THE IDEA OCCURRED to Isabel later that day, shortly after she had collected Charlie from nursery school. It came as she was walking home—a short journey in her steps but an odyssey in Charlie’s—an odyssey that was interrupted by stops to examine objects found or spotted: a piece of paper lying in the gutter, a twig from one of the trees whose boughs overhung the garden walls along the road, a feather from a seagull. The gulls, unwelcome guests in the neighbourhood, occasionally conducted aerial battles, mewing and screeching in outrage over some infringement of territory, some obscure gull slight. Charlie, who for some reason could not manage the word seagull, called them seagirls, and Isabel now did too, in the way in which we take from our children their special words, their mispronunciations, which strike us as such fitting, attractive neologisms.
“Seagirls cross,” said Charlie, looking skywards.
Isabel, however, did not hear this comment, as the idea had dawned on her and it seemed to her that this was the obvious thing to do. It was an unlikely thing to do, of course, and it might not survive close examination, but she could try it.
Why not?
“The seagirls …,” Charlie repeated, looking at his mother for support.
“Yes,” said Isabel. “The seagirls.” But she did not expand. “Come on, Charlie. Let’s hurry.”
He tugged at her hand. “The seagirls …”
She picked him up. “Let’s just go home, Charlie. The seagirls will be all right. I don’t think they need us.” She paused. “Chocolate pudding.”
It never failed: the ultimate, fool-proof bribe. Even so, Charlie sought confirmation. “Chocolate pudding?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “When we get back.”
He was silent for the rest of the journey, thinking, perhaps, of the treat that lay ahead. And when Isabel arrived back at the house, she found that Grace was only too happy to take Charlie into the kitchen and prepare the treat for him. Grace indulged Charlie, and would have willingly provided chocolate pudding in vast quantities, had Isabel permitted it.
She went into her study and took three pieces of writing paper from the stationery drawer. Sitting down at her desk, she pushed aside the small pile of papers on which she had been working that morning—the papers on the ethics of adoption—and began the first of the letters. The wording, she had decided, would be identical: the only difference being the name in the salutation. She wrote first to Duncan: Dear Duncan, I have found out what has happened. Obviously, I need to talk to you privately about this, as the last thing, I imagine, that you would want would be for it to become a public matter, with all that it would entail for the family. I assure you I shall be discreet. With kind regards, Isabel Dalhousie.
She looked at the handwritten letter and reached for another sheet of notepaper. Kind regards was wrong. Not only did it sound slightly contrived, but she was not sure that regards could be kind: they could be warm regards, they could be best regards, but kindness, surely, was something that would be in the heart of the person sending the regards and it would be unduly self-congratulatory to impute kindness to oneself. Perhaps it would be better to write With all best wishes, but then she thought: Does this letter really come with all best wishes? It did not. Yours aye was an appropriately Scottish ending to a letter, but it meant Yours ever, and it implied long and loyal sentiments. These were not there. Yours was best, then—the simple contraction of Yours sincerely or, indeed, of Yours faithfully or Yours truly. What had she been taught at school? Isabel remembered those lessons in that stuffy classroom where Miss … what was her name? … McLaren or Maclaurin had taught them the etiquette of correspondence. “Don’t forget, girls,” she had said, “you will be judged by your competence to write a letter. So remember the rules. Never, ever write Yours sincerely in a formal or business letter. We are not sincere in such letters, girls; we are, by contrast, faithful.” At which Amanda … what was her name, the first girl in the class to report on experience with a boy? (experience being the term used darkly by the teachers to warn of the consequences of such things)—she, that Amanda, had sniggered and whispered, “Speak for yourself!” Amanda … Amanda … Isabel looked up at the ceiling. Amanda Weir—that was her name. She was two divorces down the line now, Isabel had heard, both because she had gone off with somebody else, and that was presumably because faithfulness had meant so little to her. Amanda Weir had grown into unhappiness because she did not realise that happiness came from sticking at things—things that often seemed mundane, prosaic, boring, unglamorous.
Isabel rewrote the letter in exactly the same terms as her first attempt, inserting only the deliberately perfunctory Yours, Isabel. She reread the letter, and then wrote an identical one addressed to Alex and one to Patrick. Next, she addressed the envelopes, wrote Strictly Personal on the top left-hand corner of each, and went into the kitchen to inform Grace that she was going out briefly to the postbox. A scene of chocolate chaos greeted her: chocolate smeared around Charlie’s mouth, chocolate on his hands and across the front of his shirt. Grace smiled guiltily. “I tried,” she said. “I’ll put him in the bath afterwards.”
Isabel returned the smile. “Such happiness,” she muttered.
AFTER SHE HAD POSTED the letters in the small postbox on the corner, Isabel stood for a moment and considered what she had done. She often did this after consigning something important to the post; she stood and reflected. Posting something was a simple act, but it could be the first of a sequence of important events that changed one’s world, or somebody else’s. The letter of application for a job that might take one far from home; that might result in one’s meeting the person with whom one would spend one’s life … A letter could change so much, could create just as much as it might destroy.
Isabel imagined what the effect might be of the letters she had just put through the mouth of the postbox. What if she changed her mind? Could one ever recall a letter after posting it? It would surely be impossible. Letters lay in the postbox until the next collection—which she noticed was barely an hour away—and then they were removed by the postman when he passed by in his van. One might stand by the postbox and ask him for the letter back, but surely he could never accede to such a request. How would he know that the letter was yours? And once a letter was handed over to the postal authorities they were, she presumed, the legal custodian of that letter until it was handed over to the intended recipient. But they did not own it, she thought, because the letter and its contents remained your property until it was given to the person named on the envelope. So surely you could ask for the return of your own property? No, she decided, you could not; it was not that simple.
For a few moments Isabel wondered whether she had made a bad mistake. She had claimed that she had found out what happened, but it was simply not true, and if she were to be asked to expand on it, she would have nothing to say. But that was the whole point, she decided: she hoped that two of the three would ask her what had happened, while the third would not. And the reason for that was that the third would know and would not need to enquire. Unless, of course, all three asked, which would suggest that all were innocent. Yet the guilty could affect ignorance; there was that to consider, and sometimes the guilty were adept at it—more adept than the innocent might be in the assertion of their innocence.
She moved away from the postbox. It was too late: the stone had been thrown into the pond and all she could do was to return home and wait for the ripples to break—if there were to be any. As Isabel walked back down the road, the seagulls’ cries were now a Greek chorus, or so it seemed to her. She looked up at them as they circled overhead. Their earlier dispute resolved, their mewing was now less strident, but some, at least, appeared to be directed at her. Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns … And then there were the lilies to be considered; they neither spun nor weaved and yet Solomon in all his glory … She stopped herself. The wisdom of Solomon. Would he have written such a letter? Possibly, she thought. Possibly.
JAMIE WAS TEACHING that afternoon and returned in a bad mood. This was unusual for him, and Isabel knew that it would not last; Jamie’s temper was equable, and although he might manage a few minutes of silence, he seemed incapable of sustained grumpiness. Cat was the past master at that: she could sustain a huff for days on end, sometimes to the extent of forgetting—Isabel suspected—the original cause of her annoyance. Isabel had often thought that much the same thing happened in those puzzling animosities between whole nations: although there might be fresh aggravations to keep relations on edge, the original casus belli of many of the great historical dislikes were shrouded. The Greeks and Turks disliked one another, and each could provide chapter and verse for why this was so, but behind many such recited wrongs there lay ancient animosities based on incidents that really were forgotten. Greeks and Turks … she remembered now. When she was six, or thereabouts, there had been a boy who lived in the next street whose parents had been friendly with hers. This boy, David, was brought by his mother to play with her and spent long afternoons in her company. His favourite game, which she tended to tire of well before he did, was one of his own invention, or so she believed, and it had been called “Greeks and Turks.” The memory of this game always brought a smile to Isabel’s lips, as the rules had been so simple. One person was the Greek and the other was the Turk. The Greek chased the Turk and then, on catching him or her, became the Turk, to be chased in turn by the Greek. There were no further implications to the game—it continued until either the Greek or the Turk fell over and grazed a knee, as sometimes happened, or decided that endless running around in pursuit of another was of waning interest. That conclusion was more frequently and more quickly reached by Isabel than by David, and reflected what the young Isabel was to discover as she became older: that boys and men were content to chase things while girls and women saw no point in such behaviour.
Jamie’s bad mood, such as it was, had been caused by one of his pupils.
“I don’t like that boy,” he said as he came into Isabel’s study. Charlie was having a nap, and Isabel was in the middle of a rare tidying session. There was so much paper, so many piles of books, that had she thought about it she too might well have decided to indulge herself in a bad mood. But in general, in the average marriage there is room for only one bad mood at a time and on that afternoon Jamie was there first.
She shifted a pile of papers from one surface to another; the guilt that a pile of papers may induce can be so easily dissipated by a small move, she decided. “What boy? Thomas?”
Thomas was a pupil of whom Jamie had spoken more than once—a boy, he complained, who persistently came to his music lesson without some important part of his bassoon—usually the crook, but often the reed or the sling. Jamie would always have a spare crook that he could lend him, but he disliked providing reeds, which had to be placed in the mouth. He had told Isabel about how he had tackled the subject with Thomas, telling him that one’s saliva was, as a general rule, best kept to oneself. Thomas had stared at him uncomprehendingly and had forgotten to bring his reed to the following lesson as well.
“No,” said Jamie, flopping down in the armchair beside Isabel’s desk, “not Thomas. Barry.”
Isabel picked up an unopened letter that had somehow escaped her attention and examined the postmark. “Barry?” The letter was postmarked two weeks earlier, and she winced.
“He’s fourteen,” said Jamie. “And he has the most ghastly mother. He’s ghastly himself, but his mother is really seriously ghastly. And the father’s ghastly too. They’re nouveaux riches and wear really flashy clothes. Barry had this sort of shiny shirt on today and a belt made out of some endangered species. His father came to collect him and he was wearing sunglasses—very designer—and endangered shoes.”
Isabel smiled. “They probably weren’t actually endangered. Some of these things are imitation crocodile, or lizard, or whatever it is. They’re just plastic.”
Jamie was having none of this. “No, they’re not. Not in this case. You could tell that the father goes for the real thing. He probably shot his shoes himself.”
Isabel raised an eyebrow. Jamie was usually tolerant in his views, and rarely vituperative. And surely it could not just be Barry to set him off like this. “Anything else happened?” she asked casually.
He was silent.
“Nothing?” she asked.
Jamie sighed. “There was a letter. It had been delivered to the flat. I told them—I told them two or three times that my mail was to come here, but these people are hopeless, just hopeless. You may as well save your breath.”
Isabel said nothing. It was clearly nothing to do with Barry or his father’s shoes; it was the letter.
“What was it?” she asked gently.
Jamie spat the word out. “Tax.”
“Ah.”
“They said that I underpaid last year. They said it was my mistake.”
Isabel was about to say “It usually is” but realised that this might not be the moment. So she said instead, “They’re ghastly …” It was, she realised, a curious echo of Jamie’s complaint about the unfortunate Barry and his family; a word, as often happens, can be like a musical worm in the mind and invite repetition. But it slipped out. Tax inspectors were not ghastly, she thought; they were simply doing their job, and they did it, she imagined, fairly well—for the most part. They had to contend with all sorts of dishonesty and rudeness on the part of taxpayers, who were, no doubt, quite capable of being particularly ghastly in their dealings with tax officials, and so …
“You can say that again,” said Jamie. “Why do they have to wait until now to tell me? Why didn’t they sort this out earlier? Six months ago?”
Isabel shrugged. “They have a lot of tax to collect. And the public itself can be ghas—” She stopped the word in its tracks. And holding her unopened letter, she was hardly in a position to bemoan the inefficiency of others.
“How much?” she asked.
Jamie closed his eyes. “Eight hundred and fifty pounds.”
Isabel looked out of the window. She would have to handle this carefully. “Are you all right for that?” she asked. “I could …”
He looked up at her. “I’m all right. It’s just that … well, I don’t want to pay.”
“No,” she said. “That’s understandable.”
She could see that the bad mood was already wearing off.
“I’ve had an interesting day,” she volunteered.
“Really?” His tone was almost normal now; the memories of Barry and the tax demand were clearly fading.
“Yes. I had an idea. A rather interesting one, as it happens.”
He got to his feet. “I must have a shower. But what was this idea of yours?”
“You have your shower,” she said. “I could talk to you about it later on. We could go out for dinner.”
Her suggestion was well received. “Yes, why not?”
“No reason,” said Isabel. “I’ll book that place at Holy Corner. The something-or-other bistro. And I’ll ask Grace to babysit. She offered earlier today. I think she wants to read to Charlie.”
“Not teach him mathematics?”
Isabel laughed. “No, I don’t think so.”
Jamie nodded. “Good.”
Isabel returned to her task of tidying. Jamie’s birthday was coming up. She would put a cheque for eight hundred and fifty pounds in an envelope and seal it with a kiss. He would accept it, she felt, because it was his birthday and such things were permitted on birthdays even if pride, however unreasonably, prevented them on other occasions. She would give him anything, she felt. Everything she possessed. But at least eight hundred and fifty pounds was a start.
JAMIE STARED AT HER over the dinner table in the Bistro Bia. “So,” he said, “you wrote to all three of them and told them that you had worked out …”
“Discovered,” interjected Isabel.
“Discovered what had happened. And yet you say that this isn’t strictly true?” His intonation rose sharply at the end of the sentence, underlining his doubt.
“Not strictly,” said Isabel. “Of course I don’t want to rely on pedantry, but I could argue that the forming in my mind of a theory as to what happened amounts to a discovery. So that means I wasn’t really telling a lie.”
Jamie looked at her uncertainly. “You don’t really mean that, do you?” he said.
Isabel gave a sheepish grin. She had not convinced herself; she had not even tried. “Maybe not. But the point is this—this letter of mine might just flush out the guilty party.”
“If one of them is the guilty party,” said Jamie. “And frankly, it doesn’t seem all that likely.”
“Maybe not to you,” said Isabel. “But if you look at the evidence. One of the men holding the painting called Duncan by the name Alex and Patrick use …”
“And the name millions of other people use for their father,” said Jamie. He saw her face fall, and he immediately added, almost apologetically, “But carry on anyway.”
“Motive,” said Isabel.
“Motives aren’t evidence.”
She bit her lip. “Do you want me to tell you what I think, or not?”
He was placatory now. “I’m trying to play the role that Peter plays when he quizzes you about something.” Peter was Peter Stevenson, a friend who often acted as a critical sounding board for Isabel and whose advice she valued.
“But you’re not Peter,” she blurted out. “You aren’t here to test everything I say like … like a judge. You asked me what I think and I started to tell you and …” She did not finish. Jamie had reached across the table and placed his hand gently on hers.
“You’re right. I’m sorry.”
She forgave him.
“All right,” she said. “Motive: Alex needs money, or rather, her fiancé does. Same thing really. She loves the Poussin. She doesn’t want it to be given away. There’s also that very odd thing, not motive, I suppose, but back to evidence: the fact that she got me involved and then tried to shift suspicion on to her brother. Patrick may need money—we’re not sure. Disagrees with his father on politics and farming and all sorts of things, I imagine, and there’s no love lost between him and his sister.” She paused. “I suppose his motive is probably the weakest—or at least it’s the one we’re least sure about. But then …”
“Yes? But then?”
“Then there’s Duncan himself.”
Jamie looked doubtful. “Surely not.”
“What if he has financial problems?” asked Isabel.
“He could sell a painting. The Poussin could go down to Christie’s and that would be it. Financial problems solved.”
Isabel considered this. “Except that he might not feel able to sell something that he has promised to give to the nation.” She looked at him enquiringly. “Would you? Would you sell something that you had promised to give to somebody in the future?”
Jamie took a sip from his glass of water. “I might—if I needed to.”
“But you’re not Duncan Munrowe. Remember, he’s old-fashioned. He has his reputation to consider.”
Jamie smiled. “But you’re still suggesting that he might try to defraud an insurance company?”
Isabel shook her head. “No, you’re right. I don’t really think that he’s behind this. It wouldn’t be in character, and, for the most part, people act in character, don’t they?”
“Almost always,” said Jamie.
Isabel thought for a moment about her proposition that people acted in character. It was probably true, but if you were to use character as a means of predicting what people would do, you had to know their character very well. And that was the problem: most people had aspects to their character that they concealed—weaknesses, vices, and so on; not most people, she thought—everybody. Everybody had some flaws and these flaws could prompt them to do surprising things.
She looked at Jamie and thought: Was Jamie capable of surprising her? Was he capable of doing something low or mean—something that she would think completely out of character?
“Why are you looking at me like that?” he asked.
She looked away quickly. “Was I?”
“Yes,” he said. “You were looking at me in a very strange way.” He seemed amused rather than unsettled.
“I was wondering whether you could ever do anything that would shock me. I suppose that’s what I was thinking.”
He gave her an injured look—but he made it clear that he was not serious. “Don’t you trust me?”
“Of course I trust you. I was just thinking of cases where wives discover that their husband has been doing something shocking. It was mentioning character that made me think about that sort of thing.” She paused. “I don’t believe you would ever shock me, though. I really don’t believe that.”
As she spoke, she thought of all the women who discovered that their husbands were having an affair. It was a very common story—banal really, so frequently did it happen. But it was not those cases that involved the real shock: it was when the woman discovered something utterly out of the ordinary; for instance, that their husband had committed a serious crime. What would she do if she found out that Jamie had robbed a bank, or was a secret blackmailer, or had planted a bomb in a public place, or something like that? Isabel wondered. The men who did those things went back, she assumed, to their wives or girlfriends at night. Mafiosi had their families—they tucked their children into bed at night and exhorted them to do well at school. People who plotted the deaths of others bought their wives birthday presents and walked the dog and took the car to the garage. And they had their little tiffs and make-ups and went out for dinner in restaurants just like this one and talked about day-to-day things.
Isabel looked around the restaurant, at the couples at neighbouring tables. Just like us, but were there secrets at every table? There were, she decided. Yes, there were.
“We should talk about something else,” said Jamie, picking up the menu that the waitress had placed before him. “Food, maybe.” He ran his eye down the list of offerings. “One final thing, though: What do you expect to happen next?”
“I’ve already told you,” she said. “Two of them will be very keen to find out. Two will phone me. One won’t. Or …” She hesitated. “All of them will get in touch.”
Jamie laughed. “Oh well,” he said. “Robert Burns.”
“What’s he got to do with it?”
“The best laid schemes of mice and men,” said Jamie. “Remember?”
“How could one forget?” said Isabel.