The Charming Quirks of Others (14 page)

“That’s because they slip.” He paused. He was thinking of a boy he had known at school, a boy called Andrew—and he could not remember his surname. But he could picture him, and saw him now, with his untidy fair hair and his permanent smile. He had been a climber and had died in the Cairngorms when he tumbled headlong into a gully that had been disguised by a fall of snow.

She noticed his expression; he had told her about this. “Your friend? You were thinking about him?”

“Yes.”

“How often do you think about him?” she asked.

He looked surprised. “Why do you ask?”

Because she was interested, she said. Death was such a strange event—simple enough in its essentials, of course, and final enough for the person who dies; but human personality had its echoes.
Non omnis moriar
, said Horace’s
Odes
—I shall not wholly die. Yes, and he was right. As long as people remembered,
then death was not complete. Only if there were nobody at all left to remember would death be complete.

“I sometimes think of him,” said Jamie. “We were quite close. In fact, we were very close.”

He stopped. She reached out for his hand.

“I think of him a lot,” said Jamie.

Isabel squeezed his hand. “Loved him?”

Jamie nodded. “I suppose so. You know how it is with boys. Those intense friendships you have when you’re young.”

“I think so.”

“I went to the place,” said Jamie. “I climbed up there a year or so later. Just by myself—in summer. It wasn’t a hard climb at all—more of a walk, even if the gully itself was quite deep. I looked over the edge and imagined what he had seen as he fell—he must have seen something, unless he was knocked out straightaway, which they thought had not happened. And then I just cried and cried. I went down the hill, cried all the way down.”

She pressed his hand. “Of course.”

“I think I understand why mountaineering involves such … such passion. Climbers do get passionate, you know. They’re very spiritual people.”

Isabel glanced at the Everest book. “Some of them. Maybe not so much now. I think our world has become harder, you know.”

She did not want that to be true, but she thought it probably was. What had happened? Had the human soul shrunk in some way, become meaner, like a garment that has been in the wash too long and become smaller, more constraining?

H
AVE YOU EVER CLIMBED ANYTHING
, Charlie?”

It was at a party, a rather noisy one, in the Scotch Malt Whisky Society in Queen Street that Isabel was addressing Charlie Maclean, Master of the Quaich, and Scotland’s greatest expert on whisky. Charlie wore his learning lightly, but everybody in the room knew that if there was one man who could identify a glass of anonymous amber liquid and attribute it to any one of the country’s distilleries, name the man who blended it, and talk at length about the history of the glen from which it came, then it was Charlie.

They were standing at the window of one of the upstairs rooms, and beyond them, swaying in the summer-evening breeze, were the tops of the trees lining Queen Street Gardens. That wind was mild, and had on its breath the scent of the Firth, the river, and of the hills beyond. And of newly cut grass, too, for the gardens had been attended to that day and the smell of the grass was strong.

While Isabel was talking to Charlie, a well-built man in a linen suit and sporting the only monocle still known to be worn
in Scotland, Jamie was on the other side of the room, engaged in conversation with a tall man whom Isabel knew well. This was Roddy Martine, a well-liked recorder of social events who kept society, and its doings, in his head. Roddy knew who did what, with whom, and when. He knew, too, who knew what about whom, and why.

Charlie raised his glass to his lips and looked at Isabel across the rim. “Climbed?” he said. “When I was very young I was at school in Dumfriesshire. Until about eleven. Pretty odd place. They used to take us climbing the hills down there—Kirkudbrightshire and so on. Nothing very big. And I climbed a bit when I was at St. Andrews. The occasional Munro. And you?”

“Not really,” said Isabel.

Charlie remembered something about the school. “Funny, I never really think about that place. It’s closed now. It was a pretty dubious institution. One of the masters …”

Isabel imagined that she was about to hear some awful story of cruelty, of the sort that had been surfacing so much—ancient traumas exposed and scratched at, like sores. But no, Charlie’s memories were benign.

“He was called Mr. MacDavid,” Charlie went on. “He was the most unusual teacher. All he ever taught us—for years—was the Boer War. He knew a lot about that. So by the time I was eleven, I knew everything there was to know about the Boer War, but was pretty ignorant about everything else.”

Isabel laughed. “The relief of Ladysmith,” she said. “The siege of Mafeking.”

“Don’t start on that,” said Charlie. “But why did you ask me about climbing?”

Isabel took a sip of her wine. A waiter approached; their
host had ordered trays of elaborate canapés and not enough guests were eating them. “Please take something,” pleaded the waiter. “These are very nice.” He indicated a row of miniature haggis pies.

Isabel picked one out; Charlie took two in one hand, popping another one into his mouth. Isabel thanked the waiter before she answered Charlie’s question. “I thought you might know about it. I’ve been reading a book about Everest. I had no idea.”

Charlie, swallowing another tiny haggis, looked interested. “No idea about all those goings-on?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I do,” said Charlie, licking his fingers. “I know somebody who went there a couple of years ago. I met him through Pete Burgess. He went up Everest, but didn’t get to the top. Something went wrong. They’re always dying—once you get past a certain point. Apparently the mountain has got hundreds of bodies on it—they can’t get them down.”

Isabel was thinking. Edinburgh was not a large city. How many people living there would have climbed Everest? One or two, if that. “I think I may know him,” she said. “Or rather, I don’t actually know him, but I know who he is. John Fraser.” And then she added, “I think.”

Charlie was looking across the room as Isabel spoke. She thought at first that he had not heard her, as he started to say something about a woman who stood in the doorway. “I’ve seen her somewhere,” he said. “She’s an actress, I think, and the trouble with actresses is that you think you know them because you’ve seen them …” And then he stopped. “Fraser? Yes. John Fraser. Tall chap. He’s a teacher, I think.”

Isabel felt her heart beat faster. “You said that something went wrong. What?”

“One of them fell. They weren’t all that far up, I gather. This chap fell. I think he was …” He looked away again. The actress was talking to a small, rather neat man; she was taller than him by at least a head.

“Who was he—the one who fell?”

Charlie looked at Isabel again. She found herself studying his moustache—a handlebar affair that seemed to suit him so well. It must have taken years, she thought, to reach that stage of perfection; a generous act, undertaken for the benefit of others, as any act of personal enhancement was, since one did not see it very much oneself.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But I do know that he played rugby for Scotland. They had a minute’s silence for him at Murrayfield Stadium. He was one of the wings.” Then he remembered. “Chris Alexander. That was his name. I recall it now because his father was a director of a distillery I had dealings with. Nice chap. I met him. He was also a good amateur nose. He sometimes nosed for one of the distilleries on Islay. I forget which one.”

Isabel had heard Charlie refer to “noses” before. They were the people who remembered just how to achieve the taste of a particular whisky. He was a nose himself.

“Are you interested in all this?” Charlie said. “You’ve never talked about it before.”

She could not tell him, of course, and so she changed the subject. What she had heard confirmed her conviction that something had happened on the mountain to torment John Fraser. And she was already beginning to imagine what it was:
Chris Alexander had fallen and John Fraser had left him to die. That was what John Fraser sought to expunge from his conscience, and that, she imagined, was what the anonymous letter-writer had somehow found out. This was quite possible, even if she had not a shred of evidence to support it. But would this hypothesis—for that was all it was—be enough to justify going to the chairman of the board of governors of Bishop Forbes and suggesting that this was what lay in one of the candidates’ past? He might say—and he would be justified in doing so—that she had jumped to conclusions. But if he did not, and if he proved to be willing to listen, then what did all this reveal? Simple cowardice—or something worse than that? Was it murder to leave somebody to die? No, it was not, but it could still be criminal, if you had an obligation to do something to help somebody and you did not. That was called culpable homicide, she believed, and it was not what one would expect to find in the background of the principal of a school.

So if all this proved to be true, then John Fraser was out of the running for the post, and that meant that Cat’s new boyfriend, Gordon, would have a much higher chance of appointment, particularly if Isabel found something questionable in the background of the third candidate. And that, she reflected, was exactly the way she should
not
be thinking. If you play a part in a competition for a public job—and a principal’s post was a public job—you should not favour your friends, or the friends of your friends, or the friend of your niece. That was what she reminded herself, but then it occurred to her: Why not? The overwhelming majority of people would without question favour a friend or a relative, if they had the chance, and not think twice about it. Were all these people wrong? Yes, thought
Isabel; but then she thought, No. Morality could not be a matter of counting heads; but counting heads was sometimes a useful way of seeing whether a system of morality suited human nature as it actually was. Moral rules should not be devised for saints, but should be within the grasp of ordinary people; and ordinary people preferred those they knew to those they did not know; everyone knew that, but most of all, ordinary people knew it.

THE NEXT MORNING
, Isabel took Charlie out in his pram to go shopping in Bruntsfield. It was an outing that he particularly enjoyed, as it inevitably culminated in a visit to Cat’s delicatessen, where Cat would give him a marzipan pig from a small box she kept on a shelf behind the counter. He knew exactly what lay in store and would shout “Pig! Pig!” as they entered. Then, with the treat grasped firmly in his hands, he would bite off the pig’s head, watched in astonishment by Eddie and Cat.

“It’s almost indecent,” said Cat. “He has no sympathy for the pig.”

Isabel felt that she had to defend her son. “But it’s just sugar to him. It’s not a living pig.”

“Does he like bacon?” asked Eddie. “Would he eat it if he knew?”

Isabel sighed. It was the right question. If he knew that bacon had once been a pig, then he would probably not eat it. There were pigs in a book she read him; three of them, two feckless and one wise, and he clearly loved them. Yet how different were we humans from the wolf who persecuted the three pigs?

Pigs give us bacon
. This was the way it had been put to her in a book she had herself possessed as a child:
Farmer John
. Farmer John, a bucolic character in blue overalls, took the reader round the farmyard and explained what was what.
Hens give us eggs
—we steal them, thought Isabel.
Cows give us milk—
ditto. And then, in an act of astonishing self-sacrifice,
Pigs give us bacon
.

Eddie was good with Charlie, and Charlie seemed fascinated with the young man, who lifted him high in the air and then pretended to drop him, to squeals of excitement. While this was going on, Cat made coffee for herself and Isabel and carried the cups across to one of the tables.

They talked briefly about the delicatessen. The mozzarella cheese was late, Cat complained; she was thinking of changing their supplier. And the Parmesan too, although that was never delayed for more than a few days. Isabel listened politely; she wanted to hear about Gordon. Had he heard anything further about the job? she wanted to ask, but it was difficult with Cat going on about mozzarella and Parmesan.

Cat paused, and Isabel seized her chance. “I like him a lot, you know.”

“Who?”

“Your new boyfriend, Gordon.”

Cat was cagey. “So do I.”

“But of course you do,” said Isabel quickly. “One would not dislike a boyfriend, surely.” As she spoke, she thought of Bruno, the stunt man with elevator shoes. Had Cat actually
liked
him, or had Bruno been more of a perverse fashion statement? A boyfriend or girlfriend could easily be thought of in those terms, she realised. Or Cat might be making another
point altogether, showing that she was her own person; sometimes people needed to find somebody the diametrical opposite of their parents just to make a point about independence. That happened often. A boy with dreadlocks, or a hard rock musician, a member—in good standing—of a biker gang, perhaps; a girl with multiple piercings in the nose and tongue; how easy with such a choice to remind parents that one’s tastes, one’s attitude and one’s voting intentions were not to be taken for granted.