Alexander McCall Smith

Alexander McCall Smith is the author of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, the Isabel Dalhousie series, the Portuguese Irregular Verbs series, the 44 Scotland Street series, and the Corduroy Mansions series. He is professor emeritus of medical law at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and has served with many national and international organizations concerned with bioethics. He lives in Scotland.

www.alexandermccallsmith.com

BOOKS BY ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH

In the Isabel Dalhousie Series

The Sunday Philosophy Club

Friends, Lovers, Chocolate

The Right Attitude to Rain

The Careful Use of Compliments

The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday

The Lost Art of Gratitude

The Charming Quirks of Others

The Forgotten Affairs of Youth

The Perils of Morning Coffee (eBook only)

The Uncommon Appeal of Clouds

At the Reunion Buffet (eBook only)

The Novel Habits of Happiness

Sweet, Thoughtful Valentine (eBook only)

In the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency Series

The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency

Tears of the Giraffe

Morality for Beautiful Girls

The Kalahari Typing School for Men

The Full Cupboard of Life

In the Company of Cheerful Ladies

Blue Shoes and Happiness

The Good Husband of Zebra Drive

The Miracle at Speedy Motors

Tea Time for the Traditionally Built

The Double Comfort Safari Club

The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party

The Limpopo Academy of Private Detection

The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon

The Handsome Man’s De Luxe Café

The Woman Who Walked in Sunshine

In the 44 Scotland Street Series

44 Scotland Street

Espresso Tales

Love Over Scotland

The World According to Bertie

The Unbearable Lightness of Scones

The Importance of Being Seven

Bertie Plays the Blues

Sunshine on Scotland Street

Bertie’s Guide to Life and Mothers

The Revolving Door of Life

For Young Readers

The Great Cake Mystery

The Mystery of Meerkat Hill

The Mystery of the Missing Lion

In the Corduroy Mansions Series

Corduroy Mansions

The Dog Who Came in from the Cold

A Conspiracy of Friends

In the Portuguese Irregular Verbs Series

Portuguese Irregular Verbs

The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs

At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances

Unusual Uses for Olive Oil

Other Works

La’s Orchestra Saves the World

The Girl Who Married a Lion and Other Tales from Africa

Trains and Lovers

The Forever Girl

Fatty O’Leary’s Dinner Party (eBook only)

Emma: A Modern Retelling

Chance Developments

Sweet, Thoughtful Valentine

Alexander McCall Smith

A Vintage Short

Vintage Books

A Division of Penguin Random House LLC

New York

Copyright © 2016 by Alexander McCall Smith

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

The Cataloging-in-Publication Data for “Sweet, Thoughtful Valentine” is available from the Library of Congress.

Vintage eShort ISBN 9780525431916

www.vintagebooks.com

v4.1

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Contents

Cover

About the Author

Books by Alexander McCall Smith

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter One

“All right, then, you tell me: what exactly do you buy for men?”

When Isabel had been asked this apparently simple question by a friend she had at first been unable to provide an answer. Of course one bought men…She stopped; it was not as straightforward as she had imagined. What did one buy for men?

“The things they want,” she said at last. “That’s better than buying them things they don’t want.”

For a philosopher, such as Isabel Dalhousie, owner and editor of the Review of Applied Ethics, it was a lame response, even with its explanatory addition, and so she added, “Perhaps we should ask them what they want.”

Her friend considered this, but then pointed out that her own husband, when asked what he wanted for his next birthday, invariably said that he needed nothing.

Isabel understood. Men were always happy to receive presents, but were not much good at providing any guidance; it was almost as if they thought that women should be able to divine their needs.

“If I press him,” said her friend, “he tends to say something like, You know I can always do with more socks. Socks! You should see his sock drawer—it’s full to the brim with socks. And the same goes for handkerchiefs and shirts, come to think of it.”

Isabel smiled. Jamie was the same—he had at least thirty pairs of socks, she thought, although she knew that some of these were what she called divorced socks, no longer being a pair. Somewhere, in a vast, cosmic washtub, were those things that disappeared in washing machines, unclaimed, forgotten about, a Bermuda Triangle for men’s socks.

Charlie, by contrast, was very specific about his needs. He was coming up to a birthday and had recited a long list of wants. “I want a car,” he intoned. “A car with a battery and a light. And I want a fire engine and a new train with some carriages. And I want a helicopter and a plane and a garage. And I want some chocolates and a torch and a fishing rod and…”

That would change, of course, and a time would come when, like so many in a materially sated society, he would find it difficult to come up with anything he really wanted. But now her problem was not Charlie and his overambitious requests, but the imminent arrival of Jamie’s birthday. She had asked him for a birthday list—just for guidance—and he had given her a scrap of paper on which he had simply written Some nice stuff—you choose! To which he had added, romantically, And lots of hugs and kisses from you!

That had touched her, and she had kept the note, folded and tucked away in the same drawer in which she kept Charlie’s drawings, letters from her aunt in Alabama, and a few other family mementos. These included her maternal grandfather’s citation for bravery in the US Navy, and, on her paternal side, the note sent out in Field Marshal Montgomery’s name to her grandfather, Colonel Roderick Dalhousie, thanking him for his service in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders in Malaya during the Second World War. But touching though his response had been, she still had the task of finding Jamie a present, and that was what was in her mind as she sipped at a cup of coffee in Glass and Thompson, the café she frequented at the top of Dundas Street.

It was a favourite retreat of hers, a place where she could call in on those occasions on which she ventured over to the other side of Edinburgh. In the brief Scottish summer, it was possible to sit outside, at one of the two tables flanking the café’s front door, and, by craning one’s neck, look down the length of the street to the Firth of Forth and the hills of Fife beyond. Now both of those tables were occupied, and Isabel was at her usual place just within the doorway, her coffee before her and an unread copy of The Scotsman newspaper awaiting her attention. She had glanced at the headlines and sighed. A politician had been caught out in a lie and was digging a deeper and deeper hole for himself with every evasive denial. She found the story depressing—especially when it came to his triumphant denunciations of his political enemies, each of whom, she suspected, were only too relieved that it was him rather than they who had been caught.

She tried to put politicians—and their posturing—out of her mind altogether. There was a time and place for most thoughts, and those that did not belong to the moment should be put aside for consideration at a later, more appropriate time. Sitting in Glass and Thompson on a late morning in May, when it was at last apparent that spring had arrived, was not the time to think of politicians and their promises. Yet she allowed her eye to alight on the paper again, drawn to the accusations of deliberately false promises based on the intentional manipulation of figures…How obvious, she thought; how can they imagine that people will believe these extravagant untruths.

The thought made the back of her neck feel warm, as it always did when she encountered an example of human mendacity. It was a deep-rooted reaction; even as a young girl, when she heard a friend telling a lie of the sort that children bandy about with impunity, she had blushed on behalf of the liar. And that still happened.

She shook her head and looked away from the paper. Random thoughts could be controlled, she felt, but one had to practise the technique. Most of us, she suspected, allowed our thoughts to wander, making life an unruly, stream of consciousness affair in which things came into our mind, stayed for a while, but then faded, sometimes to disappear without a trace.

She tore herself away from The Scotsman. Jamie’s present, she said to herself, and stared out into the street. And then, unbidden but still welcome, came an idea. A short distance down Dundas Street was a small antique shop, The Third Shop, that always had a selection of surprising and tempting objects. If Jamie did not need socks; if he had more than enough books stacked up on his to-read pile; if he had more CDs than he could ever listen to; if he had a relatively new and, of course, lightly used exercise bike (twelve miles, one careful owner), then the only answer was to get him something small and beautiful—something he could put on his desk and appreciate in a way in which he could never appreciate his socks, or his exercise bike, or any of his other material possessions. It would be something entirely personal, something that he could remember she bought him, one particular May, when he was rehearsing for a particular concert; when Charlie had reached a particular state of his development; when she had written on the accompanying card This comes with hugs and kisses and when he had misread her handwriting and asked, “What exactly are higs?”

She left The Scotsman in the café, by arrangement with Russell, the proprietor.

“I can’t bring myself to read the paper,” she said. “Not on a morning like this.”

Russell had glanced out of the window. “Not a day for reality,” he said. “Leave it for the next person.”

“I haven’t even started the crossword,” said Isabel. “Although I did look at one clue. He conquers all, a nubile tram.” It was a classic, and she had seen it before, in a poem by Auden, who relished crosswords. Clues reoccurred—just as they did in real life.

Russell smiled. “An anagram?” he asked.

“Tamburlaine the Great,” she said. And continued, “Such an unpleasant man—he richly deserved to end up as an anagram.”

Russell looked at the ceiling. “He was a…What was he again?”

“He was an alpha male.”

“Big-time,” suggested Russell.

“Yes, you could say that. Not content with conquering the Persian emperor, he went on to victory over the Turkish sultan, a rather unfortunate man called Bazajeth, whom he then kept in a cage.” She paused, and thought of anagrams for Sultan Bazajeth. Blazes hat junta…The revolt of the hatless against the hatted?

“No respecter of human rights,” mused Russell.

“Certainly not. And he fed this poor man scraps from his table and would let him out occasionally only to use him as a footstool—if we are to believe Christopher Marlowe.”

For a moment both were silent. It had happened a long time ago, and yet, thought Isabel, there were still people who put others in cages.

“I’m glad I don’t live in the…What century was it?” said Russell.

Isabel could not remember. “Not the twentieth,” she said eventually. That century had seen three Tamburlaines: Hitler, Stalin and Mao, and there would be more no doubt—the wells of human evil were deep enough. Some child, somewhere, some playground bully, already had the mark upon him.

She looked at her watch. She had had a further idea about Jamie’s present should she fail to find something in The Third Shop.

Chapter Two

She did not have long to look in The Third Shop.

“Something for Jamie?” said George Dunbar, the proprietor. “He’s a musician, isn’t he?”

“He is, but anything will do…within reason.”

George laughed. “I have several unreasonable items,” he said. “A frieze from a Buddhist Temple, for instance.” He pointed to a ceramic plaque on which painted monkeys cavorted. “No? A collection of Victorian glass rolling pins?”

“They’re lovely,” said Isabel, touching one of the delicate blown glassware pins. “But a rolling pin carries luggage with it, doesn’t it? Isn’t it symbolic?”

George thought for a moment. “I suppose a rolling pin used to be symbolic of female ire. The long-suffering wife was always portrayed with her rolling pin tucked under her arm, face like thunder.”

“Ready to wield it,” mused Isabel. “Should it become necessary.”

“But very few people would get that reference today,” said George. “In fact, I suspect that an awful lot of people won’t recognise a rolling pin. Ready-made pastry means that rolling pins won’t be used that much.”

Isabel thought about the death of metaphor, which depended so much on what we did and how we did it: flying by the seat of one’s pants made no sense in a world of large planes and automatic pilots; Thomas Edison had done for burning the candle at both ends; too many cooks spoil the broth was meaningless when the broth came in powdered form, sealed in vacuum-packed envelopes, like space rations; and so language retreated, lost its colour.

“Here’s something of musical interest,” said George, reaching up to a shelf for a rectangular, glass-fronted box. “The rats’ quartet.”

He placed the box on his desk so that Isabel might examine it. Bending down, she looked through the glass at the tableau inside. Four large rats, preserved by the taxidermist, were seated in a semicircle; behind them, exquisitely painted, was a backdrop of a Victorian salon. The rats were dressed in dolls’ clothing—corduroy britches, fancy waistcoats, jackets—and they sat on tiny bentwood chairs. Each was playing a musical instrument, lovingly modelled: a bassoon, with key-work made of twisted silver wire; a small violin, with what looked like horsehair strings; a viola, and finally a cello, all to scale.

She caught her breath. “I don’t believe it,” she said.

George smiled. “These were quite common, you know,” he said. “The Victorians loved them. They often made country house tableaux with stuffed kittens. Kittens playing croquet for example. Formal balls. Kittens on the tennis court, and so on.”

Isabel straightened up and looked at George. “Macabre,” she said.

“To our eye, yes. Not to theirs.” He paused. “I suppose they didn’t bother to ask how the kittens met their end.”

Isabel looked again at the rat tableau. She did not like taxidermy, and could never understand why anyone should wish to have a stuffed lion’s head or a moose on the wall. Such things, of course, glorified hunting, which she found distasteful: why anybody should enjoy the killing of another creature was beyond her comprehension. People ate meat and fish, and that involved the taking of life, but this was done out of need rather than blood lust. She paused, aware that she was on the border of uncomfortable territory; she was not a vegetarian and sensed that there was more than a mote of inconsistency in the position of one who ate meat and yet talked of the rights of animals or balked at animal suffering.

Or was there? Any system of human morality had to be feasible; it had to take into account what we could realistically manage. Could we realistically be expected to foreswear the use of animals for our own ends when the clear pattern of all life on earth was the consumption of one life form by another higher up on the food chain? No other creatures felt sympathy for their prey, but we did—and that, in a sense, justified our drawing a sharp distinction between human and animal life. We were special precisely because we were capable of reason, and precisely because we could feel a sympathy of which other creatures were incapable. And if we were special, then that was justification for treating human life as having greater value than the lives of other creatures; or so the argument might run; not that she was happy with that—in fact, there were strong counterarguments to be made. Professor Singer had made these forcefully, and had to be admired for practising what he preached; but this was not the time to go into all that—not when there was a birthday present to be bought.

She had to decide. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t buy it. I just can’t.”

“I understand,” said George. “I didn’t think you would.”

Isabel looked beyond him, to a shelf on which stood a large wineglass, a rummer, delicately decorated with an incised white rose.

“Jacobite?” asked Isabel, pointing at the glass.

George nodded.

“Then that’s it,” she said. “He’ll love that.”

George took it off the shelf and handed it to Isabel to examine. “You have to be careful with Jacobite glass,” he said. “Not all of it is original—by any means. But this one, I think, is.”

She touched the glass engraving gently. All those years ago, a patient engraver had applied his wheel to the glass, working the design of the rose that indicated loyalty to the Stuart cause. Lives had been lost, great estates forfeited, because this, and other glasses just like it, had been raised in toast to the Pretender; and now, deprived of all such power, it sat on the shelf of an Edinburgh antique shop. It had lost its power, she thought, but it had not lost its significance. Scotland had not gone away.

“He likes Jacobite songs,” Isabel explained as she examined the glass.

“ ‘King Fareweel’?” asked George.

“Yes,” said Isabel. “That, and others.”

“It was a colourful cause,” said George. “I can understand how Bonnie Prince Charlie was a romantic figure.”

“Irredentism,” said Isabel. “Or a variety of it.”

“The idea that you have a right to get something back?”

Isabel held the glass up to the light. The rose was very delicate. “Irredentists are usually claiming land on behalf of a country, rather than a monarch. But it amounts to the same sort of claim of right. Argentina and the Falklands; China and Taiwan; Russia and the Crimea; Indonesia and East Timor. It’s a long list.”

“And an explosive one,” remarked George.

“If people think they’ve lost something,” said Isabel, “they can be slow to forget. How many of us keep alive the memory that a friend hasn’t returned a book borrowed years earlier? We don’t readily forget, do we?”

George sighed. “So many wars have been fought over memories,” he said.

“Oh well,” said Isabel. “We must remind ourselves that we are in the twenty-first century.”

“We hardly need do that,” said George, with a touch a regret. “The twenty-first century is quite good at reminding us itself.”

And then he brightened. “Have you been down to Hamilton’s?” he asked.

Hamilton’s was a small auction house round the corner. Their sales were irregular, but they had a reputation for fine silverware and paintings even if they were not in the same league as Bonhams or Christie’s.

“No,” replied Isabel. “Anything on view?”

George explained that there was a viewing of an auction due to take place the following week. “A mixed bag,” he said. “But some interesting stuff. There’s a lovely Gillies of the hills near Temple. Some Victorian Highland views—you know the sort of thing. A pretty impressive Jean Redpath—one of the big ones.”

“I don’t need any further temptations,” said Isabel.

“None of us does,” said George. “But you should pop in and take a look at the temptations you’re planning to resist. Viewing is today and tomorrow.”

Isabel hesitated. Much as she liked Scottish art, she did not need any new pictures. There would be no harm in looking—although every human fall from grace, when one came to think about it, began with an innocent look.

* * *

With the Jacobite rummer carefully cosseted in bubble wrap, Isabel made her way to Hamilton’s. Once George had mentioned the viewing, she had not required much persuading, although she said to herself—as firmly as she could—that this was just a viewing and she would not be leaving any bids. She would treat it like a visit to a public gallery, where the last thing the visitor had in mind was the idea of acquiring anything on display.

George had been right about the quality of the sale. Isabel bought a copy of the catalogue—a handsomely produced glossy affair—and read the background to what was on offer. Many of the paintings came from a single source, a collection put together over the second half of the twentieth century by a prominent Glasgow industrialist, Thomas Stiven, and his wife, Andrea. She recognised the name; his picture had often been in the papers, making this or that comment on behalf of trade bodies and the like; she had been reported too, usually after some act of public charity. Isabel remembered that the Stivens had been prominent supporters of Scottish Opera, and she had met them, she now recalled, at one of their receptions at the Festival Theatre. She had not known, though, about their collection, most of which now hung on the walls of the auction room, numbered and ready for the auctioneer’s hammer.

The Stivens’ taste clearly ran to watercolours, although there were oils as well. The range was broad: at one end of the spectrum there were Chinese ink–and-wash drawings dating from the late eighteenth century and at the other there were floral paintings by Elizabeth Blackadder executed within the last decade. As in so much watercolour painting, the tone was subtle and subdued: if artists had a big point to make, Isabel thought, oils made it rather more forcefully.

The prices, Isabel noted, were not extreme. This was not a sale aimed at big-spending collectors—the trophy hunters of the auction rooms; while a few of the lots—those by well-known artists—had estimates of thousands of pounds, many of these paintings would appeal to those with much more limited budgets. This, she thought, was a sale for people who would look at the painting and appreciate it for what it was rather than use it as a badge of wealth.

She was looking at a small marine landscape, The North Sea from the Coast of Fife, when she heard her name.

“Isabel?”

She turned round. Roz Leisk, a contemporary from her schooldays, was standing behind her, catalogue in hand. Isabel smiled and then suddenly remembered: she had not thought much about Roz in recent years—their paths rarely crossed—until somebody had said something about a recent divorce. Isabel had been surprised; Roz’s husband, whom she had met on several occasions, was a urologist—a rather quiet man who had good husband material stamped all over him. Had it been Roz who had brought it to an end, or the quiet urologist? Or had they simply drifted apart, as some couples did, in much the same way as friends might grow away from each other?

Isabel greeted her and then pointed at the marine painting. “I rather like this,” she said. “The North Sea seems to be behaving itself.”

Roz peered at the painting. “It’s…it’s okay,” she said. “Not for me, though.”

Isabel shrugged. She would not force the North Sea on anyone. “How are you?” she said. The question was intended to be neutral, but Isabel’s concern must have shown, as Roz frowned and hesitated before replying.

“You’ve probably heard,” she said.

“I did,” said Isabel. “I heard that you and…” She struggled to remember the name of Roz’s husband.

“Andrew,” supplied Roz. “Yes, we’re just divorced. It came through last week, in fact.”

“I was sorry to hear about it,” said Isabel.

“Thank you.” Roz paused before she continued. “The male menopause.”

“Somebody else was involved?”

Roz nodded. “Yes. The usual story. Twenty-four.”

Isabel winced. “Ow.”

Roz made a gesture of acceptance. “It’s better for Andrew to be happy. If that’s what he wants, then I wasn’t going to stand in his way.”

“I suppose not. Still…”

“Yes, still. But here we are. We’re selling the house, of course.”

Isabel imagined that Roz would not be short of money, but it seemed that there were problems.

“We had a very bad mortgage on it,” Roz went on to say. “We chose one of these with-profits policy mortgages. We discovered that the policy had done really badly, with the result that there’s a real shortfall.” She paused. “I’m going to struggle to afford a flat once everything is shared out.”

“I’m very sorry to hear that.”

Roz looked about her. “Actually, there’s something very interesting turned up.”

She had lowered her voice as she spoke, giving her words a conspiratorial tone. Isabel waited for her to continue.

“May I tell you something in confidence? You won’t tell, will you?”

Isabel nodded. “Not if you don’t want me to.”

“All right,” said Roz, her voice now not much louder than a whisper, making it difficult for Isabel to hear what she had to say. “There’s a painting in this sale—one over there, at the end—that is very interesting indeed.”

Isabel glanced in the direction Roz indicated. “Should we take a look at it?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Roz. “But let’s not stand in front of it for too long. We wouldn’t want to attract attention.”

Isabel looked at her sideways. Why should anybody wish to conceal interest in an item at an auction viewing?

They crossed the floor. Roz was silent now, and did not say anything until they reached their goal—a large painting in muted colours, hanging in a dark corner of the room. Isabel glanced at the number, and then referred to her catalogue. “English School,” she said. She turned to Roz. “Is that all? No name?”

Roz inclined her head in the direction of the painting. “Take a closer look,” she muttered, standing aside to give Isabel an unfettered view.

The painting, considerably larger than those around it, had been framed in light oak. On one side this frame had been scoured slightly, as if a nail had been rubbed against it. This gave it a rather neglected look.

“Nobody’s loved this for some time,” muttered Isabel.

Roz said nothing.

Isabel’s gaze moved over the picture. On the left of the scene, the point on which the painting’s composition dictated the eye should fall, was the unmistakeable shape of a Spitfire, the aircraft that had saved Britain against the Nazi onslaught. It was parked on the edge of an airfield, the chocks securing its wheels. Behind it, and slightly to the right, a group of four young men, clad in leather flying jackets and wearing scarves, sat on casually arranged deck chairs. One of the young men was asleep, the newspaper he had been reading slipping out of his grasp, his face turned up to the sky in repose; another one smoked; another read a letter; another had his eyes fixed on the horizon, as if watching for raiders. A dog—a black-and-white sheepdog—lay at the feet of one of the men, his chin against his master’s flying boot.

The sky above the airfield was clear, apart from one or two small clouds, drifting white and wispy. Where sky and earth met could be made out a church spire and a few indistinct roofs.

She caught her breath. The painting captured with extraordinary poignancy the historical moment. The young men were the only defence against something dark and unspeakable. The Spitfire, stood down for the moment, was all they had. On its side, a bright point in the restrained delicacy of the watercolour, was painted the familiar circular decal of the Royal Air Force. No heraldic device on a knightly shield could have conveyed with more force the message of that red, white and blue circle. It was these concentric circles against the sinister arms of the Swastika. It was as simple as that, and these young men understood that, although none of them, in life, would have made much of that. They were simply doing—or preparing to do—what they had to do.

Isabel stood back, her gaze still fixed on the painting.

“You see,” whispered Roz.

She nodded. ‘It’s very powerful.”

“And beautiful.”

“Yes, and beautiful too.”

Roz reached out to touch the glass with a fingertip. “Look at him,” she said. “Look how young he is. A boy.”

Isabel peered at the young man. Roz was right; he could have been sixteen. “When did they let them join?”

“Eighteen, I think,” said Roz. “Some of them were flying Spitfires at eighteen. They went up—into action, that is—after not much more than a few hours of training.”

“So he could have been a young eighteen,” mused Isabel.

Roz stood back. “And he would have existed. You know. That actual young man would have existed.”

Isabel thought about this for a moment. It was not a photograph. The young men in those photographs of waiting aircrews would have existed, but artists could make up faces.

“Perhaps,” she said. “Perhaps he did.”

Roz shook her head. “No, he would actually have existed. This was done by a war artist, you see. They sketched what they actually saw.”

Something was dawning on Isabel. The style had been vaguely familiar and she had put that down to period atmosphere. But now she realised her feeling was something more than that. “It’s not Ravilious, is it?”

Roz smiled. “Yes,” she whispered. “It is. It’s Ravilious.”

Isabel consulted her catalogue again. Pilots with a plane, she read. English School, c. 1940.

She was aware of Roz looking over her shoulder. “They’ve slipped up,” Roz said. “They haven’t attributed it correctly.”

Isabel frowned, and looked at the bottom of the painting. She could just make out a signature. Evans? That explained it; the painting was, as the art historians would put it, in the style of Ravilious.

“It’s by somebody else,” said Isabel. “It’s indistinct, but it looks like Evans. That explains it.”

“No,” said Roz. “Forget about that signature for a while.”

“Well—”

Roz interrupted her. “You’d think they’d recognize the style. After all, Ravilious is one of the best-regarded English watercolourists of the twentieth century. Eric Ravilious and Edward Bawden. Everybody loves their work. All those prints you can buy—and mugs too, for that matter.”

“It’s obviously by an admirer,” said Isabel. “Somebody who painted like Ravilious did.”

Roz shook her head. “No, I don’t think so.” She paused. “I’ve looked very closely at the signature and I think it’s been added later.”

“But why?”

“Because people sometimes did that. The original had no signature and so some enthusiast decided that it’s by somebody else altogether and added a signature.”

Isabel was not convinced. “But they have their experts. They know what they’re doing.”

“Not always,” said Roz. “You often read about paintings being misattributed at auctions.” She drew Isabel aside. “And anyway, I have proof. I know this is a Ravilious.”

Isabel looked at her dubiously.

A resentful note crept into Roz’s voice. “You don’t believe me, do you?”

“It’s not a question of not believing you. It’s just that…well, there are so many disagreements and conflicting opinions in the art world. You can never be completely sure.”

“I have a photograph,” said Roz. “Would you like to see it?”

She reached into the pocket of her jacket and took out a small brown envelope. Gingerly, as if extracting something fragile, she took out a faded black-and-white photograph that she passed to Isabel. “My grandfather,” she said. “That’s him on the left, and on the right is Eric Ravilious. In the background there—on that easel—you’ll see this painting.” She paused before continuing, “This was taken in Ravilious’s studio just before he went to Iceland. I’ve had an enlargement made from this print and it shows the painting in some detail. It’s the exact same dog, apart from anything else.”

Isabel stared at the photograph before handing it back. “Should we go outside,” she said. “We could talk more freely.”

Roz agreed. Slipping the photograph into its envelope, she then tucked it back into her pocket. “I have to get home anyway—are you heading back? I was going to walk.”

They lived in the same part of the city, although Roz’s house was in Morningside, slightly further out than Isabel’s.

“Let’s walk,” said Isabel. “You can tell me a bit more on the way.”

Chapter Three

They began to make their way back up Dundas Street. The traffic was quiet, the pavements largely deserted.

“I like the city when it’s like this,” said Roz. “You even feel inclined to greet people walking towards you.”

“I sometimes do,” said Isabel. “I say good morning to strangers in the street; it’s quite interesting to see the reaction.”

“Which is?”

“Mostly surprise. But then, after a moment, they realise that all I’ve said to them is good morning and they respond warmly. You see a smile of recognition. They’ve recognised something that we’ve lost.”

“Like greeting people behind the counter when you go into a shop?” said Roz. “As the French do?”

“Yes,” said Isabel. She had been momentarily distracted from the conversation by the sight of a man walking down the road in the opposite direction to theirs. “Take this man walking towards us. Should we?”

Roz glanced in the direction of the man advancing towards them. She could see that he was dressed fairly casually—not in business clothes—and was carrying a laden shopping bag. “Should we greet him? Is that what you mean?”

“Yes,” said Isabel. “Let’s say good morning to a perfect stranger.”

“To prove what?” asked Roz.

“That people still want to be human, even when they live in cities. That we haven’t lost all the ordinary ways of recognising the humanity of others. That would do—for a start.”

Roz smiled. “Will we both say good afternoon? It’s after twelve.”

Isabel looked at her watch. It was ten past twelve. “I think that we should stick to good morning. The day always feels like morning until at least one o’clock.”

The man was now not much more than a few yards away, and they were able to make out more details of his appearance. He was, Isabel thought, somewhere in his mid-forties, perhaps a bit younger; his hair was a chestnut colour, but greying in a way that people sometimes described as “distinguished.” His clothing was suggestive of good taste. There was an air of prosperity about him: his jacket and shoes had an expensive look to them.

“Good morning.”

Isabel spoke clearly. It was not a muttered greeting, but a very distinct one.

The man stopped in his tracks and stared at her. He was clearly confused, and a frown crossed his brow as he looked first at Isabel and then at Roz.

“Oh. Well, hello.” He spoke with an old-fashioned Edinburgh accent—the sort that elongates its vowels and has a tendency to stress the final syllable. The hello, as a result, came out as helloo.

It was immediately awkward. He had stopped, as if expecting a further exchange, and Isabel and Roz could hardly walk past now without appearing rude. Isabel had envisaged that there would be, at most, a courteous exchange of greetings; she had not imagined a conversation.

The man was now looking at Isabel again. He smiled nervously. “How are you?” he asked. “I haven’t seen you for an awful long time.”

He’s being polite, thought Isabel, and now she regretted saying good morning. She had not intended to confuse him.

She returned his smile. “No, well…”

The man waited for a moment before he continued the conversation. “Have you been away?” he asked.

Isabel shook her head. It occurred to her that perhaps she had met him after all; that they had been introduced at some party and had forgotten one another, and now he was racking his brains to remember who she was. “It’s difficult to get away these days. With a young child, you see…”

She was now feeling awkward that she had not introduced Roz. Even if she had created this ridiculous situation, ordinary human politeness required that she should not unduly embarrass this man.

“I don’t believe you’ve met Roz…” She suddenly realised that she could not remember Roz’s married name. She had been Leisk at school, but what was she now?

“Roz Harding,” said Roz, smiling. She had picked up on Isabel’s lapsus memoriae.

The man held out a hand to shake hands with Roz. “Martin Fortstone,” he said.

Martin Fortstone. The name was slightly familiar to Isabel, but she could not remember why. It was an unusual name; she had known a family of Fortstones, but they had all been girls: there had been no Martin Fortstone.

“We’re going to have to dash,” said Isabel. “Babysitting issues, you know.”

Martin Fortstone inclined his head. “Of course.” He paused for a moment. It seemed as if he had remembered something. “Thank you, by the way.”

Isabel was not sure how to interpret this. Had he assumed that she was somebody else—somebody whom he had reason to thank for something?

“You don’t have to,” she muttered.

He looked embarrassed. “No, I do. I really do. Thank you. You know what I mean. Thank you for your discretion.”

She had to bring this to an end. “Well, we must be getting on.”

He stepped aside to allow them to pass. “Goodbye,” he said. “And, Roz, thank you too. Nice to have met you.”

For a few moments as they continued on their way, neither said anything. Then Isabel turned to Roz and said, “I feel very bad about that.”

Roz shrugged. “You don’t need to. You only said good morning. There’s nothing to feel bad about in that.”

Isabel still felt uncomfortable. “It was childish. It was like ringing somebody’s doorbell and then running away.”

“Did you do that too?” Roz asked. “I remember we used to do it when I was a girl and we lived in Newington. We used to go to doorbells, ring them, and rush round the corner and giggle as we saw people coming out.”

“Childish pranks,” said Isabel. “But I still feel bad. Why did he thank me? What was he thanking me for? What did he mean by discretion? What was he talking about?”

“Heaven knows,” said Roz. “But anyway, let’s not worry about it. I want to hear what you think of that painting.”

“I like Ravilious,” said Isabel. “I always have. There’s a delicacy to his work.”

Roz liked the idea of delicacy. “Yes, I agree—that’s what it is. A sort of understated approach.”

“Very English,” said Isabel.

“Do you think that goes with being English? A tendency to understate things?”

“Yes, of course. They’re always understating things. If they’re in the middle of an absolute disaster, they’ll say things like a spot of difficulty or the situation gives rise to slight concern. They’re famous understaters, the English.”

“And the Scots? Don’t we understate?”

“No,” said Isabel. “We don’t. We tend to be taciturn. That’s not understatement.” She thought for a moment. “Well, it could be, I suppose. Saying nothing could be a serious understatement.”

Roz steered the conversation back to Ravilious. The problem with Isabel, she thought, was that she went off at a tangent.

“You probably know that Ravilious was very friendly with Bawden—back in the twenties. And Nash too—he studied under Paul Nash.”

“I like all of them,” said Isabel. “Bawden, in particular.”

“Well, yes, they’re—how would one put it—gentle. Yes, I think that sums them up. Gentle artists.”

“They wouldn’t go down well today, would they?” observed Isabel. “People seem to think that the role of art today is to make us feel uncomfortable. To shock us. To turn our world upside down.”

Roz was dismissive. “Oh that! I pay no attention to all that. Those people won’t last. They’ll be forgotten about. People like Ravilious will last.”

“You said something about your grandfather…”

“Yes, he was an artist too. He was with Ravilious at the Royal College of Art. He knew Bawden too. And when the Bawdens bought that house in Great Bardfield—Brick House, I think it was called—he used to go and see them there. Ravilious lived with them for a while. They were quite close friends.”

Isabel waited for Roz to continue.

“Then came the War,” said Roz. “My grandfather joined up more or less immediately—I think it was in November 1939—and Ravilious joined that December. They were both accepted as official war artists, both of them given the rank of captain. It’s a strange idea, don’t you think? Getting artists to paint something as awful as war.”

“I suppose people want a record of what it’s like.”

Roz looked doubtful. “They may want a record, but I’m not sure that they want the slant that an artist might give to it. Do you think that the military really want to show it as it is? Or are they more interested in glorification?”

“I suppose soldiers, like anybody else, feel that what they’re doing is worthy of being recorded by an artist. I suspect senior officers might feel art ennobles their efforts.”

“And they’re right—that Ravilious of the Spitfire and the young men does that. It affected both of us. It made us think about the courage of those pilots.”

She looked at Roz quizzically. “Would a photograph do the same? To the same extent?”

“Photographs can be extremely powerful,” countered Roz.

Yes, thought Isabel; they can. There came to her mind the picture of the young girl fleeing the napalm—her clothes torn off, running naked towards the photographer. It was almost too painful even to imagine. Or the Vietnamese officer with his pistol pressed to the contorted face of the Vietcong insurgent. “Perhaps they do different things,” said Isabel. “Guernica does one thing; a war photograph does another.”

Roz nodded. “Perhaps.” She returned to her grandfather’s story. “He and Ravilious saw one another on and off. They had different postings. Ravilious was with the Royal Marines; my grandfather was with the Infantry. Ravilious drew a lot of boats, while my grandfather did pictures of young men undergoing training. He went on to North Africa; Ravilious was sent to Iceland, and that’s where he died. He went out on a search mission for a downed plane, and never came back. It must have been a dreadful way to go—your last view of this world being the sea coming up to meet you as your plane went down.”

Isabel said nothing. She had always found it difficult to imagine the courage that spurred young men to give up their lives. But there was not much that she wanted to say about that.

They walked on in silence. Then Isabel said, “Are you going to go for that painting? Are you going to bid?”

“Of course,” said Roz. “You saw the estimate. Two hundred and fifty pounds.”

“Not very much.”

“You can say that again. It’s worth about thirty-five to forty thousand—maybe more.”

“A bargain,” said Isabel.

“Exactly. I only hope that nobody else reaches the same conclusion that I have.”

Isabel smiled. “I hope not. But that’s what auctions are about. They’re uncertain. You never know.” She paused. “And I’m sure it’ll give you a lot of pleasure if you get it.”

This brought a chuckle from Roz. “The money will,” she said.

Isabel frowned. “You won’t want to keep it?”

“Oh, I’d love to keep it, but I won’t be able to afford to. If I get it at the estimate, or even slightly above, I’ll make a terrific profit by selling it to a dealer.” She looked at Isabel, as if slightly embarrassed. “Twenty thousand pounds, I imagine—probably more.”

Isabel blurted out something that she had not intended to say. “How unfortunate for the seller…”

“What?”

She had no choice but to explain. “Well, I feel a bit sorry for the seller. He—or she—obviously is unaware of the painting’s value.” She paused, and then repeated, “Obviously.” She saw Roz’s face fall, but she felt she had to explain herself. “He’s going to get only a very small proportion of its true worth, don’t you agree?”

Even as she spoke, Isabel thought: this is not my business. And then, as the words came into her mind, an inner voice uttered them in Jamie’s voice. Not your business. She heard him. He had said it before—on more than one occasion. And she usually replied, Yes, I know, but how can I not…

Roz did not look at her as she replied. “But it’s an open market—it’s an auction after all.”

“I know,” said Isabel. She hesitated, uncertain whether to retract what she had just said. There were times when familiar adages came to mind, and this was one such: least said, soonest mended. To which, Isabel now thought, one might add: quick retraction—satisfaction.

It was too late: Roz’s resentment now showed in her peevish tone. “But the whole point of an auction, Isabel,” she said, “is that when you put something in for an auction—what’s the word they use—when you consign something—you take the risk that the auctioneer might get it wrong. Surely that’s part of the deal? Or at least that’s been the case at any auction I’ve ever gone to…”

Isabel was, after all, a philosopher, and she considered general propositions rather than took them for granted. Did you take that risk? Or did you assume the auctioneer’s attribution would be correct? Perhaps you did not imagine there would be any risk.

The argument might have ended there, with both tiptoeing around a suddenly awkward difference of opinion, but Roz was not going to leave it at that. “There have been plenty of cases of people making discoveries at auctions and getting something really important for way below its real value. For instance…” She pursed her lips; the examples were clearly not coming readily to mind.

Isabel came to her rescue. She was beginning to feel guilty about raising the matter in the first place; she should have given it more thought before speaking; she should have realised that a casual observation on rights and wrongs could spoil another’s delight in a triumph. “I know. I’ve heard of that happening. And—”

Roz cut her short. “I need the money,” she muttered. “I’m not doing anything illegal. And also…well, I don’t think it’s morally wrong—if that’s what you were suggesting.”

Isabel reached out and touched the other woman’s arm gently. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I was thinking aloud—before I really worked it out. You’re quite right: it’s what auctions are all about.”

Roz gave Isabel a reproachful look. “That’s what I said.”

Isabel made a gesture to indicate that she did not want to pursue the matter. “I hope you get it,” she said. She was not sure that she sounded convincing, and she glanced at Roz to judge her reaction to her apparent volte-face.

It was a while before Roz replied, and then it was to voice disquiet. “I take it that you aren’t going to mention this to anybody, are you? You did promise me, you know.”

Isabel swallowed. She had devoted the earlier part of the week to editing a special issue of the Review of Applied Ethics on promises and the obligations to which they gave rise. One of the papers she had read discussed the doctrine of rebus sic stantibus, by which undertakings could be revisited by those who gave them if circumstances had changed sufficiently. She had given a rash promise—one given before she had had the time to think of the implications of the situation. Now that she had done so, she was inclined to another view, one that would justify reconsidering the promise. Arguably.

She could not.

“Yes,” she said. “I remember what I said.”

Roz came to a halt. “That’s not good enough, Isabel. Let me ask you directly: do you intend to honour…yes, to honour the promise you made to me? Tell me. Do you?”

Isabel felt a wave of hostility welling up in the space, the few inches, between them. Hostility was like that: it could be a wall of ice between people; a wall that sometimes seemed almost tangible, almost real.

“I told you I wouldn’t,” she said. “And I won’t. I won’t do anything to stop you getting that painting.”

“Good,” said Roz. “Now, let’s see about getting a bus. I’ve had enough walking. I feel lazy.”

You feel physically lazy, thought Isabel, whereas I should feel intellectually lazy. She was aware that she had conceded on a point that should have been more stoutly defended. What made Roz think that she was entitled to expect omertà, like some Sicilian don? She found herself feeling a certain distaste for the other woman; greed dressed up as need, she thought.

Chapter Four

The first part of their journey took place in silence. As the bus laboured up the Mound, the slope that divided the Georgian part of Edinburgh from the Old Town, Roz made a remark about the National Gallery, that they were passing at the time. Isabel who was looking at a mother trying to keep her two unruly children on their seat—and sympathising—caught only the end of what Roz said: “…I imagine they’d think themselves lucky if they did.”

She turned to Roz. “Sorry. I didn’t get that.” She lowered her voice. “That poor woman over there. See her? Those kids are really hyper. She must be at the end of her tether.” Then she added, “What did you say?”

“Doesn’t matter,” said Roz, huffily.

“No, please, I’m interested…” Isabel thought that it was probably something to do with finding things at auction, and how pleased the National Gallery would be to do so.

But then the bus gave a lurch as the driver applied his brakes and sounded his horn angrily. Another driver had made a sharp turn without warning, shooting off down Market Street towards Waverley Station.

“Some people!” muttered Roz.

For a moment Isabel wondered whether the comment was directed at her, but then realised that Roz was referring to the thoughtless driver.

“They don’t necessarily mean it,” said Isabel mildly. “They just get behind the wheel of a car and forget there are other drivers. Their minds are on other things.”

“Well they shouldn’t be driving,” snapped Roz.

“No, perhaps not.”

Roz was clearly in a bad mood. “What do they think buses are for? Why pollute the place with their cars when there’s a perfectly good bus service?”

“Or legs,” Isabel ventured. It was Roz, after all, who had suggested they board a bus. Isabel would have walked had she been by herself, but had felt that to insist on doing so when they had just emerged from their argument might have been tactless.

“Well, not everybody can walk,” said Roz testily.

“No,” said Isabel. “I suppose not.”

“It’s all very well for us,” Roz went on. “We can walk, but what about people who can’t?”

Isabel looked out through the window. It was clear to her that Roz had been thoroughly…discombobulated by their exchange over the painting. Discombobulated…that was the word, that utterly splendid word. To be put out; to be upset…she thought of a metaphor…she had been derailed. Yes, thought Isabel, my mentioning the seller had derailed her. She felt sorry about that; Isabel did not like conflict, but was she really at fault to have made a perfectly reasonable observation about how one person’s gain was another’s loss? Of course people did not like to be made to feel bad about what they were doing, or proposed to do; that was the problem here, and she was not sure whether she could do anything to change that, short of making some sort of abject apology. That would have been insincere though, and she was not prepared to be insincere just to lighten Roz’s mood.

They lapsed into uncomfortable silence. By the time the bus reached Heriot’s School, Isabel was looking out of the window to the right—at the High Renaissance spires of the main school building—and Roz was gazing fixedly out the other side, at the glassy additions to the Old Infirmary. As they passed the King’s Theatre a few minutes later, the silence was interrupted by a muttered remark from Roz. “Nonsense. Complete nonsense.”

Isabel glanced at posters displayed in the theatre windows. “That play?” she asked.

“Yes, nonsense.”

“Oh. Did you see it?’

“Certainly not,” said Roz. “Mary saw it. She hated it. She said it was a complete waste of her time.”

Isabel wondered who Mary was. “Well, thanks for the warning.”

Roz said nothing. The road now wound up towards Bruntsfield; they were nearing the stop at which Isabel would alight.

“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 consciousness.

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 priests 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?”

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 doing. 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.

Eddie offered to make the tea and bring it to the table. He had just returned from the dentist and was beaming with pleasure. “He put this thing in my mouth,” he said to Isabel. “It sprayed water all the over place. And then he used an air drill. He said that it had no moving parts. I didn’t feel anything.”

“There you are,” said Isabel. “Just as we told you.”

“And then I had a session with the dental hygienist,” Eddie continued. “She took thin strips of sandpaper and put them between my teeth. She said my teeth were very strong—some of the strongest teeth she’s ever seen. She said that I should always floss in case I got gum disease. She says that just about everybody gets gum disease if they’re not careful.”

He was staring at Isabel’s mouth as he said this, and she pressed her lips firmly together. “I do not have gum disease, Eddie.”

He looked abashed. “I didn’t say that you did.”

“Then don’t look at me like that. Just make the tea.”

She rejoined Ruth at the table.

“And how’s Jamie?”

Isabel told her of Jamie’s recent concert tour with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. “They were in Amsterdam,” she said. “Amsterdam and Berlin. They had good audiences.”

“And little…forgive me, I can’t remember what your wee boy’s called?”

“Charlie. Thriving. A pillar of the local playgroup.”

Isabel enquired after Ruth’s mother.

“She’s doing well for her ninety-two years,” said Ruth. “She’s in St. Gregory’s. You know the place? They look after her very well. She has a sitting room and a bedroom and can have her own things there. But…” Ruth looked out of the window, as if debating whether to reveal something. “But it’s extremely expensive. Have you ever had to pay nursing home fees?”

Isabel shook her head. Her mother—her sainted American mother—had died when Isabel was twelve; and her father had suffered the coronary that ended his life while he was still living in the house that she now occupied with Jamie. Neither had needed to be nursed in their final years.

“I don’t know how people manage,” Ruth went on.

“They sell their house,” said Isabel.

“The children’s inheritance.”

Isabel agreed. “Yes, but children aren’t entitled to their parents’ money—or not when the parents can use it for their own purposes.”

“No, possibly not.” Ruth hesitated. “St. Gregory’s is almost forty thousand a year. I sold my mother’s house about ten years ago, but the proceeds have all been eaten up by keeping her there. Not that I resent it—not for a moment. She’s very comfortable.”

“It’s a good use of it,” said Isabel.

“Yes, but now I have to find another source, and so I’ve decided to downsize. I’m putting my house on the market.”

Eddie arrived with the tea. He placed the teapot in front of Ruth and nodded to Isabel. He was still clearly euphoric after his dental visit.

“That young man seems cheerful,” said Ruth.

Isabel glanced at Eddie, who had now returned to the counter. “He’s been to the dentist,” she said. “He was dreading it and now it’s over.”

“Ah, that feeling. Profound relief at still being alive after some dreaded threat.”

“Yes. That feeling.” Isabel poured Ruth’s tea for her. She was concerned by what Ruth had begun to say about selling her house. “Do you have to sell?” she asked.

Ruth nodded. “Effectively, yes. The doctor says that Mother will be with us for a little while yet. She has cancer, you see, that they’re not treating aggressively, but they think that she’s got another two years at the most—maybe a little less. She’s in no discomfort.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Well, we all have to go sooner or later. And she’s had a pretty good time of it. So all I want to do is to make sure that these final two years—if that’s what it’s going to be—are lived in comfort in the place that she’s familiar with, and where she’s looked after by the people she knows and likes. But that costs money. I have to think in terms of up to one hundred thousand pounds.”

“And you’ll get that by downsizing?”

“Not all of it. I can raise about fifty if I moved to a two-bedroom flat. My own place is quite small but I’d certainly come away with a spare fifty if I sold it now and bought this smaller place I have my eye on.”

“And the other fifty?”

“I have my own savings. I can use them.”

Isabel reached out to touch her friend lightly on the arm. “Your mother’s lucky she has you.”

Ruth was airily dismissive. “Heavens no! I’m the one who’s fortunate to have had her. Anyway, I’m raising a bit here and there. Mother had a few bits and bobs that I’m selling. I have a power of attorney and can manage her estate, you see. She had a car that we never got rid of—it’s been sitting in my garage and it transpires that it’s so old that it’s actually appreciating. Can you believe that? It’s been valued at twenty thousand. And there are a few paintings that she owned—nothing special. I’ve put them up for auction at Hamilton’s.”

Isabel drew in her breath. “Hamilton’s?”

“That place down in the New Town. You must know it.”

Isabel nodded. “I do.” She paused. “And these paintings—what are they?”

“A couple of landscapes—nothing special. And a rather nice watercolour—a big one—that Mother always liked. She described it as her picture of her young men. It’s rather effective—a Spitfire and some young men waiting to go up. Battle of Britain, I imagine.”

Isabel felt a cold hand clutch at her heart. “Not worth much?” she asked.

“Apparently not. The auctioneers said it might fetch a couple of hundred—maybe a tiny bit more. But every little bit helps, doesn’t it?”

Isabel struggled to answer. “Yes, I suppose it does.”

She looked down at the floor. She had given her word to Roz. She had promised not to say anything about the painting to anybody. Truth. She looked up, straight into the eyes of her friend. Ruth smiled back at her. It was a look of complete trust, of the sort that proceeds from friendship; a trust that assumes that a friend will not conceal from you that which you might wish to know—truths palatable as well as unpalatable.

Chapter Six

Jamie listened as he cooked dinner. Seated at the kitchen table, a glass of New Zealand white wine before her, Isabel told him of her conversation with Ruth in Cat’s delicatessen that morning and of the revelation that Ruth’s aged mother was the owner of the Ravilious.

He put down his wooden spoon and wiped his hands on his apron.

“That’s it?” he asked. “Nothing more?”

She looked at him across the room. He was a good cook, but a messy one, never washing up as he went along. That evening a trail of bowls and pans bore witness to his creation of a complex Rajasthan dish he had learned from the Indian cookbook Isabel had given him for his last birthday.

“No, nothing more,” she said. “And I would have thought that’s quite enough.”

He assured her he was not making light of her dilemma. “No, I agree, it’s a very difficult position to be in. Whatever you do—”

“…or don’t do,” interjected Isabel.

“Whatever you do or don’t do, you’re going to let somebody down.”

Isabel took a sip of her wine. It came from a vineyard she had visited years ago—a place on the South Island, not far from the Marlborough Sounds. She remembered standing by a row of vines and looking towards the ocean—a field of blue ploughed by a single ship; the white furrow of the ship’s wake, brief, impermanent, a straight line that was soon rubbed out by the waves. She sighed. Somehow New Zealand seemed a more innocent, less convoluted place, an attractive alternative to the complicated world in which she seemed to live her life—a world of dilemmas and conundrums, a world of nuanced decisions that, however carefully reached and however scrupulously justified, would make some people feel they had somehow been betrayed or wronged.

Jamie picked up his spoon and dipped it into the pot. “You need to break that promise,” he said. “It’s the promise that makes the situation difficult for you. If you hadn’t made that promise, you could do what you like.”

“But I did make it.”

He looked into the pot. “We don’t have to keep every single promise we make. We can’t.”

Isabel frowned. “Can’t we?”

“No, we can’t.” He turned to face her. He seemed concerned that she simply did not understand. “I’m not saying that you can break promises just like that. All I’m saying is that there may come a time when we have to say that we’re no longer bound by our promises.”

She asked him for an example.

“Marriage,” he said quickly. Then he repeated himself. “Yes, marriage. You promise to stay with somebody for the rest of your life. You even say until death do us part. But what if you go off somebody? What if you go off the person you marry to such an extent that you can’t bear to be in the same room? Are you still bound by the promise you made?”

She did not answer immediately. Some might still argue that you were—some Catholics and some Kantians, but did they do so with any degree of conviction?

She looked past him, out of the kitchen window, into a garden bathed in the soft golden light of a Scottish evening; it was June, not far off the longest day, and it would barely get dark that night. White nights—the privilege of the far northern summer. She was blissfully happy with Jamie, but she had friends who were not so fortunate. She suddenly thought of one, of a friend who had confessed to her that she found it impossible to be in the presence of her husband without feeling a visceral revulsion. “Everything about him appals me,” this friend had said. “I hate the way he eats—he slurps things. I hate the way he cleans his ears with the top of a pencil. I hate the rancid smell of his breath. I hate the things he says, the thoughts he thinks, the music he listens to.”

How could a promise survive such antipathy?

“Yes,” she said to Jamie. “You’re right. There are some promises you can break.”

“Well, there you are. That’s your answer.”

It was not going to be that simple. “But you have to have good grounds for breaking them,” she added quickly. “Really good grounds.”

Jamie thought she had them now. “Compare the claims,” he said. “On the one hand you have this woman, Roz, who’s hoping to make a profit at the expense of somebody’s mistake. Does she need the money?”

“Yes, she does, actually.”

“Because her husband’s gone off with another woman?”

“Yes.”

Jamie shrugged. “Plenty of people are in that situation. You said he was a doctor?”

“Yes.”

“She’ll get a reasonable settlement. She won’t be on the bread line.”

Isabel remembered what Roz had said about the shortfall in their mortgage. “No, but she’s going to have to struggle to get a decent flat.”

“But she’ll have a roof over her head?”

Isabel conceded that Roz probably would not be homeless. “She’ll have to come down a bit in the world, I suppose. But no, she won’t be out on the street.”

“So her need is not all that pressing,” said Jamie. “It would be nice for her to have a bit more money, but she’ll get by without it.”

Isabel nodded.

“Right,” said Jamie. “So that’s her case, so to speak. Now, what about this other woman, Ruth—what about her? What’s at stake there? Her mother needs the money to stay in the nursing home. If she doesn’t get it, she’ll have to go somewhere she doesn’t know. It would be very upsetting for her.”

Isabel corrected him. She pointed out that Ruth had savings and these could be used to make up the sums required. “Ruth’s mother wouldn’t be moved even if Ruth didn’t get the money from the painting.”

“But that money’s her mother’s. The painting belongs to her. She’s morally entitled to it.”

Isabel sighed. “I’m not sure if that’s the way our economic system works. We don’t always have what we deserve to have; we get what the system allows us to have.”

Jamie returned to his cooking. “I just don’t like the idea that you can’t break a promise. What if somebody comes to you and says: I’m going to tell you something but you must promise not to tell anybody. And you promise. Then the person says that he’s killed somebody. What then?”

“You inform the authorities.”

Jamie stirred the pot vigorously. “What’s the difference then? Roz is planning to rip off this poor ninety-year-old. Inform the authorities—or, rather, tell the auction house they’ve got it wrong.”

“I wish it were that simple.”

“It is that simple,” said Jamie.

She sensed his irritation. Was she being unreasonable? For a few moments she vacillated, but then she made up her mind. She could not break the explicit promise she had made to Roz, much as she would have liked to have done so. Promises were not sacrosanct, but this was not a situation in which breach of promise was justified. She wished that it were, but it was not. The barriers in this life, she thought, were very rarely in the places in which one wanted them to be.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t. I just can’t do it.”

It seemed to her for a moment that Jamie would continue with his argument, but he did not. He placed a lid on the pot and turned the heat down. Undoing his apron, he joined her at the table and poured himself a glass of wine.

“You know something?” he said.

She was wary; she dreaded his criticism. “What?”

“I’d hate it if you stopped thinking about things.”

She relaxed. “I see. Well, sometimes I wish I didn’t.”

“No,” he said. “You must. There are more than enough people to act badly in this world—but hardly any who do the right thing—like you.”

He reached across the table to take her hand. He squeezed it. “My amusing Valentine,” he half-sang, grinning. “Sweet, thoughtful Valentine…”

She returned the squeeze. “My favourite musician,” she said. “By far.”

* * *

Isabel tried to put the auction out of her mind, but its time and date loomed stubbornly large in her consciousness: Friday, 10 a.m. On Thursday night, sleepless, she made her way downstairs after she and Jamie had gone to bed. Sitting at her desk, she began to write. What is the exact status of a promise given rashly and without full awareness of the surrounding circumstances? This problem, familiar enough to philosophy undergraduates, is nonetheless more complex and difficult than it appears at first blush. Philosophers have always viewed promises as creating a very particular form of moral obligation…

An hour or so later she printed out what she had written and sat back and read it. It did not help; it made her feel no better simply to have explored the contours of the issue. She laid aside the four typed pages, switched out the light, and went to stand at the window. It took her eyes some time to get accustomed to the darkness, but slowly the garden landscape became clearer: the shape of the rhododendron bushes, the outline of the trees, the pattern of the shadows thrown by the moonlight. The quiet and waiting world…

She became aware of movement. At first she thought it was the wind causing a branch to sway, but then she saw the shape of the fox’s head, raised slightly, as he moved across a stretch of lawn and then stopped to sniff at the air. She saw the tail, a dark brush, and for a moment the glint of the moon in the animal’s eyes.

“Brother Fox,” she whispered.

He hesitated, looking about him as if somehow aware that he was being watched. Then he moved and in seconds was gone. Isabel stood where she was for a minute or two, unwilling to bring to an end the moment of one-sided contact. Then she returned to bed, not turning on the bedside light, but slipping back between the sheets in darkness. It was shortly after midnight, and she thought, Ten hours to the auction. She had not imagined going, but now she knew that she would. She would not intervene, but she felt she had to know what consequences her silence would have. In a strange way, she felt responsible for what was happening. She had the power to change what would happen at the auction—she had chosen not to use that power. Yet that did not distance her from the likely outcome; rather it made her central to it, its determinant, its author. And the least she could do, she decided, was to be there to see how events would unfold.

Sleep came upon her slowly, as her mind was active. As she drifted off, odd thoughts intruded: the Pitlochry Theatre, for some reason, came to mind, and then she thought, for a completely unconnected reason, of Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet. And then Martin Fortstone—and she saw him, standing before her in Dundas Street, and she suddenly realised why he had thanked her for her discretion. He had imagined—incorrectly—that she was somebody else, some friend of Hatty’s, who had become aware of their affair and who had kept silent. That must be it. So now Martin Fortstone was relying on her to continue to be discreet, and that added one more complication. Did we owe people things they thought we owed them, even if we did not really owe anything at all? Balzac intruded again, inconsequentially, and then, in dozy confusion, sleep came.

Chapter Seven

Isabel watched as the auction house began to fill up. She had been one of the first to arrive, and had taken a seat off to one side so that she would get a good view of proceedings. Busying herself with the catalogue, she did not notice Roz coming in and only saw her just before the auction was about to begin. Shortly thereafter she noticed that Ruth was there too, sitting at the back, engaged in conversation with a bespectacled thin man whom Isabel recognised as a lawyer with an interest in art. Roz saw her and waved cheerfully; Ruth, deep in conversation with the lawyer, did not appear to see her.

The auctioneer was a smartly dressed woman with a quick, businesslike manner. Once she had ascended the rostrum, she flipped open a book she was carrying and welcomed everybody to the auction. There were one or two withdrawn lots, and an announcement about the renumbering of a handful of others. Then the sale began.

The first painting was nothing special, which did not surprise Isabel. She knew that the psychology of the auction room required that anticipation be built up, that highs and lows be carefully choreographed to excite interest at the right moment and to allow people to get their breath for the next highlight. Lot number one, a nineteenth-century genre painting of a young girl picking flowers, just scraped past the bottom of the estimate—an unexceptional start. The second lot was better—and bidding took the price comfortably past the higher figure listed in the catalogue. When the third painting performed the same way, the atmosphere in the room became subtly more charged: the sale was going to be a success. The auctioneer visibly relaxed, allowing herself a small dose of humour in her description of the next lot. There was appreciative laughter.

The Ravilious came up at the tail end of the sale, an hour and a half after the beginning. As the auctioneer worked her way through the lots, Isabel found herself feeling increasingly tense. She had decided her position—silence—but now she began to ask herself whether it really was the right thing to do. Jamie’s instinct had been to break the promise to Roz. He had shown no hesitation in taking that view, and this made her wonder whether she really was, as he suggested, placing too much store by her promise. And then, as she looked across the room, and saw Roz sitting, tense with anticipation, ready to pull off her coup, she thought of that poor woman in St. Gregory’s. She was about to lose something of value; her unawareness of what she had was about to be taken advantage of. And she—Isabel Dalhousie—could stop it, just like that. She could still send a note up to the auctioneer simply saying Misattribution: Ravilious!

Would that work? She imagined the scene: the auctioneer opening the note, frowning as she read it, and then looking up sharply as she considered her position. There would be doubt, hesitation, perhaps uncertainty as to what to do; and then the announcement: Lot eighty-seven is being temporarily withdrawn pending discussions with the consignor. They would have to say something like that, as they would be duty-bound to draw their client’s attention to the possibility that the painting was worth much more than they had estimated. It would be embarrassing for them, but they would feel vindicated once the true value was realised.

The porter brought the painting to the easel in front of the rostrum. As he did so, the auctioneer glanced down at her book. “I can start this lot slightly higher than the estimate,” she said. “I have a bid of four hundred with me.”

Isabel glanced at Roz on the other side of the room. The other woman was sitting on the edge of her seat, a numbered bidder’s paddle in her left hand. Even from a distance, Isabel could pick up the tenseness in her posture.

The bid of four hundred left with the auctioneer meant that somebody, other than those in the room, had noticed the painting and was prepared to go above the estimate. The fact that the auctioneer had started with a figure above the likely reserve price spoke to something else: more than one person had lodged an absentee bid.

“Four hundred and fifty?” said the auctioneer.

Isabel saw Roz’s paddle raised. The bid was acknowledged and the auctioneer looked around the room. “Five hundred?”

A man seated in the front row nodded his head. He did not use a paddle, but the auctioneer appeared to recognise him and nodded in his direction. Roz raised her paddle again at five hundred and fifty, and again the man in the front row nodded.

Isabel watched Roz as the bidding increased. At each leap of the price, the man in the front row nodded. Indifference in the rest of the crowd now turned to interest: a bidding war between two people in the same room had all the elements of human drama that people hoped for in an auction.

After the price reached one thousand pounds the size of the increments increased to steps of two hundred and fifty. At two thousand pounds, when the auctioneer looked in Roz’s direction, she was met by a shake of the head. She was out of the running.

Isabel looked at the man in the front row. He was leaning back in his seat, his eyes fixed on the ceiling, confident now that his last bid would secure the painting. He knows, she thought. She glanced over towards Roz, and then, briefly, towards the back of the hall where Ruth was whispering something to the lawyer beside her. He knows.

Isabel made her decision. She raised her hand.

The auctioneer looked in her direction. “New bidder,” she said and then leaned over to confer with the clerk at her side. The clerk looked at Isabel and said something to the auctioneer. She was recognized.

“I have two thousand two hundred and fifty,” said the auctioneer. “Miss Dalhousie.”

The man in the front row now sat up straight. Trying not to make his interest too obvious, he looked over his shoulder towards Isabel. Then he turned to face the auctioneer before nodding his head again.

At three thousand pounds, the increments became five hundred and then, shortly thereafter, they jumped to two thousand pounds. Isabel kept her eyes on the auctioneer. Ten thousand, twenty thousand, thirty thousand. By now the room had fallen into complete silence. At forty-five thousand pounds, Isabel stopped. The auctioneer looked at her. She shook her head. The man in the front row was impassive.

“No further bids?” said the auctioneer. “With the gentleman in the front row at forty-five thousand pounds…”

Isabel felt Roz’s gaze upon her. She did not return it, but glanced instead at Ruth, who had buried her head in her hands in disbelief. The lawyer beside her was smiling.

* * *

Roz caught up with her in the entrance. She was pale with anger. “What do you think you were doing?” she hissed.

“You dropped out,” said Isabel calmly. “I assumed you’d reached your limit.”

“You told somebody,” said Roz. “You gave me your word you wouldn’t.”

Isabel was not prepared for this. “I did not. I kept my promise.”

Roz stared at her. “I don’t believe you for a moment. That man in the front…”

Isabel interrupted her. “You may have noticed I was bidding against him,” she said.

“But how did he know what it was? You must have said something to somebody.”

Isabel felt a growing irritation. “Listen,” she said, “you shouldn’t imagine that you’re the only person who can tell a Ravilious when she sees it. That man obviously knew what it was. And should anyone be surprised by that?”

She saw that Roz was close to tears.

“But why did you go for it?” Roz stuttered. “You knew I wanted it.”

Isabel hesitated. She was under no obligation to explain herself to this woman, but there was something about her now that evoked her sympathy.

“The reason why I joined in the bidding was not to get the painting,” she said quietly. “I wanted to make sure that it went for a fair price. So I bid that man up.” She paused, allowing time for this to sink in. “I didn’t want to get the painting—I just wanted to make sure that the real owner—whom I happen to know, by the way—got a proper price for it.”

Roz gasped. “You know the person?”

“Yes. I do.”

Roz’s lower lip was quivering. She fixed Isabel with an accusing stare. “So you must have told them. You must have.”

“No,” said Isabel, her voice beginning to rise. “I did not tell them. I kept my promise to you. I’ve just told you that.”

But Roz was no longer listening. Turning her back on Isabel, she began to walk off down the steps that led to the street. She did not turn round.

And there was Ruth behind her.

“Isabel?”

She turned round. Ruth was standing in the doorway with the lawyer.

“You two know one another, I believe.”

The lawyer nodded, as did Isabel.

“I had no idea you were going to go for our painting,” said Ruth. “You said nothing the other day.”

“I only decided this morning,” said Isabel.

The lawyer frowned. “But you must have known what it was,” he said. “I’ve just had a word with the other bidder. He tells me it’s a Ravilious.”

“It is,” said Isabel.

Ruth was staring at her in a disconcerting way. “You knew that?”

Isabel began to answer. “Well, it’s rather complicated—”

Ruth cut her short. “You knew it? You knew what it was?”

“Yes, I did.”

Ruth looked at the lawyer as if to seek confirmation of something unbelievable. He said, “Rather surprising.” He spoke in a dry way, as if commenting on a legal formula.

“You might have told me,” said Ruth. “It could have been sold for peanuts. And mother…”

“I wanted to,” said Isabel. “But I came by the knowledge in circumstances that made it impossible for me to tell you.”

Ruth was silent for a while. Then she said, “Some friend,” and walked away. The lawyer, taken aback, gave Isabel a look of reproach, before turning to follow Ruth.

“I deliberately bid him up,” called Isabel after her. “Didn’t you notice?”

She was left standing by herself. She had risked more than forty thousand pounds. She had kept a promise given to a person she did not even know very well. She had secured a lifeline for an aged woman. And now she was openly reproached and reviled. She sighed. Doing the right thing was not always the best way of securing the approval of others—far from it, it would seem.

But the gratitude of others was not the point. You did what needed to be done because it needed to be done, and for no other reason.

* * *

Jamie had offered to cook again.

“Bad day?” he asked.

She nodded. “Very bad.”

He walked across the kitchen and took her in his arms. “Poor Isabel.”

She nestled against him. He had been cooking porcini mushrooms and she smelled them on him—a dry, meaty smell. “I’ll survive.”

“Tell me,” he said.

She told him about the auction. “I almost ended up with a Ravilious,” she said. “Almost, but not quite.”

“You could have sold it on. You’d probably have got more or less what you’d paid for it. Maybe a bit more.”

“Perhaps. But it was scary stuff.”

She told him about being rounded upon by both Roz and Ruth.

“They shouldn’t have done that,” said Jamie. “You did the right thing.”

“I tried to,” said Isabel.

She suddenly felt an urge to cry. Sensing this, he held her more tightly.

“Don’t let them upset you,” he said. “I know you’ve nothing to be ashamed of.” He paused. “And remember Ruth’s mother. She’s the one who counts in all this. You saved everything for her. Remember that.”

Isabel did not say anything. The tears had started. It was so unfair. Those two women had no justification at all. How could they?

The telephone rang.

“I’ll answer,” said Jamie.

He left the room. The porcini mushrooms, half in their liquid, half out to dry, scented the room.

He was a good ten minutes. When he came back he was smiling.

He walked up to Isabel and kissed her on the cheek. “Sweet, thoughtful Valentine. All over.”

“What’s all over?”

“It—the situation. The row. The call it what you will. Over. Forgiven. Settled.”

She looked confused.

“That call was from Ruth,” he said. “Full of apologies. She wants to come and see you tomorrow. She says she wasn’t thinking straight when she spoke to you. Now she realises what you’ve done for her mother.”

Isabel received the news in silence. She felt the relief that always came with the end of a quarrel, even though in this case she knew she had nothing to reproach herself over. But how you felt in this life, she knew, often had nothing to do with how you deserved to feel.

Dinner was almost ready now, and Jamie served it to them in the kitchen.

“I love your risotto,” Isabel said.

“And I love you,” said Jamie. “And risotto. More than risotto, in fact. I love you more than risotto, more than chocolate, more than Bach or Mozart…”

He looked at her across the table, an arm’s length away. “I meant to tell you,” he said. “When I went to collect Charlie from playgroup today, I was early. So I went in and had a word with Miss Campbell.”

“Oh yes.”

“And Charlie was playing with his pal, Hugh—he of the adventurous mother.”

“Yes?”

“And so I slipped something into Hugh’s coat pocket.”

Isabel stared at him wide-eyed.

“That letter?”

“Yes. I returned it to base. She’ll probably find it and breathe a sigh of relief. Not lost after all.”

Isabel sat back in her chair. “Well, that sorts that out.” A few seconds later she added, “It can’t be easy—conducting an affair.”

“Exactly,” said Jamie.

That ended that, she thought. Hatty, Martin and Don would have to work out their own fate: it had nothing to do with her.

“I’ve drawn a line,” she muttered.

Jamie looked puzzled. “What line?” he asked.

“A line around what I need to concern myself with and what’s nothing to do with me.”

He smiled. “As I’ve always wanted you to do.”

“But it’s not easy,” said Isabel. “It never is.”

Jamie nodded. “I used to think it was simple,” he said. “Then you came along and showed me that it wasn’t.”

They ate their risotto. Then Isabel said, “Some music after dinner? Will you play the piano?”

“Why not? What do you want to hear?”

“That song about valentines. You sing.”

He smiled. “The real one? Or the one with our own words?”

“Our own words,” said Isabel.

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