The Quiet Side of Passion

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “I meant: I can’t say no this time. Not in these particular circumstances.”

  Jamie sighed. “But that’s the problem, isn’t it? There’s always some special reason. And you, being as kind as you are, say yes—without exception. Every single time.”

  He looked at her. It might have been a look of reproach—after all, he had just pointed out what could be a major failing, a weakness—but it was not that at all: if anything, it was a look of admiration, of fondness; thus do we list the faults of those we love—with the light of admiration in our eyes.

  Isabel knew this. She lowered her eyes. “Philosophers have a word for this,” she said. “I think we’ve talked about it before. Akrasia—weakness of the will.”

  He remembered their earlier conversation. He had been intrigued by the notion: that we could do things that we knew were not in our best interests, but do them nonetheless. “There’s that complicated discussion,” he said, “about whether the thing you really want to do can ever not be in your best interests, because of the very fact...”

  Isabel nodded. “Because of the very fact that you do it. That means it must be what you really, deeply, truly—whatever term you’re going to use—what you really want. Otherwise you wouldn’t do it, would you?”

  “I suppose not,” replied Jamie. “And that means you really want to help Cat even if you know—deep inside—it’s not a good idea.”

  Isabel wondered what he meant by deep inside. Where was this “deep inside” of which people spoke? Was it the same thing as Freud’s id, a deep, insistent force that required taming by the ego and super-ego? It depended, she decided, on what deep-inside feelings one was talking about. She smiled at him. “I’m guilty of akrasia, then,” she said.

  He leaned forward and kissed her; it was the second kiss in fifteen minutes. “I wouldn’t have it otherwise,” he said. “In fact, I’m going to compose something. Perhaps in the style of Thomas Morley. A madrigal. About you—and your akrasia.”

  “Should I be flattered?” she asked. But then immediately answered her own question. “I’d love that.”

  Jamie was gazing up at the ceiling. Isabel had noticed that he sometimes did this when he was thinking of a musical idea; it was as if inspiration lay at some higher level somewhere. “I think I have it,” he muttered. “How about Isabel, she is one who, unlike me, / Does great good—but akratically?”

  He looked back towards her.

  “You flatter me,” said Isabel. “I wouldn’t say I do great good.”

  “You do,” he said firmly. “Anyway, the words of those seventeenth-century madrigals are often rather lovely, don’t you think? Do you know another one by Thomas Morley, ‘In Nets of Golden Wires’? That’s the title. Isn’t it beautiful? In nets of golden wires...Can’t you see them?”

  She could; the image was strong—and beautiful, like the idea of courtly love itself.

  “That’s about love,” Jamie said. “We enmesh the people we love in a nest of golden wires. Or bind them to us.”

  Jamie remembered another of Morley’s songs. This made him grin. “Morley wasn’t always that high-minded,” he said. “He wrote a real shocker. Or that’s what it sounds like to the modern ear.”

  Isabel asked him what it was but he simply shook his head. “I can give you the title,” he said, “but I can’t tell you the words. I’m too embarrassed.”

  She waited.

  “It’s called ‘Will You Buy a Fine Dog?’ ”

  Isabel said that this seemed innocuous enough.

  “It’s what follows,” said Jamie. “Singers can’t bring themselves to sing it with a straight face.”

  Charlie had been silent, immersed in a picture book between the covers of which he had been placing small pieces of boiled egg. Now he looked up and said, “Will you buy a dog?”

  “No,” said Jamie. “I’m sorry, but we can’t have a dog.”

  Charlie’s face fell. “Why?”

  “Because we have a fox already,” said Jamie quickly, exchanging a glance with Isabel.

  It worked. Charlie nodded.

  “Not exactly true,” mouthed Isabel. “However...”

  “Brother Fox has us, rather than the other way round,” said Jamie. “But anyway, occasionally you have to withhold the truth in order to keep the peace.”

  Isabel agreed, but only to an extent. She looked at her watch. If she was going to do what she’d planned, she would have to start doing it now.

  “I’ll cook tonight,” said Jamie. “Venison with potatoes dauphinoise?”

  Charlie looked up from his picture book. “Dauphinoise!” he exclaimed. “I love dauphinoise!”

  Isabel and Jamie both smiled. “Middle-class kid,” said Jamie.

  “Middle class!” shouted Charlie with all the enthusiasm of a tricoteuse, or a scornful revolutionary. “What’s middle class?”

  “You,” mouthed Jamie.

  Isabel glanced at him disapprovingly, and then smiled.

  * * *

  —

  SHE MADE THREE PHONE CALLS, the first of which was to Mrs. Balvenie.

  “I know that you can’t give out telephone numbers,” Isabel began, “but could you ask somebody to phone me?”

  There was a short silence at the other end of the line. “Who?”

  “When I was in the department the other day,” Isabel continued, “I met one of the teaching assistants—Claire. I didn’t catch her surname.”

  “Richardson,” said Mrs. Balvenie.

  “Well, I wanted to get in touch with her, but I don’t have her number.”

  Mrs. Balvenie said that she would be happy to get a message to her. Then she asked, “What’s it in connection with?”

  Isabel did not answer immediately. She felt that what she wanted to speak to Claire about was none of Mrs. Balvenie’s business. The secretary was merely taking a message and had as little right to know its content as the deliverer of a letter had a right to demand to see what was in the envelope. She almost said, “It’s personal,” but did not, and chose the easier course. She did not need to make an enemy of Mrs. Balvenie, and what difference did it make if the secretary knew?

  “It’s about a job,” she said. “I’m hoping to find somebody to help me with the journal I edit.” It was a simple and truthful explanation.

  She heard Mrs. Balvenie’s breathing at the other end of the line.

  “Mrs. Balvenie? Are you still there?”

  “Yes, I’m still here. You said it was about a job.”

  Isabel felt a growing irritation. “Yes, a job. Could you ask her to call me? I’ll give you my number.”

  Mrs. Balvenie’s tone changed. Now there was a note of prickliness that seemed to flow down the line. “But Miss Richardson has a job already. She’s a teaching assistant for Professor Lettuce.” Lettuce’s name was pronounced with awe, as if it were the name of some powerful deity; so might an ancient Greek mutter the name of Poseidon before boarding a ship.

  “I know,” said Isabel. “But that’s not full-time, is it?”

  “It’s very demanding,” Mrs. Balvenie retorted.

  Isabel closed her eyes briefly. Again she struggled to keep the irritation out of her voice. She could not imagine that philosophy departments in universities were overly stretched. People worked hard, of course, but they would hardly be busy in the way in which policemen or farmers or neurosurgeons were busy. Yet there was a tendency—and Mrs. Balvenie was clearly affected by it—to overstate the pressures of the academic life and to protest them to anybody who might show an interest. Lettuce would do that, she was sure; he was so busy that he had been able to manage only ten minutes for Isabel.

  But she saw no point in arguing with Mrs. Balvenie. “I’m sure the job’s demanding,” she said. “But even so, some people like a bit of variety in their working lives. The jo
b I’d like to offer her would certainly be interesting.”

  Mrs. Balvenie absorbed this, and then came back with a further obstacle. “I’d have to ask Professor Lettuce about this.”

  Isabel drew in her breath sharply. “But this is nothing to do with him. This is between Ms. Richardson and me. Just the two of us.” And not you, Isabel thought; not you at all.

  Mrs. Balvenie was now the defender of the department. “Excuse me, but it does involve Professor Lettuce,” she said. “He is the one who decides the teaching rota. He is the one who keeps the department going. What Miss Richardson does with her time is very much his concern, I feel I should point out.” She paused. “And another thing: Professor Lettuce very much feels that teaching is at the core of the department’s responsibilities and takes it very seriously. He would not like Miss Richardson to diversify her interests.”

  “Even in her spare time?”

  Now a sliver of ice crept into Mrs. Balvenie’s voice. “Professor Lettuce asks—and gets—a thorough-going commitment to teaching on the part of his assistants. Miss Richardson is no exception to that. He wouldn’t want her to take on anything that could eat into the time she devotes to her job. Teaching is Professor Lettuce’s first priority.”

  Isabel’s eyes widened. Lettuce was one of those academics whose ultimate ambition, she thought, was to arrange things so that he had no undergraduate teaching at all. “So,” she began, “he must do quite a bit of teaching himself.”

  Mrs. Balvenie’s reply came quickly. “Not at all. Professor Lettuce would love to teach, but he’s far too burdened administratively to do that.”

  Isabel wanted to laugh. “Of course.”

  Mrs. Balvenie appeared to have relented. “I’ll give you her number,” she said. “I’m sure she’ll sort it out with Professor Lettuce. They might be able to come to some sort of accommodation.”

  Isabel made a note of the number and the conversation came to an end. Immediately afterwards, she dialled the number she’d been given and left a message on an answering machine. Then came the third telephone call. This was to an au pair agency, Help When You Need It. The woman at the end of the line was calm and professional.

  “We shall have no difficulty in arranging somebody for you,” she said. “We have many young women who are only too keen to come to Scotland. They’re well qualified, but can’t find a job in their own countries.”

  There was a brief discussion about nationalities. “They all have their particular merits,” said the woman. “But I have a soft spot for the Italians. Spanish girls—especially those from conservative households...” A note of apology crept into her voice. “By which I mean old-fashioned Catholic households, are very reliable and hard-working, but the Italians are...well, you know what the Italians are like. They have a certain sparkle.”

  “You choose,” said Isabel. “I have no preference. Nationality is not the issue.” Isabel had no prejudices of this nature; she liked the French, she liked the Italians, the Germans, the Spanish, the Dutch...In short, she liked people, and could not conceive of a mindset that viewed any large group, any nation, with suspicion or distaste.

  The woman seemed surprised. “But it is!” she exclaimed. “National stereotypes are absolutely accurate. That’s why they exist.”

  Isabel laughed. “Get me an au pair,” she said. “That’s all I ask.”

  “I have a young woman coming into the office in two hours’ time,” said the woman. “I’ll take a closer look at her and then contact you if I think she’s suitable.”

  “Perfect,” said Isabel.

  She did not feel so sure when she rang off. It was a major step inviting somebody into your house, and she had heard stories in the past of au pairs who had proved disastrous, including one who’d burned the house down and another who had seduced, and then run off with, the household’s seventeen-year-old son. These were exceptional cases, she thought, and the odds against anything going wrong were very high. She had made a decision, and, having done so, she was looking forward to meeting the young woman upon whom, although she did not yet know it, Isabel was already counting.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CLAIRE RICHARDSON returned Isabel’s call shortly before twelve. The message had also been passed on by Mrs. Balvenie, she explained, who had said something about a possible part-time job on the Review. Yes, she was interested; more than that, she was sure that if a post were to come up she would most definitely want it. Isabel suggested they meet the following day; Claire could come to the house and they would talk about what the job entailed. By the time the conversation ended, Isabel was sure that she would shortly have a new assistant. The beneficial effect of this realisation was instantaneous: the proofs that were stacked up on her desk now seemed innocuous; the unacknowledged review copies of books, piled precipitously on a shelf near the window of her study, were suddenly no longer oppressive. Relief was in sight.

  This made it easier for her to shut the study door behind her and spend a good two hours with Magnus, some of this time in the garden, where Magnus liked to crawl on the grass. He seemed to have a clear idea of where he was going, heading for a flowerbed from which Isabel would snatch him just in time to prevent his disappearing into the undergrowth.

  Shortly before two, with Magnus now consigned by Grace to his afternoon nap, Isabel left the house and made her way to the deli in Bruntsfield Place. Cat was on the verge of embarking on her trip to Fife, and managed only the briefest of conversations. Eddie was busy with a customer who was having great difficulty in deciding between black and green olives, and had launched into a long tale of a trip to Tuscany during the olive harvest.

  Isabel found a freshly laundered apron, tied it about her waist and began to clean the chopping boards. When Eddie had finished with the olive customer—who had decided on a mixture of black and green olives—he gave Isabel an account of what he thought they needed to do. Cat had started to sell soup, and although most of this was bought in the hour or so before lunch, there were still customers who liked to take it home with them for their evening meal. The soup, which was cooked in two large pots in the kitchen at the back of the deli, needed to be replenished; if Isabel would look after the counter, he could get on with peeling potatoes and cutting leeks for their popular leek-and-potato broth.

  Trade was brisk for half an hour or so, and then tailed off. This was the mid-afternoon lull when things would be so quiet that Isabel would be able to prepare herself a cup of coffee and drink it at one of the tables, perusing that day’s copy of the Scotsman newspaper. She liked their crossword, and would invariably gravitate to it after she had read the letters page, her favourite section of the paper. The Scotsman was currently hosting a correspondence on taxation; the tempers of the readers had clearly been raised by the Scottish government’s latest proposals on income tax levels. The rich were to escape largely unscathed, those who were not quite so rich were to be expected to shoulder more of the burden, while those who were struggling to make ends meet would find themselves slightly better off. This annoyed some correspondents, who believed that the rich should be taxed at such a level that they were no longer rich—an understandable position, as long as one accepted that the rich had no real entitlement to their money and their very existence was an unacceptable affront to those who were even slightly below them on the financial scale. But there were those who wrote to the newspaper to point out that if the rich were taxed excessively, then they might leave the country, rich people having a nose for fiscal hostility. “And if they go,” one correspondent wrote, “then the taxes they used to pay will no longer be available to the exchequer, and the government will then be worse off than before.” To which another had simply replied, “Good riddance—who needs these people anyway?”

  Isabel read these letters with amusement. She liked the names of the correspondents—and the addresses they gave at the ends of their letters. There was a Mr. George He
nderson McLaren, a tireless correspondent, who often wrote to the editor on subjects of a political or economic nature. He lived in a house called Tigh na Mara, which meant “House by the Sea” in Gaelic but which was located, the final line of the address revealed, in Pitlochry. This was as far from the sea as it was possible to be in Scotland, and there was no possibility that even the most long-sighted person could get a glimpse of the coast from where Mr. George Henderson McLaren lived. Then there was Mr. Archibald P. Raeburn, who wrote from 29 Hogget Road, Auchtermuchty. This was a very strange address, Isabel felt: a hogget was a young sheep that had not yet been sheared. Why would a road be named Hogget Road? And then there was the name of the town itself, which had an almost music-hall ring to it—if one wanted to imagine an archly Scottish small town, expressing every cliché of the national identity from shortbread to haggis and kilts, then Auchtermuchty would be a name one might choose. And yet Mr. Archibald P. Raeburn was interested in the affairs of the United Nations, and frequently contributed to the Scotsman’s letter columns on the issue of world government. Without world government, he suggested, we were doomed, and this belief led him to end each of his letters with the observation that time was running out. Isabel smiled each time she read one of his letters—he was silent on the subject of taxation, as it happened—but even as she smiled at the sheer predictability of his letters, she realised that he was probably right. Time was running out in so many respects—for our tenancy of a world that we were despoiling at an unsustainable rate as well as for the survival of our species in the face of nuclear proliferation. Obviously, this was evident from Hogget Road, Auchtermuchty, but not necessarily appreciated in the centres of world power. How frustrating it must be, she thought, for Mr. Archibald P. Raeburn to know this and yet to be powerless to do much about it.

  She put down her paper and mused for a moment. She wondered what Mr. Archibald P. Raeburn looked like. He was likely to be middle-aged, she felt, as few people under forty believe that time is running out. He was probably retired, because people who wrote regular letters to newspapers needed time to compose them. He would also be argumentative, and would hector those who disagreed with him. He would be well known in Auchtermuchty—what is known in Scotland as a kenspeckle character—but people would take care to avoid him in the street.