The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday

Stella looked relieved.

Isabel stopped herself short. Don’t make light of human pain, she told herself. It’s not funny.

CHAPTER FIVE

THAT EVENING, on impulse, Isabel said to Jamie, “Look, it’s five o’clock, or just about. If we bathed Charlie now and gave him his—”

“Tea,” supplied Jamie, pointedly, but smiling as he said it. He wanted to use the popular Scottish word for what Isabel would have called dinner, or possibly supper.

“If you like,” said Isabel. “I was going to say dinner, as you well know. But then, if you’re going to be all down and demotic, dinner means lunch in such circles, doesn’t it?”

“Feed,” suggested Jamie. “How about that as a compromise?”

Isabel did not think so. “Give him his feed? It sounds like agriculture to me. You give feed to cattle, don’t you. Anyway, after he’s had his…”

“Grub.”

“All right, after he’s had his grub, why don’t we…” She paused. “Grub first, then ethics. You know who said that?” It was an accurate description, perhaps, of the daily routine of the editor of the Review of Applied Ethics, which did indeed begin with breakfast and proceed to ethics.

Jamie did not hesitate. “Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral. Brecht.”

Isabel bowed her head in mock homage. “I’m impressed.”

“My German teacher at school went on about that,” said Jamie. “He said that Fressen was appropriate for animals rather than people. Brecht was showing his low opinion of humanity by choosing to say Fressen rather than Essen. That’s why grub is a better translation than food. Grub is messy, animal stuff. He was very clever.”

“He was a hypocrite,” said Isabel. “He lived very comfortably in the GDR. No belching Trabbi for him. And he supported those horrific people who ran the place.”

Jamie shrugged. “He believed in communism, didn’t he?”

“Yes,” said Isabel. “But he enjoyed what other writers in the GDR were denied. Freedom.” It was tawdry, that shabby republic, with its legions of informers and its unremitting greyness, its rotten, crumbling concrete. And then it had all gone so quickly, as in a puff of smoke; the whole Soviet empire, with its deadening tentacles of fear, collapsed and discredited, vanished like a confidence trickster who has been exposed. And yet there had been so many who had connived in it, had derided its opponents; what had they to say now? Her thoughts turned to Professor Lettuce, who had been a founder of something called the East-West Philosophical Engagement Committee. He had gone to East Berlin, as had Dove, and had publicly complained about reactionaries, as he described them, who had questioned the visit on the grounds that meetings would be restricted to those with posts in the universities, Party men every one of them. Dove…She thought of his paper on the Trolley Problem; she felt a vague unease about that, and she felt that there would be more to come.

But Brecht and the GDR, and even Dove and Lettuce, seemed far away. “Let’s leave Brecht out of it for a moment,” she said. “After Charlie has been fed, I thought we could go out to the Pentlands and just…just go for a walk. Up past the reservoir. Charlie could go in the sling. He’s getting a bit heavy for that, but you can carry him. He’ll probably just nod straight off. It’s such a lovely evening.” And I want to talk to you, she thought. I want to be with you.

THEY DROVE OUT onto the Biggar Road, leaving the last of the town behind them. Isabel was at the wheel of her green Swedish car and Jamie sat in the back, to keep Charlie company in his car seat. At Flotterstone, a few miles round the back of the Pentland Hills, they turned off the main road and parked in the small car park set aside for hikers. Then, Charlie safely installed in the sling affixed to Jamie, they set off up the winding road into the hills. Jamie gave Charlie a finger, and the child gripped it tightly. “Look,” said Jamie, nodding in the direction of the little fist around his index finger. “Look.”

Isabel smiled at the sight. She had watched the process of Jamie’s falling in love with Charlie, watched every step, from the first surprise and discovery to this emblematic moment, each act of tenderness by Jamie confirming the diagnosis of deepening love. Nothing had been said, and she thought that it was right that this should be so; the declaration of love could weaken its mystery, reduce it to the mundane. To say on the telephone, Love you, as she heard people doing, was dangerous, or so Isabel thought, because it made the extraordinary ordinary, and possibly meaningless. Good day meant nothing now because it had become an empty formula; love you could go the same way. It was significant that it had already been shortened, and the I had been dropped. What did that mean? That people were too busy to say I love you, or too embarrassed by the subjectivity of the full expression?

They began their walk, following the narrow road that worked its way up between the fold of the hills. The road, which was not used by ordinary traffic, was bordered on either side by an undulating stone dyke. To their left, all the way down to the bed of a small river, the throaty gurgling of whose waters could just be heard, was a slope on which Scots pines grew, their branches host to crows, which cawed and flew away. On the other side of the road, beyond the lichen-covered stones of the dyke, fields swept up the hillside; fields interrupted here and there by clumps of gorse, in flower at this time of year, the dark green foliage spiked with small clusters of yellow. Blackface sheep, hardy enough for the Scottish hills, dotted the fields, paused in their grazing and stared vacantly at Isabel and Jamie as they walked past, then dropped their heads again, unconcerned, and moved away.

“Charlie’s asleep,” whispered Jamie. “Off like a top.”

She peeked at him. “It must be the most wonderful feeling, being carried like this. Warm and secure. Why would one want to grow up?”

Jamie laughed. “Why indeed?”

They walked on. They were now drawing level with the reservoir, which covered the flooded floor of the glen.