CHAPTER FOUR

BEA GESTURED towards one of the tables.

“I need to sit down. Could we talk?”

Isabel glanced at her watch and then looked at Eddie. He nodded. “Things won’t pick up for another twenty minutes,” he said. “I’ll cope.”

They went to the table while Eddie, having volunteered to make Bea a cup of coffee, busied himself with the controls of the espresso machine.

“A nice boy,” said Bea appreciatively, looking over towards the counter.

“Yes, he is,” said Isabel. “My niece owns this place, you see. Eddie helps her—as do I.”

“I’d heard that,” said Bea. “And I thought that I might come and surprise you here one day. But living on the other side of town, as we do, means that I hardly ever venture across Princes Street.”

“The great divide,” said Isabel.

Bea looked at her blankly.

“Australia,” explained Isabel, waving a hand vaguely. “There’s a great divide, you see—an actual physical feature…” She trailed off. “I’m sorry. I sometimes go off at a tangent.”

Bea shot her a slightly reproachful glance. “Actually, this isn’t really a casual drop-in. I wanted to see you. I phoned your house and your cleaning lady told me you’d be here.”

Isabel smiled at the description of Grace, who would not have taken kindly to being described as a cleaning lady. “Strictly speaking, she’s a housekeeper,” she said.

Bea laughed. “These distinctions,” she said dismissively.

Isabel thought: Yes, you may laugh at these distinctions, but they can mean a great deal to some. The small scraps of status, the petty trappings of office, helped people through their lives. She looked enquiringly at Bea. “Anyway, you wanted to see me?”

“Yes. It’s something—” She broke off as a frown crossed her brow.

Isabel waited.

“It’s something rather sensitive,” Bea continued. “I’ve made a terrible mistake.”

An array of possibilities raced through Isabel’s mind. Bea had got rid of Arnold. She had started an affair with the window cleaner; Isabel knew somebody who had done just that. The woman had watched him as he cleaned her windows, had made him a cup of coffee and then, as reported to Isabel by another friend, “They had ended up in one another’s arms—even before she had paid the bill!” Isabel had listened to this breathless account and had said simply, “It’s important to pay one’s bills immediately; I’m not sure if I approve. If one’s going to start a passionate affair with a window cleaner, pay him first.”

She smiled at the thought, but Bea was frowning. “I said: I’ve made—”

“Of course, sorry. You said you’d made a mistake. I was thinking of somebody else who made a bit of a mistake. Or it might not have been, for all I know. Perhaps she found what she was looking for…”

“Who?” asked Bea.

“Oh, somebody I know vaguely.” She made a dismissive gesture to indicate the reverie was over before continuing, “Most mistakes can be rectified, of course.” But even as she uttered the anodyne, she reminded herself that there were some to which it did not apply: there were plenty of mistakes that simply could not be put right.

“I hope so,” said Bea. “Particularly in this case.” She paused, her expression wistful. “Although frankly I have no idea how to go about it.”

“Perhaps you should tell me,” suggested Isabel. “If you want to, of course.”

“That’s why I’m here,” said Bea quickly. “You have a reputation for helping people. You know that, don’t you?”

Isabel looked embarrassed. “No more than others,” she muttered.

Bea shook her head. “There’s no need to be modest. You’re known for it. You’ve helped any number of people. And you do it rather well.”

Isabel squirmed inwardly. There was something about Bea’s manner that irritated her—a disingenuousness, perhaps—and this made it difficult for her to accept the compliment. She did not want her interventions, as she called them, to be the subject of praise. Yes, she might help people from time to time, but she did not like to dwell on it. She decided to move the conversation on. “Why don’t you tell me about what happened?”

Eddie was approaching their table. He placed a cup of coffee on the table in front of Bea, who looked up and thanked him. She waited until he had started to walk off before she continued.

“About a month ago,” she said, “I held a dinner party. I like doing that, I’ll admit.”

“So many people have given up on dinner parties,” remarked Isabel. “They’re too busy, or they just don’t care. And, to tell you the truth, I’m one of the offenders.”

Bea smiled. “You have your hands full. You have a young child.”

“Two,” corrected Isabel. “Two boys now.”

“It’s such a busy stage of your life,” said Bea. “My youngest is in his late teens already. I started much earlier than you.”

Isabel almost responded, We knew you would, but did not. Instead, she said, “I don’t really have an excuse for not entertaining. My husband…”

Bea nodded. “I’ve heard about him. I gather you have a very…delicious husband. I’d love to meet him some day.”

“I’m happy enough with him,” said Isabel evenly. “But I was going to say: my husband’s a very good cook. So, with two of us to shoulder the burden, we could entertain a bit more than we do.”

“It’s not compulsory,” said Bea.

“You were telling me about a dinner party.”

Bea seemed to gather her thoughts before she spoke. “Yes, a dinner party. You may know—or, put it this way, quite a few people seem to know—that I like to introduce people socially.”

Isabel said that she knew that. It was, she said, a thoughtful thing to do.

Bea acknowledged the compliment. “Thank you. You see, I don’t think that a dinner party should just consist of friends who know one another. What’s the use of that?”

Isabel was not sure whether an answer was expected of her.

“So I make a point,” Bea continued, “of inviting people who I think might like to meet one another.”

“Nothing wrong in that,” said Isabel. “Hosts and hostesses have been doing that forever.”

Bea looked relieved. “I’m glad you think that. However, I suppose there’s always a risk that you might bring together two people who aren’t right for one another. Somebody pointed this out to me in the past, and I’m afraid I was rather dismissive. Perhaps I should have listened.”

There was real regret in Bea’s voice now, and Isabel felt a sudden sympathy for her. “I’m sure you weren’t to know,” she said.

“I didn’t.”

“Well, unawareness of something is a perfectly good excuse, you know.”

Bea looked at her intently. “Do you really think so?”

“Yes, I do. Not knowing about something means that you can’t be blamed for it.” She paused, her philosopher’s training bringing up a niggling doubt in her mind. In certain circumstances one might be responsible for a state of unawareness, and this prior responsibility could mean that the consequences of unawareness could be laid at one’s door. She looked at Bea; now was not the time to split philosophical hairs.

Isabel continued, “But, listen, why not tell me what happened? I assume you made a bad match and now you’re worried about it. Not that I think you need to be—”

Bea cut her short. “But I do need to worry,” she said. “This is a nightmare—a complete nightmare.”

Her voice rose as she spoke, prompting Isabel to try to calm her down.

“Listen, Bea, just tell me what happened,” she said.

Bea took a deep breath. “All right, but, oh…”

“Just tell me. I’m not going to be sitting in judgement over you. Just tell me what happened at this dinner party of yours.”

Bea took a sip of her coffee. “Do you know a woman called Constance Macdonald? She’s usually called Connie.”

Isabel thought for a moment. There had been any number of Macdonalds in her life, including a Candida Macdonald and even a Clarinda Macdonald—“Nothing to do with Robert Burns’s girlfriend, I assure you,” she had said—but no Constance. She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

“I didn’t think you would. Somehow I thought she’s not your type.”

“Oh. Why’s that?”

Bea shrugged. “She’s a bit…how shall I put it? A bit loud. You know what I mean?”

“I’m not sure. Loud in the sense of…loud? She speaks at the top of her voice? Drowns everybody else out?”

Bea laughed. “Oh no, not that sort of loud. Her tastes are loud. Yours are…well, yours aren’t.”

Isabel looked away. Bea was…she struggled to find the right word, and then it came to her: intrusive. Bea intruded on people—as much through talking about them to their face, as she was doing now, as through her matchmaking.

“You make me sound muted,” said Isabel.

Bea looked surprised. “But you are, Isabel. You’re very muted.”

Isabel flushed. Was she being described as muted because she thought? “I don’t really think of myself that way. I have opinions, same as anybody else, and I do express them, you know.”

Bea waved a hand airily. “Oh, one can have opinions and still be muted.”

Isabel struggled to contain herself. “I didn’t think we were going to start talking about me,” she began. “I imagined—”

Bea interrupted her. “Of course. We can talk about you later—if you like.”

“This Connie Macdonald,” Isabel persisted. “This loud Macdonald—you invited her to dinner?”

Bea considered this. “Invited her? Well, in a sense…But no, not actually invited.”

Isabel wondered what she meant. “You asked her?”

“Yes, I asked her, but only after she had fished for an invitation. Some people do that, you know—you can tell when they’re fishing for you to invite them. They don’t come straight out with it; rather, they say something like ‘Perhaps we should have dinner one of these days,’ and then don’t actually propose that you should come to dinner with them, and it’s clear that they mean they should come to you. You must get that a lot.”

Isabel looked blank. “I’m not sure if we do. Jamie and I have people round occasionally, but not all that often. And I don’t think I get many hints.”

Bea was incredulous. “But somebody like you—somebody with that house of yours, and everything, and being well known too. You must. There must be people who want to have dinner with you—who want to be able to say, ‘We were at dinner at Isabel Dalhousie’s.’ ”

Isabel sighed. She had not intended to, but the sigh escaped. “I’m not well known. I don’t know where you got that idea from.” She paused. “You’re the one who’s well known. I see your picture in Scottish Field. Often. And you were in the Evening News the other day. You were at that premiere.”

Bea was obviously pleased that Isabel had spotted the picture. “Oh, that. It was a bit tedious, I must admit, but it raised over twenty thousand for Waverley Care. You might know about their work. They look after people with HIV.”

“Yes, I know about them. But you were saying…”

“About Connie Macdonald?”

“Yes.”

Bea returned to the subject. “What happened was that she made it quite plain that she had heard that I helped people meet one another. She then more or less invited herself—not that she used those words exactly. She said something like ‘I wouldn’t mind meeting somebody,’ and then she said something about how she’d heard that I’d been behind Ivor and Jenny’s marriage and didn’t everybody think that was a great success, and so on. It all added up to a self-invitation.”

Isabel smiled. “There are some hints that just have to be taken.”

“Yes,” said Bea. “And I did. I rather liked her, and although there are far more women than men looking for someone, I did have a spare man in mind.”

Isabel stopped her. “Are there really more women than men?”

Suddenly Bea became animated. “On the lookout? Oh yes—definitely. Beyond any doubt. Hundreds more.” She paused, looking intently at Isabel. “Let me tell you something: if you’re a man and you’re wanting to meet somebody, then you are absolutely guaranteed to find somebody. Guaranteed. The only reason you won’t is if you’re utterly impossible—which few men are.”

Isabel asked Bea what she meant by “utterly impossible.” She wondered whether she herself had met any man who could be described as utterly impossible—Christopher Dove? Professor Lettuce?

Bea addressed the question with the gravity she clearly felt it deserved. “Utterly impossible men? There has to be something really seriously wrong. I’m not talking about appearance or anything like that. No, that’s not an issue. I knew this man, Isabel, who looked like a pig. I’m not exaggerating—he really looked exactly like a pig. He had small porcine eyes and his skin—I’m not making this up—was exactly like a pig’s. And the remarkable thing was that his voice was very nasal, with the result that it sounded like a series of oinks and squeaks. But he was speaking English, and you could work out what he was trying to say if you listened hard. It went a bit like this: ‘I think oink oink that there’s oink squeak a possibility that oink…’ And so on. All delivered in this very nasal way.” She laughed. “Honestly, Isabel, it was almost impossible to keep a straight face.”

“Poor man.”

“Poor man, yes. But I didn’t think he cared at all, because he knew that he’d always have somebody to look after him—to be the pig-keeper, so to speak—because he was a man and there were always, always women who would take on a spare man, even if he was completely porcine. His wife died, you see, and he was by himself for exactly four months when this really rather attractive person from Fife—she had a house in St. Andrews, I think—met him and took him off to Fife with her, and that was it. So even he had no difficulty. Whereas…”

Isabel smiled. “Whereas women who are looking for a man…”

Bea shook her head sadly. “They have to join the queue. They find out that for each spare man there are ten or twelve, maybe more, contenders. Widows, divorcees—there are hundreds of them milling about, all desperate to get one of the handful of spare men available.”

Isabel suspected that all this was true. And yet were the demographics that skewed? Was nature making some sort of mistake—or was the mistake ours? “Why?” she asked.

“Why?” repeated Bea. “I suppose it must be because men die earlier. They’re less robust, in a way. So that has an effect. And then more and more men seem not to be interested. It’s easier for them than it was in the past. It’s more of an option. So that reduces numbers even further. Or they decide that they don’t need marriage because there’s less social pressure to be married.” She shook her head. “And that’s a mistake, I can tell you. Letting up on social pressure is a serious mistake. Remove social pressure and nobody will do anything about anything. It becomes a question of what suits me. Me, me, me…that’s all that matters to a lot of people these days.”

Isabel sensed that the discussion of social policy—and demographics—was taking them away from Connie Macdonald. She steered Bea gently back.

“All right,” said Bea. “I’m sorry to go on about it, but it’s a subject I’m really interested in. But it’ll keep. Now, Connie. So I issued her an invitation to dinner. It was going to be Friday—I had been thinking of Saturday, but something cropped up and I changed it to Friday. That’s a good night for a dinner party—not as good as Saturday, but not too bad. Eight people. The ideal number, in my view. You probably know some of the guests.”

Isabel inclined her head. Edinburgh was not a large city: half a million people was small by the standards of the sprawling monsters that many cities had become, and this meant that it was still possible to go to a social occasion, even one outside one’s normal circle, and encounter familiar faces. And there were other forms of recognition too: like that which came from simply having seen somebody in the street or in a shop. You might never have spoken to a person, might have no idea who they were, but they might still be known in a way, rather as one comes to know familiar surroundings. That morning, walking back from Bruntsfield, she had walked past a woman she knew on that basis; they each said good morning, and smiled, but neither knew who the other was. That was the intimacy of the small place—an intimacy that was normal and unsurprising in a village, where there could be no anonymity, but that seemed remarkable in a city.

“Tom and Kitty Michaelson?”

Isabel thought for a moment. “I don’t think so.”

“I thought you might have met them,” said Bea. “They live in Regent Terrace—you know, overlooking Arthur’s Seat. They have a painted ceiling.”

Isabel smiled. It was a strange way to talk of anybody—to refer to them by a feature of their house. This is So-and-so—he has a magnificent bathroom…

“But they do,” said Bea. “Those Georgian houses are quite exceptional—even by the standards of the New Town.”

“Yes, I know they are,” said Isabel. Perhaps it was not all that odd for a ceiling—particularly a painted one—to carry social weight. After all, people who happened to own large houses often expected their social position to be dictated by floor space. Or was the floor space merely a sign of something that had always had a powerful effect: money?

“Their ceiling was in a bad way when they bought the house,” Bea went on. “But they spent a lot on it and had it restored. They had to get somebody up from London to do it. He was an Italian. They have all those painted ceilings over there, of course—I suppose they’re used to it.”

Yes, thought Isabel. The Pope had a painted ceiling that needed restoration. Perhaps somebody had said to him—at a dinner party—“I have just the person to restore that Sistine Chapel ceiling of yours. I’ll give you his number.”

Bea looked pained. “Did I say something funny?”

Isabel shook her head. “I’m so sorry. No, you didn’t. I have a tendency, I’m afraid, to think at a bit of a tangent. I think of things at odd times. I know it’s very rude of me, but it just seems to happen.”

This reassured Bea. “I rabbit on a bit too, from time to time. I have a niece who keeps telling me that I talk too much, but she herself—you should hear her on her phone. She’s rarely off it—talking to her friends. Gossiping away.”

“I was thinking of the Pope,” said Isabel. “It was your mention of Italian painted ceilings. That made me think of the Pope, and of how he might get advice at a dinner party.”

And then she thought: Imagine if somebody like Bea—a Roman version of her—invited the Pope to dinner in order to matchmake. And somebody would whisper to the hostess: “But you can’t, you just can’t! He’s the Pope. For heaven’s sake—he’s not available. No, it makes no difference that you think the two of them would get on—it’s just not going to work.”

“You’re smiling again.”

“Dinner parties,” said Isabel apologetically. “The thought of dinner parties leads to all sorts of conjectures. But, look, tell me about these Mitchellsons…”

“Michaelsons. He’s an architect, but I don’t think he’s ever actually built anything. He designs projects that are never made—cathedrals and so on. No, I’m not making that up—he worked for years on a cathedral that never got built. Somebody somewhere or other wanted to build a cathedral, and they asked him. Apparently he’s the only person in the country who can design a cathedral.”

Isabel remembered Christchurch Cathedral: the New Zealand Christchurch. Who had built that? And out of cardboard, after the earthquake? That architect who used cardboard because it was cheap and simple and could help people affected by disasters. As long as you coated the cardboard with something waterproof, then it would do the job handsomely.

“Have you heard of the cardboard cathedral?” she asked.

Bea did not seem to be interested. “No. I’ve not. And I don’t think he wanted to use cardboard.”

“There’s a Japanese architect,” said Isabel. “He does such good work. He builds paper structures to help people after natural disasters—earthquakes and so on.”

“Oh well…You asked about them. That’s who they are—or at least that’s who he is. I don’t really know very much about her. She’s something to do with, oh, something or other. I forget exactly what. She goes all over the place doing something for whatever it is.”

“I see.” Isabel paused. She had an incomplete picture: an architect who had designed an unbuilt cathedral; a painted ceiling restored by an Italian; a woman who busied herself with some undescribed work on behalf of unknown people. “And who else? You said there were eight people altogether.”

“Well, there were Arnold and I, of course, and Tom and Kitty—we’ve just been speaking about them—and then there were two people who were not a couple. I don’t like to make it too obvious, and so I usually have people who may know one another but who aren’t a couple. So I had my friend Frances, whose husband works a lot in Frankfurt and who’s often by herself as a result. I had her, and then I had another friend called Rob who lives by himself and likes coming to my dinner parties to make up numbers. He’s very good with people. He’s a good listener—and that’s a great gift.”

Isabel agreed. “A rare gift too.”

“I’ve seen Rob sitting there smiling while the most terrific bores go on about something. And he makes them feel that he’s really interested—which I think he probably is. You could talk to Rob about drains, or average times taken to get through the Panama Canal, or some such subject, and he would take it all in and say How interesting every so often—and mean it. I don’t matchmake for him, by the way.”

Isabel found herself thinking: Just how long did it take to get through the Panama Canal? She might ask Jamie, perhaps: it was the sort of thing he might know. As a boy he had devoured The Guinness Book of Records, he once told her, and could still come up with information on the world’s tallest man or the largest steak pie ever made, even if his facts were now a bit out of date.

She prompted Bea. “And then there was Connie and…”

She waited. Bea pursed her lips; she looked distinctly uncomfortable. “A doctor,” she said. “A surgeon, to be precise.”

“What sort?”

“Plastic. Facial reconstruction—that sort of thing.”

That information, Isabel thought, was neutral. The fact that Bea’s final guest was a plastic surgeon told her nothing about him—other than, perhaps, that he was skilled, and intelligent, and capable of looking after himself in the difficult world of surgery. Yet that, she now decided, was not nothing—in fact, it was rather a lot.

“He’s called Tony MacUspaig.”

Isabel expressed surprise at the name. “MacUspaig?”

“It’s a very rare Scottish name,” said Bea. “He told me about it when I first met him. He said it was generally believed to have died out at the beginning of the twentieth century, but he was living proof that it hadn’t. It’s Hebridean, apparently—from one of the islands. I think he said Harris.”

“So he’s the last of the MacUspaigs?” She stumbled over the pronunciation.

“I think so.”

“And he really is the last of a line of…of MacUspaigs?”

Bea smiled. “So it would seem.” Her smile faded. “Though I’m not sure now whether I should believe anything he said to me.”

“You’re going to have to tell me more,” said Isabel.

She sat back as Bea spoke, trying to concentrate on what she was being told, but finding that her mind kept drifting back to the name. MacUspaig. What would it be like to be called MacUspaig? Every time you gave your name you would have to spell it for people. People would look blank; would look confused; or smile, perhaps, because it was so odd. One could become defensive about one’s name, as people did who had those fine old English surnames, Winterbottom and Sidebottom. They saw nothing funny about their names—and why should they? Bottom meant field in Old English, and there was nothing ridiculous about being called Winterfield or Sidefield. And yet there were people who went through life feeling ashamed, or awkward, about their names. To be burdened by a disgraced name must at times be unbearable, and yet some people did just that, rather than change their names: Adolf Hitler’s sister was required to become Miss Wolf, but at least one member of the Himmler family stuck to the family name as part of an identity that she felt could not be changed, whatever the degree of shame and embarrassment. Svetlana Stalin, daughter of the monster, felt that being a Stalin entitled her to special treatment, as must the offspring of many dictators. Many of them, of course, are damaged right from the beginning: tyrants, Isabel reflected, generally made bad parents. But she put these thoughts out of her mind, as Bea was expressing the view that Tony MacUspaig was, on balance, a psychopath.

“So there you have it,” said Bea. “I’ve introduced a woman to a psychopath.” She paused. “And she likes him.”