She crossed the room to stand in front of him. Charlie looked up, but only briefly; down on the floor, in the world of toy train schedules, problems as pressing as those involved in running a real railway occupied his attention. Isabel leaned forward and planted a kiss on Jamie’s cheek. He looked surprised.
“Kiss, kiss!” intoned Charlie from the floor, but the engine had toppled off the line and that was more important.
Isabel looked down. The toy train was on its side, its carriages skewed across the track, its clockwork mechanism still driving the engine’s wheels, without traction, ineffective. Somewhere in the world, she thought, such a thing might be happening in reality; in the newspapers you saw photographs showing just what a train crash could look like—how much damage the weight of a train could cause. And she remembered how, as a young woman, she had travelled in India, and in the Punjab, on one of those heart-stopping mountain roads, she had seen the wreckage of a bus hundreds of feet below, the possessions of the passengers still littering the path its tumble had created; clothing, suitcases, papers. It was a very recent accident, but need would gather to this detritus, once the nearby villagers began to pick their way across the hillside, but for the moment these human things were reminders of what hurtling machinery could do. She had read somewhere about the possessions of the dead and of their sanctity: it lasts a very brief time, and in countries where the smallest thing could find a willing owner, even the toothbrushes of the dead did not remain unused for long.
“Isabel?”
“Sorry—I was thinking.”
He had returned her kiss, and now he held her gently, his hands resting on her hips. “Thinking about what?”
“About an accident—or the aftermath of an accident—that I saw in India a long time ago. A bus had gone over the edge—on one of those roads where there’s no barrier and it’s a thousand-feet drop if your steering lets you down.”
He shuddered. Jamie suffered from slight vertigo: he could climb a ladder, but anything above that made him feel queasy.
She said, “Don’t worry. I’ll never take you on one of those roads.”
She looked down. Charlie had replaced the train, and it was making its way slowly round the track; it would need rewinding.
Isabel asked him on impulse; she had not intended to, but the question slipped out. “Charlie, where did you get that bit of paper in your pocket?”
Jamie raised a finger to his lips in a futile gesture of discouragement; he did not want Isabel to ask this, but it was too late.
Charlie did not look up. “Hugh gave it,” he said.
“Why?”
He was not interested, and it took a minute or so for him to respond. “Hugh said it was a secret.”
Isabel and Jamie exchanged glances. “Don’t go there,” whispered Jamie. “Listen to me, Isabel: don’t go there.” Then he continued, “You haven’t told me why you mentioned John Donne.”
“No man is an island, entire of itself,” she whispered back. “Every man is…” She suddenly had difficulty in remembering. But he knew.
“I learned that at school,” he said. “We had this English teacher who made us learn whole passages off by heart. I can do the Gettysburg Address, if you like. I used to be able to do all of ‘Tam O’Shanter.’ ”
“Everybody can,” said Isabel. “Everybody in Scotland, that is. When chapman billies leave the street, and drouthy neibors, neibors meet…”
Jamie returned to Donne. “Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less…”
She thought: when will it come—that moment when that no longer resonates with people too tired of others and their demands, too exhausted to open their doors to those in need, too overwhelmed by the scale of humanity in all its billions to value individual human life.
Jamie said: “You’re looking serious.”
“I’m thinking.”
He reached across to take her hand. He knew that her thoughts could be a burden to her and that for all his advice not to take the woes of the world on her shoulders, she always would.
“Sleep on it,” he said. “If you feel tomorrow that you have to do something about it, then do it. I won’t criticise you. But sleep on it first.”
“All right.”
“With me,” he added in a whisper.
She glanced down at Charlie.
“He’ll be going for his rest,” Jamie said.
“Not tired,” said Charlie.
“Yes, you are,” said Jamie firmly.
Charlie never argued with Jamie, and so was silent as he was carried upstairs to his room, placated with the promise of more train play before his dinner. Isabel went up to their bedroom and stood by the window. She looked up at the sky. Witness to us in all our humanity, she thought, and then repeated aloud, Witness to us in all our humanity.
Jamie was by her side. “Turtle dove,” he said.
“Why that?”
“That song,” he explained. “Though it be ten thousand miles, my love…”
She took his hand. She could not believe her good fortune. Blessed are those, she said to herself, who live with the objects of their true desire. And then she asked herself: how many are they? One in three? One in ten? One in a hundred? How many married people, she wondered, remained deeply in love with their spouse? She thought of her friends: some of them, she knew, were in unhappy marriages, or had left such marriages behind them, most of them, though, seemed happy enough with the bed they had made for themselves. Yet who amongst these friends, contented though they may be, was passionately in love? One? Two? A small handful?
Would that happen to her? Would she no longer shiver with longing at the thought of embracing Jamie, as she was now doing; or would the physical side of their relationship become mundane, be deprived of excitement and awe? It seemed impossible to her, and yet she knew that there were no pleasures that were incapable of fading or of being replaced. She thought of Auden and his reference to the toy pumping engine he had loved as a boy—the most beautiful thing, in his mind; and her own doll, Raggedy Ann, whom she had recovered a few years ago in the attic, dusty and until then forgotten. She had felt a pang of guilt at her disloyalty but had realised that the soul with which, as a child, she had invested the doll was no longer there. Dolls, perhaps, required their burial, their final obsecrations—and she thought of what that might entail. Their good deeds would be remembered: their patience, the comfort they gave, their uncomplaining acceptance of their owners’ whims; their readiness for every duty; their implicit understanding of friendship and all that it meant.
Chapter Five
She was no nearer a decision the following morning; indeed, she had given the matter no further thought. That day was to have been devoted to routine editorial tasks, but became something altogether different when her niece, Cat, called her shortly after breakfast.
“I know you’re busy,” Cat began—an opening that invariably preceded a request for help.
“Staff shortage?” asked Isabel.
Cat did not answer. “Charlie’s still going to that playgroup of his?”
Isabel replied that he was. “Do you need me to help at the deli?”
Cat could hardly ignore the direct question. “As a matter of fact, I do,” she said. “Eddie has to go to the dentist. He hasn’t been for ages and I had to make the appointment for him. He’s got some sort of dental phobia.”
Isabel remembered that she had had a dental conversation with Cat’s young assistant some years previously. She remembered that he had looked at her disbelievingly when she told him about the efficacy of dental anaesthesia.
“I wasn’t going to be doing very much,” she said to Cat. “I can easily come in, if you like. Jamie’s going to take Charlie to playgroup this morning—I can be in by nine.”
“Oh, Isabel! You…you angel.”
“I don’t mind,” said Isabel. “And, by the way, angels are those who do things they can’t abide do
ing. There’s no great credit in doing something you enjoy doing.” As she spoke, she thought of the issue of whether good actions were good because they had good results or because they were done for a good motive. Would a saint be less of a saint if he did what he did for reasons of personal gratification rather than for the benefit of others? She thought he would.
Cat was always short with her when she made philosophical points. “Nine o’clock then?” she said. “I don’t think we’re going to be particularly busy. It’s been quiet these last few days.”
Cat rang off and Isabel returned to the kitchen to finish giving Charlie his breakfast. She had cut small strips of bread on which butter and boiled egg had been spread; these were called soldiers and they were a particular favourite.
“Soldiers!” he shouted, waving his hands enthusiastically.
Jamie took him off to playgroup half an hour later, giving Isabel time to read a few emails before she left for Bruntsfield and Cat’s deli. As she made her way along Merchiston Crescent, she thought about the content of the emails. There had been seven of them, and most of them had been concerned with mundane journal affairs. One, though, was a complaint from a subscriber, who berated Isabel for publishing papers by a conservative philosopher of whom she strongly disapproved. It was a letter of extraordinary intolerance, and Isabel had stared at the text with astonishment.
She had begun to feel angry, tapping out a response on her keyboard with a force that she would not normally have used to type a letter. I assume that you intended your letter to be published in our correspondence columns, she wrote. However, since I do not like your views, I shall not do so. She looked at her words—she was serving out to this woman exactly what the woman was advocating for others. What she wanted to do by this was to get her to understand the injustice of censorship—but would she? The intolerant, she felt, were exactly those least likely to see themselves critically…but—and now she faltered—this reply of hers, she decided, was petty. Tolerance, surely, required that she publish the letter and allow the readers to decide for themselves on the merits, or otherwise, of precluding views one found distasteful.
By the time she reached the delicatessen her mind was made up. She would publish her critic’s letter but would indicate, at the end, that the policy of the Review was to keep channels of communication open. She had already devised the wording she would use, which would include a denunciation of the worrying tendency in universities to deplatform speakers whose views students might disagree with or find objectionable. That had happened to somebody recently who had expressed reservations about sex-reassignment surgery. Isabel herself had no such concerns—it seemed to her that such procedures could answer a very deep need and bring happiness to those who felt that nature had made a mistake. But the idea of censoring anybody who took a different view to hers on this subject seemed to her to be objectionable in the extreme. And yet it was happening. The woman who expressed that view had been uninvited by universities, had been threatened and insulted, simply because she departed from the current consensus.
“You’re looking cross,” said Cat as Isabel entered the delicatessen.
Isabel closed the door behind her and looked at Cat. Her niece was preparing a cup of coffee for a customer while he chose a sandwich from their refrigerated display unit.
“Am I?”
“Yes. I can always tell, Isabel.” Cat paused. “And it’s always something to do with what somebody’s said about something. You can be very easily wound up, you know.”
“Can’t we all?”
“Be wound up? Not me. I don’t get wound up.”
From the other end of the counter, Cat’s assistant, Eddie, whose dental appointment was half an hour away, joined in the conversation.
“But you do get wound up, Cat,” he said. “You get wound up by that guy who sells yoghurt and cream cheese. You called him a—”
Cat cut him off. “I didn’t. I didn’t call him anything. I just don’t like the way he goes on about other brands—that’s all. It’s not as if he invented yoghurt.” She paused. “I don’t get wound up. I don’t let people get to me.”
She spoke with a degree of condescension that made Isabel smile. “Don’t you? Oh well, I suppose I’m one of those people who can’t control herself as well as she should. But there we are.” She reached for the apron she habitually used in the deli.
“I’ve got to go to the dentist,” said Eddie.
“I know. Cat told me. It’ll be fine, Eddie.”
Eddie looked unconvinced. “What if he has to drill?”
Isabel sought to reassure him. “You won’t feel a thing. They use dental anaesthesia. They numb your jaw.”
“What if it doesn’t work? I read somewhere that that stuff doesn’t always work.”
Isabel’s reply was brisk. “That’s just not true. It’s very effective.”
“Yes,” said Cat. “I had a filling last month. I didn’t feel a thing—not a thing.”
Eddie looked miserable. “You’re just saying that.”
“Let’s talk about something different,” said Isabel brightly. “Sex-reassignment surgery.”
Cat and Eddie looked at her in astonishment.
“Come again?” said Eddie. “Did you say: sex-reassignment surgery?”
Isabel nodded. “Yes. Do you think a man can really become a woman—and the other way round?”
Eddie glanced at Cat. It was a look that said: you answer this.
“Of course,” said Cat.
Isabel looked at Eddie. “And you, Eddie?”
“Of course,” said Eddie. “Why not? You can become…” He shrugged. “You can become anything you like. What’s the problem?”
Isabel tied the strings of her apron. “There may be some things that you just are—things that you can’t change.” She searched her mind for examples; perhaps it was not quite so simple; perhaps being able to change had become the norm. As she spoke, a counterargument suggested itself to her, making her list seem progressively lame. “Being tall, for example.” But then she thought: can’t orthopaedic surgeons lengthen bones now? “Being born somewhere—into a particular culture.” No. People can change that with ease. They reinvent their past—and themselves. America has shown the world how to do that. “Having a musical ear. Being allergic to seafood.” You can probably learn to distinguish pitch; allergies can be desensitised…She decided that what she really meant was that the past could not be changed; the future could.
“You can learn music,” said Eddie.
“That’s not what I said, Eddie. I was talking about pitch.”
Cat frowned. “Why do you ask, Isabel?”
“Interest. I’m interested in the question of whether somebody who says that she thinks that a man can’t really become a woman should be allowed to speak to students about it. That’s all.”
Eddie made a disapproving sound. “Of course not.”
Isabel turned to him. “Why?”
“Because she might offend people.” He paused. “What if there’s somebody like that in the audience? What then?”
“Yes, such a person might be offended,” said Isabel.
“Well, you can’t allow it. And anyway, what do you think, Isabel—not about who can say what, but about whether a man can become a woman—or a woman a man?”
She chose her words carefully. “I think we should allow people to choose their gender in a social sense. I don’t think, though, that we should pretend that things are different from what they are. A person who has undergone surgery is still biologically a man or a woman. But we don’t need to give that any practical weight. They should be allowed to live the role they chose—to live as a man or a woman.” She looked defiant. “I think that’s a defensible position.”
It was as if Cat had lost interest. She looked at the clock beside the fridge. “You need to watch the time, Eddie,” she said. “Remember the dentist.”
* * *
It was, as Cat had predicted, a quiet morning, and Cat,
who felt guilty now over having asked Isabel to help, suggested to Isabel that if she wanted to go home before Eddie returned from the dentist, she would cope by herself. But Isabel was happy to stay; she would have, she said, a cup of coffee and then attempt the Scotsman crossword before going home.
All three tables in the delicatessen were empty; Isabel chose her favourite, the table by the window that afforded her a view of what was going on in the street. Opening the newspaper, she looked at the first clue in the cryptic crossword, 1 across: small time before a biblical woman—a fact (5). Small time was always the letter “t” and a biblical woman must be Ruth. Truth.
She filled in the word and moved to the next clue, 2 across. Inevitably, and by every route (6). A moment’s thought revealed that as “always.” She reached for her pen and began to write.
“Isabel?”
She looked up. There was a second or two of uncertainty before she recognized the woman addressing her. She had not seen Ruth Porteous for a year or two; they had served on a local committee together, a civic association that provided support for schools and libraries. Ruth was older than Isabel and until recently had been an accountant with a fund management firm. She had never married, but Isabel knew that she had an aged mother whom she had looked after for years.
Laying aside The Scotsman, Isabel greeted her warmly, inviting her to join her for coffee.
“You work here from time to time, don’t you?” said Ruth as she sat down.
Isabel explained about her arrangement with Cat. “I’ve learned a great deal about Parma ham and such things,” she said. “And as for olive oil, if you thought that was a simple matter…There are vintages, you know.”
“Oh, I know,” said Ruth.
Isabel glanced at her newspaper. A biblical woman…It was a coincidence, of course, but one of those coincidences that was seized upon by those who wanted to believe in synchronicity.
“Coffee?” asked Isabel. “On me?”
“Tea,” said Ruth. “If you don’t mind.”
T, thought Isabel. Truth. Another irrelevant coincidence.