The Charming Quirks of Others

people have deeper pockets than others.”

She wanted him to put a figure on it, and she pressed him.

“Forty thousand pounds,” he said. “Something like that. But you could be lucky and get it for twenty-five or thirty. Interested?”

Isabel had forty thousand pounds. Not in cash, of course, but she could raise that if she needed it by selling shares. That year she had bought two paintings—one for three thousand pounds and one for eight hundred. She was not used to spending much larger sums on art, although she had done so before. This, though, was special. She nodded her assent. “Will you try?”

“I’ll do my best,” said Guy. “I’ll get a condition report and check that everything’s all right. Then we can go for it, if you like. Give me an upper limit.”

She closed her eyes and saw, rather to her surprise, her mother, her sainted American mother, as she called her. “Don’t miss your chances in this life,” her mother had said to her. And now she was saying it again.

“Thirty …” She hesitated. Her sainted American mother had something to say. Thirty- eight.

“Yes?”

“A hammer price of thirty-eight thousand. Let’s not go any higher than that.”

Guy took the catalogue and made a note in the margin. “We should be all right,” he said.

Isabel looked at her watch. Grace was looking after Charlie for a couple of hours; she had taken him to see her friend who had a child of the same age. She would be back, she said, at two, and Isabel wanted to be at home when they returned.

“I have to get back,” she said, rising to her feet. “When is the sale?”

“Six weeks from now,” said Guy. “Plenty of time. It’s down in London, and so we’ll bid by phone. If you change your mind, let me know.”

“I won’t change it.”

Guy knew that she would not. He knew Isabel reasonably well, and he had noticed two things about her. She told the truth, and she was as good as her word. He, too, rose to his feet, and as he did so, an elderly woman who had been sitting at a nearby table leaned over and addressed him.

“Mr. Peploe? You are Mr. Peploe, aren’t you?”

Guy inclined his head. “Yes.”

“I just wanted you to know how much I like your paintings,” said the woman. “Those lovely pictures of the island of Iona. And Mull too. So striking.”

Isabel bit her lip.

“I’m afraid they’re not mine,” said Guy politely. “My grandfather. Samuel Peploe. He painted them.”

The woman looked surprised. “Really? Well, doesn’t time pass? My goodness. Well, I still want you to know that I like them very much indeed, even if it was your grandfather, not you.”

Guy thanked her politely; he avoided catching Isabel’s eye. Once outside, he looked at her, his eyes bright with amusement. “Well!”

Isabel was thinking of the Raeburn, and of the woman and her granddaughter. We were all tied to one another—ourselves and those who came before us; this had been their city too, these streets their thoroughfares, these stone buildings their homes. The curious anachronistic mistake of the woman in Glass & Thompson merely showed that the barriers between present and past could be porous. Isabel had closed her eyes and seen her mother; as easily might she look into the mirror and see something in the shape of her nose, or the line of her brow, that she might discern in the two sitters in that Raeburn portrait. We were ourselves, but we were others too; our past written on us like lines drawn on a palimpsest, or the artist’s rough sketch beneath the surface of a painting. And little Charlie—she saw herself in him sometimes, in the way his mouth turned when he smiled; and her father was there, too, in Charlie’s eyes, which were like two sparkling little pools of grey and green.

She looked at her watch; she would have to rush to be home when Charlie arrived. She wanted to be there in the hall, to take him from Grace and to hold him tightly against her, which he allowed, but only for a few seconds, before he began to struggle to escape her embrace. That was the lot of the mother of sons; one embraced and held them, but even in their tenderness they were struggling to get away, and would.

CHAPTER TWO

THE NEXT DAY was a working day for Isabel. As editor—and now owner—of the Review of Applied Ethics, she could determine her own working patterns, but only to an extent. The journal was quarterly, which might have led outsiders to think that Isabel’s job could hardly be onerous. Such outsiders would be wrong—as outsiders usually are about most things. Although three months intervened between the appearance of each issue of the journal, those three months were regulated by a series of chores that were as regular as the tides, and as unforgiving. Papers had to be sent out for review and, if accepted for publication, edited. The professors of philosophy who wrote these papers were, as Isabel had discovered, only human; they made mistakes in their grammar—egregious mistakes in some cases even if in others only minor solecisms. She corrected most of these, trying not to seem too pedantic in the process. She allowed the collective plural: If you wish to reform a person, you should tell them—Isabel allowed the them because there were those who objected strongly to gendered pronouns. So you could not tell him in such circumstances, but would have to tell him or her, which became ungainly and awkward, and sounded like the punctilious language of the legal draughtsman. She also allowed infinitives to be split, which they were with great regularity, because that rule was now almost universally ignored and its authority, anyway, was questionable. Who established that precept, anyway? Why not split an infinitive if one wanted to? The sense was as easily understood whether or not the infinitive was sundered apart or left inviolate.

But it was not just the editing of papers that took up her time. An important part of each issue was the review section, where four or five recent books in the field of ethics were reviewed at some length, and a few others, less favoured, were given brief notices. Then there was a short column headed Books Received, which listed other books that had been sent by publishers and were not going to be given a review. It was an ignominious fate for a book, but it was better than nothing. At least the journal acknowledged the fact that the book had been published, which was perhaps as much as some authors could hope for. Some books, even less favoured, got not even that; they fell