The Quiet Side of Passion

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “I don’t know if I’m imagining it,” Grace said. “I just feel that there’s something not quite right.”

  “I’m not surprised you’re not sure about it,” said Isabel. “Frankly I find Patricia a bit pushy.”

  Grace frowned. “I know what you mean,” she said. “She’s one of those people who seems very keen to be your friend.” She paused. “That sounds odd, I know—why shouldn’t somebody want to be your friend? It’s just that there are times when you want things to progress a bit more gradually.”

  “Natural reticence,” said Isabel. “That’s what we’re talking about. None of us likes to be overwhelmed. Friendship is a bit of a dance, isn’t it? You stand back from one another, look one another over and then make the first moves. But those moves are usually cautious, aren’t they?”

  Grace agreed. “I like things to develop slowly. You see somebody a few times and then you decide. You don’t jump in with both feet right at the beginning.”

  “No,” said Isabel. “You don’t.” Then she added, “Or, most people don’t. There may be some who do.” She paused. There was something else that she wanted to ask. A play date that ended at seven was unusual. Not only was that four whole hours, but seven in the evening was half an hour beyond Charlie’s bedtime. Allowing time to get back from Albert Terrace—even if it was just around the corner—would mean that he would probably not be fed, bathed and tucked up in bed much before eight.

  Isabel asked Grace how she had replied to the invitation.

  “I accepted.” Grace’s tone was sheepish. “I had to. I didn’t know what to say.”

  “ ‘No’ would have done fine,” said Isabel.

  Grace looked at her reproachfully, and Isabel immediately apologised. “I’m sorry, Grace. I didn’t mean it to sound like that.”

  Grace looked down at the floor. “You often don’t think of what you need to say until much later.”

  “No, you’re right. You don’t. And I probably would have done the same as you.”

  Grace kept her eyes on the floor. “There’s something about her that makes it hard to stand up to her. I don’t know what it is, but there is.”

  Isabel spoke soothingly. “No, neither do I. But it’s there nonetheless. There’s something wrong about that woman. Something...”

  Grace looked up. “Something dishonest?”

  “Perhaps,” said Isabel. “Perhaps that’s it.”

  Grace remembered something, and smiled at the memory. “I had an uncle—he was married to my mother’s sister, my aunt. So he was no blood relation. He came from the Western Isles—South Uist, in fact.”

  Isabel had been there years ago, as a student, to stay with a friend whose family owned a cottage on the island. The name was enough to bring that back: the smell of the peat fire, the late light of the summer evenings, the sea lochs that fingered into the land from the green sea; the sheepdog who slept on her bed and woke her in the morning when the first noises drifted through from the kitchen.

  “My uncle had a very strong sense of smell,” Grace went on. “He was famous up there for being able to smell whisky, they said, from half a mile away. He said that the smell travelled on the wind and he could pick it up from there.”

  “A considerable talent,” said Isabel.

  “Yes. But he also said that he could smell lies. He said that you could blindfold him and he would still be able to tell whether somebody was telling the truth just by sniffing at the words as they hung in the air.”

  For a few moments, Grace remembered him: Uncle Hector, who would stand by his sheep fank on the island and turn his face to the wind. Then he would sniff at the air—that air of the Scottish islands that is laden with the iodine of the seaweed, and the fish landed on the pier, and the salt of all the seas, and he would say, The wind is in the north and I can smell them—somebody is telling awful lies up in Lewis. I can smell it. And the children would laugh but would be secretly afraid that he would turn to them and say that their lies—small, childish lies about the unimportant this and that—were on their coats, biblical stains that he could detect and reveal.

  “An even more considerable talent,” Isabel remarked. “Think of the job opportunities. Insurance investigations, police work, journalism...”

  “As children we were frightened of him because we worried that any fibs we told would be sniffed out by our uncle.”

  Isabel laughed. “But did you inherit his talent?”

  “No,” said Grace. “And yet when it comes to Patricia, I get a whiff of something. I don’t know exactly what it is, but it’s a whiff of dishonesty. There’s something about her that doesn’t quite ring true.”

  “I can’t sniff things out,” said Isabel. “And yet my nose is telling me the exact same thing here.” She looked at Grace, who had forgiven her now—a fact she could deduce by the very same faculty of intuition that told her there was something not quite right about Patricia. There were people, she knew, who trusted their noses, which of course meant their intuition, for guidance on just about everything. This could work, and could be plausibly defended—there was a school of thought in ethics that put our intuitive moral sense right at the heart of any decision as to what was right or wrong—but it also had its opponents, who regarded it as a silly, almost thoughtless dead-end street. If people said “I think this is wrong” just because they felt it was wrong, then morality became a matter of subjective individual preference. And that shut down debate quickly enough, thought Isabel. If all we had to think about was our intuitive sense, then she could close down the Review, because there was no point in discussing any of the issues it explored—that, at least, would lighten her load in life.

  But the most devastating argument against ethical intuitionism was that it relied on experience for its justification. Our intuitive beliefs, it said, came from our experience of the world; but what was experience but observation, coupled with some reflection on what we experienced? That reflection was morality; that moment of thought was the foundation stone of everything—of Aristotle, Kant, Hume, of all of them. Intuition was the impulse buy; reflection was the considered purchase.

  Grace was staring at her now. Grace knew her so well, and was familiar with these short absences when Isabel seemed to be drifting off in thought. “What are you thinking about, Isabel?”

  Isabel thought: I could tell Grace that I was thinking about how intuition comes from experience, and experience involves observation and thought, but she knew that this would simply annoy her housekeeper. Grace was an intelligent woman, but she rapidly became impatient with philosophical speculation; she knew what was right and what was wrong, she had said on more than one occasion, which meant, of course, that Grace was an ethical intuitionist without ever having described herself as such. Isabel smiled, remembering those lines from Molière’s Le Bourgeois gentilhomme where Monsieur Jourdain is delighted to discover that he has been speaking prose all his life.

  “You’re smiling,” Grace accused her.

  “You’re right,” said Isabel.

  “About what?”

  “About there being something not smelling right. That woman wants something. Or is she hiding something?”

  Grace shrugged. “Yes, but what?”

  “I have no idea,” said Isabel.

  * * *

  —

  WITH THE CHILDREN IN BED, Jamie went off to his music room. It was Isabel’s turn to cook dinner, and she was preparing that simplest and most satisfying of stand-bys, a fish pie. This she would make in double quantities, with the result that even after she and Jamie had had a helping that night, along with peas—which Isabel believed were the only vegetable that belonged completely and unconditionally to fish pie—there would be enough left over to provide a light lunch the following day, and dinner for both boys.

  She had bought strips of monkfish from the fishmonger in Bruntsf
ield. It had been lying on a slab, ready prepared, alongside a large and reproachful-looking black-skinned fish that was still whole, still glistening with what might have been the water from which it had been plucked. She looked at this fish, which stared back at her with outsized round eyes, and imagined its life, somewhere down in the depths of the North Sea, no doubt content in its dark fastness, until it was suddenly brought up to the light, and to the air that spelled death for fishkind. The thought disturbed her, and she concentrated on the monkfish. That, at least, no longer looked like a living creature, and could be thought of in pie terms.

  Now it was further transformed, placed in a dish, covered in potato, doused in white sauce and was ready to be placed in the oven. She washed her hands, set the table with knives, forks and water glasses, and then joined Jamie.

  “I’m not disturbing you, I hope.”

  He looked up from the piano. “Not really.” That meant yes, but was a polite way of saying it.

  She sat down on a stool near the piano. “What are you playing?”

  He grinned. “The piano.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Oh, what music? Well...This.” He turned back to face the keyboard; a series of ascending arpeggios, easy on the ear, effortless. “But the problem, with that,” he said, “is that we run out of room on the keyboard. We get this high...” He demonstrated. “And then we can go no further. So we have to come down.” The notes descended, like falling water.

  “Lovely,” said Isabel.

  “But not architecture,” said Jamie. “Whims. Floating clouds. Streams. Not like Bach. Bach is a building, you know—a great edifice.”

  She agreed. She could envisage the intricate structures of Bach: blocks of stone delicately placed one upon the other, all connected with one another, all holding one another up.

  He stopped playing. “Fish pie—I can smell it.” He then continued with an emphatic chord. “That’s what I think of fish pie. Roll it on.”

  Isabel opened her mouth to speak. Jamie played another few chords—a fanfare of sorts for what she was about to say.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t resist. Go ahead.”

  She told him what Grace had told her about Patricia’s invitation.

  Jamie applied the quiet pedal, and the piano was silenced. “Three until seven?” he said. “That’s ridiculous.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  He shook his head. “Kids of that age get fed up with one another’s company after half an hour,” he said. “Put them together for four hours like that and they’ll be crying their eyes out. They’ll think they’re going to have to spend the rest of their lives together.”

  “Grace accepted,” said Isabel. “I’m not blaming her—it’s difficult to turn down an invitation, especially when you have to say yes or no on the spot.”

  “But why seven?” Jamie mused. “You’d think that...” He stopped, and looked up at Isabel. “It’s suddenly occurred to me. Yes. That’s it.”

  She waited.

  “Patricia is playing with a chamber orchestra at the moment. They’re rehearsing in Edinburgh tomorrow—at the Queen’s Hall. Tom told me.” Tom was a violinist friend with whom Jamie kept in touch via a sporadic and often eccentric email correspondence. He thought for a moment. “Have I got it right? Yes, I’m sure I have. Tomorrow’s the fifteenth, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then it’s definitely tomorrow. And I know she’s playing, because Tom said something about their viola player being in hospital with something or other. He mentioned her specifically. He said she was really good.”

  “You don’t think he might have got his dates mixed up?” Isabel asked.

  Jamie was adamant. “No. The fifteenth, because he wanted to meet me in the pub after their rehearsal and I couldn’t because I’m teaching early evening on the fifteenth. It’s in my diary.”

  They looked at one another, both of them astonished at the conclusion they were drawing.

  “Do you really imagine she would do it?” asked Isabel.

  “I don’t really know her,” replied Jamie. “Do you think she would?”

  Isabel felt the back of her neck getting warm: witnessing effrontery had that effect on her. “The sheer nerve,” she said. “Grace is being used as childcare. Unpaid too—or unpaid by her.”

  Jamie imagined how it would work. “Grace goes there, and then suddenly Patricia looks at her watch and says, ‘Oh my God, I’m due at a rehearsal in twenty minutes.’ ”

  Isabel took it up. “And then she looks at Grace and says, ‘Do you mind terribly? They’re having such a good time together.’ ”

  “Yes,” said Jamie. “And next thing she dashes off to the Queen’s Hall with not a care in the world. Those rehearsals end at six-thirty, which would give her time to get back to Albert Terrace by seven at the latest.”

  They stared at one another wordlessly, sharing their distaste for the deception that they were sure they had just uncovered. Isabel broke the silence. “I’ll ask Grace to call off.”

  “She may not like that.”

  “I’ll ask her nonetheless.”

  The next morning, when Grace arrived at the house, she listened attentively as Isabel told her of the conclusion that she and Jamie had reached. “I think Patricia’s planning to use you as unpaid child cover,” she said. “She’s going to be rehearsing this afternoon—Jamie is pretty sure of that.”

  Isabel had not expected what came next. Grace became animated as she recalled what had happened a few days earlier. “That’s funny you should say that. I was there with Charlie, at her house, when she suddenly remembered a dental appointment. I said it was fine for her to go off—I could handle both boys. But she was away for almost three hours.”

  “Dental appointments don’t usually take three hours,” said Isabel. She thought that this must have been when she saw Grace in Bruntsfield with Charlie and Basil.

  “What should I do?”

  Isabel thought for a moment before answering. She was angry with Patricia and did not want to continue the new friendship. “We keep our distance. We cancel the play date.”

  “I can’t cancel,” said Grace. “I told her I’d be there.”

  Isabel reassured her that she understood. “No, I can see why you feel this way. I thought I’d ask.”

  Grace looked anxious. “You don’t think I’m being cowardly?”

  “I’d never think that of you.”

  “You don’t think I’m frightened of her?”

  Isabel threw up her hands. “Of course not!”

  “Because I am...a bit.”

  Isabel sighed.

  “You think I shouldn’t be frightened?” Grace challenged.

  Isabel was soothing. “No, definitely not. I just think it’s a pity that she should have that effect on people. And I also think that we need to be very careful in how we handle this. We need to disengage, but we need to do that in a way that doesn’t lead to a row.” She paused before continuing. “You see, I think this woman is one of those people who would bear a grudge. She just might. And as a general rule, I think there’s no point in making more enemies in this life than you need to.”

  “So?” asked Grace.

  “So, go this afternoon—as planned. Do the babysitting, if that’s what happens. But then, if she tries to make another arrangement, put her off. Say that Charlie needs to go to the doctor, or something like that.”

  “Lie?”

  Isabel smiled. “Every week we get an article submitted on some aspect of truth-telling,” she said. She gestured towards her study. “Half of the papers in there are about that. But there are cases where you just can’t tell the truth and have to tell”—she held up a thumb and forefinger, barely apart—“to tell a tiny lie. That size.”

  “I agree,” said
Grace.

  CHAPTER NINE

  ISABEL HAD ARRANGED for Claire Richardson to come to the house for coffee that morning. She would be working, as would Jamie, who was due to teach at the Academy; Charlie would be at nursery, and Grace had agreed to take Magnus for a session at a playgroup called Friend Time.

  She had been careful not to describe the meeting as an interview, referring to it as a casual chat, an opportunity for Claire to take a look at the position she had mentioned. “Actually,” said Isabel, “calling it a position is perhaps a bit grandiose. It’s really just a part-time job; a position suggests...”

  Claire grinned. “A title? An office?” She paused. “A desk and chair?”

  Isabel relaxed at this friendly response to her words. They were standing in the entrance hall of Isabel’s house, and Claire was still wearing her raincoat; a summer shower had swept in from the west but had not lasted more than a few minutes. Light patches of moisture extended across the shoulders of the mackintosh, and her hair, thick and blonde, was speckled with minute raindrops.

  “You can have all of those,” said Isabel, leading Claire through to the kitchen. “Except the office, perhaps. The Review is run from right here, in the house, and my study is the office. There isn’t a spare one, I’m afraid, but it’s a large room and there’s a table at the far end that could be yours.”

  “It’s more than I have at the university,” said Claire. “I don’t even have a seat there, as far as I know—or at least I don’t have one that is exclusively mine. Others can use it, if they like.”

  “You share?”

  Claire made a gesture that suggested resignation—or hopelessness. “There’s a room set aside for the philosophy postgraduates. It’s quite a nice room, as it happens, in Buccleuch Place. We look out at the back over the Meadows. There’s a set of tennis courts there that you can see from the window.”