She kissed Charlie on his cheek; once, twice. “Oh, did you?” she said. “And what was he doing, my darling?”
“He was playing a trumpet,” said Charlie.
“Really? Does Brother Fox play the trumpet? He’s a clever fox, isn’t he?”
“Fooled you!” cried Charlie.
Jamie still looked concerned. “Are you sure?” he asked. “About what we’ve just been discussing?”
Isabel nodded. “Absolutely,” she said. “Normal life resumes.” And then to Charlie, she said, “Did Daddy give you your dinner?”
“Spaghetti,” answered Charlie. “Lots of spaghetti.”
Isabel put on a thoughtful expression. “I wonder if there’s room for some chocolate cake?”
Charlie squirmed with delight and slipped out of her arms, to run headlong into the kitchen and the high-carbohydrate treat. Isabel turned to Jamie. “Another major ethical dilemma: how many carbohydrates to give our children when we know what carbohydrates—or the wrong sorts of carbohydrates—can do.”
Jamie shrugged. “You can’t have life without chocolate cake.”
“I know,” said Isabel. “A modern paraphrase of Saint Augustine...”
“O Lord, give me the willpower to resist carbohydrates—but not just yet...”
“Precisely,” said Isabel, following Charlie into the kitchen. Perhaps there were low-carbohydrate saints, she thought, who would be examples to all those struggling with the temptations of gastronomy—thin, ascetic saints who believed in the mortification of the flesh and the denial of appetite. What banquets must have awaited those saints in Paradise—groaning tables laden with bowls of sweetmeats, creamy confections, succulent roasts; a time when all restraint and self-denial might be cast off and forgotten, like sins atoned for and forgiven.
Charlie was looking at her expectantly.
“Mummy’s thinking,” said Jamie. “That’s what she does, you see. I’ll get the chocolate cake.”
* * *
—
THAT EVENING, Isabel wrote a message to Claire, who was due to come into work again on Monday morning. She composed it carefully, weighing each word before she read it for a final time and pressed that most irrevocable of all keys—the send button. “Dear Claire, I was looking forward to seeing you on Monday but I’m afraid I shall have to be helping my niece run her deli—unexpected staff problems. [She thought, but did not write: Her young assistant, a rather nice but vulnerable boy called Eddie, has been seduced by our new au pair, whom you’ve met. Who would have thought that she would have such an appetite for men? I didn’t. Perhaps your radar for such things is more acute.] So I shall be out of the house all day, I’m afraid. I’ve left a pile of submissions on your desk—some look all right, others are not going to take up much of your time. [She did not write: One of them is from a certifiable lunatic; I wonder if you’ll spot which one that is.] I’ve also left some proofs for you to read. [She did not write: I can’t stand that job—anything to avoid it.] There’s another thing I wanted to discuss with you but have not had the opportunity to do so. [She did not write: Or the courage...] Professor Lettuce mentioned that he would drop in from time to time to help. I would prefer it if he did not, for entirely private reasons. [She did not write: Extreme, visceral distaste for somebody should always be kept private.] So please would you explain to him that his coming into the office is not a good idea? [She did not write: Because you’re his lover, aren’t you, and presumably can get the message across.] Thank you. Isabel.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
WHEN GRACE ARRIVED on Monday morning, Isabel explained to her about Antonia. Grace listened wide-eyed and said nothing until Isabel had finished. Then, after a good minute of silence, she shook her head and said, “I’m not surprised. Not in the least. Not in the least.”
“Well, I must admit that I was,” said Isabel. “I was very surprised.”
Grace’s smile had a superior look to it. “You’re too charitable, you know. I’m not criticising you, of course, but you’re always too ready to see the good side of people. You never seem to see the bad side.”
Isabel had heard Grace on this subject before. “I see.”
“Yes. That girl, the moment I saw her—the very first moment—I said to myself, She’s interested in only one thing. I could tell—I could tell straightaway. Anybody in trousers had better watch out when she’s around—sorry to be so direct, but that’s exactly what I thought. You can always tell. Always.”
Isabel raised an eyebrow. “But how can you tell? Is this some sort of special intuition?”
“I don’t know about intuition,” said Grace. “It’s the way she looked at Jamie. You saw it in her eyes. She was thinking about...well, you can imagine what she was thinking about. Sorry, but she was. It was every bit as clear as if she had a big flashing neon sign above her head, spelling it out.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really. And then there was the way she walked. Did you notice that? It’s a dead giveaway. Girls like that walk in a special way—it’s extremely hard to imitate, but when you see the real thing there’s no doubt about it. That’s the way they walk.” She gave Isabel an eloquent look, conveying so much about things that could not be spelled out, but that were perfectly understandable to those who understood. “And now she’s got her talons into that poor boy, Eddie. That nice Scottish boy is being led astray by that Italian besom.” Grace used the Scots word, besom, in its original sense, which meant an immoral woman or temptress. An Italian besom, in her view, would clearly be more immoral, more tempting than a Scottish besom—who could possibly disagree with that?
Not Isabel, although if she thought about it...“Well, there we are,” she said.
“She’ll drop him after a few days.”
Isabel said that this was very much what she feared would happen. “I’ll be sending her home,” she said. “We’ll buy her a ticket back to Italy.”
Grace beamed with pleasure. “I’ll go and pack her stuff. We can leave it in the hall so that she doesn’t have to come in.”
“That’s a bit harsh,” said Isabel.
“It’s for the best,” said Grace.
Isabel’s view was different. “No, we’ll treat her with more consideration than she’s treated us.”
“Pity,” said Grace.
* * *
—
THAT MORNING, Isabel did not have time to think about anything other than serving the steady stream of customers who came into the deli. Although she was busy, she was not single-handed: Cat was there in the morning and Leo would arrive at midday to help in the afternoon.
“I have to go to Glasgow this afternoon,” Cat said. “A friend is getting married in the register office there and I’m one of the witnesses.” She added that the friend was a childhood pal—for anyone else she would have cancelled the trip. “I know how awkward all this is for you, Isabel.”
“I don’t mind,” said Isabel. “It will give me the chance to get to know Leo a bit better.”
A shadow crossed Cat’s face. “Give him a chance,” she muttered.
“Of course I will.”
“It’s just that sometimes you...” Cat left the sentence unfinished; the first customer had arrived and was asking for anchovies.
Leo arrived just before the lunchtime rush began. They exchanged perfunctory greetings; Isabel thought him aloof, but that was his manner, she discovered, with customers as well as with her. He was quick and efficient, and she saw that he had a good manner with female customers, who clearly liked him.
Shortly after two, in the first lull of what was proving to be an unusually busy day, Leo offered to make a sandwich for both of them. Isabel accepted; she was tired, her feet hurt and all she wanted to do was to sit down. Leo set to the task and within minutes had produced a tasty club sandwich, laced with the products of the fresh food counter�
�dill pickles, hummus and an exotic cheese that Isabel had never tasted before and that Leo could not identify. “We’ll call it expensive cheese,” he said. “Expensive cheese from somewhere exclusive.”
In the absence of customers, they sat down at one of the tables.
“You look shattered,” said Leo. “Are you all right?”
Isabel would normally have given a stock, reassuring answer to that question, but on this occasion something prompted her to reply differently. “No,” she said. “Not really. I had a difficult weekend.” She hesitated; she wanted to talk. “In fact, something rather shocking happened on Saturday.”
Leo encouraged her to tell him, and without considering why she should tell this near-stranger about what had happened, she gave him the whole story, from her first meeting with Patricia through that bizarre evening in Leith, to the appearance of the freckled man outside the house. He listened attentively, only breaking off for five minutes or so, to attend to a customer, and then returning.
At the end he shook his head in wonderment. “How do you get caught up in something like that?” he asked.
“It just seems to happen,” said Isabel. “I know I shouldn’t—my husband is always telling me not to—but you know how it is.”
“I do,” said Leo. “And you know something? I agree with you. I can’t stand not being able to do something about things that I think need to be sorted.”
Isabel was warming to him. “You must have a strong sense of justice,” she said.
“Too true.” He looked at her. The colour of his eyes, she thought; lion’s eyes.
He ran his hands through his mane of hair. She wanted to touch it, to discover its texture. What would happen, she said to herself, if I leaned forward and did just that? That, of course, was a dare to herself of the sort that we often tantalise ourselves with: the doing of something that we know we shall never do.
“You know,” he continued, “when I was a kid I used to get really upset by unfairness. If I saw somebody get away with something they shouldn’t, then I used to sit there and boil with anger. I really did.”
“Young children have a vivid notion of fairness,” said Isabel. “It tends to pale a bit as they get older.”
“Bullying is one thing I can’t stand,” said Leo. “It makes me see red.”
“It’s horrid,” said Isabel.
“Horrid?” Leo snorted. “Sure, it’s horrid. It’s completely out of line.”
“Zero tolerance,” said Isabel.
“Yes, sure. Zero tolerance.”
Leo looked thoughtful. “This guy—this freckled guy—what was his beef?”
Isabel was not quite sure how to answer that. The most likely explanation, she thought, was that Basil Phelps had spoken to Patricia. Although he had summarily rejected her approach, it was possible that he had been sufficiently piqued by her suggestion to raise it with Patricia. Presumably she would have denied the allegation, but she could have mentioned to Archie McGuigan—if that was who the freckled man was—that Isabel had spoken to him. The idea of intimidating Isabel might be his, or Patricia’s, although Isabel imagined that it was more likely to be his. His manner in the car, crude and threatening, showed what sort of person he was—and his presence in a police rogues’ gallery of photographs pointed in much the same direction.
“It’s complicated,” she said to Leo.
“Try me.”
She told him, and he nodded as she spoke. “Yes,” he said. “Yes. This all makes sense.”
Perhaps it made sense to him, she thought, but to her it seemed utterly improbable. People did not threaten one another on the streets of Edinburgh, in broad daylight...She stopped herself. Of course they did. People did such things to one another everywhere, at all times of the day and night; and they did far worse. People used violence, people stole, tricked, lied, killed. People were ruthless, and if it seemed to her that none of this happened in her world, that was because her world was something of a parallel universe to that occupied by most of humanity. Most of humanity did not live in the circumstances in which she lived, insulated by good fortune from the economic realities that made life a struggle; most of humanity did not earn its living by editing the philosophical observations of others; much of humanity did not have the happiness and contentment of a marriage such as hers. So, yes, it was perfectly feasible that when she strayed into the murky business of others, then she would risk being subjected to this sort of thing.
She felt herself blushing at the thought: the naïve, privileged wilting at the first experience of gritty reality. When she had described bullying as horrid, she had seen Leo begin to smile—he must have been thinking just that: You’re out of your depth.
Their break was over. A couple of customers had wandered into the deli and one of them was looking pointedly—and impatiently—in their direction.
“Don’t worry,” said Leo under his breath as he rose from his chair. “Don’t be frightened.”
“But I am,” she said.
“Just don’t. Understand? Just don’t.”
Which was all very well, Isabel thought, when your name was Leo, you looked like a lion and you were built as he was. Built, she thought; some people are just thrown together, but others are built. There was a difference. She found herself staring at his shoulders, and then, quite accidentally, but with a certain inevitability, her gaze slipped down across his chest and to the buckle of his belt, a pitted brass affair, larger than necessary for its purpose, not an ornament, she thought, but a brazen statement of physicality. He saw this, and she looked away sharply. He reached out and put a hand on her shoulder, very briefly, but in that moment something seemed to pass between them. She stepped away, confused and embarrassed, regretting the fact that having strayed into one murky world, she now found herself on the perilous, seductive edge of another. Confusion and embarrassment became shame.
Later on in the afternoon, shortly before they were due to close and lock up, Leo said to her, “That story you told me this morning—amazing, really amazing.” He paused. “Actually, it’s shocking. And it happens, you know. Women think they can do that to men—make them pay for another guy’s child.”
“I’m not sure if it happens that often,” said Isabel. “And I think we need to bear in mind that there are many, many men who don’t pay up for their children—the ones they really are responsible for.”
“Oh sure,” said Leo. “There are some men like that, but it’s easy, isn’t it, for a woman to pick some random guy to come up with the cash for her kid? What’s to lose?”
Isabel thought that it was probably not all that easy, and said so. There were DNA tests, too, that could resolve the matter beyond a shadow of a doubt, and could do so quickly and easily. Genetic tests worked both ways: to refute just as much as to confirm paternity. She had wondered why Basil Phelps had not asked for a test to be carried out. It was possible it had not occurred to him that Patricia had another lover during the currency of their affair. Or there might have been a gentlemanly reticence that prevented his confronting her; that was possible, of course.
Leo was still thinking of female perfidy. “They shouldn’t get away with it,” he said.
Isabel shrugged. “I’m with you on that, but...” She made a helpless gesture with her hands. “Something I’m learning is that you can’t set everything right in this life. You have to let things happen.”
Leo simply said, “Negative.”
She wanted to laugh. Who said negative and affirmative like that? Army officers? Astronauts? People who had lost all their day-to-day words—the words that ordinary people used when conversing; words that were simple and direct and that had the patina of the ages about them; words like yes and no.
* * *
—
WHEN SHE ARRIVED HOME, Jamie was bathing the boys. For Charlie, the evening bath was a high point of the day—a
n opportunity for rumbustious aquatic play, a pretext to soak his parents and enjoy their reaction to the inundation, a chance to make Magnus cry by splashing him in the face—all of these things added anticipation to bath-time. Isabel stood in the bathroom doorway unseen, and watched for a short while before announcing her presence.
“Mummy!” shouted Charlie. “Magnus is drinking the bath water.”
Half turning round, Jamie said, “Not on my watch.” And to Charlie, he said, “That’s a fib, Charlie, and we don’t tell fibs, do we.”
“I won’t interfere,” said Isabel. “I’ll do a story for Charlie if you get Magnus to bed.”
Jamie agreed, and then remembered something. “Major drama here,” he said. “Claire.”
Isabel froze. “Oh?”
“Resigned,” said Jamie.
Isabel’s face fell. She did not have to enquire as to the reason: her letter had forced Claire to choose between carrying on in her post—and offending her lover—or declining to say anything that risked her relationship with Lettuce. She had obviously chosen the latter option—and who could blame her for that?
They waited until the boys had both been settled before they sat down in the kitchen and discussed the day’s events.
“Claire arrived shortly after you’d gone to Cat’s,” began Jamie. “She said she was sorry to have missed you, and I said that she could call you there if she liked, but she seemed unwilling to do that. Then she became quite weepy—just like that—out of the blue. I asked her what was wrong, and she said that she had had a really hurtful message from you. I said, ‘Can I read it?’ but she was dead set against that. She said you’d put her in an impossible position.”
The Quiet Side of Passion Page 23