Jamie grinned. He would have liked Oscar Wilde, he thought—in small doses. But it would have been exhausting to listen to him for too long. That was the trouble with very witty people—they tire the rest of us. Boswell, he had always imagined, must have found it rather wearying to be in Dr. Johnson’s company day after day on their trip through Scotland. Oh just shut up, will you, we’ve got miles to go and you keep coming up with these wise observations…
He frowned. “One thing?”
“They weren’t his actual last words. Apparently he said that a few weeks before he died.”
Jamie shook his head. “Nice try, though.”
Isabel brought the conversation back to Lin Yutang. She would look for his book that evening, she decided. “There’s something else Lin said that I must look up. He wrote an essay on flowers, I seem to recall, and he lists the conditions that displease flowers. Isn’t that a marvellous notion—that flowers should be displeased by certain things?”
“Flowers with attitude,” said Jamie. “Sure. But what?”
“I don’t remember everything on the list—in fact, I can only remember one thing he said flowers definitely don’t like.”
“Which is?”
“Monks talking noisily,” said Isabel. “Apparently that displeases flowers.”
“And oysters,” said Jamie. “What annoys them?”
Isabel thought for a moment, but only a moment. “A noisy noise,” she said. “A noisy noise annoys an oyster. Or so the tongue twister would have us believe.”
She glanced at her watch. She would have been happy to talk for ever about ancestors and rugby and Lin Yutang, but she had to put on the leek and potato soup for lunch and then, at two o’clock, she was expected to help in Cat’s delicatessen. Her niece, whose delicatessen had recently become increasingly popular, had chosen a busy summer weekend to go off to Paris. She had not explained what took her there—or who, thought Isabel; and Isabel did not like to pry—or wish to pry, perhaps, as she enjoyed prying a great deal. Cat had arranged cover for Saturday morning but was short of a hand for Saturday afternoon. Eddie, her long-standing assistant, was generally competent but was subject to panic attacks if there were too many people waiting for service at the counter. He was always reassured by Isabel’s presence and never felt his panicky symptoms if she was there.
She rose to her feet, and so did Jamie. He came round to her side of the table, took her hand and squeezed it.
“What’s that for?” she asked.
He looked down at her; he was four inches taller than she was, which Isabel found just right. But everything about Jamie was just right, in her view. His eyes, the nape of his neck, his chin, his laugh, his gentleness. And she liked, too, the way he was filled with music; it was there in his mind, and it came out so effortlessly when he sat at the piano or played his bassoon, or when he sang. It was as if there were wells within him, deep wells of music waiting to be drawn upon.
“It’s for you,” he said. “Just a random thank-you. And because I really…well, because I actually rather love you.”
He leaned forward and kissed her upon the lips. He had been eating mint chocolate, and she loved mint chocolate at that moment.
“Let’s have a special dinner tonight,” he said. “I’ll cook. I’ll do something from that Israeli chef. The one who does Near Eastern cuisine. You like his things, don’t you?”
“I do. But be careful with the cous cous. Watch the quantity. They love their cous cous and one can only take a certain amount of cous.”
He nodded in mock solemnity. “And New Zealand white wine? Before they ask us to send it back?”
She laughed. “Yes. Yes to everything.” And then she added, “He’s called Ottolenghi, that chef. And he deserves a tongue twister of his own. Lo, Ottolenghi lengthens leeks laterally. How about that? Or, Competent chefs count cous cous cautiously?”
There was a noise from under the table. “Silly,” said Charlie.
Isabel and Jamie looked at one another. Isabel mouthed a question. “Is he talking about our conversation?”
They looked under the table at Charlie. He had finished drawing and now he thrust the piece of paper at them. Isabel took the crumpled sheet and examined it.
“You,” said Charlie. “You and Daddy.”
Two people, stick figures both, were surrounded by what looked like flowers. Behind them was the typical childish, stylised rendition of a house—all windows and doors and chimneys. There was a benevolent sun in the sky, smiling, as the sun in children’s art inevitably is, and birds. The taller of the two figures held the hand of the shorter.
Jamie noticed something else. Behind the birds, what looked like an aeroplane crossed the sky. There were lines drawn around it—wavy lines suggestive of movement, of chaos.
“And a plane,” said Jamie. “Charlie, you’ve drawn us a plane as well. Clever boy!”
Charlie was standing now. His knees showed the tattoos; his fingers were blackened by ink from the pen. “Plane crashing,” he said. “Bang.”
Jamie affected dismay. “But it was so nice, Charlie. Look—those pretty flowers and the birds and even the sun smiling on it all. So nice.”
Charlie peered at his own drawing. “Nice before,” he said.
Nice before. Isabel wondered how Jamie was going to handle this. And then she thought, But what Charlie has said is exactly what Lin Yutang meant. She would talk to Jamie about that later—over the Ottolenghi dinner and the New Zealand white wine.
IMMEDIATELY AFTER LUNCH Jamie and Charlie set off for the Zoo while Isabel made her way to Cat’s delicatessen. She had promised Cat that she would be there at two, and she was going to be a few minutes late. That would not matter too much, though, as the assistant who had been helping through the morning had said that she would be happy to stay until Isabel arrived.
She was vaguely annoyed with Cat. Isabel was happy enough to lend a hand in her niece’s delicatessen, and did this often, sometimes with very little notice. If Cat were ill, or if she had to stay in her flat to await the arrival of the dishwasher engineer, Isabel would drop whatever she was doing and cover for her. Cat’s dishwasher was temperamental, and obviously needed replacing, but she had a service contract that entitled her to the attentions of an engineer whenever necessary, and without further charge. It was a vastly disadvantageous contract for the company, but they answered her calls without complaint, and Cat, it seemed, had no intention of purchasing a new machine.
“It still works,” she said to Isabel. “And I’m fond of it.”
Isabel had listened to this explanation with a certain degree of puzzlement. “Frankly,” she said, “I can’t see how one can become fond of something so patently inanimate, like a dishwasher, or even a fridge. They’re just machines, after all.”
She saw Cat looking at her with disbelief. “But of course you can. Look at people with their old cars. They love them to bits.”
There was some truth in that. “But cars have personality. People give them names.” I love my green Swedish car, she thought, although I’ve never told it I do…
Cat was staring at her. “Why are you smiling?”
“Oh, nothing…Well, I was thinking about the love of cars. Are there men, do you think, who love their cars more than they love women?”
“Hundreds,” said Cat. “Thousands.”
Isabel imagined a woman desperately giving her man an ultimatum. You have to choose between me and the car…
“And football too,” said Cat. “There are a lot of men who think more about football than they do about relationships.”
Isabel could believe that. But now, walking along Merchiston Crescent, she thought about the latest call from Cat. None of us likes being taken for granted, including those who will rarely turn down a request for help; even St. Francis, she imagined, might have felt a bit imposed upon by the birds. They assume I’m going to feed them every day…Paris: the city of light; Cat walking by the Seine; Cat in the Tuileries…But what exactl
y was she doing there? If I went off to Paris and asked somebody to look after things for me, I would explain why I was going. I would say something like I’m going off to Paris because there’s a Monet exhibition or whatever. There was always a special exhibition to see in Paris. Isabel would not have said that she was simply going off to Paris and could you please give up your Saturday afternoon to work in my delicatessen. Or would she?
She wondered whether Cat took her for granted. Their relationship was an unusual one; although Isabel was her aunt, there was not a very great age gap between them, and in some respects they were more like cousins; cousins were often a decade or so apart, which was almost like being a coeval, if not quite.
But there was another reason why their relationship was unusual, and this was a bit more complex. Cat had notoriously bad taste in men, and over the years had been involved with a succession of patently unsuitable boyfriends. There had been Toby, of course, who had irritated Isabel with his attitudes and his crushed-strawberry trousers. She knew it was unfair to judge somebody by the colour of his trousers, and she had tried not to, but she had ended up doing just that. Crushed-strawberry trousers, in her mind, somehow went with views that were at odds with the way she saw the world. She knew that this was irrational, and unfair, and that she should not hold such indefensible opinions, but she could not help herself. Most of us have preferences that we cannot explain or justify—those who dislike a particular composer’s work may not know why they feel that way, but the dislike is real. Some people cannot abide fish, or whisky, or Spanish onions; they may not be able to say why they dislike these things, but that will make no difference to their feelings. It might be cultural: some cultures distrust certain forms of food, or food not prepared in a particular way; or it may be based on some early unpleasant experience—being forced to eat fish as a child; an over-indulgence in whisky at a party; a meal involving Spanish onions and a rejection in love—there are so many ways in which we may be turned, in a lasting way, against something or somebody.
Isabel had been pleased when Cat and Toby had split up, although she sought to conceal her satisfaction at the rupture. But there had been others, post-Toby, who were even worse, and Jamie, who was quite unlike all the others. Jamie and Cat had been involved with one another for a rather brief period. Isabel had approved of him, of course, and had hoped that Cat had come to her romantic senses. But no, she had not, and it was soon all over. Isabel, though, had already established a friendship with Jamie, and this had, in due course, and rather to the surprise of both of them, turned into something more. That had caused predictable difficulties with Cat. She might not want a particular man, but that did not mean that her aunt could swoop in and pick him up. What niece could fail to resent that?
Isabel had felt her way carefully through the ensuing tricky period, and it was only because she was persistent and tactful with Cat that her relationship with her niece survived. But there were further hazards ahead, including the birth of Charlie and her and Jamie’s eventual marriage. Again, it was Isabel’s tact that had managed to avert an outright split, and now she and Cat got on much better. But she still felt that Cat sometimes asked, and expected, too much. An objective observer would undoubtedly have agreed with that; Cat did ask rather a lot of Isabel, possibly because she knew that Isabel would always respond. There was no selfishness in Isabel—which was half the problem, said Jamie; you have to leave room for yourself, for your own needs. If you were too generous—as he thought Isabel tended to be—you could end up with nothing in the bank.
Of course, to leave this life with an empty current account could just as well be a sign of a life well lived rather than of fecklessness or prodigality. There were people who gave away what they had because they believed this was their duty, or because they were just intrinsically generous, and could even do so to the point of reducing themselves to penury in the process. They were quite different from the very wealthy, who, even as they dispensed largesse, were careful to keep a good cushion of funds for themselves.
“Don’t worry,” Isabel said to Jamie. “I’m not planning to give everything away.”
“I didn’t think you would,” he said. “People don’t do that, do they?”
“Some do,” said Isabel. And she thought of John Maitland Moir, and saw him, for a moment, on his bicycle, in his Orthodox priest’s cassock, cycling around Edinburgh. “John Maitland Moir, for instance. Remember him?”
Jamie thought for a moment. “That chap on the bicycle? With the grey beard?”
Isabel nodded. “He was the son of a fairly well-to-do doctor out in Currie. And his mother wasn’t short of funds either. So he inherited a lot of money.” She had once been told just how much it was, but had forgotten. “He gave it all away—all of it. Over the years he just handed it out to people who needed help—tramps, down-and-outs, men who had been in prison and who had nobody else to turn to. He gave them food, coffee, clothing. And at the end, when he died, there was nothing left. Nothing. He died penniless.”
“A good man,” said Jamie.
“Very,” said Isabel. “Wonderfully eccentric, but completely good. Did you know that he wore a kilt under his cassock? He was a fervent Scottish patriot.”
Jamie wondered how he had ended up as an Orthodox priest. “Surely it’s a bit unlikely—a Scotsman on a bicycle, with a concealed kilt—also being an Orthodox priest.”
It happened that Isabel knew how the conversion had taken place. John had told her himself. “He found himself in sympathy with Orthodox theology,” she said. “He went to Mount Athos and studied there. They received him into the faith. And he always held that the Scottish Episcopal Church had been liturgically influenced by Eastern Orthodoxy. It’s all very complicated. Something to do with the epiclesis—the calling down of the Holy Spirit at a certain point in the service. He thought that very important because…”
“How completely pointless,” interjected Jamie.
“Why do you say that?”
Jamie shrugged. “If there’s a god, do you think it makes the slightest bit of difference what form of words you use when you address him? Or her? I suspect they don’t like the thought that God could be feminine.”
There was no reason why God should even listen to us, Isabel thought. And there was certainly no reason to assume his good will, much as we might wish for that good will to exist. After all, look at the Greek gods, Isabel reminded herself, who were far from indifferent—to the point of taking pleasure in making our human lives difficult. No, the idea of a benevolent god was very much an exception in the enormous pantheon of gods that people had invented over the course of human history. The most that many people could hope for was that they should not incur the wrath of gods whom they had failed to appease or propitiate; beyond that, gods should be left to get on with their proper business and mortals with theirs.
She looked at Jamie. “It may well be right to say that God doesn’t care. But…” She was not sure what she wanted to say about God. She thought that he might be there—embodied somehow in the perfection of the world, or in the sublime harmonies of a great work of music. Of course, if he was anywhere in music, she felt he was in the grave beauty of the motets of John Tavener, or in the more sublime passages of Bach. The architecture of such music was incompatible, Isabel thought, with a world that was meaningless. Nor did she believe that our reaction to such pieces of music merely resulted from the brain’s recognition of pattern and order. That left her sympathetic to those who held religious views, even if at the same time she found it difficult to imagine a god who attended to our prayers. Although she was unenthusiastic about theology, she had long since realised that the real point of prayer was not to flatter those addressed; prayer was a form of meditation, she decided, and it did not detract from its efficacy that nobody was listening. Or so she had reasoned, until she had come across the argument that the prayers of many could amount to a large body of energy directed towards a particular goal, and that such energy could somehow have
an impact on the material world. Prayer was directed energy, and we should at least be open-minded on what directed energy might achieve. The roar of a sporting crowd urging on its side could make a great difference to the outcome, she had heard it said. And then there were psychosomatic effects in medicine: if you thought you were going to get better, you often did; and vice versa, of course. Mind over matter was how her father had put it—although he was talking about golf.
As she walked along, Isabel found herself humming a tune triggered by these thoughts of prayer and imprecation. It was about wishing on stars, and about how kind and benevolent Fate might make your wish come true. She had known the song as a child, and had a dog-eared book in which each line was accompanied by an illustration. She could still see the picture of Fate weaving a cloth of the submitted wishes from those below, and making them come true—just as the song said she would. She had believed that book, and had fervently tried to make one of her wishes develop in just the way they did in the song. Fate is kind, the song assured her; she brings good things to those who dream; Isabel had believed this at the age of eight, and never quite lost that belief. Later, though, she shored this belief up; there was no such person as Fate, but there might be something called karma, and that, she thought, brought at least some people the things they deserved.
Isabel had never given Cat money, mainly because she had never asked for it and presumably did not need it. Isabel had never been quite sure of her niece’s financial position, but she assumed that Cat was comfortable enough. Certainly Cat’s father had been in a position to set his daughter up in her delicatessen, and her flat, and he had done both of these. Emotionally, though, he had given her very little, and Isabel had wondered whether this might explain her niece’s restless moving from man to man. The amateur psychologist, she imagined, might simply nod and say, Looking for father. It would have been a glib explanation of something much more complex, but she thought there was possibly a grain of truth in it. If a woman had a good relationship with her male parent, then she was unlikely to suffer from the insecurity that led to difficulties in maintaining stable relationships with men.