Alexander Mccall Smith - Isabel Dalhousie 06 (27 page)

I
SABEL’S DREAMS
that night might have been about Brother Fox, or foxes in general, but it was Minty Auchterlonie of whom she dreamed: Minty in her garden, talking about something that she could not quite make out; Minty at a table in a restaurant pointing a finger at her, jabbing at the air to emphasise her point. And then, quite suddenly, Minty was no longer there, and Isabel found herself in a place that she thought might be Mobile, Alabama. She was with an aunt in a garden shaded by oak trees, and her aunt, whom she hardly knew, was talking about her sister, Isabel’s mother: “Such a pity she had an affair and your poor father was so upset by it.” Isabel felt embarrassed, and ashamed for her mother, and was about to protest that the affair was long ago and should not be talked about, when her aunt suddenly and severely said, “We must finish what we begin, Isabel. Your mother should have taught you that, but clearly has not. Too busy having an affair perhaps.”

Jamie touched her lightly on the shoulder. “Isabel?”

The garden in Mobile disappeared. “Oh.”

“You were having an unpleasant dream.”

“Yes.”

“You were muttering, you know. It was quite loud.”

She sat up. There was light flooding into the room through the chink in the curtains. Glancing at her watch, she saw that it was almost seven; Charlie would have had Jamie up already. She looked at Jamie, who was standing beside the bed, having leaned over to touch her; he was already dressed, in dark trousers and a lightweight navy-blue jacket.

She got out of bed. “I was dreaming of Minty Auchterlonie,” she said. “Minty—of all people.”

Jamie moved across to the dressing table. He picked up a silver-backed clothes brush and used it cursorily on his jacket. The brush had belonged to Isabel’s mother, and she wondered:
What would she have thought about Jamie?
She would have approved; Isabel’s mother had only wanted her to be happy, and Jamie made her happy. She would have understood.

Jamie spoke without turning round. “That woman. You know what I think?”

Isabel retrieved her dressing gown from the back of the door. “What do you think?”

Jamie turned round now. “I think that she’s not going to go away.”

Isabel frowned. “Meaning?”

Jamie’s eyes met hers. “I think that she’s like a piece of unfinished music. It wants to resolve, but the notes aren’t there. So it goes round and round in your head until you work out an ending for it.”

She fumbled with the cord of her dressing gown. It was frayed and she would need to replace it. The dressing gown was beginning to look shabby, but she still loved it. She looked up. Jamie’s words hung in the air between them; one of those observations that on occasion comes out as an accusation.

“You think I should do something?” It was not what she expected; whenever Jamie offered her advice in this sort of situation, he usually told her to do nothing, to avoid further involvement.

“Normally …”

“Normally you wouldn’t.”

“No. I mean, yes, you’re right, I wouldn’t. But it seems to me now that this Minty person has really got under your skin.”

It was a good way of describing it. Minty had indeed got under her skin, like one of those little jigger creatures that one found in the American South; her aunt, the one she had dreamed of, had complained about those in the grass of her lawn. “Like a jigger,” said Isabel.

“Those parasite things?”

“Yes. My mother used to talk about how she took them out from under her skin as a child. With a pin.”

Jamie shuddered. “Maybe. But you need to sort out what you think of her. You can’t leave things up in the air, as they are. Many people could—but you can’t. You’re too much of a worrier.” He paused. “Use a pin.”

Isabel listened carefully. Why should she be surprised that Jamie thought of her as a worrier? Was she really?

“Do you think that I should …?”

“Have it out with her again?”

“Yes.”

He hesitated before replying. “Maybe. Just tell her what you think of her. Tell her that you don’t believe a word she says, and leave it at that. If you don’t do anything, she’s likely to draw you into something again. You don’t want that, do you?”

She thought about this. Charlie, who was in his playpen downstairs, had begun to cry. He would have thrown one of his
soft toys out of the playpen confines, like one prisoner helping another to escape over the prison fence, and now he was regretting it.

“Fine. I’ll do it.”

She thought: he’s right. And he often is.

He seemed pleased with her response. “Do you want me to come with you?”

She did not. He had done enough: he had pushed her in a direction that she might have gone in anyway, and she was confident that she could manage by herself. And she did not want to expose Jamie to Minty; she was not sure why, but she felt somehow that Minty was a threat to him, and that he was vulnerable.

AFTER BREAKFAST
,
Isabel went to her study. There were letters that she had to write, some personal and some connected with the
Review.
Edward Mendelson had written from New York, and her reply to him was late. As Auden’s literary executor, he had been trying to trace a school magazine in which Auden had written an article when he taught at a small private school in the west of Scotland. A woman on the Isle of Mull, hearing about this, had written to say that they had no knowledge of the magazine, but had a typescript which they thought was Auden’s original draft. “My grandfather,” wrote this woman, “was on the staff of the school when Auden was there. He was friendly with him and he gave him a box of papers to look after, which he forgot about and never claimed.” The woman was happy for them to be looked at, but would not allow them out of the house, even on a promise of return.

“I don’t like to impose,” wrote Edward, “but could you possibly go and take a look at them? Perhaps she’ll allow you to photograph them. And, as for the typescript, you can tell straight away whether Auden typed it. He never put a space after a comma—it’s as if it’s a signature. If you see that, then that’s almost certainly by him.”

Isabel wrote back and said she would do this. They would all go—Jamie and Charlie too—and look for crowded commas.

Then there was a letter from Steven Barclay, a friend who had a flat in Paris. Steven wanted Isabel and Jamie to spend a weekend with him in Paris. There was a hotel, he said, whose staff would love Charlie and it was not far from his place in the Latin Quarter. “I’ll take you to my favourite restaurant, La Fontaine de Mars,” wrote Steven. “It’s in the seventh arrondissement on rue Saint-Dominique, close to the Ecole Militaire—so you’ll be quite safe! And you’ve always been so keen on Vuillard—I can take you and Jamie to the place where Vuillard stayed when he was in Paris. And you can look at the Vuillards in the house of somebody I know. Vuillards that nobody else sees. Just you. Isabel, you’ve got to come.”

She wrote to Steven and assured him that she would. Then, musing on a life that included such calls to Mull and Paris, she turned her attention to
Review
correspondence. This was largely mundane, although she had to write to one author to inform him of a negative assessment of an article submitted for publication. “I’m sure that you will understand,” she wrote, knowing that authors often did
not
understand. Months, possibly years, might have gone into the turned-down article, and more than a few hopes might be dashed by rejection. For an untenured professor somewhere in the reaches of a university system looking
for savings on salaries, the rejection might precipitate the end of a career. That worried her, but she saw no way round it. The world could be a hard place—as hard, even if in a different way, for philosophers as for salesmen or miners or anybody who lived on the edge of unemployment and financial ruin.

By eleven o’clock her correspondence was finished. She printed out and read through the last letter, to the
Review
’s printers; she noticed that in the final sentence of the last paragraph she had used unspaced commas—,thus, —and on impulse she left them. She would do that too, from time to time, as an act of homage, and because little rituals like that gave life its texture. Big Brother, masked as the intrusive state or the political censor of thought and language, might force us to do this and that, but we could still assert ourselves in little things—private jokes, commas without spaces, small acts of symbolic subversion.

She rose from her desk. She had decided what to do next, and she would do it without prevarication. She would pay a call on George Finesk, Minty’s wronged investor, and then she would go to see Minty, seek her out in the lair of the leopardess.

IT WAS NOT DIFFICULT
to find where George Finesk lived. There were two Finesks in the telephone book—one in Tranent, a former mining town in East Lothian, and an unlikely place for a wealthy investor to live; another was in Ann Street, a highly sought-after Georgian street that was known for its elegant, if somewhat cramped, terraced houses. That was the number she dialled, and it was answered by a rather warm, welcoming voice.

She gave her name, and the warmth immediately disappeared; it was as if a window at the other end of the line had been opened to admit a chill blast.

“You said that you were Isabel Dalhousie?”

“Yes.”

There was silence at the other end. “And you wanted to speak to me? May I ask why?”

Isabel had been taken aback by the change in tone and took a moment to recover. “It’s about Minty Auchterlonie.”

A further silence ensued. Then, “I thought it might be.”

This puzzled Isabel. Why would George Finesk associate her with Minty? It would be unlikely that Peter Stevenson had said anything—he would never mention anything confidential.

Isabel resumed the conversation. “I think it might be best for us to discuss this matter in person, rather than on the phone. Easier.”

George Finesk agreed, even if he sounded reluctant. Yes, she could come down immediately, if she wished. He would have to leave the house in about an hour, so he could not give her very much time. With that, he rang off, after the most cursory of goodbyes. He had not put the phone down on her, she thought—he was obviously too polite for that—but it felt to her as if he had.

Isabel went into the kitchen. Although it was a Saturday, Grace was there, making up some time ahead of her holiday. She was giving Charlie an early lunch, crushed peas with fried fish fingers—quintessential nursery food. The smell tempted Isabel, and she reached forward to sample a morsel.

“Please,” Grace reprimanded her. “We mustn’t take the food out of his little mouth.”

Charlie, strapped into his feeding chair, looked up at his mother. Then he looked down at his plate and reached for a small fragment of fish finger. He offered this to her.

“Why, thank you, darling,” Isabel said as she accepted the
offering, glancing at Grace. “I can’t refuse his little present, you know.”

Charlie watched solemnly, and then offered a similar scrap to Grace, who frowned before she took it.

“We must be grateful for small mercies,” said Isabel, smiling.

Grace, tight-lipped, turned to Charlie. “You must eat up your food, Charlie,” she said. “Mummy and Grace have their own. We don’t really need yours.”

ISABEL TOOK A TAXI
to the other side of town, getting out at the top of Learmonth Terrace and walking down the hill to the point where Ann Street joined the larger road. It was a part of town that she knew quite well; her art historian friend Susanna Kerr lived there, as had her father’s cousin, a clever, bird-like woman who had been an expert in palaeography and Celtic place-names. Cousin Kirsty had spoiled Isabel as a child with overly generous presents and regaled her with sanitised snippets of Edinburgh gossip, which her father claimed were exaggerated, or even untrue, but which he liked to have passed on to him anyway. When Isabel had been eleven, Cousin Kirsty had slipped on her highly polished kitchen floor and lain there unattended, in the cold, and died, which meant the end of Isabel’s visits to Dean Terrace. She had sobbed and sobbed over Kirsty’s death, her first real loss; and the second, and much greater one, had come not long afterwards, with the loss of her mother.

She found the house almost at the end of the street. The front garden was well tended, as were all the neighbouring gardens, and colourful too: there was California lilac, climbing roses and a small square of lawn at the side of which a stone
bench had been placed. The bench was covered with silver-grey lichen; it did not look well used.

George Finesk was slow to answer, but eventually the front door opened. Isabel found herself standing before a grey-haired man wearing a loose-fitting white jacket, a pair of gold-framed spectacles tucked into the top pocket. He looked her in the eye briefly, but then his gaze fell away. He was a tall man, somewhere in his fifties, she thought, with an aquiline nose and blue eyes that seemed to be a small area of space, an area of nothing. She had seen such eyes before, in the north of Scotland; eyes that seemed to reflect the sky and its emptiness.