The road ahead curved slowly to the left. Off to the right, the land dipped down towards the plains of the coast, to the cone of Berwick Law and the blue haze of the North Sea. Suddenly she thought of the schoolboy with whom she had spoken; she saw his serious expression, his freckles, his green eyes, and she smiled as she sent him a mental message: Don’t worry. You may think you are in prison right at the moment, but the door will open soon enough. Remember that. It will—it really will.
BACK IN EDINBURGH, and two days later, they did not have far to go for their picnic—only a few paces, really, out on to the lawn behind the house, close to the wooden summerhouse that Isabel had decided she would soon convert into a place for Charlie to play in with his friends, when he eventually found some. There she laid a rubber-backed picnic rug on the grass—a rug in Macpherson tartan—and brought a few of Charlie’s toys to keep him entertained: an old wooden truck, green in body, with red wheels, that had belonged to her father and would not have looked out of place in a museum of childhood; his stuffed fox, who might be a familiar for their resident member of the species, Brother Fox; a vaguely sinister woollen spider, knitted by a Morningside widow and sold for charity at a bring-and-buy sale at Holy Corner. These would keep him entertained for hours, as he loaded the spider and fox into the back of the truck and then unloaded them again; interminably, it seemed; fascinated by the whole process.
“Do you think he knows that his stuffed fox is a fox?” asked Jamie, as Isabel laid out a plate of cucumber sandwiches and a neatly quartered Scotch egg pie. “Or is it just … something else?”
“I’ve been trying to see if he says ‘fo’ when he plays with it,” said Isabel. “He knows that Brother Fox is a fo, as he calls him. But I’m not sure if he knows that this is a fo.”
“Fo!” exclaimed Charlie, pointing to the bushes alongside the garden wall.
“Perhaps,” said Isabel. “He may be there. But I don’t see him, do you, Charlie?”
Isabel passed Jamie a quarter of the pie, and for Charlie she cut off an eighth. “We bank up so many resentments in our children,” she said. “As Mr. Larkin observed in that poem of his.”
“I haven’t read it,” said Jamie. “What does he say?”
Isabel waved a hand in the air. “Oh, something about how your mum and dad confuse you.”
“Confuse?”
“Well, something like that.”
Jamie looked puzzled. “Why do you mention that?”
She pointed to the tiny piece of pie. “Because here I am giving you a large slice of pie, and Charlie gets one-eighth of a pie.”
Jamie snorted. “He won’t notice. The size of one’s pie in this life depends on the size of one’s stomach. Charlie has a small stomach.”
“You’re right,” said Isabel. “He seems happy enough.” Words came to her, unbidden, unplanned. “I never wished for larger pies / A one-eighth pie was very nice / I never yearned for larger pies / My own small slice would quite suffice.”
She looked at Jamie, and they both burst out laughing.
“Don’t expect me to set that to music,” said Jamie.
“I don’t.”
They moved on to cucumber sandwiches. Above them, the sky was pale blue, empty apart from a few stately drifts of high, cotton-wool cumulus. Jamie lay back on the rug and stared up into the void; Isabel followed his gaze. They had more than enough cucumber sandwiches; they had all the elderflower cordial in the world; they had box after box of wafer-thin almond biscuits; they had everything that two people and a child could ever want.
“You’ve been busy, haven’t you?” observed Jamie. “I’ve been worried about you.”
“You don’t need to worry about me,” she said dreamily. “My life seems to tick over in a satisfactory way. Not much happens, I suppose. I run a philosophical review. I have a little boy. I have a hus …”
“… band,” he said. “Or almost. When are we going to get married, Isabel?”
“Soon,” she said. “We can talk about it after this picnic.”
“We mustn’t forget.”
“No, we won’t. I promise.”
He turned on to his stomach and, resting his head on his forearm, looked across the rug at Isabel. “Have you dealt with that business with Professor Lettuce?”
“No,” said Isabel. “And I don’t know what to do. I just don’t.”
“Then let me decide for you. You say that he sent in a dreadful review of Dove’s book?”
“Yes. It arrived yesterday. They must have fallen out with one another. They’ve done that before—like squabbling children. He tore the book to shreds.”
Jamie thought for a moment. “If you don’t publish it, then he’ll think that you’re trying to silence him. He’ll accuse you of personal pique because of what went before with Dove and him.”
“Quite likely.”
“And if you do publish it, then Dove will think that you’re trying to destroy him—for the same reason: what went before.”
“Yes.”
Jamie thought for a moment. “All right. This is what you should do. Write to both of them—the same letter. Say that you will not be party to their private rows and that this is the reason why you will not publish the review. Let Dove read the review, and he can sort it out with Lettuce. Or not. It’ll be up to them.” He paused, judging her response to his suggestion. “In that way, you’ll rise above both of them.”
She nodded her agreement. “That’s the wisdom of Solomon. Thank you. And I have always wanted to rise above Dove and Lettuce.”
“Well, you do. Calmly and elegantly, like a Zeppelin, you rise above them.”
She smiled. She knew it was a compliment. “You’re very kind.”
“Because I love you so much,” he said. “That is why I like to be kind to you.”
“And that is why I shall bring you all the flowers of the mountain,” said Isabel. “For the self-same reason.”
She went on to say something else, but Jamie found his attention drifting. He was feeling sleepy, for it was warm, and he could lie there for ever, he thought, listening to the sound of Isabel’s voice, in the way one listens to the conversations of birds, or the sound of a waterfall descending the side of a Scottish mountain; sounds for which we cannot come up with a meaning, but which we love dearly with all our heart, and loving anything with all your heart always brings understanding, in time.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alexander McCall Smith is the author of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, the Isabel Dalhousie series, the Portuguese Irregular Verbs series, and the 44 Scotland Street series. He is professor emeritus of medical law at the University of Edinburgh and has served on many national and international bodies concerned with bioethics. He was born in what is now known as Zimbabwe and taught law at the University of Botswana. He lives in Scotland.
Alexander McCall Smith, The Charming Quirks of Others
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