The Quiet Side of Passion

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “Awesome,” muttered Isabel.

  “Awesome?” asked Antonia. “Is that what I should say? Awesome?”

  Isabel shook her head. “No. I was just thinking aloud. I was thinking that people say awesome far too much. Everything’s awesome. It’s not a word that has any meaning any more. It used to mean something, but no longer.” She shook her head again. This was her chance to do something—even a very little thing—to protect the integrity of the English language. If she could persuade one person—just one person—to avoid the use of the word awesome, then she would have struck a blow against the menacing tide of meaninglessness and debasement that threatened the language.

  “So I mustn’t say awesome?”

  “That’s right. You mustn’t say awesome—ever. You must never use that word.”

  “Is it rude?”

  Isabel laughed. “No, it’s not rude. It’s just used too much—and in the wrong place.”

  “So it’s not like...” And here Antonia used an obscene term—in its adjectival form.

  Isabel laughed again. “No, it’s not like that. That doesn’t mean anything at all. That’s a swear word. People use it for all sorts of things for no real reason at all. You don’t use that word.”

  “But they do,” said Antonia. “I have seen many films where they use that word all the time. I saw a Scottish film where everybody spoke like that.”

  Isabel wondered how to explain. “There are different sorts of people in Scotland—just as, I imagine, there are different sorts of people in Italy. Some people use that language all the time because...well, because that’s what they do.”

  “Vulgar people?”

  Isabel hesitated. “We don’t use the word vulgar very much. It’s not polite to talk about other people as vulgar.”

  “Even if they are?” asked Antonia.

  “Even if they are...” Isabel paused. “I think it might be better if you listened to the people you meet—people of your own age group. Speak like them.”

  “Even if they’re vulgar?”

  Isabel nodded. “Even then. But that word you mentioned—it would be best not to say that, especially in this house. I wouldn’t want the children to pick it up.”

  “We have many vulgar expressions in Italian,” said Antonia, her tone matter-of-fact. “I could tell you some of them, if you like. Some of them are very funny.”

  “I’m sure they are,” said Isabel.

  “Although you’re not meant to use them,” continued Antonia. “And there’s a special way of doing that. You can swear without using vulgar words. You use the word cavolo instead—that means cabbage. But everybody knows that you don’t mean cabbage, you mean something else. It’s very useful.”

  “Awesome,” said Isabel. “Perhaps awesome is like cabbage.” They both laughed. “But let me show you where the vacuum cleaner is. We also call that a hoover, by the way.”

  “Hoover,” repeated Antonia. “That’s very sexy.”

  Isabel looked at her. “Sexy?”

  “It’s a very sexy word. Hoover.” Antonia elongated the vowels.

  “Possibly,” said Isabel. “I’ll show you the cupboard. You can start upstairs. Those rooms haven’t been hoovered for weeks.”

  “That lady?” said Antonia. “That lady I met? Is that her normal work?”

  “It was,” said Isabel. “But now she has a lot of work to do with the two boys.”

  “I would like to help her with the boys,” offered Antonia. “Then she could get back to working with the hoover.”

  Isabel was aghast.

  “Have I said something wrong?” asked Antonia.

  Isabel imagined the scene. “No,” she reassured her. “I’m sure you will be able to help with the boys sometimes, but perhaps not too often when Grace is here.” She looked at Antonia to see if the message had been understood.

  It had. “She likes that job?” asked Antonia. “She doesn’t want anybody else?”

  “She likes it,” said Isabel. She decided that frankness was the best policy here. “And no, I think that she might not like it if somebody took it away from her.”

  Antonia thought about this. “But there are two boys,” she said. “There’s the other one, isn’t there?”

  “Charlie. Yes, there are two, and there’ll be plenty for you to do when Grace isn’t here.”

  “I must be tactful? Is that the correct word?”

  “Absolutely the right word,” said Isabel.

  “But she won’t mind if I use the hoover?”

  Isabel assured her that the use of the hoover would give no offence.

  Antonia looked impatient. “Then I must start hoovering,” she said.

  Isabel showed her to the cupboard where the household devices were stored. The cupboard had a dusty and neglected feel to it, and could itself have done with a major clean.

  “Very dirty,” said Antonia.

  “It’s possibly a tiny bit rude to call somebody’s house dirty,” Isabel said gently. “English is a funny language that way.”

  The gentle reproach seemed to have little effect. “But there is a lot of cleaning to be done.”

  Isabel looked apologetic. “Yes, that’s why we asked you to come. This house needs help. There’s a lot for you to do.” She did not want to expect too much from Antonia, and so she said, “Then, this evening, you should go and take a look at the town. There’s a lot that goes on in Edinburgh. It’s a lively place.”

  “I shall go out tonight,” said Antonia. “But first I have a lot of work to do.”

  * * *

  —

  CLAIRE ARRIVED FOR WORK a few minutes later, bringing with her a large box file of submitted papers. She had worked quickly, attaching a brief, preliminary report on each of them. This was what Isabel called the “first sweep,” in which the completely impossible papers—those from enthusiastic and often obsessive amateurs—were weeded out. When she had first become involved with the Review, Isabel had been astonished at the extent to which people failed to understand the nature of the journal and insisted on submitting completely unsuitable material. Over the years she had received articles on fishing, the habits of polar bears, confessional memoirs, and, from one author in particular, a high school teacher in Sri Lanka, papers on mathematical theory. As a matter of principle, she wrote back to every author who submitted anything; if they took the trouble to send things to her, then she would acknowledge their effort, no matter how misguided they were. The teacher in Sri Lanka was a special case: he had received an initial letter in which she had explained that the Review was a journal of philosophy and not of mathematics, pure or applied. “I am just not in a position to comment on your paper,” Isabel wrote. “We are a philosophical publication, you will understand, and therefore we cannot judge the merits of your paper. I would suggest that you submit it to a mathematical journal, and I do hope that you find a suitable home for it in this way.”

  This had brought back the response, “Esteemed Sir, I shall endeavour to simplify the introduction to my paper so that you can understand it more readily. It is a well-known habit of mine to be obscure in circumstances where clarity and simplicity are called for. Once I have done that, I shall send the paper back to you for your much-appreciated consideration.”

  Then there was the man in Toronto who wrote papers on vegetarianism, a subject that at least fell within the scope of the Review, in so far as vegetarianism was a moral issue. These papers, though, were light on theory and heavy on recipes. Once again, Isabel was polite in her response: “I must say,” she wrote, “that I found your recipe for pasta with mushrooms, spinach and feta most mouth-watering. It’s a pity that we cannot publish it in the Review of Applied Ethics, as we are a philosophical, rather than a culinary, journal.” This had not discouraged the author, who wrote back to say that should she eventually publish his
article—“I am in no hurry,” he wrote—then would it be possible to have some of the quantities in cup measurements, for the benefit of North American readers, rather than just in pounds and ounces, or grams? This exchange had been followed, a few months later, by the submission of a further article from the same source, ostensibly on the ethics of disclosing the source of food in menus, but, for the most part, concerned with tables of the carbohydrate content of the various forms of vegetable.

  There were no such articles in the batch that Claire had taken off to read. These were all papers by established philosophers, and written according to the proper formula for an academic paper. There were eight submissions and Claire had selected two for further consideration. One was on the taking down of statues; the other was on parental responsibility for the misdeeds of their children. These two papers, she thought, should be passed on to the editorial board for further reports; the other papers could be rejected at this stage.

  Isabel glanced at Claire’s reports. “What line does the statue paper take?” she asked. “Leave them or take them down?”

  “It’s a woman from a university in Florida,” Claire said. “She mostly talks about Confederate statues—General Grant and so on. There’s some discussion of Rhodes—not a lot—and a bit about the naming of the Codrington Library in Oxford. Apparently, Codrington was a slave owner. And there was a row at the University of Michigan over the naming of a building honouring a man who was a full-blown eugenicist.”

  Isabel listened as Claire explained. “She thinks that you can’t correct everything, but you can erect competing monuments, or put some sort of footnote on the existing one.”

  “Telling the other side of the story?”

  “Yes.”

  Isabel looked doubtful. “That won’t work,” she said. “It’s not enough of a victory for the people who want the memory expunged altogether. You couldn’t have a statue of Hitler in Berlin with a footnote at the bottom saying that he was also responsible for millions of deaths.”

  “No,” said Claire, “you couldn’t.”

  “Because that sort of approach misunderstands what a statue actually says.”

  “Which is?” asked Claire.

  “That the person portrayed is worth remembering.”

  Claire thought for a moment. “Worth remembering in a positive way?”

  “Yes. That’s implicit.”

  “But does keeping a statue—allowing it to stand—necessarily say the same thing?”

  Isabel agreed that there was a difference. “No, I suppose it doesn’t. Letting a statue stand where it has always stood says that at a particular time—maybe a long time ago—somebody was admired sufficiently for a statue to be erected. It doesn’t say anything about what people feel now.”

  No, thought Claire. No. “You don’t think it does?” she said. “Doesn’t the statue’s continued presence imply that there’s still some approval for what that person stood for?” She paused. “It’s like keeping a photograph of a former lover. If you have a photograph like that on your table, then surely that means you still have some affection for him. A lover you don’t like any longer tends to go on the fire—or in the bin.”

  “I’m going to have to read the paper,” said Isabel, removing it from the pile. “And what about the parental-responsibility paper?”

  “It says that we should make parents pay for the damage their children cause. The idea is that this is the only way you’re going to get them to discipline their unruly offspring.”

  Isabel looked doubtful. “Unruly offspring often have unruly parents—not the sort of people to pay much attention.”

  “Not always.”

  “No, not always, but...” Isabel felt uncomfortable with the whole idea. Parenthood was a challenging matter and there were many who failed through no fault of their own. “Is it well argued?” she asked.

  Claire thought it was, and the paper survived to the next stage.

  “And the others?” asked Isabel.

  Claire shook her head. “Nothing,” she said.

  “I’ll take a quick look at them later,” Isabel said. The streamlined selection process would work well, she thought, saving her the hours she would otherwise have spent wading through submissions. Already she felt liberated from at least part of her editorial load; if this continued, her life would certainly be easier. I might even be able to spend time thinking, she told herself, which was what, as a philosopher, she was meant to do.

  After mid-morning coffee, Isabel decided to take a break. Magnus was still with Grace, and Jamie was teaching. Judging from the sound of the vacuum cleaner, Antonia was still busy upstairs, and Claire could be left with the proofs of one of the sections of the next issue. Everyone, it seemed, was profitably engaged in what they should be doing, and this gave her a curious sense of freedom. I can walk into Bruntsfield if I wish, she thought. I can pick up some fish for this evening from the fishmonger—a nice piece of halibut, which always pleases Jamie. I can spend time chatting to the woman behind the counter about fish; she loves to talk about what is coming in and where it was caught; she lives for fish. Isabel savoured the words: she lives for fish; what an epitaph that would be, she thought—a simple inscription on the stone: She lived for fish. How many lives can be summed up that simply? Most of them, she thought. It could be a thing we lived for, or it could be a person. Many of us go through this life living for somebody else—that other person being our be-all and end-all. She lived for her husband, or He lived for his wife. That would be an accurate summary in many cases of what a life had been; and there was a simple dignity to such an epitaph. Or, He lived for vintage cars. She had a friend to whom that might apply; he loved old Bugattis, thought them every bit as beautiful as the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. He lived for art. She lived for ballet. He lived for unhealthy food...That, of course, would be one of those epitaphs that contained within itself a judgement on a life—which an epitaph can do, of course, although it should always be gentle. He lived for unhealthy food, but who can blame him? might be more charitable.

  And, she told herself, I can buy some battered fish fingers for Charlie, for whom they are the biggest treat, even if the woman in the fishmonger thinks that fish fingers are an admission of creative defeat, a sort of vague insult to fish. I can do ordinary things that most people take for granted but that I can so rarely do.

  It was a brisk ten-minute walk from the house to the fishmonger, but Isabel took her time, savouring the warm air of summer and the scents from the gardens she passed: a mown lawn here, a chopped hedge—vaguely lemony—there; the odd whiff of something drifting from an open kitchen window. As she approached the end of Merchiston Crescent she saw coming towards her the figure of a man she recognised—a man whose name she had once known, as he had been pointed out to her by somebody, but had now forgotten; he lived somewhere in one of the roads off the crescent and had once played chess for Scotland. Local legend had it that he had lost his temper in an important match in Iceland and had upset the board in a gesture of disgust. Now he lived by himself on the ground floor of a converted Victorian house and was said to have no visitors apart from a son, who was the leader of a motorcycle gang in Glasgow. There had been a wife, people said, but she had long since left him.

  As they approached one another on the pavement, Isabel deliberately sought to make eye contact. She smiled, and even when his eyes slid away, shy of the contact, she greeted him. His name came back, suddenly and unexpectedly: he was a Mr. McGregor, of the same name as the irascible gardener in Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit; or the man who wrote that book about the history of the world in one hundred objects from the collections of the British Museum; or the Scottish folk hero, Rob Roy Macgregor. So many and varied MacGregors, thought Isabel inconsequentially—of both spellings, Mc or Mac—and her mind had suddenly brought them up before her: the frightened rabbit running for his life from the crusty gar
dener, fearing incorporation within a rabbit pie; the articulate museum director talking of a sixteenth-century Benin plaque from Nigeria or the ship’s chronometer from HMS Beagle; the red-haired and ruthless Highlander, Rob Roy, said to have had arms so long he could tie his gaiters without stooping, a consummate cattle thief and scourge of the nobility. All these MacGregors...

  “Hello, Mr. MacGregor.”

  He started at her greeting, but did not say anything. His eyes briefly met hers, though, and then he inclined his head slightly in acknowledgement; there was nothing more. He continued on his way.

  For a moment she debated within herself about what to do. She could turn round and say something more to him while he was still within earshot. But what would that be? What could she say to this isolated, unhappy man? Forget about Iceland? Forget about chess, which will only upset you because you will never find any peace from all its moves and stratagems? Forget about the wife who left you, and find somebody new who will appreciate and at least try to make you happy?

  In the fishmonger she said to the woman behind the counter, “I would like a piece of halibut.”

  “For how many?” asked the woman.

  “Just for me and my husband. Some fish fingers for the boys.”

  The woman reached for a large piece of firm white fish. “This is delicious,” she said. “We had a piece last night—me and Jimmy. He said it was the best halibut he’s tasted in a good long while.”

  Isabel was only half listening.

  “And the monkfish is good,” said the woman.

  “Yes,” said Isabel. “A bit of that too. Not too much, since we have the halibut.” She paused, and then continued, “Ellie, do you know that MacGregor man? You see him about here a lot. He lives somewhere off Merchiston Crescent.”

  The woman was wrapping the fish. “Yes, I know him. Odd fish.”

  Isabel laughed involuntarily, and Ellie glanced up.

  “But he is,” said Ellie. “You know they say that he was one of the best chess players in the world.”