractive; beauty sought beauty. Cat was tall and attractive, and clearly wanted tall and attractive men; that the men she found were empty vessels had not deterred her at all. But none of them had lasted, thought Isabel, which showed that the consolations of beauty were not long-lasting: there had to be something else.
Cat was talking to her, and had said something that Isabel had not caught. Now she repeated it.
‘I don’t like to ask you,’ said Cat. ‘But you said that you really enjoyed looking after the delicatessen. The last time that you did it, you . . .’
‘Yes,’ said Isabel. ‘I enjoyed it. And I don’t mind doing it again. You have only to ask.’
They were talking in Cat’s office at the back of the delicatessen, and now she sat back in her chair, relieved that Isabel was volunteering. She had wondered whether she dared leave Eddie in control, but had decided that she should not. It was not that he did not know enough to run the shop – he could handle any of the tasks involved in keeping the delicatessen going – but he lacked confidence. Cat had seen it before, on occasions when she had left him in charge for a few hours: everything would be all right when she came back, but Eddie would be anxious, his relief at her return quite palpable.
Cat explained that a friend had invited her to join her for ten days in Sri Lanka. She could fly from Glasgow to Dubai, she said, and then from there to Colombo. Helen, her friend, had a boyfriend who knew somebody who had a villa. They had taken the villa for a couple of weeks and a party of them was filling it up.
‘Are you going by yourself ?’ Isabel asked.
Cat looked at her sideways. ‘Yes. Just me.’
There was a brief silence. ‘I wasn’t prying,’ said Isabel softly.
Cat hesitated. Then, ‘You can pry if you like. I don’t mind. He’s called Martin, but I’m afraid that he’s not the one. We’re still seeing each other, but I just don’t know.’
‘If your heart’s not in it, what’s the point?’ said Isabel.
Cat shrugged. ‘You’re right. But then it’s not all that easy breaking things off. Particularly if the other person is still keen.’
‘Which he is?’
‘Which he is.’
Cat was looking at her in a bemused way, and Isabel wondered whether she was expected to say anything more. But what could she say about this Martin, this man she had never even met, and about whom she knew nothing. She could assume, of course, that he was tall and well built, but beyond that she could only speculate. Martin: the name gave nothing away. At length she said, ‘You probably don’t want to hurt him, do you?’ It was a trite remark, but it led to her adding, ‘So don’t string him along. Tell him it’s over.’
It appeared to be what Cat had wanted. ‘I will. I’ll tell him before I go to Sri Lanka.’
Isabel winced. Her advice had been seized upon, and this made her uneasy. She knew her niece, and understood that if Cat came to regret her decision to end her relationship with Martin, then she would lay the blame at Isabel’s door, even if subtly.
‘It must be your decision, of course,’ said Isabel. ‘I wouldn’t want to interfere.’
Again Cat looked at her in bemusement; her niece shared Jamie’s view that she interfered too readily and far too frequently. But this time Isabel had told her what she wanted to hear – that the relationship with Martin should be brought to an end. The decision taken, she felt a strong sense of relief. She was free.
Cat left for Sri Lanka on a Sunday morning, and Isabel took over on that Monday, arriving at the delicatessen shortly before Eddie. Grace had come to the house early, pleased to be placed in sole charge of Charlie for the entire day. She had already mapped out his week: a journey on the bus to her cousin in Dalkeith; an outing to the café at the Chambers Street museum; se
veral trips to the Botanical Gardens – ‘He loves the squirrels,’ she said. ‘And the hot houses too.’ Isabel knew from a friend’s report that Grace pretended that Charlie was hers. This friend had been standing behind her in a café at the zoo and had complimented her on Charlie’s Macpherson tartan rompers. Grace had replied that she was part Macpherson, as if that were the explanation for Charlie’s attire. She had not said that Charlie was hers, but had certainly implied it, not knowing, of course, that it was a friend of Isabel’s who was addressing her. Isabel had been saddened by the story; she could so easily have been in Grace’s position, had Jamie not turned up; and had it been she who was taking somebody else’s child to the zoo, she might well have wanted others to think the child was hers. Who amongst us was above such longing, such pretence?
Eddie came in and hung up his green windcheater on the back of the office door. He always wore the same thing, Isabel had noted: a pair of blue jeans, blue trainers with white laces, and a curious long-sleeved white tee-shirt. She had never seen him in anything different, although he obviously had several pairs of jeans and several tee-shirts, since his clothes were always clean.
‘Will she be there by now?’ asked Eddie, looking at his watch.
‘Yes,’ said Isabel.
Eddie looked thoughtful. ‘Where is it?’ he asked. ‘I’ve heard of it, but I’ve never really known. Is it somewhere . . . somewhere near Egypt?’
Isabel’s eyes widened in surprise. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not really. It’s near India. It’s the teardrop off India.’
‘Oh,’ said Eddie.
Isabel watched him. There were so many people who knew very little about the world, and Eddie’s generation knew less than most. She wondered, in fact, what he did know. Would he know who David Hume was, or Immanuel Kant, or Aristotle?
‘Aristotle,’ she said, on impulse.
Eddie frowned. ‘I don’t know about that,’ he said. ‘I’ve never sold any myself. Has Cat ordered any?’
Isabel looked away and muttered something about checking on it. She had not intended to expose him, and she knew that she should not laugh. There were plenty of people who would not know who Aristotle was, but there were not many who would think that he was . . . a cheese.
The Comfort of Saturdays Page 8