The Quiet Side of Passion

by Alexander McCall Smith

  CHAPTER THREE

  GRACE SEIZED UPON the two boys with enthusiasm.

  “I’ll look after the wee ones,” she said, grabbing Charlie’s hand. And to Basil she said, “Who are you, young fellow?”

  Basil was initially tongue-tied, but on maternal prompting managed to answer, “Basil.”

  “Good. Well, come with me, Charlie and Basil. We’ll find something to build.”

  “A fort!” shouted Charlie.

  Basil looked puzzled for a moment. Then he too shouted, “Fort!”

  “A fort it will be,” said Grace.

  Isabel smiled. Grace’s manner with children was such that they complied. There was only one word for it: compliance, and Isabel, acknowledging it, felt slightly envious—as any parent accustomed to asking numerous times for things to be done would feel.

  She led Patricia into the garden room—a room that looked out over the lawn to the high stone wall bounding the back garden. Against this wall Isabel had encouraged fruit trees to grow in candelabra style: apple trees, figs, a couple of pears.

  Patricia went to the door, which was ajar, and looked out. “You wouldn’t think we were in a city...” She left the sentence unfinished. “So much work.”

  At first Isabel said nothing. But then, “We have help. There’s a man who comes for a couple of hours a week. He does three gardens in this street.”

  She could not take credit for the garden, but she did not want to create the impression that she was attended on all sides by staff. Grace had looked after her father and had simply stayed on; George, the gardener, tended over fifteen gardens in the area and was paid by the hour.

  She thought: I don’t have to justify myself. I support a lot of causes; I give my money away; I don’t indulge myself. I vote for people who support public goods. She stopped. Self-justification was tedious and usually rang hollow.

  “You’re very lucky,” said Patricia. It was the second time she had said this.

  “Yes,” said Isabel, adding, quite forcefully, “And I know it.”

  Patricia glanced at her, and Isabel realised that her response had possibly sounded sharp. She changed the subject and asked how Basil was settling in at the nursery.

  “He loves it,” said Patricia. “He wakes up at six, regular as clockwork, and says, ‘Time for nursery.’ ”

  Isabel laughed. “Charlie needs no persuading either.”

  Patricia sat down while Isabel went off to make tea. After she returned with the tea things, for a few moments there was silence, as if they were both assessing the tenor of the forthcoming conversation. Then Isabel said, “You’re by yourself, I’ve heard.”

  It was a potentially awkward question, but Patricia seemed happy to answer. “Yes. I’m a single mother.”

  “I can imagine that it’s...”

  Patricia took over. “Hard? Well, yes, it is—some of the time. Childcare’s the big issue, particularly if you’re working. What do you do? I’m lucky—I have a cousin who lives in Edinburgh. She doesn’t work—her husband’s an offshore engineer and he has an odd schedule. They’ve tried for kids but...” She shrugged.

  “She must love Basil.”

  “She can’t see enough of him. I just have to lift the phone.”

  Isabel remarked that this must make life much easier. “I’ve heard that you’re a musician. Jamie—my husband—said he’d—”

  “We’ve worked together occasionally. I stand in for one of the ensemble.” She paused. “Basil’s father’s a musician too. You probably know him—everyone seems to.”

  Isabel nodded. “Not very well, though.”

  Patricia was watching her. Her tone, now, was more guarded. “I’m afraid he doesn’t see Basil. I tried, but...”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “He does support him, though,” continued Patricia. “Financially, that is. I’ll give him that.”

  Isabel was keen to move the conversation on. They talked about the nursery school and the new assistant who had started work there the previous week. They talked about early musical education—Basil was already learning violin according to the Suzuki method. They discussed the age at which the recorder could be started—Patricia suggested that three was not too early: the soprano recorder was small enough for their little fingers, she thought, and they would pick it up quickly enough if they had a good ear. They talked about Ireland, about where Patricia had come from in Dublin, and this somehow led on to the decline of the power of the Catholic Church in Ireland.

  “The Church asked for it,” said Patricia. “They wanted to keep an iron grip on education. They set out to exclude everybody else, including the Irish state itself. So the state ended up entrusting Ireland’s children to organisations that were riddled with distorted, unhappy people. Made unhappy because they themselves were made to suppress their natural instincts.”

  Isabel shook her head. “How did it happen?”

  Patricia did not answer the question. “They locked young women away, you know. Committed them to psychiatric institutions—or places that purported to be psychiatric institutions.”

  “I’ve heard of that.”

  “My mother’s sister—my aunt—was one of them, you know. She was effectively locked up for five years because she became pregnant at the age of sixteen. They didn’t punish the boys, of course. My aunt never recovered. She was on the verge of tears for the rest of her life.”

  “But it’s a different country now, isn’t it?” said Isabel. “All that’s over.”

  “Yes. The Church’s power drained away like...like snow off a hillside. It just went. Those men in their clerical collars, those bishops, they just folded up when people stood up to them and started to talk about what they’d suffered at the hands of various nuns and brothers.”

  “All those ruined lives,” said Isabel.

  “And I must say that I’m pleased to be out of it,” Patricia continued. “Sure, I’m fond of the usual things about Ireland, but I’m pleased not to be living there, and instead bringing up Basil in a country that doesn’t have such a long history of murderous hatreds.”

  Isabel looked thoughtful. “Murderous hatreds...yes, but didn’t we—the British, that is—create so many of those? Look at the way Queen Elizabeth—the original one—treated Ireland. We stole their land. Did our best to crush them. Who can blame the Irish for resenting British colonialism? I don’t think I can.”

  Patricia sighed. “Oh, of course—the past, the past...But Ireland’s had almost one hundred years of freedom. And what have they done with it? Allowed themselves to be treated as a theocracy for a good part of that. That was de Valera for you. Signed over control of their lives to a religious hierarchy run by embittered men with a lot of hang-ups about practically everything? Allowed gunmen to pursue their agenda while the state turned a blind eye? Then spent European Union money with gusto.”

  “Oh, I don’t know—”

  Patricia cut her short. “Well, I do. I feel ashamed of my country. There’s the small matter of the Second World War. Where were we then? I learned an odd version at school in Dublin. They explained that we were neutral and did not want to get involved in England’s wars. Great. So while the Nazis were overrunning Europe, whose side were we on? Don’t ask that question.”

  “Plenty of Irish people fought...”

  “Oh yes, as individuals. There were volunteers, all right. And even deserters from the Irish army who went over to help the British. But the Irish state? Who signed the condolence book in the German embassy in Dublin when Hitler died? De Valera himself. Him again. Can you believe it? Condolences. And even after the war, he never once admitted that the Allied cause was just. Maybe he didn’t see the photographs of Belsen and places like that.” She paused. “The Catholic Church taught us to be hypocrites and, boy, were we good at it.”

  Isabel felt uncomfortable. �
��Didn’t the Irish government apologise a few years back?”

  Patricia was dismissive. “Eventually. They pardoned the men who had fled the Irish army to fight with the Allies—most of them were dead anyway. The Minister of Defence made a big speech. He said that our failure to do anything in the face of the Holocaust amounted to moral bankruptcy—I think those were his words. But rather late, I thought.”

  There was an anger in Patricia’s voice that disturbed her. And yet, Isabel wondered, should it? The problem with living in Edinburgh was that it was so rational, so considered. Edinburgh had never been oppressed in the way that other places had been; there was no inheritance of resentment.

  “So, you’re going to bring Basil up as Scottish?”

  Patricia nodded. “Looks like it.”

  “I suppose he’s half Scottish, anyway.”

  Patricia looked away—just for an instant. Then she turned to face Isabel again. “I’m sorry if I sound strident,” she said. “You pressed a particular button there when you started talking about Ireland. I can’t help myself—it all wells up, all of it, and I know it can sound as if I see only one side of it.”

  Isabel was quick to reassure her. “One need not apologise for feeling strongly about something. What did Yeats write in that poem of his? About the best lacking all conviction?”

  Patricia made a dismissive gesture. “Oh, Yeats was part of all that flim-flam—that romantic rubbish. I’ve no time for Yeats.”

  “None at all?”

  She looked a bit sheepish. “Well, very little.”

  From within the house there came the sound of high-pitched shouting. “They’re enjoying themselves,” said Isabel.

  “I’ll have to be going before too long,” said Patricia. “My cousin’s coming to the house. I have to play in Glasgow tonight and so she’s looking after Basil.” She looked at her watch. Isabel noticed that it was made of rose gold; it was not inexpensive.

  “Basil will be very welcome to come again.”

  “Thank you,” said Patricia. “And perhaps Charlie will come to us.”

  “I’m sure he’d like that very much,” said Isabel.

  “We live in Albert Terrace,” said Patricia.

  Isabel struggled to disguise her surprise. Albert Terrace, which was only ten minutes’ walk away, was an address that might be thought to be out of the reach of a struggling single mother.

  Isabel thought that Patricia noticed her reaction.

  “My parents had a house in Dublin,” she explained. “They gave it to me when they went to live in Donegal. You know how expensive Dublin is. I sold it and bought Albert Terrace outright.”

  “It’s very convenient for the nursery,” said Isabel, embarrassed.

  “There are any number of single mothers worse off than me,” said Patricia. She hesitated, and then continued, “I don’t need people to pity me.”

  Isabel struggled. “Oh, I wasn’t pitying you. Of course I wasn’t.”

  Patricia rose to leave. “Tomorrow? Would he like to come tomorrow?”

  Isabel felt that she was being rushed. The invitation to tea had been accepted with alacrity, and now the return visit was already being proposed. Was this spontaneous hospitality an Irish trait?

  “Of course, if you’re too busy...,” said Patricia.

  “No, I’m not,” said Isabel. She felt vaguely irritated at the thought of being tied down with this invitation. “I’ll bring him round. Same time? After nursery?”

  “That would be fine.”

  Grace appeared with the two boys. “They were asking where you were,” she said. “But they seem happy enough to go on playing together.”

  “Tomorrow,” said Isabel. It occurred to her that Grace was a convenient solution. “In fact, would you be able to take Charlie to Basil’s house, Grace? I’ve just remembered I have some work to do.” It was, strictly speaking, true; she had just remembered the book on vices. She was going to review that herself, and the following afternoon would be the time to do it.

  It was just the sort of commitment that Grace liked. She was inquisitive by nature, and there was nothing she liked more than seeing the inside of other people’s houses.

  Isabel turned to Patricia. “Is that all right with you? May Grace come in my stead?”

  Patricia nodded. “That will be absolutely fine,” she said. But Isabel could detect a note of disappointment, and wondered what lay behind it. Loneliness? Or something else?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  HER DAY did not work out quite as she had hoped. She took Charlie to nursery, as planned, telling him that it would be Grace who would pick him up. The announcement of the play date at Basil’s house had been greeted with excitement. Basil, he said, had a train set, and they would make a railway station and play Train to Glasgow, a game inspired by a song Jamie had taught him. In this song, a “fortunate boy” named Donald McBrayne was given a ride on the train to Glasgow, a great adventure for him.

  Returning to the house, Isabel spent time with Magnus. He was crawling now, and the mobility had seemed to go to his head as he set off in whatever direction his nose was pointing in, determined to escape to the far-flung regions of any room he found himself in. A playpen would have contained him, and made him easier to supervise, but Jamie had been against it. He had read something that persuaded him that playpens were stifling, and that children reared without them were more creative. Isabel was sceptical; those who criticised playpens were probably not mothers at the end of their tether, struggling to look after two or three young children while wrestling with the burden of housework. There were plenty of people prepared to give advice, but how many of them had actually done what they were advising others to do?

  Jamie had volunteered to look after Magnus that day, and with Grace taking Charlie to Basil’s house after nursery, that meant Isabel would be able to get in a more or less full day of work. She was looking forward to clearing the backlog that had built up on her desk; she would do that in the morning, she decided, and then spend the afternoon getting the review of The Virtues of Our Vices out of the way. By the time Charlie returned from his play session with Basil, she would be able to give him her uninterrupted attention. Motherhood, she felt, ought to come first in the order of the moral claims on her. This was followed, in sequence, by her duty to Jamie, her work with the Review, her obligations to those immediately around her...She stopped herself. Then it became difficult: How did one balance the claims of friends against the claims of others one did not happen to know?

  She suddenly thought of the Cambridge spies—the group of highly placed young men who had become Soviet agents in the 1930s and who, when the net closed in, had abandoned their country rather than betray their friends. Blunt, Burgess, Maclean and the highly accomplished liar, Kim Philby, who had come close to being appointed head of a branch of British intelligence, all professed a greater loyalty, as such people often did: loyalty to the Communist cause, which they ranked above their duty to their own country. And the same was true of more recent examples, minor functionaries or obscure clerks who betrayed state secrets under a claim of moral duty. Patriots were outraged, government officials even more so, and with good reason: clearly no country could allow individuals to regard loyalty as an option one could reject if one disagreed with the policies of the government. And yet where did such a position lead? To “My country, right or wrong”—a form of patriotism that hardly survives moral scrutiny. Officials who defected from North Korea were heroes in Western eyes, as were those Germans who had plotted against Hitler, or those who planned the demise of the Soviet Union from within. Loyalty itself—unquestioning and uncritical—was not, then, invariably a virtue; disloyalty, similarly, had to be assessed in the context of what it was one was being disloyal to. Those who betrayed bad governments were good; those who betrayed good governments were bad. By that token, Isabel thought, the spy who betrayed a
liberal democracy had a major hurdle to overcome—probably an insurmountable one—if he sought to justify betrayal. Ultimately liberal democracies, even if imperfect in some respects, were infinitely preferable to dictatorships and tyrannies.

  She sighed. Another special issue of the Review was taking shape in her mind: Loyalty and Betrayal—the Moral Issues. Perhaps she would be able to persuade a retired traitor to write an article explaining how he justified his actions. Blunt, the art historian who spied for the Soviet Union, would have been ideal, had he still been alive, as he could write so elegantly. She possessed a copy of his large book on Poussin, although she had never got beyond the first five pages because she found it so coldly intellectual. He would have declined, of course, because he did not want scrutiny and understood that nothing could justify what he had done. His was a retirement of regret and, towards the end, public humiliation, whereas Philby, re-emerging in Moscow as a full-blown KGB colonel, had been unrepentant. He had written his apologia pro vita sua and might have been tickled by the chance of philosophical rumination on his stance. But he was dead too, and so of no help.

  She dwelled for a moment on the fact that all these traitors had been men. Was treason a male pursuit—one that women found uncomfortable? Few of the great traitors were women, which made one wonder whether women were more circumspect, or even less inclined to betray their own side. That led to an interesting train of thought—feminist philosophers talked about an ethic of care, which had concomitants of greater attentiveness to the needs of friends and family than might be involved in a more formal male-centred philosophy. This might support the view that women were more loyal than men, which might, or might not, be true. Had anybody actually measured that—as they seemed to have measured just about every other aspect of human nature?