The Quiet Side of Passion

by Alexander McCall Smith

  Isabel was relieved that the interview appeared to be coming to an end. She had done her civic duty and reported the incident. All she wanted now was to go home.

  “There’s one more thing,” said the policewoman. “It would be helpful for us if you could take a look at some photographs. Can you do that?”

  Isabel agreed, and the policewoman returned with an album that she placed on the table in front of Isabel. “Just the first three pages,” she said. “There aren’t many photographs.”

  Isabel looked at the faces staring out at her. She turned the first page, and then rapidly moved on to the second and third.

  “Is he there?” asked the policewoman.

  “No.”

  “You seemed to recognise somebody. You reacted to the first page.”

  Isabel shook her head. She wanted to leave now.

  The policewoman was clearly disappointed. “Are you sure he’s not there? Don’t hesitate to tell me—even if you’re less than one hundred per cent certain.”

  Isabel shook her head again. “No, he’s not there.”

  * * *

  —

  JAMIE CALLED ANOTHER TAXI. They started the journey in silence. Then Jamie said, “That wasn’t too bad, I hope.”

  “No,” said Isabel. “She was very supportive.”

  She looked at her hands.

  “And?” said Jamie. “Still upset?”

  She turned to him. “She showed me photographs,” she said. “They have a book.”

  “Of suspects?”

  “Yes.”

  “But he wasn’t in it?”

  “No,” said Isabel. “But Patricia’s friend was—the man with the freckles. He was.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CLAIRE ARRIVED for her first half-day of work when Isabel was walking Charlie to nursery school and while Jamie was introducing Magnus to the top two octaves of the piano keyboard. Jamie suspected that Magnus was more musical than Charlie, as he appeared to be able to discriminate between the pitch of different notes. Charlie liked volume, and found no greater pleasure than beating any drum-shaped object as hard as he could; Magnus, by contrast, seemed to listen, and would beam with pleasure at the sounding of the higher notes of any instrument. He was not interested in the bassoon, except in its very highest register, at which he would smile, but only briefly.

  “We have one son who will clearly become a percussionist,” Jamie pronounced. “And one who is destined for higher things—in the pitch sense, of course.”

  This was a musical joke, a reference to the sense of hier-archy sometimes found amongst musicians, in which the strings might look down on wind of any variety, and woodwind in turn had a sense of innate superiority to brass players—a “beery lot,” as one of Jamie’s friends described them. “A beery lot, always off to the pub the moment a rehearsal is over.” And if brass players had to look down on anybody, then all that was left was the percussion, who, if suitably provoked by a conductor, were capable of making enough noise to drown everybody else out.

  Jamie balanced Magnus on his knee with one hand while, with the other, he picked out a series of high chords. Magnus squealed with delight, and reached forward to pound the keys with his fists.

  “Not quite right,” said Jamie. “Almost, but not quite.”

  The impromptu music lesson was interrupted by the doorbell, and by the arrival of Claire.

  “I know it’s early,” she said. “But I couldn’t wait.”

  Jamie explained that Isabel would be a few minutes yet, but he would be happy to make Claire a cup of coffee while she waited. She accepted, and he led her into the kitchen.

  “What’s it like—being a musician?”

  She asked the question without preliminaries, and he answered in a similar vein.

  “Hard work,” he said. “Full of anxiety and disappointment. You have questions that never seem to go away: Will I get enough work? Am I good enough? What happens if my lip goes, or I hurt my fingers, or...well, there are a hundred different questions you tend to ask yourself in the sleepless hours.”

  “And yet people do it,” said Claire. “You do. Others do. People make a living.”

  “By juggling things,” said Jamie. “Including babies.”

  He moved across the room to where Claire was standing and offered her Magnus. “I can’t make coffee while I’m holding him. And if I put him down, he’ll crawl off down the corridor at high speed. Do you mind?”

  She took the child gingerly, uncertain as to his reaction to her. But Magnus simply stared, his eyes wide, his mouth set in a curious expression of wonderment.

  “He likes you,” said Jamie. “Look. Star-struck.”

  Magnus was silent in his admiration. As Claire moved her head, his eyes followed, with the intense, uninhibited stare of the young child. Jamie poured coffee grounds into the cafetière and switched on the kettle. From the hall the sound drifted in of the front door opening.

  “I think that’s Grace,” he said. “Did you meet her when you were here the other day?”

  Claire shook her head. “Isabel mentioned that there was somebody...”

  “A housekeeper,” said Jamie. “She looked after the house when Isabel’s father lived here. Isabel kept her on—and she’s a great help with him.” He nodded in the direction of Magnus, who was still visibly entranced with Claire.

  Grace came into the kitchen, taking off a light raincoat. “Summer,” she said. “Or so they tell us. It’s raining. And that stupid bus was late.” She stopped as she saw Claire. She looked at Jamie for an introduction.

  “We told you about Claire,” said Jamie. “She’s going to be helping Isabel with the Review.”

  Grace looked at Claire with much the same directness as Magnus did. Beyond a mumbled greeting on introduction, she said nothing: the remarks about rain and the bus had not been intended for strangers.

  “I wish I could play an instrument,” said Claire. “I never learned as a child. I was offered the chance of piano lessons, but I wouldn’t do them.”

  “The one instrument you can’t really learn as an adult,” said Jamie. “Or, at least, not properly. The brain pathways just aren’t there when you’re an adult—and you can’t lay them down.”

  This prompted Grace to contribute. “I don’t know about that. I read about somebody who went to bed one night not knowing how to play a note on the piano, but who woke up the next morning and could play the piano perfectly.”

  Jamie burst out laughing. “No,” he said. “Impossible.”

  “Surely not,” echoed Claire.

  Grace’s eyes had not left Claire; now they narrowed, and she tensed. “There are many things that we think are impossible, but that happen,” she said. “All the time. These things happen.”

  Claire glanced at Jamie, and unfortunately the glance was intercepted by Grace. The glance was subtitled We’re above this sort of belief, and it was correctly deciphered by Grace, whose lips set in a firm line of disapproval.

  Jamie sensed the sudden drop in temperature. “Not everything has an easy explanation,” he said. “There are those strange cases of people suddenly talking with a foreign accent. Sounding Swedish, or whatever.”

  “Precisely,” said Grace. “They wake up and find they’re speaking Swedish. Those are proved cases—nobody denies them.”

  “I’m not sure if they actually speak Swedish,” said Jamie. “They may sound Swedish, but that’s not the same as speaking Swedish. Anybody can sound Swedish. You elongate the vowels and add a bit of melody.”

  “No, they use actual Swedish words,” insisted Grace. “Swedish people can understand what they’re saying.”

  Jamie looked doubtful. “I’m not sure about that.”

  “Well, I am,” said Grace. “And lots of other people are too.” She looked defiantly at Claire.

&
nbsp; Jamie tried to defuse the situation. “Grace is very interested in spiritualism,” he explained. “You go to those lectures, don’t you, Grace—down at that place off the Queensferry Road...”

  “The Psychic College,” said Grace. “They have the lectures at the Psychic College.”

  Claire looked at Grace quizzically. “The Psychic College?”

  “Yes,” said Grace. “I’m surprised you’ve not heard of it.”

  Jamie moved across the room to relieve Claire of Magnus. “They have some very interesting events there,” he said. “Séances...”

  “Sittings,” Grace corrected him.

  “They communicate with the other side,” Jamie continued.

  Grace gave Jamie a discouraging look. “It’s not as simple as you say, Jamie,” she said. “I know you don’t believe in anything, but you don’t have all the answers, you know. What about telepathy? Everyone knows that telepathy exists. How would you explain that?”

  “How do you know I don’t believe in anything?” Jamie challenged. The exchange between them was friendly, but it was having an effect on Claire, who was unsure where to look.

  “I just do,” said Grace. “But there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy...”

  “...Horatio,” supplied Jamie, and then laughed. “True. And in yours, too, Grace—sauce for the goose being, as they say, sauce for the gander. Could you pour the coffee? How do you like yours, Claire?”

  Grace looked at Claire for an answer. Her look was discouraging, as if to imply that the expression of any preference, for milk or sugar or for black, would be an irritation.

  “Can’t you tell telepathically?” Claire replied.

  It was an attempt at humour, but it fell resoundingly flat. Jamie stood stock-still. He looked at Grace, and saw that her reaction was as he feared. There were one or two areas about which Grace was inordinately sensitive: parapsychology was one of them.

  “Telepathy doesn’t work that way,” Grace said coldly. “And it’s not something that we take lightly.”

  Jamie groaned inwardly. “Isabel will be back any moment,” he said, with forced cheerfulness. “Any moment now.”

  * * *

  —

  JAMIE HAD TO TEACH that morning at the Academy, but was planning to return to the house for lunch. There was a concert that evening in the Queen’s Hall, and he was playing a rarely performed bassoon concerto with Mr. McFall’s Chamber, an adventurous chamber orchestra that explored musical byways. They enjoyed experimenting with tango, and there was a new piece on the programme that evening, The Bassoon in Buenos Aires, that would test Jamie’s technical virtuosity. He needed a few hours to go over the more difficult passages, and had set aside the afternoon for that. He had made sure he would be free: Isabel had agreed to fetch Charlie from nursery and to entertain him thereafter; and Grace was planning to take Magnus to tea with her cousin in Newington. He would have several uninterrupted hours to familiarise himself with his part in the evening’s programme.

  Shortly before he left the Academy, Jamie telephoned Isabel to suggest that rather than have lunch in the house, they should meet in la Barantine, a small French bakery and coffee shop in Bruntsfield, just over the road from Cat’s deli. It was a popular place, its tables often filled with enthusiasts for their strawberry tarts and macaroons, but there were more savoury offerings too, served, as had become fashionable, on small slate slabs doubling up as plates. Customers were addressed in French, and they usually responded gamely in schoolday French, dredged up from the recesses of memory, or, on occasion, in memorable franglais, that curious European pidgin that seemed, miraculously, to be as intelligible to French as to English speakers, and equally amusing to both. Sur l’autre main (on the other hand), as one recent customer had said, je might avoir un green salad avec un peu de soft fromage...

  Isabel readily agreed.

  “Is she still there?” asked Jamie over the phone. “Can you talk?”

  “Claire? No, she’s left.”

  He asked her whether it had gone well, and she replied that it had. “We got through a lot of work. Cleared quite a bit of the backlog—or at least made an impression on it. I’ll tell you about it over lunch.”

  Isabel arrived at la Barantine first and was pleased to find a table free. There were ten tables crammed into the café’s limited space, with the result that people at neighbouring tables were shoulder to shoulder. It was not a place for the exchange of confidences or for a discreet lovers’ tryst, but for lunch between friends where the gossip was about nothing important, it was ideal. Today it was mostly women, although there was a solitary man at one of the tables near the window, immersed in the copy of the Scotsman newspaper that the café placed, along with The Times, in a reading rack on the window ledge.

  Isabel noticed the effect of Jamie’s entrance. At the table next to hers, two women of about her own age paused in their conversation and exchanged glances. On the other side of the restaurant, a middle-aged woman, halfway through the delicate operation of eating a macaroon, put the crumbling confection down on her plate while she stared—none too discreetly. Isabel was used to this; Jamie turned heads—he had always done so, and, most significantly, was quite unaware of the fact. It did not displease her, although she did not enjoy the envy that she sometimes saw in the eyes of other women when they realised that this extraordinarily good-looking young man was with her—not just having lunch with her, but with her.

  “That boy,” said Jamie, as he sat down opposite Isabel.

  “Geoffrey something?”

  “Geoffrey Weir. He’s hopeless at the bassoon, and has a dreadful, clapped-out old instrument that makes it one hundred times worse. I’ve told him to get it repaired, but he said that the repairer had just condemned it. Said it wasn’t worth fixing.”

  Isabel knew what bassoons cost. It was no easy task for a parent to provide even a low-cost student model. But this should not be a consideration in this case, said Jamie. “His parents could easily afford something better,” he said. “His father has plenty of cash—he developed some sort of lawnmower that everyone buys, apparently. Provided they have a lawn, of course.” He paused as he glanced at the menu, and then continued, “I spoke to him about it at the school concert. I said, ‘Your son’s playing would improve greatly with a better instrument.’ And you know what he said? ‘You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.’ Imagine that. That’s what he actually said.”

  Isabel smiled. “Not the normal thing for a parent to say. Parents usually take a pretty optimistic view of their children’s talents.”

  “Not in this case,” said Jamie. “Weir père, as we call him”—he gave a wry grin—“said that his son’s playing made him feel nauseous, and that it was only because of maternal encouragement that Geoffrey continued with music lessons. Then he asked me how much a new bassoon would cost. So I told him, and he made a face and said it just wasn’t worth it in his son’s case.” He sighed. “At least the school has plenty of other students who are good. There’s a girl called Florence Douglas who plays superbly. She’s fantastic. She could get into the Conservatoire in Glasgow if she tried.”

  The woman who had been eating the macaroon was still gazing at Jamie. Isabel caught her eye and smiled, causing a rapid, embarrassed return to the few crumbs of macaroon still on the plate.

  “I’m sometimes tempted to give up teaching,” Jamie mused. “Life would be much simpler if I didn’t have to worry how those kids were doing—whether they were practising enough, whether they were ready for their music exams, and so on. It would be nice to forget about all that.”

  Isabel looked at him sympathetically. “If you wanted to,” she said, “you could. You don’t need the money.”

  Something crossed Jamie’s face. An expression of regret? A wistfulness?

  “I need to earn my living,” he s
aid quietly.

  She was quick to correct herself. “Of course you do. I’m not saying you don’t.” But she knew, as did Jamie, that this was a fiction. Jamie did not have to earn his living, because Isabel had more than enough for both of them. This was a matter of pride, though—of self-respect—and she would not have it otherwise.

  “You could spend more time playing, rather than teaching,” she suggested. “Session work pays well, doesn’t it? Or you could form your own consort—you’ve thought about that, haven’t you?”

  He nodded. “Sometimes.” The trouble with that, though, was that it would require capital to start a new chamber orchestra or consort. Musicians had to be paid; venues had to be hired; recordings were an expensive business, with all their sound engineers and mixers. Nothing was cheap, and he did not want to ask Isabel to back this financially. Jamie was largely indifferent to money, but had a strong sense of when he did not want to ask Isabel to pay for something.

  “Oh well,” he said. “I’m happy to carry on as I am. I’ll survive the likes of Geoffrey Weir.”

  Isabel had already ordered; now Jamie did the same. Then he folded his hands and looked across the table at Isabel. “The agenda,” he said. “Item one.”

  She looked at him quizzically. “Is there an agenda?”

  “Yes,” Jamie replied. “I know it and you know it: what happened yesterday.”

  “I was going to tell you about Claire’s first day at work,” said Isabel.

  “There’ll be time for that in due course. We didn’t have the chance to discuss anything when we came back last night, but we can hardly ignore it. You had a real shock, you know.”

  She had not wanted to make a fuss over that. “At the time it was a bit upsetting,” she said. “But no harm done.”

  He stared at her incredulously. “But something like that’s dreadful. You can’t just shrug it off.”