“My stop’s coming up,” said Isabel, preparing to get to her feet. “I’m glad we were able to catch up.”
For a moment Roz hesitated. She was clearly torn, but eventually her better nature triumphed. “Thank you,” she said. “And I’m sorry if I was a bit…well, a bit upset over our…our…”
“Discussion,” said Isabel.
“Yes, our discussion.” She looked up anxiously at Isabel, who was now standing, holding on to the handrail as the bus slowed down for the next stop.
“You don’t need to say sorry,” said Isabel. “I was the one who started it. And I do hope everything goes well at the auction.”
Roz looked at her gratefully, and for a moment Isabel felt an intense sympathy for the other woman. How could one not feel sympathy for somebody whose husband had done what Roz’s had done? Oddly—slightly absurdly—she thought: to be abandoned by a urologist, of all people. Surely if anybody should know about human weakness and vulnerability—not to say human need—it should be a urologist.
There used to be a word in use in Scotland for a woman who was widowed. She became her husband’s relict. Isabel had always found it a rather sad word—a patriarchal term; a relict—one left behind, like some abandoned piece of furniture. It could apply here, she thought, emphasising the sense of being thrown away, walked away from.
She reached out and took Roz’s hand, squeezing it briefly in a gesture that said, I understand. It was the most eloquent of gestures—it said so much, far more, in fact, than could be said in words. One could speak at length about fellow feeling and solidarity, but no matter how eloquent the speech, no words would ring as true as this particular touch.
* * *
Jamie had left to collect Charlie from playgroup when Isabel returned to the house. The playgroup—called group therapy by Jamie—was now a daily occurrence and had been only a qualified success. Although Charlie did not object to going, his sessions there were beset with what the organiser, Miss Campbell, tactfully referred to as issues. As far as Isabel could see, virtually all the children attending the group had issues of one sort or another, and there would have been more cause for alarm had Charlie not had any issues. Most of them seemed to revolve around who played with what; Charlie had to learn, said Miss Campbell, that he was not the only child to be allowed to play with the building bricks.
“Sharing is so difficult for them at this age.” Miss Campbell sighed. “It takes a long time, but they eventually do get it.”
“I’m sure they do,” said Isabel. There were some adults, though, who did not, she thought, including those who lived in tax shelters. Did people who went to live in places like Monte Carlo believe in sharing? “Monte Carlo, I suppose, they…”
Miss Campbell was staring at her. “Monte Carlo?” asked Miss Campbell. “I’m sorry, I’m not with you.”
Isabel blushed. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I was thinking aloud. Tax shelters, you see, raise issues about sharing.”
Miss Campbell had given her an odd look, but she had done that before; Isabel was aware that the other woman was wary of her. She was not sure why this should be so; it had something to do with the disparity in their circumstances. Miss Campbell, she imagined, thought of her as being remote from the problems of those who she had once heard the organiser refer to as “ordinary people.” The injustice of this assumption rankled, but Isabel had been unable to dislodge it.
“Of course, you have somebody to help you at home,” Miss Campbell had once said. “The other mothers, I’m afraid, don’t have that luxury.”
It was as cutting a comment as could be made, short of downright rudeness, and Isabel had smarted under it. As is always the case in such circumstances, possible responses only came to mind much later. She might have told Miss Campbell that she paid Grace a third more than the going rate for a housekeeper’s job, and gave her six weeks of paid holiday a year. She might have mentioned the donations she made to various charities, but that was a last resort, and always sounded like boasting, even when made in self-defence. And of course it was never enough: the greatest of philanthropists, the Carnegies and their modern equivalents, never gave away everything; they were still rich at the end of the giving, and those who hated the rich for being rich would hate them still. Isabel was well-off, but she tried, as far as possible, to behave as if she were not, and to use what money she had to good end. She wondered what more she could do. If she gave everything away it would be gone, and that would be that. She would herself then become in need of help. Grace would lose her job and could find it difficult to find another, and Jamie and Charlie would feel the pinch. Jamie was a musician and would struggle to support the three of them because she, as a philosopher, would not be able to earn much. And she would definitely not be able to pay the fees that Miss Campbell charged for attendance at her playgroup, which was not cheap. Is that what Miss Campbell wanted?
It depressed her to realise that the answer was that while Miss Campbell would not want to have her income depressed in any way, she would be delighted if that happened to Isabel. The essence of envy of that sort was that it gave rise to a pain that would only be dulled when those others lost everything. There was no other anodyne for material envy.
She was in her study when they returned. She heard the sound of the front door opening and went out into the hall to meet them. Charlie, seeing her, rushed towards her with an excited whoop, flinging his arms about her. She stooped and gathered him up, feeling his little hands round the back of her neck, feeling his hot breath against her cheek. There was the smell about him of small boy; a strange, hard to categorise smell, but one that she had once detected in a punnet of mushrooms in a supermarket and had remarked on this to Jamie.
“Boys don’t smell like mushrooms,” he had said.
“They do.”
He had laughed. “If you say so.”
“It’s all in the nose of the…” She struggled to complete the parody. “The olfactor?”
“Maybe. Or sniffer?”
She did not think so. “Sniffer is too…too sniffy a word. Sniffers disapprove. If olfactor can’t be used here, then it can now. After all, how else would we get neologisms? Or shades of meaning?”
And the conversation had ended there, as a woman standing behind them had wanted to get at the mushrooms on display and had pushed forward and said, “Excuse me,” in a rather impatient way.
She closed her eyes. Yes, it was definitely mushrooms.
“Don’t sleep,” said Charlie, pinching the back of her neck. “Wake up.”
She opened her eyes and looked at her small son. Don’t grow up too quickly, she thought. Don’t get too old to throw yourself into my arms like this.
“So what did you do at playgroup today?” she asked.
As she put him down, he answered, “Nothing.”
“And did you learn anything?”
“No.”
“Nothing at all?”
He shook his head.
That was the way it was with small boys. If anything had happened—and sometimes fairly dramatic events occurred—it was rarely reported at home. She had wondered why this should be and had concluded that it was probably because boys of that age imagined that parents simply would not understand. How could they? They were too far removed from what happened at the level of four year olds—too tall, to put it bluntly—to see what happened down below.
“Oh well, we don’t learn something every day…” Which was untrue, she thought. We learned at least something, even if it was nothing we would remember learning.
She helped him off with his coat, and he dashed away into the kitchen, where Jamie had laid out his model railway circuit. Isabel disliked battery toys, which she felt took all the imagination and creativity out of play; this train, though, having been found in the attic and rehabilitated, was driven by clockwork. The engine was a model of the Flying Scotsman, the famous train that had travelled between Edinburgh and London and that had somehow entered the national consciousnes
s.
She started to hang the coat up in the cupboard off the hall. As she did so, she felt something in his pocket. She always checked Charlie’s pockets before putting his clothes away because there was often something messy that needed to be extracted: a piece of chocolate, a sandwich, once even half a boiled egg that he must have taken from somebody else’s lunch.
This time it was a piece of paper—a folded note. Miss Campbell occasionally sent notes back to parents, but usually put them in envelopes slipped into the child’s bag.
Isabel saw that the note was handwritten—in an unfamiliar hand. Miss Campbell’s writing was spidery—suitably spidery, thought Isabel uncharitably—but this was more elegant, more assured.
Martin, love, she read. I tried to call you but you didn’t answer. So I sent an email, but don’t reply to it, of course—security, my tiger! Can’t make Tuesday because Don is going to be around and he’s bringing some ghastly business contact back for dinner. I’m already yawning. Some Dutchman with one of those names van der something, and I’ll be expected to be on parade and say charming things when all the time I’m thinking about you and imagining what you’d be saying to me if we were only together and…Oh well, thinking about you isn’t going to make you appear, and so I shall just be brave and try to think about something else. Love, love, love you to bits, darling Fortstone! Hatty.
Isabel has read it before she asked herself whether she should be reading it at all. And by then it was too late. Then she knew.
* * *
She went through to the kitchen to find Jamie. He was standing by the window, examining a bassoon reed.
“I thought this was going to be a good one,” he said. “But I’m going to have to scrap it.” He tossed the reed down on the table and looked at her. “Something wrong?”
She passed the note to him. “I found this in the pocket of Charlie’s jacket.”
Jamie began to read the note. He looked up and frowned. “What is this?”
“A love letter,” said Isabel.
Jamie looked at the note again. “So it would seem. But who’s Hatty? And Martin, for that matter?”
He handed the note back to Isabel. She folded it and tucked it into the pocket of her jeans. “I didn’t realise what it was until I had got to the end. I suppose I just read it automatically, without asking myself whether I should be reading it at all.”
“Natural enough,” said Jamie. “After all, I would have thought that a mother had the right to read letters she finds in her son’s pockets.”
“Do you know Charlie’s little friend, Hugh?”
Jamie nodded. “The little redhead? Freckles?”
“Yes,” said Isabel. “That’s him. He and Charlie play quite a lot together. They’re great friends, as far as I can see. Well, his mother is called Harriet. But she uses Hatty—I’ve heard her.”
Jamie’s eyes widened. “Married to Don?”
Isabel inclined her head. “Yes. I’ve only met him once or twice. But he’s called Don—yes.”
Jamie went back to the window. Standing with his back to Isabel he looked out over the rhododendrons in the garden outside. “And Martin?” he asked.
Isabel hesitated. It was Martin Fortstone—an extraordinary coincidence, but then living in an intimate city like Edinburgh threw up these coincidences. “He’s a man called Martin Fortstone,” said Isabel. “Her lover—obviously.” She sighed. “What a mess.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Jamie. “Why do you think it’s a mess? She’s carrying on with somebody. People have affairs all the time.”
She looked at him sharply. “Do they?”
“Other people,” he said quickly.
“But even if they do, it’s, well…there’s something rather distasteful about it. The dishonesty. The concealment.”
“Except for the lovers,” said Jamie. “They don’t think of it that way. They think of it as exciting. It’s not distasteful to them.” He paused for a moment, before turning round from his inspection of the garden. “Throw it away.”
“Just like that?”
“Well, I don’t see what it’s got to do with us. Obviously young what’s his name…”
“Hugh.”
“Yes, Hugh must have picked it up in the house and put it in his pocket. Then Charlie somehow got hold of it and pocketed it himself. They’re always swapping things, aren’t they? He brought home that toy car the other day—heaven knows where he got it from.”
“So you think I should just throw it away?”
He looked at her quizzically. “What else can you do? Take it back to her?”
She hesitated for a few moments before replying. “What interests me is whether she knows what happened to it. I assume that she doesn’t.”
Jamie considered this. “So she must be wondering where it is. It’s not the sort of thing one would like to lose, is it?”
“No. Not at all.”
Isabel looked at him. “Should I tell her?”
“That it’s pitched up in Charlie’s pocket?”
“Yes. To put her mind at rest.”
He looked unconvinced. “Why?”
“Imagine how she must feel. She must be worried that her husband will find it.”
Jamie hesitated, but then he reached a conclusion. “Her fault. She shouldn’t write letters like that—or, if she does—she shouldn’t leave them lying around.”
“I don’t think it’s that simple.”
“What about him?” he challenged. “What about telling him—the husband? Why not give it to him?”
“Why would I do that?”
“Because he’s the injured party. She’s the one carrying on with this…this Martin. You’re always going on about duty, Isabel—don’t you have a duty to tell Don?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so. I barely know him. If he were a friend, then it might be different. But he isn’t.”
Jamie had covered this ground—or ground very like this before, and he knew the contours of the debate. “Hatty isn’t exactly a friend. Yet you were proposing to relieve her anxiety by telling her you’d found the letter. If you have a duty to her, then why don’t you have one to the wronged husband?”
Isabel was ready with her answer. “Because I did something. I read her letter, and in doing so I put myself into a relationship of moral proximity with her.”
Jamie smiled. He had heard about moral proximity on numerous occasions, but was never quite sure of how you inferred a relationship of that nature.
“Prior acting on my part,” said Isabel. “I’ve done something which puts me into a situation involving other people. I read the letter. That brings me into a relationship with the writer of the letter.” She paused. “It’s like taking a guest into your house. Once the guest is under your roof, you have various responsibilities that flow from your act of welcoming. You can’t throw the guest out in the middle of the night when there’s a force nine gale blowing outside.”
Jamie thought of something else. “Of course if you hand the letter back to her she might be relieved that it hasn’t fallen into her husband’s hands.”
“Certainly.”
“But,” Jamie continued, “if you hand her the note, she’ll know you’ve read it because, well, how otherwise would you know it’s hers.” He did not let her interrupt. “And don’t you think she might feel awkward that you know that she’s having an affair?”
“Possibly…”
“No,” said Jamie. “More or less definitely. It’s very embarrassing for people to discover that other people know their inmost secrets. People don’t like it—they just don’t. Speak to any doctor about it. Doctors know their patients’ most intimate problems and they—that is, the doctors—say that patients can find this awkward. Doctors don’t mind—they’ve seen it all before—but patients do, apparently.”
Isabel was lost in thought. Jamie’s objection was a powerful one, but she was thinking of secrets.
Jamie had more to say. “Catholic pries
ts knew all about that, I imagine. I had a friend when I was a boy—he was Catholic from Motherwell. Big Catholic family and very observant or whatever you call it. They went to mass every Sunday and so on. Anyway, he said that he spent most of his time avoiding the priest because he had been obliged to confess to him all about his sins of impurity. And all boys are impure, Isabel—it’s just the way they are.”
“That’s about power,” said Isabel. “If somebody knows your secrets, then they have power over you. Confession helped cement priestly power.”
Jamie remembered something. “When my friend was eighteen—and about to leave home—he decided to go to confession one last time. So he went along to the church and went into the confessional and started to tell the priest about the dreadful things he’d done—or wanted to do. He told him that he had wanted to sleep with his mother. He told him that he had derailed a train from Glasgow by putting bricks on the railway line. He told him that he had stolen money from his parents’ bank account.”
“And?”
“The priest listened to all this apparently and then at the end he said, ‘And there’s something you’ve left out.’ My friend asked him what it was, and the priest said, ‘Lies. You tell such lies—just like the ones you’ve just told me.’ ”
Isabel laughed. “They’re more worldly-wise than they let on.”
“Of course they are,” said Jamie.
Isabel took the note out of her pocket and made as if to tear it up; but she stopped. Tearing up the piece of paper amounted to another act on her part, and that might complicate matters further. She looked across the room to where Jamie was standing. He was smiling.
“Not your business, Isabel. I know I’m always saying that to you, but…well, it’s true. The problems of other people are not your business. Their love affairs are not your business. Their cheating and lying is not your business. It just isn’t.”
“John Donne,” she muttered.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
But Jamie persisted. “No, you said something. What was it?”
“I said John Donne.”
“The poet? Why? What’s he got to do with it?”