Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Permissions Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Alexander McCall Smith
Copyright
This book is for Amy Tan
CHAPTER ONE
WHAT MADE ISABEL DALHOUSIE think about chance? It was one of those curious coincidences—an inconsequential one—as when we turn the corner and find ourselves face-to-face with the person we’ve just been thinking about. Or when we answer the telephone and hear at the other end the voice of the friend we had been about to call. These things make us believe either in telepathy—for which there is as little hard evidence as there is, alas, for the existence of Santa Claus—or in pure chance, which we flatter ourselves into thinking plays a small role in our lives. Yet chance, Isabel thought, determines much of what happens to us, from the original birth lottery onwards. We like to think that we plan what happens to us, but it is chance, surely, that lies behind so many of the great events of our lives—the meeting with the person with whom we are destined to spend the rest of our days, the receiving of a piece of advice which influences our choice of career, the spotting of a particular house for sale; all of these may be put down to pure chance, and yet they govern how our lives work out and how happy—or unhappy—we are going to be.
It happened when she was walking with Jamie across the Meadows, the large, tree-lined park that divides South Edinburgh from the Old Town. Jamie was her…What was he? Her lover—her younger lover—her boyfriend; the father of her child. She was reluctant to use the word partner because it has associations of impermanence and business arrangements. Jamie was most definitely not a business arrangement; he was her north, her south, to quote Auden, whom she had recently decided she would quote less frequently. But even in the making of that resolution, she had found a line from Auden that seemed to express it all, and had given up on that ambition. And why, she asked herself, should one not quote those who saw the world more clearly than one did oneself?
Her north, her south; well, now they were walking north, on one of those prolonged Scottish summer evenings when it never really gets dark, and when one might forget just how far from south one really is. The fine weather had brought people out onto the grass; a group of young men, bare-chested in the unaccustomed warmth, were playing a game of football, discarded tee-shirts serving as the goal markers; a man was throwing a stick for a tireless border collie to fetch; a young couple lay stretched out, the girl’s head resting on the stomach of a bearded youth who was looking away, at something in the sky that only he could see. The air was heavy, and although it would soon be eight o’clock, there was still a good deal of sunlight about—soft, slanting sunlight, with the quality that goes with light that has been about for the whole day and is now comfortable, used.
The coincidence was that Jamie should suddenly broach the subject of what it must be like to feel thoroughly ashamed of oneself. Later on she asked herself why he had suddenly decided to talk about that. Had he seen something on the Meadows to trigger such a line of thought? Strange things were no doubt done in parks by shameless people, but hardly in the early evening, in full view of passersby, on an evening such as this. Had he seen some shameless piece of exhibitionism? She had read recently of a Catholic priest who went jogging in the nude, and explained that he did so on the grounds that he sweated profusely when he took exercise. Indeed, for such a person it might be more convenient not to be clad, but this was not Sparta, where athletes disported naked in the palaestra; this was Scotland, where it was simply too cold to do as in Sparta, no matter how classically minded one might be.
Whatever it was that prompted Jamie, he suddenly remarked: “What would it be like not to be able to go out in case people recognised you? What if you had done something so…so appalling that you couldn’t face people?”
Isabel glanced at him. “You haven’t, have you?”
He smiled. “Not yet.”
She looked up at the skyline, at the conical towers of the old Infirmary, at the crouching lion of Arthur’s Seat in the distance, beyond a line of trees. “Some who have done dreadful things don’t feel it at all,” she said. “They have no sense of shame. And maybe that’s why they did it in the first place. They don’t care what others think of them.”
Jamie thought about this for a moment. “But there are plenty of others, aren’t there? People who have done something out of character. People who have a conscience and who yet suddenly have given in to passing temptation. Some dark urge. They must feel ashamed of themselves, don’t you think?”
Isabel agreed. “Yes, they must. And I feel so sorry for them.” It had always struck her as wrong that we should judge ourselves—or, more usually, others—by single acts, as if a single snapshot said anything about what a person had been like over the whole course of his life. It could say something, of course, but only if it was typical of how that person behaved; otherwise, no, all it said was that at that moment, in those particular circumstances, temptation won a local victory.
They walked on in silence. Then Isabel said, “And what about being made to feel ashamed of what you are? About being who you are.”
“But do people feel that?”
Isabel thought that they did. “Plenty of people feel ashamed of being poor,” she said. “They shouldn’t, but many do. Then some feel ashamed of being a different colour from those around them. Again, they shouldn’t. And others feel ashamed of not being beautiful, of having the wrong sort of chin. Of having the wrong number of chins. All of these things.”
“It’s ridiculous.”
“Of course it is.” Jamie, she realised, could say that; the blessed do not care from what angle they are regarded, as Auden…She stopped herself, and thought instead of moral progress, of how much worse it had been only a few decades ago. Things had changed for the better: now people asserted their identities with pride; they would not be cowed into shame. Yet so many lives had been wasted, had been ruined, because of unnecessary shame.
She remembered a friend’s mother who had discovered, at the age of twelve, that she was illegitimate, that the father who had been said to have been killed in an accident was simply not there, a passing, regretted dalliance that had resulted in her birth. Today that meant very little, when vast cohorts of children sprang forth from maternity hospitals without fathers who had signed up to anything, but for that woman, Isabel had been told, the rest of her life, from twelve onwards, was to be spent in shame. And with that shame there came the fear that others would find out about her illegitimacy, would stumble upon her secret. Stolen lives, Isabel thought, lives from which the joy had been extracted; and yet we could not banish shame altogether—she herself had written that in one of her editorials in the Review of Applied Ethics, in a special issue on the emotions. Without shame, guilt became a toothless thing, a prosecutor with no penalties up his sleeve.
They were on their way to a dinner party, and had decided to walk rather than call a taxi, since the evening was so inviting. Their host lived in Ramsay Garden, a cluster of flats clinging to the edge of the Castle Rock like an impossible set constructed by some operatic visionary and then left for real people to move int
o. From the shared courtyard below, several cream-harled buildings, with tagged-on staircases and balconies, grew higgledy-piggledy skywards, their scale and style an odd mixture of Arts and Crafts and Scottish baronial. It was an expensive place to live, much sought-after for the views which the flats commanded over Princes Street and the Georgian New Town beyond.
She had told Jamie who their hosts were, but he had forgotten, and he asked her again as they climbed the winding stairway to the topmost flat. She found herself thinking: Like all men, he does not listen. Men switch off and let you talk, but all the time something else is going on in their minds.
“Fleurs-de-lis,” said Isabel, running her hand along the raised plaster motifs on the wall of the stairway. “Who are they? People I don’t know very well. And I think that I owe them, anyway. I was here for dinner three years ago, if I remember correctly. And I never invited them back. I meant to, but didn’t. You know how it is.”
She smiled at herself for using the excuse You know how it is. It was such a convenient, all-purpose excuse that one could tag it on to just about anything. And what did it say? That one was human, and that one should be forgiven on those grounds? Or that the sheer weight of circumstances sometimes made it difficult to live up to what one expected of oneself? It was such a flexible excuse, and one might use it for the trivial or the not so trivial. Napoleon, for instance, might say, Yes, I did invade Russia; I’m so sorry, but you know how it is.
Jamie ended her reverie. “They’ve forgiven you,” he said. “Or they weren’t counting.”
“Do you have to invite people back?” Isabel asked. “Is it wrong to accept an invitation if you know that you won’t reciprocate?”
Jamie ran his finger across the fleurs-de-lis. “But you haven’t told me who they are.”
“I was at school with her,” said Isabel. “She was very quiet. People laughed at her a bit—you know how children are. She had an unfortunate nickname.”
“Which was?”
Isabel shook her head. “I’m sorry, Jamie, I shouldn’t tell you.” That was how nicknames were perpetuated; how her friend Sloppy Duncan was still Sloppy Duncan thirty years after the name was first minted.
Jamie shrugged. “What are their real names then? I need to know those.”
“Colin and Marjorie. And their surname is MacDonald. He’s some sort of lawyer. Intellectual property, I think. And she…well, I don’t think that she does anything, or anything for which she gets paid. She volunteers a lot. And she’s very active with a domestic violence shelter that looks after women who flee abusive men. She’s always busy.”
“Why have they invited us?” asked Jamie.
Isabel hesitated, and then gave a noncommittal answer. She had decided that the reason for the invitation, which was an unexpected one, was that the MacDonalds had heard about Jamie and wanted to inspect him. She knew that there had been gossip; Edinburgh was too small a place to allow a woman of Isabel’s standing to take a younger lover without people talking about it. And some of this gossip had got back to her, as gossip inevitably does. The truth had been distorted, just as it is in a game of Chinese whispers. In one version Jamie was alleged to be a young sailor whom she had picked up at the Royal Forth Yacht Club annual dance, not an occasion she had ever attended; in another he was the gardener—Mellors to her Lady Chatterley; and in one particularly outrageous distortion, he was barely seventeen and had escaped from Fettes College, an expensive Edinburgh boarding school, to be with her. “They said that he climbed out of the window,” she was told. “After midnight. And that you were waiting for him on Inverleith Place, in your car.” In my green Swedish car, she thought; parked under a tree, in the shadows of night, the engine idling, waiting for a boy.
Had she been more sensitive to criticism, she would have smarted at these embellishments, but Isabel did not especially care what people said about her. She knew, too, that at least some of those who disapproved of her relationship with Jamie were envious; it is not always easy to accept the good fortune, the pleasures, of others. And anyway, she had nothing to reproach herself for: she was barely into her forties and Jamie had just celebrated his twenty-ninth birthday. That was not an impossible age gap, and was certainly no more than that which people accepted when older men took up with younger women. Nobody blinked an eye at that, and yet they judged women differently, and were only too ready to accuse them of cradle-snatching.
The MacDonalds were evidently curious to see what sort of young man she had acquired, and she did not resent their curiosity. In fact, she felt a certain pride in showing Jamie off; she had not set out to get herself a trophy, but if she had found one, then she might as well bask in the achievement. Trophies could be taken from one, be snatched away; she knew that. No trophies were permanent; they had to be given back, and perhaps she would have to give Jamie back, but not just yet. And not, she thought, without a fight.
There were six other guests. Isabel sat on Colin’s left at the dinner table and on her other side was a cardiologist. Colin quizzed her gently about Jamie without appearing to do so. Isabel, impressed with his tact, gave him the information he was seeking: Jamie had a flat of his own in Saxe Coburg Street; he played the bassoon professionally and taught at a school; he saw a lot of Charlie.
“We live together but not quite together,” she said. “It’s not a bad idea to have one’s own place.”
He nodded his agreement. “Of course.”
“And he needs a place to teach.”
“Naturally.”
She waited for his next question. People had talked about Jamie being a kept man; they knew that Isabel had money and assumed—correctly—that Jamie did not. She must pay the bills. She must do.
But Colin was too tactful. “The old assumptions about how people should live their lives—well, they’ve gone, haven’t they? And there are plenty of options.”
Isabel smiled. “I wouldn’t write off the old assumptions too quickly,” she said. “It may be that people are happier in conventional relationships.”
The doctor on her left had been listening. “I’m not so sure,” he said. “I’ve seen so much human unhappiness directly linked to being with the wrong person. It’s as simple as that. People get themselves trapped. And that’s the fault of marriage, isn’t it? So many marriages are just awful. Long spells of penal servitude.”
Isabel turned to him. “A rather bleak view, surely?”
“Realistic. And if reality is bleak, then I don’t see what the point is in pretending that the bleakness isn’t there.” The doctor looked at her challengingly. “Or do you think otherwise?”
Isabel toyed with her fork. “It depends. I’m not sure that I would deny the bleakness; but I’m also not sure whether I would dwell on it. Why dwell on something that will only make you unhappy? What’s the point of that?”
The doctor drummed the fingers of his left hand on the edge of the table, a strange gesture which suggested, Isabel thought, an impatient temperament. Perhaps he had been obliged to listen too long to those whom he did not consider his intellectual equal, exhausted patients with long-running complaints, unable to put their views succinctly. Some doctors could become like that, she thought, just as some lawyers could; prolonged exposure to flawed humanity could create a sense of superiority if one was not careful—and perhaps he was not.
“But most people are unhappy in one way or another,” he said. “I found that out at the beginning of my medical career. Most people are unhappy and afraid; all you have to do is scratch at the surface and it comes out.”
Isabel felt that she could not let this pass. And she had been right; he was condescending. “I just don’t agree with that,” she said. “Not in the slightest. Most people are reasonably happy. They may not be ecstatic over their lot, but they’re happy enough to carry on. Look at us in this room tonight. Do you think most people here are unhappy?”
She looked around the table. The dinner party was in full swing and the noise level had risen as a series of
animated conversations got under way. There was laughter, candlelight, and the glint of silver.
The doctor followed her gaze. Then he turned to her, his head inclined to allow for a discreet aside, although there was no danger of being overheard amidst the general hubbub. “Happy?” he said. “Do you really think so? If I look round this table, I can identify three cases of extreme unhappiness. Yes. Three.”
Isabel said nothing, and the doctor continued: “That man at the end of the table there is married to that woman over there. I take it that you don’t know them? Well, he’s having an affair with some younger woman down in London. His wife is furious and, naturally enough, very unhappy about it. He’s unhappy because he can’t go to London and live with his mistress because he has a business up here in Scotland. And a family. Bleak, I’d say.
“And then,” he went on, “that poor woman on the other side of Colin…”
Isabel glanced anxiously to her right. It occurred to her that the doctor had drunk too much wine and become disinhibited.
“No, don’t worry,” the doctor said. “Nobody can hear. She’s called Stella Moncrieff. And you may have noticed that she’s here by herself. She has a husband, though; they live in one of the flats down below. And right at this moment, I imagine, her husband is sitting down there by himself, thinking of what’s going on a few floors up.”
“Why isn’t—”
“Why isn’t he here?” the doctor interrupted. “It’s shame. She goes out by herself. He’s too ashamed to go anywhere. Nobody sees him anymore. Never shows up at the golf club—he used to play off a handicap of four. Never goes to the theatre, opera, what have you—nowhere. And all because the poor man’s ashamed of what he’s accused of doing.” He paused and reached for his glass. “Although I, for one, take the view that he’s entirely innocent. He didn’t do it. But that doesn’t make things any better.”
Isabel was about to ask what it was that he had done when the conversation suddenly shifted. Colin, who had been busy with his neighbour, turned to Isabel and asked her about the journal she edited. “Do many people read it?” he asked.