The Quiet Side of Passion

by Alexander McCall Smith

  “That was her parents’ place—it was in Donnybrook. They retired to Galway. He was an eye surgeon, you know. I knew their place in Dublin well, because we lived just down the road when I was young. Patricia and I were more or less brought up together. We were cousins, but we were more like sisters.”

  “Then it’s nice for you that you’re now both in Edinburgh,” Isabel said.

  “It’s great,” said Carol. “And when we were kids it was particularly good because we were both only children. I would have been lonely without her. No brothers and sisters.”

  Isabel’s attention had been drifting; the door of the nursery was being opened from within. She turned sharply. “Only children?” She had not misheard it. “I thought Patricia had a brother.”

  Carol shook her head. “No. She’s an only child.”

  Isabel wanted to say, “Are you sure?” but realised that such a question would sound absurd. She was silent.

  “Here they are,” said Carol. “Look, Charlie and Basil are holding hands. Now, doesn’t that make you want to smile?”

  Isabel was still silent.

  “Two wee friends,” said Carol.

  “Yes,” said Isabel, vaguely.

  “Don’t you love his freckles?”

  “I do. I do.”

  Charlie saw Isabel and immediately dropped Basil’s hand to run to his mother. Basil did the same, throwing himself into Carol’s opened arms.

  “Hello, Spotty!” said Carol, hugging the little boy to her.

  Isabel was stunned. Spotty. It was a term of endearment, no doubt, but who would call a freckled child that, even in jest? It was about as bad as Fatty for a chubby child, or Rickety for one with bandy legs. She glanced at Basil. He did not seem to mind.

  “Well, we must be off,” said Carol. “I’ve enjoyed talking to you.”

  “Yes,” said Isabel. “Me too.”

  She took Charlie’s hand and began to walk down the path to the gate. She had a lot to think about.

  “Basil smells,” Charlie said.

  Isabel looked down at him in astonishment. “No he doesn’t, Charlie. That’s a very unkind thing to say.”

  “But he does,” said Charlie. “I told him. He said, ‘I don’t.’ But he does.”

  Isabel looked over her shoulder. Carol and Basil were not within earshot. “Charlie,” she said, “we don’t say unkind things about our friends. We just don’t.”

  She heard herself. We don’t say unkind things about our friends. She thought: Would that this were true. Then another thought occurred: If a friend did smell, should you tell him? Children operated at a lower level of moral sophistication than adults, but sometimes they got the answer right precisely because of their lack of sophistication and subtlety.

  What you should say to people...That was her problem reduced to its essentials. Yet even when you reduced some problems to their essentials, they became no easier to answer.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “NOT SIMPLE,” said Peter Stevenson.

  “No.”

  Peter looked at Isabel across the table of his kitchen in the Grange. She had spent the last ten minutes telling her friend about the dilemma with which she was now faced. That dilemma had ruined her sleep the night before, and now, although it was only eleven o’clock in the morning, Isabel felt the heavy hand of fatigue.

  Peter was wide-eyed. “You mean you actually followed them—as in...” He waved a hand airily. “As in some fanciful thriller? Followed?”

  “Yes. Or, rather, tried to follow. I’m not a very successful sleuth, I’m afraid.”

  Peter laughed. “I’ve never met anybody who has actually followed somebody. But I suppose it happens. We see it in films often enough. They follow people onto train platforms, and then when the suspect—I suppose that’s what you call the person being followed—gets onto the train, the person following does the same; and then the suspect gets off again just as the doors are closing.” He paused. “I love that scene. It’s used time and time again, but I still love it.”

  “I didn’t even get that far,” said Isabel. “As I said, I lost them immediately. But then...”

  “Then you were accosted and ended up in the police station and saw a photograph of the freckled man.” Peter relished the words. “The freckled man. That has a real ring to it, doesn’t it? Isn’t there something by Conan Doyle along those lines? Or is it the speckled band?”

  “It’s the speckled band. It’s a snake. One of the best of the Holmes stories.”

  Peter looked at Isabel quizzically. “What do you want me to do?”

  “I don’t want you to do anything,” she said. “I was rather hoping you might help me to decide what to do.” She reached for the mug of coffee that Peter had poured for her. “That is, if you don’t mind.”

  Peter was quick to assure her that he did not. “I suspect you already know what to do,” he said. “Most people who ask for advice do, you know. The advice usually just helps to confirm their intentions.”

  “And what do you think my intentions are?”

  Peter looked out of the window. “On past form,” he began, “I’d say you’re going to inform Basil Phelps—that is, the organist Basil—that he’s being taken advantage of. Then you’re going to tell the Irishwoman...”

  “Patricia.”

  “Yes, her—you’re going to tell her the game’s up.”

  “And what about the police photograph?”

  Peter thought for a moment. “I think you’re going to tell Patricia that you happened to see the photograph because”—he watched her reaction—“because if you don’t, you will continue to wonder whether you should have done so, and you’ll have no peace until you do.”

  Isabel took a sip of her coffee. “How can you be so sure?”

  Peter smiled. “First, am I right?”

  She reached the conclusion reluctantly, but she knew that he was. “Yes,” she said.

  “Well, there we are,” said Peter.

  She asked him what he would do. He answered without hesitation. “I’d find it very difficult to decide—just as you have. I can see the arguments either way: minding my own business—which is always a sensible thing to do—or helping to save somebody from being cheated, which is what is possibly happening here. I emphasise possibly. You don’t really know.” He paused. “I can’t tell you what to do, you know. You want me to do that, I suspect, but should I?”

  Isabel sighed. “You’re right. It would be so much easier for me if you’d simply take this decision for me. That’s what I’ve been hoping—but...”

  “But I can’t do that, can I?”

  She shook her head. “No, you can’t. And it’s unfair of me to expect you to.”

  She looked into her coffee cup. “How do we decide on the limits, Peter? How do we decide what we can do about the world?”

  Peter sighed. “I suspect there isn’t a hard-and-fast rule. You have to do as much as you think is necessary for you and as much as you think you can realistically do. In other words, use common sense.”

  “I wish I could define common sense,” said Isabel.

  “Isn’t common sense more or less a gut feeling as to what seems right?” said Peter. “You could have a more sophisticated definition, of course, but I think that’s at least a start.”

  She thought of what lay ahead. “I’m going to go soon,” she said. “Probably next week. I’m going to go and see Basil Phelps and tell him.”

  “And then?”

  She was less certain as to how to answer that, but eventually she replied, “I think I’ll warn Patricia.”

  “About the photograph?”

  Isabel nodded.

  Peter looked doubtful. “That’s the bit I don’t like.”

  “So I shouldn’t?”

  Peter sank his head in his hands
. “We’re back to square one. You want me to tell you what to do. So, all right, don’t. That whole area is no business of yours—at least in my opinion. And although I’m not going to tell you what to do, I find myself saying: No, don’t do that. Just don’t.” He paused. “So let’s talk about something else. There must be something.”

  “I have another issue,” said Isabel. “I wasn’t going to mention it, but since you ask...”

  She began to tell him about Antonia, but he stopped her before she had got very far.

  “Isabel,” he said, “other lives are other lives. Live yours. Leave it to others to live theirs.”

  She was silent as she thought about this. It was sound advice, in principle, but she thought it might be difficult to apply. “Lives aren’t lived in isolation,” she said. “Unless you cut yourself off from everybody.”

  “True.”

  She made a gesture of helplessness. “So we find ourselves caught up in the affairs of others.”

  “Also true.”

  “And by taking on an au pair, surely I’m responsible in some way for her. And she owes me something in return—she must make some concessions to my feelings.”

  He agreed with that. “You’re entitled to state the house rules. Just be reasonable in what rules you make.”

  “Do you think I would ever be anything but reasonable?”

  She asked the question with a smile, and he answered in the same spirit. “Yes,” he said.

  Again, they both laughed, and went on to discuss something altogether different. Peter’s wife, Susie, who had been upstairs on a long telephone call to their daughter, came downstairs and joined them. Isabel did not burden Susie with her indecision, and their conversation flowed lightly around the themes that old friends in Edinburgh so enjoy: who had said what to whom, when they had said it and what the implications were—not exactly gossip, but something so close to it that one might as well call it gossip. In the nicest sense of the word, of course.

  * * *

  —

  ON THE WAY HOME, Isabel called in at the deli to buy eggs. She spoke to Eddie, who was busy cleaning the slicing machine; he abandoned this task when Isabel arrived and insisted on her sampling a consignment of olives that had just come in. “There are peppers in the oil,” he said. “And garlic. Taste this.”

  She took the proffered olive and popped it into her mouth. “Perfect.”

  Eddie was pleased. “You know that girl, that Antonia? The one who helped yesterday?”

  “Yes, what about her?”

  “She’s coming back this afternoon. She’s just phoned to tell us.”

  Isabel was slightly taken aback. She had seen Antonia briefly that morning and had discussed the ironing with her. Nothing had been said about how she would spend her afternoon.

  “Cat’s really pleased,” said Eddie, nodding in the direction of the office. “And so am I.”

  Isabel reached out to help herself to another olive. “I need a dozen eggs, Eddie. The organic ones.”

  “Oh yes,” said Eddie, “you must have seen what I read the other day. Organic eggs are really good for your eyes. They have something in their yolks that stops you getting macular...macular something or other.”

  “Macular degeneration.”

  “Yes.”

  She waited for him to fetch the eggs. She thought of what he had said: Cat’s really pleased. And so am I. He whistled something—a few bars, tunelessly, but enough for Isabel to reach her conclusion. Eddie had fallen for Antonia. There was something about his manner that gave this away; Isabel had always felt that a person in love simply could not conceal it.

  “Eddie,” she said when he came back, “be careful.”

  He looked down at the box of eggs in his hand. “Of course I will.”

  “No,” she whispered. “Not about the eggs. About Antonia.”

  He blushed, and looked directly into her eyes. She looked back at him. She had known this young man for some years now. She knew that he had been damaged, and she had helped him on his road to recovery; she had seen him flourish. There was a long history here; Eddie was not a stranger to her.

  For a moment he hesitated, but then he put the eggs down and leaned forward to whisper in Isabel’s ear. “Isabel, I’ve known you for ages, haven’t I? And I really want to tell somebody about this, because I’m so...well, I’m so excited.”

  She placed her hand on his shoulder. “It’s all right, Eddie,” she whispered back. “I understand. It’s just that I didn’t want you to be hurt.”

  “Antonia and I are an item. We’ve...well, you know what I mean, we’ve...”

  She felt herself reeling at the disclosure. Why was he telling her this? “When did this happen, Eddie?”

  “Last night.”

  She wanted to laugh, although everything within her said this was not an occasion for laughter—anything but. He had met her that afternoon, and presumably that same evening...

  Then she found herself asking, “Where?” Had this affair started in the deli office?

  “In her room,” said Eddie. “That’s where we were last night. She said it was all right. She said you didn’t mind.”

  Isabel thought: Last night. That was Antonia’s second night in Edinburgh. The first night had been the night when she had gone to Sandy Bell’s and then come back to the house with the unidentified young man. That could not have been Eddie. Eddie was last night—after the conversation with Isabel about guests in rooms.

  She drew back, making Eddie look at her with the sudden concern of one who thinks he has said too much.

  “I shouldn’t have told you,” he said. “You shouldn’t speak about sex. It’s private—I know that—but I just wanted to tell you how happy I am. I wanted to be able to say that to somebody. And I think I know you better than anybody...”

  She touched him gently on the forearm. “That’s all right, Eddie. But just be careful. Remember that some people take these things more seriously than others. You don’t want to go and fall in love with somebody who doesn’t take them as seriously as you do. That’s the way you get hurt.” She struggled not to wince at her own words; Eddie was not a sixteen-year-old who needed warning about the power—and inconstancy—of human emotions. He was a young man in his twenties. And yet he was vulnerable; he was impulsive and had a puppy-dog enthusiasm for the world; having been hurt as a youngster, he could so easily be hurt again. It was all very well for her to limit the scope of her concern, to try to put into practice the advice that both Jamie and Peter consistently gave her—and that other friends did too—but Eddie was not on the margins of her moral circle, one might even say he was somewhere near its centre. She had no alternative, then, but to say what she was saying to him, trying to be as gentle as possible about it, avoiding being too much of a Dutch aunt. But perhaps that is what I am, she thought, a Dutch aunt: telling people off, advising them to do this, that or the other; sticking my nose into their business.

  “Oh, I know that,” he said. “But this is different, Isabel. She’s in love with me. She told me that. Those were her exact words. She loves me, Isabel.”

  * * *

  —

  SHE SAW BASIL PHELPS rather sooner than she had anticipated, and in circumstances that she had not planned. It was at a concert, two days after her conversation with Peter, and Eddie’s disclosure—a concert at which, unusually, she and Jamie were both in the audience. Isabel was used to performances in which Jamie would be on stage, and it was a treat for her to be able to sit with him and enjoy the playing of others. This concert took place in the Queen’s Hall, a converted church that made up in atmosphere for what it lacked in comfort; the church had been Presbyterian, and traditionally that meant hard seats at an upright angle, designed, it would seem, to ensure attention to sermons, and discouraging of anything but Protestant rectitude. Given over to the arts, the build
ing had mellowed, but in its clean lines and unadorned surfaces still reminded the visitor of the culture from which it had emerged. For Isabel and Jamie, though, it was a place of layered memory; here Jamie had first performed Mozart’s Bassoon Concerto to a packed house; here Isabel had listened to him play a tortuous piece of Strindberg and had as a result developed a headache that lasted for eighteen hours; here they had both heard an orchestra of children from a town near Stirling play to an audience largely composed of their parents. Isabel had found herself weeping at that concert, not from watching the children with their half-sized violins and their missed cues, but from seeing the expressions of pride on their parents’ faces. One of the fathers had caught her eye—a bruiser of a man with a broken nose—and he had smiled in recognition of her engagement with the performance, making a thumbs-up sign of triumph.

  Now she was sitting with Jamie halfway down the main body of the hall, waiting for the concert to start. They were early, which gave them time to inspect the programme notes for the concert of Jacobean songs from the court of James VI, both before he left Scotland for England and after he had taken up the glittering heritage conferred on him by the English. The English had chopped off his mother’s head—and would, in time, chop off his son’s—but in spite of that, James, who had been a late convert to music, came to be an enthusiast for all that England had to offer in terms of the music and the arts the religious zealots back in Scotland had so enthusiastically repressed.

  A few minutes before the concert was about to begin, Jamie nudged Isabel gently. She looked up from the programme notes.

  “The French manner,” she muttered. “They liked the French musical style.”

  “Over there,” whispered Jamie. “See? The third row from the front.”

  Isabel followed his gaze. “Who?” Her mind was on Orlando Gibbons. “They’re going to sing ‘Trust not, fair youth, in thy feature.’ A madrigal by Gibbons. Isn’t that a wonderful line? Does feature mean features, do you think? If it does, then what salutary advice for any fair youth...”