The Quiet Side of Passion

by Alexander McCall Smith

  The woman acknowledged the offer with a nod of the head and left. Isabel returned to the delicatessen, where Eddie was waiting behind the counter, grinning broadly.

  “What happened there?” he asked.

  “I apologised for my rudeness,” said Isabel. “I offered her some ham, but she was standing on her dignity, I’m afraid.”

  Eddie laughed. “Her loss,” he said.

  Business had slackened off, and the shop was now empty. “You don’t have to stay,” said Eddie. “I’ll cope fine now by myself.”

  Isabel suggested they have a cup of coffee together before she went home. Eddie made this, and they sat down at one of the tables to drink it together.

  “You know what I said about Cat?” Eddie ventured. “About her going off to see some man?”

  Isabel nodded. “Yes.” Eddie looked thoughtful. “I think I’ve worked out who it is. I saw her, you see, at a movie the other day. It was at the Dominion Cinema.”

  Isabel smiled. The Dominion was an old-fashioned cinema in Morningside, famous over the years for its owner’s habit of greeting his patrons in the lobby in evening dress. “She always liked the Dominion.”

  “It was that film about that guy who fell into a time warp. You know the one?”

  Isabel shook her head. “I can’t say I do.” She paused; Eddie was not strong on irony, but she continued nonetheless. “There seem to be an awful lot of time warps around these days. It’s quite unsettling, don’t you think?”

  Eddie was impassive. “I don’t think you need to worry too much,” he said. “I don’t think there are any time warps here in Edinburgh.”

  Isabel stared at him. Did he really believe in such things? “I wasn’t being entirely serious,” she said.

  “But it is serious,” responded Eddie. “If you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, you could wake up to find yourself back in...” He shrugged. “Back in the seventeenth century. Just like that.”

  Isabel resisted the temptation to laugh; Eddie was sensitive, and she had learned that he was easily upset. “The seventeenth century? Not very pleasant...in Scotland, at least.”

  Eddie agreed. “Sure. No electricity. No internet.”

  Isabel raised an eyebrow. “No internet indeed. That would be pretty hard to bear.”

  “Yes. Imagine not being able to find things out. Not being able to connect with people...”

  Isabel thought for a moment. Eddie was in his early twenties, and the internet was invented...when? It must have been before Eddie was born; the internet, then, was as natural to him as the telephone and long-playing records had been to her.

  “You’d miss it, wouldn’t you, Eddie?”

  “Of course I would. It’s—” He broke off, before continuing with a frown, “I suppose it’s part of my life. It’s the first thing I do when I wake up.”

  “You go online?”

  He nodded. “Just to check whether anything’s come in.”

  “Messages?”

  He looked surprised. “Yes, of course. Photos. That sort of thing.”

  Isabel said nothing. There were new addictions, she realised, and some of them were so subtle, so mainstream, that those afflicted had no idea they were addicted—until their prop was taken away and separation anxiety set in. So far, she had avoided internet addiction, as had Jamie. Charlie was the one at risk, though, as he was already taking a close interest in computer screens. She hated the thought of what that could do to childhood, to the imaginative world of Winnie-the-Pooh, of nursery rhymes, of songs that children learned, of the little things that made up the culture of the very young.

  “Of course, there would be other unpleasant things about the seventeenth century,” she said. “Particularly in Scotland. Religious fervour. Burning of witches and heretics.”

  Eddie looked worried. “Burning? They burned people?”

  Isabel did not reply immediately. There were times when she was as surprised by what Eddie did not know as by what he did know. She was not sure what history was taught in schools now, if they bothered to teach it at all. Eddie, she had discovered a few weeks previously, had never heard of Mussolini; nor of Stalin, for that matter. And American presidents started, for him, with President Bush—although, as he said, there had been “some guy before him” whom he could not quite remember.

  She was not sure where to start. “In those days...,” she began.

  “When?” asked Eddie.

  “In the seventeenth century—we were discussing the seventeenth century, I think.”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Everybody had to conform. You had to be a Christian. You had to go to church or you’d be chased up by the local presbytery. And if you dared to argue with what the religious authorities said, then you could be accused of heresy and put to the stake.”

  “An actual stake?”

  “Yes, a big post in the ground. And then they’d stack wood round it and set a match to it.” She paused. It was not all that long ago, she reflected, and you should never assume that things that had happened would never happen again. When was the last witch burned in Scotland? 1727. She remembered the date because it had been drummed into them at school by a teacher who had a jaundiced view of her fellow Scots. “We have only recently stopped burning people at the stake, girls—only very recently. 1727, I should point out. 1727.” But then when was the last public execution in France? 1939.

  Eddie had been struck by this talk of the Scottish auto-da-fé. He had seen a flaw. “Did they have matches in those days? Are you sure about that?” Then he thought of something. “Unless they got some matches from a time traveller,” he suggested. “That’s always possible, I suppose.”

  Isabel looked at him, then looked away. “It was a dreadful way to die,” she said. “It must have been the most agonising end imaginable.”

  Eddie agreed, but he was still wondering how they started the fire.

  “They had tinder boxes,” said Isabel. “Now that you’ve pointed out the lack of matches, I’ve remembered. They had flints, and you struck a flint against a bit of metal and it gave you a spark.”

  “Oh, I know that,” said Eddie. “That’s how muskets worked.”

  “Precisely.”

  Eddie frowned. “But why did they burn these people?”

  She replied that it had to do with conformity. People, she said, generally wanted other people to believe the things they did, and would punish those who deviated. And, she went on to think, there are still plenty of people like that. There was still an orthodoxy, and it was quite capable of being oppressive; there were still those who believed that people should be hounded out of their jobs for using the wrong words or not toeing an ideological line. There had been a teacher recently who had found himself in deep water after addressing a group of schoolgirls as “girls” when one of them was in fact a girl who defined herself as a boy; his offence was “misgendering,” and the innocence of his mistake had been an irrelevance. There were many such snares placed in the way of the unwary, and the consequence of inattention to the enforced wisdom of the times could be a medieval public shaming.

  Eddie became silent. “You’d never imagine these things happened,” he said.

  Isabel thought about this. If you knew very little history, then there was much that you would find difficulty in imagining. She glanced at her watch; she would need to get back to the house, although she still wanted to find out about Cat’s new boyfriend.

  “So you saw her at the Dominion?” she prompted.

  “Yes,” Eddie replied. “She was there with this guy and another girl. I thought that the guy was with the girl, not with Cat, if you see what I mean, and so I didn’t think much more about it. But then a few days ago I saw the same girl with another guy—not the same guy at all. They were snogging in a pub. Really snogging. And so I thought: that first guy must hav
e been with Cat, rather than this girl—unless she was snogging some old friend or something—just for old times’ sake.”

  Isabel laughed. “Snogging in a pub. They were probably an item.”

  Eddie allowed himself a smile. “That’s what I thought. And then I saw him again—the first guy. He was sitting in that tattoo parlour down near that dodgy restaurant—the one that poisoned my friend Harry last month. He was really sick, you know. Spectacular. Throwing up all over the place—”

  Isabel interrupted him. “I get the picture, Eddie.”

  “So there was this guy in the tattoo parlour—and he wasn’t a customer, he was the owner, I think. It’s his place. He’s a tattoo artist.” Eddie paused, scrutinising Isabel’s face for a reaction. “So you see, what I’m saying is: Cat’s new man does tattoos.”

  Isabel opened her mouth to say something, but then closed it. She turned away and looked out of the window. Then she muttered to herself, Chacun à son goût, chacun à son goût, chacun à son goût. Mantras, she had always felt, could help, and intoning the phrase chacun à son goût could be as calming, and as encouraging of tolerance and acceptance, as the repetitive chanting of om mani padme hum, the precise meaning of which she had never really found out.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ISABEL WAS WELL AWARE that procrastination was a failing of hers, but had always consoled herself with the thought that it was, at least, a failing that she knew all about. There was a difference—and an important one—between those failings we knew we had and those of which we were unaware. So the fact that she acknowledged her tendency to procrastination made it more likely that she would do something about it—and she did, with the result that she now very rarely allowed matters to ride. Letters she had to answer were dealt with timeously; unpleasant tasks such as unblocking drains when Jamie was not there—he loved that task—were usually performed in good time, and without too much hesitation. If I don’t do this now, I’ll never do it was what she said to herself in such situations, and this undoubtedly helped. According to a psychologist friend of hers, there were plenty of psychological tricks, nostrums, private invocations, that we could use to make things better; all we needed to do was to learn them.

  And yet failings still persisted, like rocks below the surface of the sea. She thought about this. She knew that we might arm ourselves against them, we might do our best to defuse them by facing up to them, we might do the very opposite of what our failings prompted us to do and we might feel that we had succeeded in overcoming them. But they would still be there, lurking, ready to show themselves and remind us that we were still the same flawed people we had always been. So the dieter, knowing of a weakness for chocolate éclairs, may control that particular appetite, may never yield to the temptation of buying a chocolate éclair, but will forever be at risk of succumbing to those fatal confections. So, too, might one burdened with an underlying bad temper be calm and controlled in most dealings with others, but will know that in the right—or wrong—set of circumstances that temper could manifest itself in some sudden and vivid explosion. We live with our failings, Isabel thought, denying some, indulging others, knowing all the while that life is a constant battle between the good to which we all aspire and the flawed and venal lurking within us—or, in Plato’s view, between the two horses that pull the chariot of our soul: one that wishes to take it upwards, and one that, lumbering and obstinate, would drag it down.

  When it came to replying to Professor Robert Lettuce, procrastination had definitely set in. Isabel realised this, and had told herself that she really should not ignore his letter, but it was over two weeks before she eventually picked it up and did something about it. It had lain on her desk, in full view, with its condescending salutation written by hand while the body of the letter was in typescript. My dear Isabel Dalhousie, he had begun, and in this seemingly innocuous opening, Isabel had already found sufficient offence to make the back of her neck feel warm. There was nothing wrong in beginning a letter with My dear; it was, in a way, much friendlier than simply writing Dear. But Professor Lettuce had not written My dear Isabel, he had written My dear Isabel Dalhousie, and there was something about that particular form of address that made Isabel’s hackles rise. It was condescension, she decided. If Lettuce were treating her as an equal, he would have written Dear Ms. Dalhousie, or Dear Dr. Dalhousie, as Isabel had a doctorate, even if she rarely used it. She knew that when he wrote to male colleagues, Lettuce often simply used their surnames; she had seen correspondence between him and Dr. Christopher Dove in which Lettuce had begun Dear Dove, and had then signed Lettuce at the bottom of the page. That, she thought, was a masculine thing, going back to Lettuce’s schooldays; she knew he had been sent to an all-boys boarding school, some dim and distant place in Northumberland, and she imagined that in such places first names had not been widely used. Of course, that had changed, but in those draughty days Lettuce would have called all the other boys by their surnames.

  It was not just the mode of address that irritated her, however; it was also the content of the letter. Lettuce had begun with some anodyne remarks to the effect that he hoped she was well and that it was a matter of great regret to him that they had not seen much of one another since he had moved to Edinburgh. “My chair involves me in so much administration,” he wrote. “Scarcely do I have time for what I am really meant to be doing, and what I most enjoy—teaching students.” Isabel had decided that this was meretricious. Lettuce had never enjoyed teaching, as far as she knew; indeed, he had somehow managed to delegate teaching responsibilities to junior staff, or to teaching assistants recruited from the ranks of his postgraduate students. She knew this because she had heard some of those assistants grumbling about it; they would have been happy to do the teaching, they said, if only Professor Lettuce had paid them to do it. When he had been head of philosophy at one of the lesser colleges of the University of London, he presented the teaching to his assistants as “an opportunity for career development” and therefore not something for which the university should be expected to pay. This would not have been countenanced by the university itself, had it known what was going on, but Lettuce had said nothing about it. The assistants themselves, being at the bottom of the academic food chain, had been loath to make a fuss. They knew the consequences awaiting those who, at the beginning of their careers, complained about pay and conditions; understanding that, they chose to remain silent.

  Returning to the offending letter, Isabel had read on, only to find her irritation mounting. “But let us not bemoan the contact that somehow has not materialised—mea culpa, I confess; mea maxima culpa—let us see if we can do something about it!” At this point Isabel had thought: A dinner invitation! She and Jamie were about to be invited to dinner with Robert and Clementine Lettuce in their flat off Palmerston Place; but then, no, that was not the lactucian intention. She smiled, momentarily distracted by the word she had invented. As far as she knew, there was no adjective to describe the state of being a lettuce. In an idle moment, curiosity had sent her off to the dictionary to see if such a word existed, and she had drawn a blank. So a simple resort to the etymology of the Middle English letuse, itself based on the French laitue and the Latin lactuca, had led to her muttering “lactucian.” She liked the sound of it: lactucian; it was a useful word, she felt, if one needed to describe the doings of a lettuce, which were minimal, of course; lettuces grew—they did little else, other than to propagate themselves. So the essence of lettucehood, the things that constituted the state of being a lettuce, was lactucian, a word that until now had not been used because nobody, it seemed, needed it. Well, now, if they did, it would be there for them.

  So there was no lactucian social invitation; instead, there was a suggestion, if not a command—and here she caught her breath at the sheer effrontery, the sheer lactucian effrontery, of the suggestion that she should come and see him in his office. “So,” he wrote, “I would be most grateful if you would come and see me
at the university. I’m in the David Hume Tower and you’ll see the telephone number at the top of this page. If you call my secretary, Mrs. Balvenie, she’ll find a time that suits me.” He had then signed the whole affront Professor Robert Lettuce, FRSE, MBE.

  When she first read the letter, it had taken Isabel several minutes to recover. She could scarcely believe Lettuce’s presumption; you did not write to somebody and “suggest” that he or she should come to see you. You did not do this unless you were that person’s employer, grandparent, probation officer, bank manager (and then only in the case of overdrawn accounts), doctor or head teacher. Apart from these obvious relationships, there was nobody who could command your attendance like that—apart from the Queen, of course; invitations from the Queen were, through long tradition, commands, but even there the etiquette was that you were first approached to see if you would accept the invitation before it was issued. Lettuce had simply summoned her to come at a time to be arranged. She looked at the wording again. It was there on the page, rank in its offensiveness: a time that suits me. Me! Him! The metaphorical taking away of her breath became almost actual.

  And then, of course, there was the signing-off. The FRSE that he had attached to his name stood for Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland’s learned academy, membership of which was an honour given to people of intellectual distinction in science and the arts. It was not entirely surprising that Lettuce had been admitted to that, but what surprised Isabel was that he had used the distinction in an ordinary letter to somebody he knew. That was ostentatious, as was the inclusion of the civilian honour MBE, something that was awarded for general service to the community or for notable achievement in some field. Professors could well be singled out for an MBE—and Isabel had met a number who had been. There were also those of less exalted status who were awarded the honour for things they had done: long-serving charity workers; valued rural posties—as deliverers of mail were called in Scotland; the coxswains of lifeboats who saved lives in coastal waters; and so on. They all deserved recognition, but none of them, she thought, would sign their letters with “MBE.” It was laughable; Lettuce was just impossibly pompous—incorrigibly so, she suspected.