A Distant View of Everything

  “I thought you might have met them,” said Bea. “They live in Regent Terrace—you know, overlooking Arthur’s Seat. They have a painted ceiling.”

  Isabel smiled. It was a strange way to talk of anybody—to refer to them by a feature of their house. This is So-and-so—he has a magnificent bathroom…

  “But they do,” said Bea. “Those Georgian houses are quite exceptional—even by the standards of the New Town.”

  “Yes, I know they are,” said Isabel. Perhaps it was not all that odd for a ceiling—particularly a painted one—to carry social weight. After all, people who happened to own large houses often expected their social position to be dictated by floor space. Or was the floor space merely a sign of something that had always had a powerful effect: money?

  “Their ceiling was in a bad way when they bought the house,” Bea went on. “But they spent a lot on it and had it restored. They had to get somebody up from London to do it. He was an Italian. They have all those painted ceilings over there, of course—I suppose they’re used to it.”

  Yes, thought Isabel. The Pope had a painted ceiling that needed restoration. Perhaps somebody had said to him—at a dinner party—“I have just the person to restore that Sistine Chapel ceiling of yours. I’ll give you his number.”

  Bea looked pained. “Did I say something funny?”

  Isabel shook her head. “I’m so sorry. No, you didn’t. I have a tendency, I’m afraid, to think at a bit of a tangent. I think of things at odd times. I know it’s very rude of me, but it just seems to happen.”

  This reassured Bea. “I rabbit on a bit too, from time to time. I have a niece who keeps telling me that I talk too much, but she herself—you should hear her on her phone. She’s rarely off it—talking to her friends. Gossiping away.”

  “I was thinking of the Pope,” said Isabel. “It was your mention of Italian painted ceilings. That made me think of the Pope, and of how he might get advice at a dinner party.”

  And then she thought: Imagine if somebody like Bea—a Roman version of her—invited the Pope to dinner in order to matchmake. And somebody would whisper to the hostess: “But you can’t, you just can’t! He’s the Pope. For heaven’s sake—he’s not available. No, it makes no difference that you think the two of them would get on—it’s just not going to work.”

  “You’re smiling again.”

  “Dinner parties,” said Isabel apologetically. “The thought of dinner parties leads to all sorts of conjectures. But, look, tell me about these Mitchellsons…”

  “Michaelsons. He’s an architect, but I don’t think he’s ever actually built anything. He designs projects that are never made—cathedrals and so on. No, I’m not making that up—he worked for years on a cathedral that never got built. Somebody somewhere or other wanted to build a cathedral, and they asked him. Apparently he’s the only person in the country who can design a cathedral.”

  Isabel remembered Christchurch Cathedral: the New Zealand Christchurch. Who had built that? And out of cardboard, after the earthquake? That architect who used cardboard because it was cheap and simple and could help people affected by disasters. As long as you coated the cardboard with something waterproof, then it would do the job handsomely.

  “Have you heard of the cardboard cathedral?” she asked.

  Bea did not seem to be interested. “No. I’ve not. And I don’t think he wanted to use cardboard.”

  “There’s a Japanese architect,” said Isabel. “He does such good work. He builds paper structures to help people after natural disasters—earthquakes and so on.”

  “Oh well…You asked about them. That’s who they are—or at least that’s who he is. I don’t really know very much about her. She’s something to do with, oh, something or other. I forget exactly what. She goes all over the place doing something for whatever it is.”

  “I see.” Isabel paused. She had an incomplete picture: an architect who had designed an unbuilt cathedral; a painted ceiling restored by an Italian; a woman who busied herself with some undescribed work on behalf of unknown people. “And who else? You said there were eight people altogether.”

  “Well, there were Arnold and I, of course, and Tom and Kitty—we’ve just been speaking about them—and then there were two people who were not a couple. I don’t like to make it too obvious, and so I usually have people who may know one another but who aren’t a couple. So I had my friend Frances, whose husband works a lot in Frankfurt and who’s often by herself as a result. I had her, and then I had another friend called Rob who lives by himself and likes coming to my dinner parties to make up numbers. He’s very good with people. He’s a good listener—and that’s a great gift.”

  Isabel agreed. “A rare gift too.”

  “I’ve seen Rob sitting there smiling while the most terrific bores go on about something. And he makes them feel that he’s really interested—which I think he probably is. You could talk to Rob about drains, or average times taken to get through the Panama Canal, or some such subject, and he would take it all in and say How interesting every so often—and mean it. I don’t matchmake for him, by the way.”

  Isabel found herself thinking: Just how long did it take to get through the Panama Canal? She might ask Jamie, perhaps: it was the sort of thing he might know. As a boy he had devoured The Guinness Book of Records, he once told her, and could still come up with information on the world’s tallest man or the largest steak pie ever made, even if his facts were now a bit out of date.

  She prompted Bea. “And then there was Connie and…”

  She waited. Bea pursed her lips; she looked distinctly uncomfortable. “A doctor,” she said. “A surgeon, to be precise.”

  “What sort?”

  “Plastic. Facial reconstruction—that sort of thing.”

  That information, Isabel thought, was neutral. The fact that Bea’s final guest was a plastic surgeon told her nothing about him—other than, perhaps, that he was skilled, and intelligent, and capable of looking after himself in the difficult world of surgery. Yet that, she now decided, was not nothing—in fact, it was rather a lot.

  “He’s called Tony MacUspaig.”

  Isabel expressed surprise at the name. “MacUspaig?”

  “It’s a very rare Scottish name,” said Bea. “He told me about it when I first met him. He said it was generally believed to have died out at the beginning of the twentieth century, but he was living proof that it hadn’t. It’s Hebridean, apparently—from one of the islands. I think he said Harris.”

  “So he’s the last of the MacUspaigs?” She stumbled over the pronunciation.

  “I think so.”

  “And he really is the last of a line of…of MacUspaigs?”

  Bea smiled. “So it would seem.” Her smile faded. “Though I’m not sure now whether I should believe anything he said to me.”

  “You’re going to have to tell me more,” said Isabel.

  She sat back as Bea spoke, trying to concentrate on what she was being told, but finding that her mind kept drifting back to the name. MacUspaig. What would it be like to be called MacUspaig? Every time you gave your name you would have to spell it for people. People would look blank; would look confused; or smile, perhaps, because it was so odd. One could become defensive about one’s name, as people did who had those fine old English surnames, Winterbottom and Sidebottom. They saw nothing funny about their names—and why should they? Bottom meant field in Old English, and there was nothing ridiculous about being called Winterfield or Sidefield. And yet there were people who went through life feeling ashamed, or awkward, about their names. To be burdened by a disgraced name must at times be unbearable, and yet some people did just that, rather than change their names: Adolf Hitler’s sister was required to become Miss Wolf, but at least one member of the Himmler family stuck to the family name as part of an identity that she felt could not be changed, whatever the degree of shame and embarrassment. Svetlana Stalin, daughter of the monster, felt that being a Stalin entitled her to special tr
eatment, as must the offspring of many dictators. Many of them, of course, are damaged right from the beginning: tyrants, Isabel reflected, generally made bad parents. But she put these thoughts out of her mind, as Bea was expressing the view that Tony MacUspaig was, on balance, a psychopath.

  “So there you have it,” said Bea. “I’ve introduced a woman to a psychopath.” She paused. “And she likes him.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  JAMIE COOKED DINNER that evening. Isabel kept him company in the kitchen, seated at their scrubbed pine table, sipping at a glass of the New Zealand white wine she favoured, watching Jamie chopping onions. She valued this time spent alone with him in the kitchen; like most parents of young children, they cherished such periods of peace.

  “It seems so quiet,” she said. “I keep thinking one of them is going to start crying.”

  “If anybody’s going to start crying,” said Jamie, “it’ll be me—with these onions.”

  “There’s a poem about onions,” she said. “It’s about how memory is like an onion—it makes you cry.”

  Jamie did not turn round. “Surely that’s about memory, not about onions,” he said. “There can’t be many poems about onions.”

  “Some, I suspect. There are poems about just about everything.”

  Jamie paused at his task. Using the sleeve of his shirt, he wiped at his eyes. “How do film stars cry?” he asked. “Do directors wave onions about?”

  “No,” said Isabel. “I think they have to do it naturally. Some of them train themselves to think about things that really make them sad, and that does the trick.” But then she remembered something. “There was a famous child actor, I seem to recall, who cried very convincingly on screen because the director had told him he was going to shoot his dog.”

  “So, real tears?”

  “Very real in that case,” agreed Isabel. “But not what a director would do these days, I think.”

  Jamie finished off the chopping of onions. “The moral progress you talk about?”

  “I suppose so. We’re more sensitive to bullying.”

  Jamie scraped the onions off the board and into a pan. “Risotto,” he said. “I know I’m always cooking risotto, but why not?”

  “With mushrooms?” asked Isabel.

  “Porcini. And Madeira.”

  She thought: How many women can sit in the kitchen and watch their perfect husband cooking risotto? And for a brief moment she felt fear—fear that this was all too fragile, that it could not last. That was the problem with things that were exactly as you wished them to be; that was the problem if you found yourself in Eden—there was a snake in the garden.

  Jamie turned to her and smiled. There she saw the shape of his lips; his mouth was wide, with its splendid cupid’s bow. She lowered her eyes, as to gaze on physical beauty sometimes felt like defiling it. She would not look at him. She would not tempt providence to snatch him from her.

  “Do you know the difference between a psychopath and a sociopath?” she suddenly asked.

  Jamie was adding an extra knob of butter to the pan. “Psychopaths always cook with butter,” he said. “Sociopaths use oil.”

  “Be serious.”

  He laughed. “All right: I haven’t a clue. They’re both to be avoided, I suppose. Apart from that, take your pick.”

  “I had to look it up today,” said Isabel. “Lots of people use the words interchangeably, and psychiatrists don’t use them at all. They talk about personality disorders.”

  Jamie adjusted the heat on the stove. “Lots of those,” he said. “There’s a conductor I know, for starters. And Richard Wagner.”

  Isabel sipped at her wine. “One distinction is the way they’re made. Sociopaths are made by their experience—by a bad upbringing.”

  “And psychopaths are born that way?”

  “So the psychologists say.”

  Jamie hummed a snatch of tune.

  “What’s that?” asked Isabel.

  “Something from Gilbert and Sullivan,” he said. “Iolanthe. It goes: That every boy and every gal / That’s born into the world alive / Is either a little Liberal / Or else a little Conservative.”

  Isabel smiled. “One doesn’t associate Gilbert and Sullivan with psychopathy. Except for…”

  “Except for?”

  “The Mikado,” she said.

  Jamie stirred the onions. The sizzle, and smell, reached Isabel.

  “Have you thought of how psychiatric insight changes opera?” she said.

  “Or antibiotics,” Jamie suggested. “La Bohème would not be quite so tragic if antibiotics had existed at the time. Mimì would have made a good recovery. Your tiny hand is no longer frozen…” He looked over his shoulder at Isabel. “Of course modern medicine would improve the outlook for sopranos—at least as far as opera is concerned. They have a terrible mortality rate, sopranos. They’re always dying on stage—and they take a long time to do it. Tenors are much luckier.”

  “Their mortality rate is lower?”

  Jamie nodded. “Distinctly.”

  Isabel warmed to the theme. “Of course a lot of people are stabbed in operas, aren’t they?”

  Jamie agreed. “Yes, it happens. But never in the lungs. You need lungs to sing your final aria, and so they’re usually stabbed elsewhere.”

  He took the pan off the heat and turned to face Isabel. “How did we get on to this?”

  “I mentioned psychopaths.”

  Jamie wiped his hands on his apron. “Why?”

  Isabel hesitated. Jamie was looking at her in a way that told her he already suspected. It was a look that mixed disapproval and disappointment.

  “You’re getting involved in something?” he said.

  She did not answer for a moment. Her life was her life, she said to herself, and she did not have to account to anybody for what she did—not even to her husband. But then, even as that thought came to her, she doubted it. The point about being married was that you shared your life with another, and this meant that there could never be complete freedom. There were responsibilities that came with marriage—as indeed with any relationship with another—and these could limit your choices. If Jamie suddenly announced he was going to take up skydiving, she would have something to say about that. She would leave him in no doubt about her feelings: she would not like it.

  For a moment she imagined the scene. “This is something I have to do,” he would say. “I’ve always wanted to…”

  “Jump out of a plane?”

  “It’s more than that. I’d be proving to myself…”

  “You don’t need to prove anything.”

  “But haven’t you seen those pictures. People holding hands while they float…”

  “Fall. You don’t float when you jump out of a plane.”

  There must have been any number of such conversations, she thought, between skydivers and their husbands and wives, girlfriends and boyfriends. Or did those who remained on the ground put on a brave face and say they did not mind—which surely could not be true. The families of skydivers must have moments of acute anxiety, she decided—whatever they said to the contrary. What was it like, she wondered, to watch a person whom you loved emerge from the door of a plane, a tiny black speck in the sky, and then wait until the life-saving canopy unfurled—if it did, because there were times when it did not, and those down below would see that happen before their eyes?

  “Isabel,” Jamie repeated. “Are you getting involved in something?”

  She shook her head. “Not quite.”

  “What does ‘not quite’ mean?”

  She sighed. “All right. I’ve been asked…” She did not finish.

  “Oh, Isabel, that’s the way it always starts, isn’t it? Somebody comes along and asks you something—and how many times do you say no? How many times do you say: ‘No, I can’t do this because I have a job’—and you do have a job, you know. ‘I can’t do it because I have two young children, and a husband, and a home, and so on.’ ” He shook his head.


  She looked up. They never really argued with one another; this sort of exchange was as close as they came. “I haven’t agreed to anything yet.”

  Suddenly he broke into a smile. “You haven’t agreed? But you will, won’t you, and yes, I know, it’s none of my business. It’s just the way you are, isn’t it?”

  He took a step forward and bent down to kiss her lightly on the cheek. “It’s all right,” he whispered. “You have to do what you have to do. But…” He hesitated. “Be careful of getting involved with psychopaths. Or at least tell me who the psychopaths are, so that I can rescue you.”

  She reached up and put her arms about his neck. “You would, wouldn’t you? You’d always rescue me.”

  “Of course. I’ll fight your battles for you.”

  “And I’ll fight yours.”

  He laughed. “We’re a sort of NATO, aren’t we? A private NATO.” He stroked her hair. “That could be a song, you know. ‘Our Private NATO.’ Rather like ‘My Funny Valentine.’ ” He hummed a few bars, and played with the words. “Are your missiles far too tall / Are your troops a little small…”

  He returned to the pan. “You’re going to have to tell me now.”

  She was relieved that the moment had been defused, and now she told him what Bea had revealed about Tony MacUspaig.

  At first she gave him the background on Bea’s matchmaking reputation.

  “Somebody tried to matchmake for me once,” he said. “It didn’t work.”

  Isabel expressed relief. “I have reason to be thankful for that,” she said.

  “Yes, me too. Had it worked, I would have been with somebody else, rather than you.” He stirred the risotto. “And I wouldn’t be standing here cooking dinner for you, and you…”

  “I wouldn’t be sitting here with a glass of wine and telling you about…”

  “Yes, carry on.”

  “She held one of her dinner parties because she wanted to help a woman called Connie Macdonald, who had more or less invited herself to dinner because—”

  “She wanted a man?”

  “Yes. She wanted a man. She’d heard about Bea’s reputation for doing that sort of thing and so she placed herself in her hands. And so Bea invited a man called Tony MacUspaig. She’d met him, apparently, at one of those Scottish Opera drinks parties.