The Charming Quirks of Others (6 page)

“My husband, Alex, is on any number of committees,” Jillian said. “He was a businessman before we retreated to a farm near Biggar, and he’s been co-opted on to virtually every public body in Lanarkshire. I put up with it, and he seems to like it. He’s pretty busy, as you can imagine.”

“What’s the popular saying?” asked Isabel. “If you want something done, ask a busy person.”

“True. And he gets things done. He’s really good at that.” Jillian paused to take a sip of her coffee. “One of the things he does is serve on the board of governors of Bishop Forbes School. You know it? It’s just outside West Linton.”

“Of course I do,” said Isabel. “I was at school in Edinburgh. We used to get the boys from Bishop Forbes shipped in for school dances.”

“They still do that,” said Jillian. “They send them in to dance with girls. Being a boys’ school, they try to arrange some female contact for the boys. Not that the boys need much help in that respect.”

Isabel looked out of the window. She was remembering a school dance where one of the girls had claimed to have seduced a boy in the chemistry lab, having slipped away from the hall with him. They had not believed her, and had pressed her for details. She had burst into tears and accused them of ruining a beautiful experience for her. “You’re such a liar,” said one of the girls. And “Wishful thinking,” said another. The cruelty of children.

Isabel brought herself back to what Jillian was now saying.

“Alex is the chairman of the board of governors, as it happens. It’s his second term; I tried to get him to hand over to somebody else after he had done three years, but you know how some people are—they think they’re indispensable. That, and a sense of duty.”

Isabel was trying to remember Jillian’s husband. There had been a dozen or so people at the Stevensons’ house that night, and she found it difficult. There had been a tall, rather distinguished-looking man who could well have been the chairman of a board of governors. He had talked to her about art, she thought; about Cowie. Yes, they had talked about a Cowie retrospective that the Dean Gallery had put on.

“Not that I would want him to give everything up,” Jillian went on. “I can imagine nothing worse than having one’s husband underfoot all day. So he carries on with my blessing, and I fulfil the role of chairman’s wife as best as I can, although frankly I find school politics pretty stultifying. It’s the pettiness. Any institution is like that, I suppose.

“The principal is a very good man—Harold Slade. Maybe you know him. He rowed for Scotland in the Olympics years
ago. Rather like that politician—what’s his name?—Ming Campbell. He was an Olympic runner, wasn’t he? Well, Harold announced that he wanted to take up the headship of an international school in Singapore. He wasn’t going for the money—I think he was just ready for a change, which was fair enough. He had been principal for twelve years, which is quite a long time for one person to hold the job. So we advertised, and Alex was the chairman of the appointment committee—naturally enough.”

Jillian sipped again at her coffee. “We had rather more applications than we expected. Some of them were very good. One or two withdrew for various reasons, but eventually they put together a rather strong shortlist of three candidates, all of them from Scotland. We had expected to get some impressive applicants from England, but for some reason the English candidates were rather weak. So it’s pretty much a local list, which makes it easier to get in references and so on. Alex likes to talk to referees face-to-face if he possibly can, and he’s been able to do that since all three are Scottish.”

Isabel nodded. “I suppose it’s important to talk to people,” she said. “It’s hard to be honest in a written reference. You expect that the candidate will get hold of it one way or another. And then, if you’ve written something damning, there’s all sorts of trouble. It’s rather like doctors’ notes. They can’t write what they really think any more—the patient can see what’s there.”

Jillian had views on this. “And a good thing too,” she said. “Doctors used to write terrible things in the past. I had a friend who found out that she was described in her medical notes as a ‘dreadful woman.’ ”

“And was she?” asked Isabel. She spoke quickly; it slipped out, and she immediately apologised. “No, I don’t really mean that. I mean …” She trailed off. There
were
dreadful people, and doctors had to deal with them.

“Not at all,” said Jillian. “Maybe she’s a bit
demanding
, but that’s not the same as being dreadful.”

“No, of course not.”

“Anyway,” Jillian continued, “it looked as if we’d find no difficulty in getting a very good person to take over, but then my husband received an anonymous letter. Normally he would throw such a thing straight into the wastepaper basket, but in this case there was something that stopped him from doing so.”

“It was about the candidates?”

“Yes. Well, yes and no. It was about one of the candidates. Unfortunately, it didn’t say which one. It merely said that there was something about one of them that would cause the school considerable embarrassment if he were to be appointed. But it gave no further details.”

“A shot in the dark,” suggested Isabel. “The writer of this letter could be trying it on, surely. It could just be a spoiler. Perhaps from one of the unsuccessful candidates. People get pretty upset about these things.”

“I thought that,” said Jillian. “But there was something significant about this letter. It gave the names of all the candidates. So the person who wrote it must have seen the shortlist. And I can’t imagine there were many of those. There were the members of the committee—and it’s hardly likely to have been one of them. And … well, the school secretary, Miss Carty. She’s one of those people you find in schools who never seem to
have a first name, but it’s Janet in her case. A rather mousy woman, probably unhappy about something or other.”

One might say that about most of us, thought Isabel. Most of us are unhappy about something or other.

“Anything else? Was there anything else in the letter?” she asked.

Jillian shook her head. “No.”

“Typed?”

“No. Handwritten. In green ink.”

Isabel smiled. “There’s a popular view that green ink is favoured by the insane. No truth to it, no doubt. But people say that. They say that real cranks like green ink.”

Jillian reached for her cup again. She had said all she wished to say, it appeared, and she was waiting for Isabel’s reaction.

“It must be rather worrying,” said Isabel. “I can see that. But I don’t know if I can say more than that.”

“Would you look into it?” asked Jillian.

“Well, I don’t really see what I can do. I really don’t.”

Jillian leaned forward. “Please,” she said. “We have to make an appointment. But we just can’t risk appointing somebody who is going to come unstuck because of their past. We can’t afford scandal—you do see that, don’t you?”

Isabel said that she understood that reputation was important. But this did not seem to satisfy Jillian, who returned to the theme. “I can’t stress enough how important it is to avoid scandal,” she said. “Education is competitive these days. Parents have a choice. A whiff of something not quite right and we would lose students—we really would.”

“I understand. But, really, what do you expect me to do?”

Jillian lowered her voice. A young couple had come into the
delicatessen and had taken a seat at a neighbouring table. The woman was looking at them in a way that suggested more than casual interest. “We need a very discreet person—and I gather that you are just that. We need somebody to make enquiries and find out which of these three has … well, has a past.”

“We all have a past.”

Jillian brushed this aside. “There are pasts and pasts.” She paused. “Please help us. The last thing we could do is to get professional enquiry agents involved—imagine if that ever got out. So we need somebody like you—somebody who knows her way about Edinburgh, who understands the issues. You’d never be suspect. And I
have
done my homework on you—you have a reputation, you know, for helping people.”

Isabel stared down at the table. She had more than enough to do over the next few weeks. And yet she had never turned down a direct plea for help. Jillian was not to know it, of course, but Isabel found it very difficult indeed—practically impossible—to say to somebody in need of help that they would get no assistance from her.

“All right,” said Isabel.

Jillian reached out and took Isabel’s hand and squeezed it. “You’re an angel.”

I’m not, thought Isabel. I’m weak.

“Look,” said Jillian. “I’m not sure how you do these things, but why don’t I send you a photocopy of each candidate’s application? There’s a curriculum vitae with each of them—that’ll tell you all you need to know.”

“And more than I
should
know,” said Isabel.

Jillian looked blank. “I don’t see …”

“Confidentiality,” said Isabel.

Jillian laughed dismissively. “Oh, we never bother with that.” She paused. “Do you?”

Isabel looked at her in a bemused fashion. “But you yourself said that you wanted me to do this because you didn’t want it to get out. That suggests that you attach at least some importance to confidentiality.”

Jillian was brisk. “Where necessary,” she said. “But not otherwise.”

J
ILLIAN MACKINLAY,”
said Isabel from her chair at the kitchen table.

Jamie barely looked up from the stove. He was cooking dinner that night, and with Charlie safely tucked up in bed and asleep by now—he had been tired out by five o’clock and had had been given an early supper and bath—the house seemed quiet. Any sudden absence of children, Isabel noted, made the normal silences of the evening seem more pronounced; a small child could be a centre of noise, like a cyclone moving across the weather map, until suddenly, at bedtime, the storm subsided and quiet returned.

“Jillian who?”

“Mackinlay,” said Isabel. “We met them at the Stevensons’. It was some time ago …” She thought quickly; in the lives of most of us, there is a time before our partner and a time after our partner: in her case, BJ (Before Jamie) and AJ (After Jamie), although AJ suggested that Jamie was in the past, which he was not, and so DJ (During Jamie) might be more appropriate. She
was sure that this meeting at the Stevensons’ had been in the DJ years.

“Can’t remember,” muttered Jamie.

Of course he could not, thought Isabel; they met so many people on the social round—such as it was—and one could not be expected to remember every conversation at every drinks or dinner party. Most such conversations were instantly forgettable anyway, merging into one another, smoothed out by banality.

“There’s no reason for you to remember her. I almost didn’t when I saw her this morning, but then she helpfully told me exactly who she was. People sense it when you haven’t got a clue who they are.”

“Garlic,” said Jamie.

She looked at him quizzically. “Garlic?”

“Sorry. I’m trying to get this right. I haven’t put any garlic in and she said that I should. Or I think that she did.”

“She being?”

Jamie dipped a spoon into the contents of the pot and tasted the result. “Mary Contini.”

“Check the recipe.”

He put down the spoon, shaking his head. “I don’t know where I put the book. It’s somewhere, but I don’t know … Do you think garlic makes a difference?”

Isabel smiled. “Yes, of course. Garlic in a dish makes it taste garlicky.” She paused; what was wrong with Jamie this evening? “Don’t you agree? Whereas dishes without garlic …”

Jamie sighed. “Don’t taste of garlic.”

She looked at him. The sigh was uncharacteristic; it suggested that he had found her comment tiresome, a weak attempt at humour.

“Do you want me to take over?” She had not asked him to cook that evening—he had volunteered. He was a good cook, she had discovered, and unlike many men he seemed prepared to stick closely to the recipe—or most of the time, at least. Men, she had noticed, were inclined to be slapdash in their measuring of quantities and even choice of ingredients; her father, who belonged to a generation of males who rarely ventured into the kitchen, had occasionally cooked but had been gloriously cavalier in his methods, substituting mint for basil and, on one famous occasion, onions for potatoes.

Jamie declined Isabel’s offer, but not very graciously, she thought. He was rarely irritable, and there seemed to be something on his mind this evening. Should she ask him? She watched him at the stove. Yes, his body language gave it away; there was something tense about his position, as if he were feeling hostility to the task he was performing, as if he were poised to move away. He was standing, she thought, in the way of an opera singer about to stride off the stage in a display of high dudgeon.

“Should I …”

He did not let her finish. “I’m fine. It’s just that I wish I had the recipe to hand … Garlic.”

“Put it in. You can’t go wrong with garlic.” You could, of course.

He mumbled something she did not catch. Then he gave the casserole dish a final stir, replaced the lid and turned to face her. “This woman, Jillian what’s-her-name—what about her?”