had already been put to rest?
Stella listened, but started to shake her head vigorously before Isabel had finished speaking. “But you don’t know the background. You don’t see how it all fits together.”
“I’m sorry,” said Isabel. “You’ve lost me.”
Stella took a deep breath. “Norrie Brown’s mother, Diana Moncrieff, was a very difficult woman. She and Marcus had a great-aunt, Maggie, up in Inverness, an extremely wealthy woman who had a large farm on the Black Isle, a lovely place. Marcus and his sister used to go up there during school holidays every year. Maggie was childless and there was an understanding—which everybody spoke about quite openly—that she would leave the farm to Marcus and Diana jointly, on the understanding that it would not be split up but would be a sort of family base for both of them. That was very clearly understood, and Maggie herself talked about it. But when the old girl died, they found that she had not done this at all, but had left it to Marcus. It transpired that she had taken against Diana’s husband for some reason or other. I have my theories. He was an Irishman, and they differed about Ulster. Maggie had some uncle on her mother’s side who had been a relative of Carson’s and was an ardent loyalist. She thought of Ulstermen as stranded Scots. These things last generations in Ireland.”
Isabel listened. There were issues like this in virtually every family, even if the stakes were rarely quite so high. It could be something quite small: a photograph, a keepsake, a small amount of money.
“Diana was devastated,” Stella continued. “She confronted Marcus at the funeral, at the wake afterwards, one of those Highland affairs with lots of whisky and formal black suits. She told him that she expected him to keep to the understanding and share the farm with her. Marcus said no. He’s not a greedy man, but it was the way she laid into him that made him dig in. He thought that had she asked politely, then he would probably have agreed. But he was not going to be dictated to like that. And after that, they never spoke again, directly, that is.
“Then Diana died. She was killed in a car crash driving down from Inverness, just near Dalwhinnie. It’s a lethal road that—it always has been. Marcus felt very bad about the row between him and Diana, and he tried to make it up to Norrie. When Norrie decided to do medicine, Marcus did what he could for him, including taking him under his wing. But I always suspected that Norrie resented him. I was convinced that Diana had poisoned him against Marcus; had spun him nonsense about being cheated out of the farm, and so on. I always thought that was there. Feelings of resentment like that never really go away, do they? They linger on.”
Yes, thought Isabel; and she reflected on her own family, where Cat had entertained feelings of intense jealousy over Jamie, forgiven her, patched up, and then relapsed. Those feelings were always there, she thought, in spite of our best efforts to dispel them.
“You’re smiling?”
She could not help herself; it is a concomitant of my allowing my thoughts to wander excessively, she thought. Then I smile or even say something. “I’m sorry. It’s nothing to do with what you’ve told me. It was just an odd thought—about something else. About a racehorse…”
Stella stared at her intently. “A racehorse?”
“Nothing,” said Isabel. “It really has nothing to do with what we were talking about. Sometimes my mind wanders off. I’m sorry; you now have my full attention.”
Stella was silent, staring out of the window, out past Isabel, who was seated with her back to the street. Then, quite suddenly, her gaze shifted back to Isabel. “Yes,” she said. “Yes. That must be it. Norrie.”
Isabel looked at her expectantly.
“Norrie,” Stella went on, her tone becoming more forceful. “What a perfect way of getting back at us. Perfect.”
Isabel understood. However, she could not help but sound incredulous; real life simply did not involve plots like that; real life was disappointingly mundane. “Revenge? Do you really think so? Do you think that he…any doctor would do that sort of thing? Risk people’s lives?”
“Doctors do odd things,” snapped Stella. “They’re exactly the same as the rest of us.”
Isabel wrestled with the possibility. Stella was right about the frailty of doctors; they had extramarital affairs, cheated on their tax returns, involved themselves in dirty politics. And there were spectacularly wicked doctors— doctors like Mengele—to show that for some the Hippocratic oath meant nothing. Anything was possible—from anyone. “You’re suggesting that Norrie altered the data? You’re suggesting that he did this to ruin Marcus? To ruin his uncle over some long-running sense of being deprived of something that his mother thought should be his?”
Stella’s answer was simple. “Yes. Exactly.”
Isabel, looking away from Stella, gazed out of the window. A man was walking up Dundas Street; a man wearing a chocolate-brown corduroy jacket of the fusty, vaguely raffish sort once worn by art teachers. He stopped and patted the pockets of his jacket, as if feeling for something that he hoped he had brought with him, before glancing in through the cafe window. His eyes met Isabel’s, and he seemed to hesitate. There was recognition, but no recognition. We have met one another before, thought Isabel, and we both understand that. But we do not know who the other is, which speaks eloquently, she thought, of the way we live now, knowing more and more, but less and less.
CHAPTER TWELVE
ISABEL FELT RELIEVED when Stella looked at her watch and announced that she had to leave. She suspected that it had been a trying meeting for both of them. For her part, she had been landed with the awkward task of telling Stella that Marcus had done precisely what he had been accused of doing; not an easy message for the wife of any wrongdoer to absorb. And then she had been obliged to listen to Stella labouring the point over Norrie Brown’s grudge; the family feuds of others are never anything but discomforting for the rest of us. And Stella had been tenacious, worrying away at the ancient casus belli:
Isabel had diagreed:
