The front door of the deli opened, jolting Isabel out of her daydreaming. A well-built man, somewhere in his late twenties and with a shock of sandy-coloured hair, had come into the deli. He looked about him for a moment and then walked past Isabel towards the door that led to the kitchen.
She rose to her feet. “Excuse me,” she said. “Can I help you with anything?”
He turned round and looked at her. She noticed the bone structure first—the high cheekbones—and then she saw that his eyes were an almost tawny colour. And with that she knew immediately.
“Looking for Cat?” she asked.
He hesitated for a moment before he replied. She saw him looking her up and down, in some sort of quick appraisal, and it disconcerted her. Then he said, “Yes. Is she here?”
Isabel rose to her feet. “No,” she said. “She’s gone over to Fife on business. I don’t think she’ll be back this afternoon.”
She watched him as she spoke. There was something about him that was deeply alluring, an energy that manifested itself in his demeanour. It was animal, she decided: pure animal. And then it dawned on her what this young man looked like: he looked like a lion. It was the hair—that was a mane, just like the mane of a lion—thick, profuse, framing the face like a halo, and precisely the colour of a lion’s mane.
He must have noticed her stare, meeting her gaze as he looked back at her, his expression mildly challenging. It was a look, she realised, that people who were used to being stared at—people with some sort of disability or peculiarity of appearance—gave back to those whose eyes they met. This flustered her, and she said, “I’m Cat’s aunt, by the way. Isabel.”
This brought a smile of recognition, and now she saw his teeth. They were brilliantly white, and even, but once again they made her think of a lion. These were teeth that could bite.
“My name’s Leo,” he said.
It was only with the greatest effort that Isabel stopped herself from laughing. Leo. It would have been impossible to invent this situation; here was a man who had the mane of a lion, a lion’s eyes and a leonine physiognomy, and he was called Leo.
She raised a hand to her mouth and coughed. It was the only thing to do, the only way of stopping an eruption of laughter.
“May I make you a cup of coffee?” she asked. “It would be nice to have a chat.”
Leo nodded. “I can’t stay too long,” he said. “But yes, that would be great.”
She struggled with the accent. Leo was not Scottish, and he did not sound very English either. Australian? No, there were none of the characteristic rhythms of an Antipodean accent.
“If you take a seat,” she said, “I’ll ask Eddie to look after the counter.”
She found Eddie in the small kitchen at the back of the shop. He was stirring a large pot of soup.
“Can you leave that to simmer on its own?” she asked.
Eddie nodded. “I like to stir it well,” he said. “Lumps form if you don’t.”
“Cat’s man is here,” she whispered. “I’m going to make him a cup of coffee. Could you look after the counter?”
Eddie put aside the spoon he was using to stir the soup. Putting the lid on the pot, he shifted it to the side of the oven-top ring. “I’m coming,” he said. “I want to get a good look at this guy.”
Isabel returned to the counter, where she prepared a fresh cup of coffee—decaffeinated this time—for herself and one for Leo. Then she took these over to the table where Leo had seated himself. Eddie in the meantime had installed himself behind the counter, from where he cast the occasional furtive glance in Leo’s direction.
Isabel sat down. “Have you and Cat known one another for long?” It was an innocuous question, but no sooner had she uttered it than she thought that it sounded too intrusive; she did not want their conversation to sound too obviously like an aunt’s attempt to find out about her niece’s suitor. And yet that was exactly what this was, she thought; there was no disguising the fact that she wanted to find out as much as she could about this young man in the space of the twenty minutes or so in which they would be in one another’s company. Cat enjoyed keeping her cards close to her chest, and Isabel could never rely on her to provide much information about her private life. Well, here she was in the company of Cat’s latest man and able to steer their conversation in whatever direction she chose. She could not miss the opportunity.
Of course she would try to be tactful. She had heard of two aunts—less restrained aunts—who had deeply embarrassed their niece by taking photographs of a boyfriend brought to just such an initial meeting. No sooner had the boy arrived than one of the aunts sprang to her feet and took a photograph of him. She would not be that unsubtle...
He did not seem to mind the question. “Two months,” he said. “Ever since I came to Edinburgh. We met in the gym.”
The reference to the gym was a detail that she would have got around to eliciting, but she was pleased it had come out so quickly. She knew that Cat used a gym from time to time, and of course a gym would be just the right place for her to meet the sort of men she preferred—fit, sporty men with strong physical appeal.
“I must get to the gym one of these days,” Isabel said. “I used to go, but somehow I let it slip.”
“That happens,” said Leo.
Isabel took a sip of her coffee. She was still not sure about the accent. He had talked about coming to Edinburgh, though, and this gave her the opportunity she needed. “Where were you before?” she asked.
“Kenya,” he said. “That’s where I was born, actually.”
“Ah. I thought you might have been Australian. But Kenya...”
“Our family is Scottish years back, you see,” Leo continued. “Two generations ago, but these things linger. My grandfather went to Kenya in 1950. Just before Mau Mau. I went to school in South Africa—in Cape Town. Then to university in Scotland, in Aberdeen. Estate management and a bit of chemistry on the side.”
“An interesting combination.”
“I’d always loved chemistry.”
She asked what had happened after that. “Back to Kenya,” he said. “My father has a ranch up in the Laikipia Plateau—up north. But what really interested him was hunting. He and my grandfather were great hunters. He organised hunting safaris in Tanzania and he wanted me to run the ranch while he concentrated on that.”
“Why Tanzania?”
“Because they still allow it. Hunting big game in Kenya was banned years ago.”
Good, thought Isabel.
Leo raised his cup of coffee to his lips. He watched Isabel over the white foam of the cappuccino. “You disapprove?” he asked.
She hesitated, but only for a few moments. “Yes, I do. I don’t understand the attraction—I simply don’t.”
He said nothing.
“It’s ghastly,” she went on. “There was a photograph in the papers recently of some hunter—an American, I think—who had shot a lion in Africa. There was a row because the lion was a special one that had been given a name, and had some sort of transmitter around his neck.”
Leo nodded. “I read about that.”
“And then you see these pictures of men standing beside their victims, grinning, and the poor animals are lying sprawled out on the ground. Whenever I see things like that it disgusts me. It simply disgusts me. Some beautiful creature—a lion or whatever—has had its life snuffed out by a grinning bully...”
Leo nodded again. “Yes,” he said simply. “It’s horrible. It sickens me too.”
She was relieved; she was worried that she had become too strident in her condemnation and would have offended him. Perhaps he sees things from the point of view of the lion, she thought; perhaps he empathises with the lion because he looks so leonine.
“Did your father...” She left the question unfinished.
“Did we di
sagree? Yes, we did. He knew what I thought about hunting, but he wasn’t going to give it up. He needed the money, apart from anything else. He took wealthy visitors down to Tanzania, and they paid thousands of dollars for every so-called trophy they got.”
“It must have been hard for you,” said Isabel.
“Sometimes. But most of the time we agreed to disagree. Once I’d finished in Aberdeen I went back to Kenya and ran the ranch for him. We agreed not to talk about the hunting side of things. Some of his clients came and stayed on the ranch before he took them down south. I had to be polite to them. Sometimes it was difficult.”
“I can imagine,” said Isabel.
“But you have to live and let live in Africa,” Leo went on. “If you start taking a high moral tone you pretty quickly hit a brick wall. You’ll have no friends and you won’t be able to do anything. Everything’s corrupt.”
Isabel glanced at her watch. There was more to find out, and she had only ten minutes left. “Then you came back to Scotland?” she said.
“Yes. I came back two months ago.”
“You’d had enough of running the ranch?”
“In a way,” he said. “But it was a bit more complicated than that. The ranch had been invaded by Samburu pastoralists. They’re local people up there, and they resented the fact that the land was owned by ranchers who had thousands of acres and who were also white—foreigners in their eyes, even if some of them were born there. You can understand it. They’ve over-grazed their own lands and they see good grass on the other side of the fence. They saw us as interlopers—on the land that had belonged to them in the past.”
“So you gave up?”
“I did. My father still has a manager who tries to run the place, but the grazing’s been pretty much destroyed.”
Isabel waited to see if he had more to say about Kenya, but he seemed to have gone quiet. She looked at his arms—his shirt-sleeves were rolled up, as it was a warm day. There was no sign of a tattoo. She decided to be direct.
“I heard that you were a tattoo artist.”
For a few moments Leo looked puzzled. “Me? A tattoo artist?”
She felt a surge of relief. Eddie had been wrong.
But then he said, “Oh, yes. I share a flat with a tattoo artist. He has a studio down the road. He’s called Chris. But he’s the tattoo artist, not me.” He paused. “I sometimes watch the shop for him when he’s busy in the back room doing a tattoo. He doesn’t like to be disturbed, and so I sit in the front and deal with any new customers. I show them the design books and we discuss what they want. But I don’t know how to do tattoos—that’s an art, you see.”
“Of course.”
“Then Chris comes and talks to them when he’s finished doing the business in the back.”
Isabel smiled. That explained everything. Eddie had fallen into the trap of reaching a conclusion based on deceptive evidence. Not everybody who sat at a desk in a tattoo parlour was a tattooist. Nor, on the same grounds, could one assume that a woman serving behind a delicatessen counter knew nothing about philosophy.
“Do you like tattoos?” asked Isabel.
“Love them,” said Leo. He looked at her wryly. “I take it you don’t.”
Isabel looked away. “And yet you don’t seem to have any.”
“How do you know?” he asked. “You can’t tell just by looking at somebody’s arms. You’ll find tattoos in surprising places.”
“Of course.”
Isabel had long since come to the conclusion that any meeting between people, if it was to lead to anything more than a passing relationship, required a certain willingness—right at the outset—to accept the other for what the other was. If, at the beginning, a fundamental difference of opinion appeared, further attempts at friendship, or even acquaintanceship, might flounder. Thus the lion did not begin his relationship with the lamb with a loud—and hungry—roar; nor did the pacifist cosy up to the militarist with a protestation on the folly of war; nor the authoritarian to the libertarian with a paean of praise for strong government. Isabel sensed that she and Leo were from different places—in the metaphorical sense—and that tattoos were probably high on the list of things that divided them; she knew that, and she knew that the conversation should be steered into bland waters, but to leave the subject alone would be a victory for tattoos, and she did not wish to concede. That was the trouble with being a philosopher, she sometimes told herself; you argued points that did not always need to be argued.
Leo was not ready to move on either. “What’s wrong with tattoos?” he asked. There was no truculence in his tone, but the challenge was there.
“Why disfigure the human body?” asked Isabel.
“It’s not disfigurement,” Leo replied. “It’s adornment—aesthetic enhancement.”
She thought the expression “aesthetic enhancement” seemed alien on the lips of a man who looked like a lion. But then she went on to tell herself, I should not think that: it’s condescending; it implies that this man from a world of Kenyan skies and big-game hunters has no right to express views on aesthetics.
She tried to sound conciliatory. “I suppose you’re right. We adorn ourselves with clothing, jewels and so on. Perhaps tattoos are just a version of all that.”
He said, “Exactly.” She noticed that he clipped the a so that it became an i. Exictly. It was how the white tribes of southern and eastern Africa spoke.
“And yet,” Isabel continued, “the point about a tattoo is that it’s permanent. You can take your clothes off, but you can’t get rid of a tattoo, can you?”
“They can be removed,” Leo said. “Didn’t you know that?”
“Yes, but at what cost?”
“It’s not all that expensive,” Leo said. “They use lasers.”
That was not the cost that Isabel had in mind. “There’s a physical cost, you know. Scarring and so on.”
He shrugged. “It’s a trade-off. It’s like riding a motorbike. Sure, there’s a risk that you’ll get hurt, but you weigh that against the pleasure.”
No, thought Isabel, that was different. Utility against cost was not the issue here—it was change of mind that mattered. “People regret their tattoos,” she said. “You get them done when you’re twenty and then you find you don’t like them when you’re forty—or even thirty. That’s the real problem. People think their tastes won’t change, but they often do.”
Leo was listening, but she could tell that he was uncomfortable. She could have left it there, but she persisted. “We all change, you know. What we like, what we believe in—all of that changes. That’s why so many people regret their tattoos. They grow up. What you”—she was aware that he knew she was talking about him—“what you like right now may not be what you’re going to like when you’re forty.”
She could tell that she had gone too far; it was the worst of all arguments to use with somebody younger than oneself: You’ll grow up. People did not like to be told that, she thought, because we all think that what we are now is what we shall be tomorrow. That was clearly false—but we all believed it.
Leo looked at his watch, not surreptitiously, as one does when one is enjoying oneself and does not really want to be elsewhere, but overtly, as if to underline the ending of a meeting. Isabel realised that there was nothing she could do to change the mood that had developed, and that she herself had created. Leo was lost to her, as most of Cat’s boyfriends had been lost.
“Of course,” she said. And then added lamely, “I’m sorry we seemed to disagree just after we found we both thought the same about hunting.”
It was a late coda to a conversation that had been largely in the wrong key, and all that Leo said as he stood up was “Exictly.”
Eddie had been watching, and, Isabel suspected, trying to listen too. Now, as Leo closed the deli door behind him, Eddie came over to Isabel’
s table and sat down opposite her.
“Well!” he said. “Did you see his eyes?”
Isabel nodded. “They’re a strange colour, aren’t they?”
“And his hair?” Eddie went on.
“He’s called Leo,” said Isabel. “You know what that means in Latin, Eddie?”
“Leonard?”
Isabel smiled. She wanted to hug Eddie. She wanted to mother him. She wanted to take him home and read to him to make up for all the things that nobody had bothered to teach him in his young life. “It means lion.”
Eddie’s eyes brightened. “As in the sign of the zodiac?”
“Yes. As in the sign of the zodiac.”
“I’m a Pisces,” he said. “My birthday is on the eighteenth of March.”
Isabel made a wiggling motion with her left hand; the motion of a fish in water. “So, you’re a fish.”
Eddie laughed. “I had a magazine that told me all about Pisces. It said that we’re compassionate.”
Isabel nodded. “Which you are.”
“It also said that we’re no good at business. It said that we’re too sensitive to take charge of a business.”
Isabel looked away. The problem with astrology was that it was complete nonsense, but it was a nonsense that every so often would, by sheer chance, get it right. It was rather like the apology for the entirely broken clock: twice a day it would tell exactly the right time.
CHAPTER EIGHT
WHEN ISABEL RETURNED to the house that afternoon, Grace told her that Patricia had called to invite Charlie to Albert Terrace the following day. She had suggested that he go there immediately after nursery school and should stay until seven. Grace was invited too; Patricia said that there was plenty for them to talk about. They could take the children for a walk and perhaps drop in for coffee somewhere. Grace said that she would be willing to take him, but there was something that was making her feel uncomfortable. It was an unusual invitation.
The Quiet Side of Passion Page 9