OVER THE FOLLOWING two days Isabel busied herself with preparing the next issue of the Review for the printer. She had taken to doing the page layout herself, using a computer programme she had bought at vast expense and that effortlessly—or so it seemed to the user—sized text, chopped it up into page-length segments and produced what looked like a professionally laid-out page at the end. The effortlessness, she knew, was illusory; behind each simple keyboard stroke was a vast hinterland of human effort. Somewhere, in some distant office, anonymous computer programmers had passed large parts of their lives glued to screens, writing the code that did the work, churning out forests of numbers to produce the tidy miracle at the end. Now their work enabled her to cut and paste, to line up notes neatly at the end of each article, and to vary fonts and the type size of whole screeds with all the ease of a god deciding the fate of hapless mortals.
Halfway through the afternoon of the second day of editing, she had the entire issue more or less ready for the printer. His staff would run a more professional eye over Isabel’s efforts, and with a few tweaks the whole thing would be ready for printing. With the issue printed, for a few days Isabel would avoid her study altogether before the whole business would begin again. “My daily grind,” Isabel remarked, but knew, of course, that her lot was infinitely easier than that of most. A true daily grind involved a journey to an office or a factory, often on crowded transport, and the performance of tasks that were boring or repetitive: watching machinery, moving pieces of paper from one place to another, carrying and stacking, cleaning up. She thought of the people who manned those booths at tolls or at car park exits. What of the air they breathed, laced with traffic fumes? What of the sheer monotony of taking the money and handing back the change, hour after hour, through the day? There were jobs that were even worse than that, right down to the most demeaning ways of scratching a living. There were people who picked over heaps of rotting detritus—she had been struck by a picture she had seen of a family scavenging for tins and bottles in a South American shanty town; that was their life, their only life. And in the background of the photograph were the gleaming towers of the city centre, a world of affluence and plenty.
No, the real working world was very different from hers. Of course, somebody had to do what she did: if there were to be reviews of applied ethics, then it would obviously fall to somebody to edit them, and perhaps that person should not feel too guilty about her good fortune. Similarly, there were people who earned their living tasting wine, or inventing new chocolates, or designing cathedrals. Isabel thought of people she knew who had daily grinds like that: her friend Will Lyons wrote about wine for the Wall Street Journal and was obliged to visit wine estates in Bordeaux as part of his job. And another friend, Charlie Maclean, drank whisky professionally in order to write tasting notes for Scotch whisky distillers. Neither complained about the calling in which they found themselves. Neither would be tempted to go on strike, she thought. And of course there was Evelyn Waugh’s Captain Grimes in Decline and Fall, who had been offered the job of his dreams by a brewery: “We employ a certain number of travellers to go round to various inns and hotels to sample the beer and see that it has not been diluted…”
With the Review safely tucked up in its electronic bed, Isabel rose from her desk and crossed the room to the window. It was just before three, and in ten minutes Charlie would be ready to be collected from his nursery school. She was not to do that, though, as this was a Friday, and Friday afternoon, by unspoken agreement, was Jamie’s afternoon with his young son. It was an afternoon of unabashed treats, beginning with a visit to the Italian ice-cream bar in Bruntsfield Place, where Charlie would be indulged in a three-flavour cone, most of which would end up on his face, his hands and his clothes. Jamie seemed indifferent to this liberal distribution of ice cream, and did not appear to mind when Charlie, a tactile child, transferred a fair proportion of the sticky mess from himself to his father. Then, smelling of peppermint or raspberry or whatever flavour had been chosen, they would go off to the park near the canal, or, more frequently, to the Zoo, where there were penguins and meerkats to be observed. By the time they returned, Charlie would be ready to drop, being almost too tired for his bath, but needing it, nonetheless, for the removal of the now almost-ingrained layer of ice cream. Even if he stayed awake for the bath, he rarely managed to keep his eyes open for the story, and on a Friday he was often half asleep before the first page of the book was finished.
Isabel left her study. She stood for a moment in the hall, undecided as to how she would spend the rest of the afternoon; the prospect of free time for a busy person, for a mother in particular, can be intoxicating. There were exhibitions she wanted to see, and one of these, an exhibition of Dutch paintings at the National Gallery on the Mound, was due to close soon. On the other hand, Valvona and Crolla, the Italian delicatessen on the other side of Princes Street, beckoned seductively; art or the needs of the kitchen? Art, she thought; art, of course.
She caught a bus to Princes Street, alighting just before the Mound. Looking down into the gardens below the street, she saw, through the thick summer foliage of the trees, the Glasgow train accelerating through the greenery. The train’s whistle sounded—a curious, rather plaintive sawing between two notes—and then it was gone; in the bandstand an accordion band played bravely on, although for the smallest of crowds. She smiled; an accordion band might seem out of place in this setting—a folksy, undemanding sound from a Scottish hinterland of village halls and remote Highland bars, but it was a reminder that for all the cosmopolitanism and grandeur of Edinburgh in the month before the International Festival, this was still Scotland. And that particular Scotland was a windswept country of fish suppers and whisky and unfulfilled dreams; a country in which folk music of the sort being played by the accordion band was still in the people’s blood, half forgotten, perhaps; overlaid by the bland, promiscuous culture of the age, but still there somewhere, an ancient artistic DNA that went back to the heartbeat of a very different Scotland. “Mhairi’s Wedding”: the familiar tune, played at countless dances, reached Isabel from the gardens below, and she stopped for a moment and listened before continuing her walk towards the Gallery.
She did not want that Scotland to disappear, that Scotland of ceilidh bands and kilts; it was hers, shared with so many others, a small fragment, an offshoot of the feeling that bound people together, that meant that people were not strangers to one another. Every country needed that: the French needed their picnics by the river, their pâté, their games of boules on dusty squares; the Germans their brass bands and beer, their Lieder; the Americans their flag and its rituals, their proms and cheerleaders; little things, yes, and embarrassing too; sneered at; clichéd in their repetition and their superficiality, but part of an identity that saved us from feeling utterly lonely and detached, mere passengers on a circular rock spinning through space.
She entered the Royal Scottish Academy on Princes Street. Above the entrance, a large banner proclaiming the exhibition rippled in the breeze: The Dutch Golden Age: Masterful Interiors. Below the inscription was a reproduction of a Vermeer: Mistress and Maid. Isabel had seen the painting in the Frick in New York, who had lent it for the show. She liked it rather more than she liked Scotland’s own Vermeer, Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, a rather sombre picture, she thought, even if brighter in colour than many of the artist’s works. Mistress and Maid was far better because it had that strange quality that so many Vermeers had; that quality that put you there in the room with the subjects. What was it that David Hockney had suggested about Vermeer? She remembered it as she went into the exhibition: he had said that he had used a camera obscura device to paint his pictures. It had seemed such an unlikely theory, and yet Hockney’s explanation made it seem so feasible. It was all to do with angles and perspective, and when you came to look at a Vermeer, there was a definite photographic feel to the artist’s work.
Or was it the light? Was that what made a Vermeer so arresting? There was an afternoon quality to it; a stillness, a warmth, that seemed to support the people and things in the painting, that gave them body. That was why you felt you could reach out and touch them; might intercept the note being passed between mistress and maid; might feel the nacreous earring sported by the girl.
She walked into the first hall. A child playing in a courtyard, a small dog at her side, and through the courtyard door a view of a passageway and a lane beyond. The Dutch masters liked to give us a view from one room into another, said the exhibition guidebook. There are few interiors that do not reveal other interiors, or even the outside world. Yes, thought Isabel; that was everywhere in these paintings. That, and things—physical things, possessions, evidence of the habits of the household, evidence of wealth: elaborate dishes, food, the accoutrements of bourgeois life.
The show was not crowded, and what few visitors it had attracted seemed to be drawn to the Vermeers—the Pearl Earring Effect, she thought. A group of Japanese students stood around one of these, listening attentively to a lecture from their guide. One of the students produced a camera and took a surreptitious photograph of a girl standing next to him; she dug him in the ribs, playfully, flattered, perhaps, to be of as much interest to him as Vermeer.
On the other side of the room, Isabel stood before a painting by Pieter de Hooch: A Woman Drinking with Two Men. The men were seated, the woman stood beside them; a maid hovered in the background. To their side, a great window allowed copious light to fall upon the party; again the light…
Suddenly she became aware that somebody else, a couple, had entered the room. Up until that moment it was just her, the Japanese students, and two elderly ladies making their way round the room with earphones and a recorded commentary. The earphones had required the removal of hearing aids, and this was causing difficulty, as they both tapped at the equipment in an attempt to improve audibility.
She saw the new arrivals out of the corner of her eye and did not pay any attention—to begin with. But then she realised that one, at least, was familiar. The realisation came as a shock: it was Lettuce.
She turned back to face the de Hooch. She did not want to meet Lettuce. That was a rare feeling for her; she would usually never avoid anybody, but Lettuce was somehow different. Was it just dislike, or was it something different—a wariness born of the knowledge that he did not like her and would be perfectly happy to harm her interests—such as they were? She was not sure.
She sneaked another glance. Lettuce’s companion was probably Clementine, who must have accompanied him to Edinburgh after all. Poor woman…There is a particular sort of pity, Isabel thought, that we feel for those married to people whom we do not like. How awful to have to share a bed with Lettuce; not a vegetable bed, she thought, and, in spite of everything, smiled. There were so many otherwise nice men, of course, with whom it would be inconceivable to share a bed; in fact any man, Isabel decided, could be a bit of an effort—except one’s own man.
And what if you discovered that your husband or your partner was, like Lettuce, scheming and ambitious, or something even worse? The alternatives in such a case were stark, she imagined: you stuck to your man and said, “Oh well, he may be scheming and ambitious, but he…” And then you recited his finer qualities. Or you denied it. People had it wrong; he was not like that at all.
She suspected it was the second of these that was more common. So Clementine Lettuce was probably proud of Lettuce. She would be ignorant of the machinations that Isabel had witnessed, including Dove’s attempt—aided and abetted by Lettuce, Isabel thought—to get rid of her from the Review, a piece of perfidious plotting that had been so beautifully trumped by Isabel’s outright purchase of the company that published it. There were other matters to be chalked up against him, not least this new plot that he was apparently hatching to appoint Christopher Dove—who was considerably worse than he was—to a post in Edinburgh; again she would be unaware of all that, no doubt. So Clementine was probably innocent in the matter of Lettuce intrigues, and Isabel told herself, I must try to like her; I must try to like her.
Still seemingly engrossed in de Hooch, but looking, every now and then, at the Lettuces on the other side of the room, she saw that they were making some sort of arrangement. Lettuce looked at his watch, tapped its face in emphasis and pointed over his shoulder in the direction of Princes Street. His wife listened, then nodded, and reached into her handbag to get something to pass to him. A shopping list, thought Isabel. Lettuce is being sent off to do some shopping. Even philosophers shop, she said to herself; even people like Professor Robert Lettuce.
Lettuce left, and Isabel moved away from the de Hooch to look at the painting beside it. This had the look of a Rembrandt, but was not; she did not recognise the name of the artist, but he had achieved something of Rembrandt’s effect in his picture of a young boy with his dog—a vague, rather smudged image but one that captured the loneliness of the boy and his relationship with his dog. The dog, a nondescript terrier, was at the boy’s feet, gazing up at his young master, but the boy was looking directly out of the picture, straight at the viewer. Behind him, on a table, stood an hourglass, a symbol, of course, of the passage of time. Childhood was fleeting; life was painfully brief. Art reminded us of that—in case we needed reminding.
She found herself thinking of the boy. This had been a real boy, presumably the son of the family that had commissioned the painting. The boy was dressed in good clothes, which revealed the family’s wealth, and he was not undernourished. But he was dead, thought Isabel, and had been dead for centuries. What had life brought him? A career as a merchant—following his father, presumably? Happiness, illness? An end from some trivial infection that would today be cured in hours by a powerful antibiotic? People died of the merest scratch in those days, she reminded herself. His little terrier could have nipped him and that would have been that; no wonder people paid such attention to the hourglass.
For a few moments she was immersed in the world of the Dutch boy and forgot about Clementine Lettuce. But then she became aware that the other woman had wandered across to her side of the room and was standing by an adjacent painting. Isabel turned her head just as Clementine did so, and they found themselves looking directly at one another.
It was one of those sudden moments of contact with a stranger when we find ourselves looking into the eyes of someone we do not know but feel that we must acknowledge. Isabel felt this. I have to, she thought.
She smiled at Clementine. “Mrs. Lettuce?”
Clementine gave a start. “Oh…” She recovered quickly. “I’m sorry, I didn’t…No, I’m so sorry, I just can’t place you.”
“I’m Isabel Dalhousie. I know your husband slightly. I saw you with him a few minutes ago. He didn’t see me, I think.”
The anxiety left Clementine’s face. “Of course! Robert has mentioned you. I knew that you lived in Edinburgh.”
“Well, yes, I do. In fact, I saw your husband a few days ago, in the Institute.”
Clementine nodded. “I believe he mentioned that.”
“With Professor Dove,” continued Isabel.
“Christopher. Yes. He’s here too. We’re staying in the same hotel. Christopher’s over in Fife today. He knows somebody at St. Andrews. Robert was going to go with him, but he decided to stay in Edinburgh.”
As Clementine spoke, Isabel found herself warming to her. She had an open expression and a soft, rather gentle face. She’s innocent, Isabel decided. She may be married to Lettuce, but she’s innocent of his crimes. Now, on impulse, she said something that she had not intended to say.
“I hear that you’re moving to Edinburgh. Will that be soon?”
Clementine hesitated, but only briefly. It was as if she was weighing up whether to make a disclosure. “It’s not widely known yet,” she said. “But yes, we are.”
Isabel wanted to smile at the words it’s not widely known. People were odd about confidentiality; irrelevant, unimportant matters were deemed, for some reason, to be state secrets. What did it matter if people knew that the Lettuces were coming to Edinburgh? Perhaps if he had not yet given his notice in London, it might be something to be kept confidential, but otherwise, surely not.
She was aware that she had led Clementine into this admission, and she felt a pang of guilt. But the next moment she thought: But I had heard that. What I said was quite true.
“Have you found somewhere to live?” she asked.
“We’re looking. We saw somewhere rather nice yesterday and we’re getting further particulars from the agents.”
Isabel felt a momentary sense of doom. There was a house on the market round the corner from her own—a matter of a few hundred yards away. What if the Lettuces had seen that and would end up being her neighbours in Merchiston? What if she had to run the risk of encountering Lettuce every time she walked along Merchiston Crescent to Cat’s delicatessen? And—excruciating thought—what if Lettuce were to come into the delicatessen and she had to serve him?
“Whereabouts?” Isabel asked. The anxiety she felt made her voice crack.
“In the West End,” said Clementine. “Near that Cathedral—the Church of England one. Drumsheugh Place. Maybe you could tell me something about the area.”
Isabel winced. She could not help it. “Episcopalian,” she said. “The Episcopal Church of Scotland is a member of the Anglican communion, but is not the Church of England.” She put more emphasis into the not than she had intended, and it had its effect.
“Oh, I’m so sorry. Of course. I have to remind myself that people are sensitive up here.”
Up here. Isabel bit her tongue. It was unhelpful to blame people for their ethnocentrism. Everybody believed that they were the centre of the universe and at times forgot that there were other cultures. It was a familiar complaint in Scotland, where the English assumption that the United Kingdom was the same thing as England particularly rankled. But it was not ill-meant, Isabel reminded herself, and it was pointless working oneself up into a state of nationalistic frenzy over such things.
The Japanese students had moved away from the painting they had been studying and had dispersed in small groups around the room. Two young women, not much older than eighteen or nineteen, were now peering past Isabel at the painting of the boy.
“Would you care for a cup of coffee?” Isabel asked Clementine. “Or tea, of course. There’s a rather nice tearoom on the level below. It looks out over the gardens.” She paused. “You asked me if I could tell you about the area—that bit of the West End.”
Clementine accepted, and they made their way towards the stairs that led to the tearoom. There they found another group of students, Italian this time, but not so many as to make them wait long for their tea.
“This part of town can get a bit crowded in the summer,” Isabel remarked. “But when you live here, you tend to avoid the places that get too busy.”
“Oh, it’s the same with us in London. We’d never dream of going somewhere like Oxford Street. Robert would expire, I think.”
In her mind’s eye, Isabel saw Lettuce lying on the Oxford Street pavement, gasping like a stranded fish, while crowds of indifferent shoppers made their way about him, careful to avoid treading on him but not doing anything to help. The Expiry of Professor Lettuce. It could so easily be the title of a painting.
She immediately censured herself. One should not think such things; and yet, of course, one did. Unwelcome thoughts was the term psychiatrists gave to such imaginings; most people, if they were honest, thought these things, at least occasionally, but not everybody sought to control them. That, Isabel felt, was one of the great moral challenges: how to think charitably when it was sometimes so entertaining to do otherwise. Sexual fantasies fell into this category: Isabel had read that many people—particularly men—entertained sexual fantasies every day of their lives, and on average slightly over once an hour. She had wondered about this. Did men really think about sex that often? She had asked Jamie, whose eyes had widened at the question before he gave the Delphic answer, “It all depends, I suppose, on whether they have anything to think about.”
Isabel took a deep breath. “But do you?” she asked.
Jamie stared at her and then winked. “What do you think?” he said.
She said nothing. She had crossed a barrier, and must retreat. But she looked at him and thought: Every hour?
There were other fantasies, of course, and if she were to confess to being a fantasist, then these were more her province; she had a tendency to picture things like the last moments of Lettuce in Oxford Street, or Cat’s former boyfriend, Toby, who had irritated her so much, being caught up in an avalanche on the ski slopes and ending up with his legs sticking up out of the snow, legs encased in those crushed-strawberry corduroy trousers he invariably wore. Only his legs would show above the snow, but these would be enough, of course, to guide the rescuers. They would dig him out and dust him off—he would be miraculously unhurt—chastened, yes, but not hurt; and they would scold him: You really shouldn’t show off so much, you know; keep on piste…And suddenly Toby became Christopher Dove, and it was the arrogant Dove who was pursued by the roaring avalanche, only to be saved at the last moment by Isabel herself, swooping down from a higher snowfield, guiding him down to safety. And Dove would say, “I don’t know how to thank you…” She would say, “Don’t think twice about it—you’d do the same for me”—which of course he would not; there were times when one said You would do the same for me in the full knowledge that the person to whom you said it would not; that was the reason for saying it.
She tried to control these thoughts because she recognised their pettiness and knew they were all about revenge. Revenge was wrong in principle; that at least needed no further discussion: a dish eaten hot or cold, it was always wrong. Imagining humiliation for others was not something of which one could be proud; it was what inadequate people did to build themselves up, and she would not allow herself to become inadequate. Mind you, she thought, some of these fantasies are funny, and she was only human. She was a philosopher, and she was well aware of the stern requirements of duties to self, but she was also human, and being human involved a certain amount of weakness, and silliness too; not too much of either, of course, but some. It had once occurred to her that perhaps somebody could market a notebook with My Failings printed on the front cover. You could give it to your friends for their birthdays, and encourage them to use it. “You won’t need many pages of this, my dear, but still…”
IN THE GALLERY TEAROOM Isabel and Clementine found a table by the window.
“That really is a most peculiar edifice,” said Clementine, as she settled in to her chair.
Isabel followed her gaze to the Scott Monument. “Yes,” she said. “A lot of people think of it as a sort of Gothic spacecraft, poised to blast off. And yet I’m rather fond of it, in an odd sort of way.”
Clementine inclined her head. “This is a very unusual city,” she said.
“Oh, in what sense?”
“It’s hard to put one’s finger on it. People talk to one another, I suppose. That makes it a bit different from some places.”
“You should go to Glasgow,” said Isabel. “If you want people to talk to you. They do that a lot. All the time, in fact.”
Clementine smiled. “No, I’m serious. I don’t think that you would have talked to me, had we been in London. You would have been too busy. You would have been too reticent.”
Isabel poured their tea. Proper china. Proper cups. “I believe you work in the British Museum,” she said. “Are you going to be giving that up? Now that you’re moving to Edinburgh?”
“The Museum? Yes, I’m an assistant keeper there. I’m one of the people who works on the cuneiform collection. We have the largest collection of cuneiform tablets in the world, you know. Clay tablets. About one hundred and thirty thousand of them.”
Isabel showed her surprise. Somehow she had not imagined that this is what Clementine Lettuce would do. “You mean, you read cuneiform? You decipher it?”
Clementine Lettuce smiled weakly. “Yes, people are sometimes taken aback a bit. They don’t expect people to be able to read these things.”
“There can’t be many of you who do.”
There were, Clementine said, not more than a few hundred people in the world who could make any sense of the scripts. There was, she thought, one person in Edinburgh who could. There were none in Glasgow.
Suddenly Clementine reached into the pocket of her jacket and took out a small notebook. From this she tore a page, and wrote on it, in ink, a collection of odd, angular strokes. She handed this to Isabel. “Your name,” she said. “Isabel Dalhousie in the Hittite language. I’ve done it phonetically, of course.”
Isabel examined the inscription. “So that’s me.”
“Yes. I’m sorry it looks so spiky, but none of us, I assure you, looks glamorous in Hittite.”
Isabel tucked the piece of paper into a pocket. She would show it to Jamie: My Hittite self—see?
“So Edinburgh will mean you’re going to give up the job?”
Clementine put her notebook away. “Yes.”
“With regret?”
“Of course.” She paused. “I’ve spent years of my life on cuneiform. Years. But…” She shrugged.
Isabel waited for her to continue; she sensed that something important was coming.
“The truth of the matter is that this move is important for Robert. If it were just me, then I’d stay in London—I’d stay in my job in the Museum. But it isn’t just me.”
Isabel was silent. She liked Clementine Lettuce. She liked the way she looked; she liked the way she spoke. She felt this way although she had been predisposed to dislike her intensely; that was strange—and unexpected.
“You see,” Clementine went on, “the last few years have been very tough for Robert. And for me, I suppose, but particularly for him. He needs a fresh start, and that really means getting away from our house in London. Getting away from so many associations there.”
“I thought he was happy in London,” said Isabel. “I thought he enjoyed the Society of Philosophy. Isn’t he on the Council? And his chair there; I thought he’d enjoy that.”
“Oh, professionally everything has been fine for him. It’s not that, though—it’s what happened to us. We lost our daughter you see, our only child—our daughter, Antonia.”
Isabel looked down at the table. “I’m so sorry…”
“Thank you.”
“Please don’t feel that you have to…”
Clementine held up a hand. “No, it’s important to be able to talk about it. I often say that to Robert. It causes him immense pain—I can see it in his face—but I always encourage him to talk about her.”
Isabel spoke quietly. “What age was…was Antonia?”
“She was eighteen.”
Isabel said nothing.
“She went off to look at a university—it was Durham, actually. She wanted to apply for a place there, and they had an open day. She went with some school friends, and there was a road accident. Somebody was driving a bit too fast. It doesn’t matter who that was. I don’t bear them any ill feeling because they couldn’t have known what would happen. Robert found that harder, but he came round to my view eventually.”
“I see.”
“But his heart was broken.” She paused. “Have you ever known anybody with a broken heart?”
Isabel was not prepared for the question. Had she? She was not sure.
“It’s the saddest thing there is. Something goes out inside them. It just goes out.”
“I’m sorry to hear this.”
“Thank you. But that’s why Robert needed to apply for this job. Edinburgh or Oxford are the two places he says he would be prepared to move to. There’s nothing coming up in Oxford, and anyway, I think that there are people there who don’t like him, so he won’t stand a chance. So it’s going to be Edinburgh, I hope.”
The words were not intended as a reproach, but that was what they were—in Isabel’s mind at least. There are people there who don’t like him. And in Edinburgh? There were people there who did not like him either. She imagined the anti-Lettuce faction in Oxford—a group of fussy, argumentative dons, united at least in this one thing: their dislike of Lettuce; meeting in secret to discuss the latest doings of their bête noire. Adolf Sax, the inventor of the saxophone, similarly had a society of his enemies—he attracted fervid jealousy from people who wished they had invented the saxophone; this society had formal meetings in Paris, in, quite appropriately, la rue des Serpents. She smiled at the thought.
But the smile quickly faded. She had been without charity, and she now saw Lettuce in a different light. He was a sorrowing father, to whom the most awful thing conceivable had happened. And here was this woman giving up her career for his sake. She obviously loved him. He loved her. They had both loved their daughter. And Lettuce was presumably doing the best he could in an imperfect world. He was vain and he was pompous. But he was human, and his heart had been broken.
“I’m so very sorry,” said Isabel, and reached out to put her hand on Clementine’s arm. She saw the first sign of tears in the other woman’s eyes. They were quickly wiped away.
“It’s very kind of you,” said Clementine. “It’s very kind of you to talk to me. I don’t know a soul in Edinburgh.”
“I’m sure you’ll make friends here quickly,” said Isabel, and she added, without thinking, “I’ll help you meet people.”
“You’re very kind.”
“And Robert too.”
Clementine frowned. “Robert’s not always easy,” she said. “Sometimes it’s more difficult for him. He had a very unhappy childhood, you know. His father was with Shell, you see, and so his parents lived abroad much of the time. Robert went to one of those dreadful boarding schools. It was down on the South Coast. I think some very unpleasant things happened there.” She looked hard at Isabel. “So many lives were distorted by such cruelty. I know so many men who had to put up with that, so many…”
Isabel closed her eyes momentarily. Those schools, and the attitudes that allowed them, were a largely spent force now, but their shadow was a long one. Now she asked the first thing that came into her head. “And Christopher Dove? What does he think of the move?”
Clementine did not answer immediately. She glanced out of the window and seemed to be studying something. Isabel looked out too. The gardens were busy; a woman with a group of children—six or seven—walked past, and Isabel thought: They can’t all be hers—not these days. Then Clementine turned her head. “At times it’s difficult to read Christopher. Do you know him well?”
At first, Isabel was unsure how to answer. She knew Dove’s faults well enough, she believed, but she could not say that she knew him well. “Professionally. We’ve had some dealings. I edit a journal, you know, and he…”
“Oh, I know you do,” interjected Clementine. “Robert’s spoken about that. He says you’re very good at it.”
Isabel tried to hide her surprise. “That’s good of him. I do my best. It’s a bit of a burden at times.”
Clementine returned to Christopher. “Robert’s close to Christopher, but sometimes, well, frankly, I don’t quite get what he sees in him. Friendships between men can be rather opaque, I find. Men are not particularly given to thinking about their friendships. They just take them for granted. So-and-so is my friend—that’s all there is to it. That sort of thing.”
“I know what you mean,” said Isabel.
“Still,” mused Clementine, “I think that it will be good to have Robert here in Edinburgh and Christopher down in London. I think it will be good for Robert to get out of Christopher’s orbit, so to speak. Sometimes I think that Christopher manipulates Robert—or tries to.”
Isabel caught her breath. “So Christopher wouldn’t think of coming here too?” She paused, watching the effect of her words. “If something suitable came up, of course.”
The suggestion seemed to appal Clementine. “Oh, I hope not.” She stopped to reflect. “Of course, I shouldn’t be selfish about that. Robert is not very good with friends—he doesn’t keep up any friendships. I rather think that Christopher is his only real friend, you know.”
Isabel gazed up at the ceiling. How bleak to have Christopher Dove as your only friend. Lettuce, she thought, is not what I thought he was. I have been unkind. I have been wrong. He may be insufferably pompous, but within him there’s the damaged, frightened little boy trapped in an institution of bullies and oppression, wanting only the love of his mother, who was far away, in some place where Shell people went, a voice on the telephone in occasional, snatched conversations—that same frightened, uncertain little boy who was there within so many men. She thought of a politician she knew who had a reputation for bombast and bullying. That little boy was within him. Or the greedy tycoon who had tried to put a rival out of business through sheer canon power; that same boy’s voice could be heard there too. No, it’s Dove who’s the one to watch; he’s the Svengali, he’s the Rasputin.