The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday

Stella heard none of this, or, if she heard it, dismissed it.

“What do you want me to do?” she had asked, when Stella looked at her watch. And she knew, even as she uttered the words, that they were the wrong ones. She should bow out of this now; she had done what she could to throw some light on the situation, and the light had turned to murk, complicated by the unlikely suggestion that Marcus’s disgrace had all been engineered by an embittered nephew.

Stella did not wait to answer. “Well, obviously I want you to…I’d like you, rather, to sort this out. If you wouldn’t mind…I know I’m imposing on you.”

And she started to cry, the sobs coming up from somewhere within her, racking her frame. She struggled to control herself. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry…”

Isabel leaned forward and put an arm around Stella’s shoulder. At a neighbouring table a young man looked at them, and then looked away tactfully.

“You don’t need to say you’re sorry for being human,” whispered Isabel. ”Nobody needs to say sorry for that.”

“It’s just that I’ve got nobody to help me,” said Stella. “And so I latch on to you. And you were so kind to me. Said yes. I couldn’t believe it…that somebody would help me out of the goodness of her heart.”

Now there was no possibility that Isabel could refuse. And as Stella calmed down, Isabel reassured her that she would not abandon the case. She heard herself say that—the case—and thought: Who do you think you are? You’re beginning to talk like some ridiculous sleuth, when you’re just Isabel Dalhousie, intermeddler. That was the right word, although it was heavy with self-criticism. She imagined the dictionary definition—intermeddler: one who meddles in affairs that are no business of hers; as in: “Isabel Dalhousie was a real intermeddler” or “Isabel Dalhousie, an echt intermeddler” (for echt, see the Real McCoy).

She stopped that line of thought, which could quickly lead to an inappropriate, badly timed smile. We do not smile when people weep / But weep we may / When people smile. The lines came from nowhere, as such lines did to her; unbidden, but redolent of something elusive, only half understood— sometimes—and oddly memorable, as had been those lines about the tattooed man that she had whispered to Jamie before they feel asleep together in each other’s arms; the tattooed man who had loved his wife and was proud of his son, the tattooed baby. They were ridiculous, and frequently trite, but these little stories, these little snatches of poetry, provided their modicum of comfort, their islands of meaning that we all needed to keep the nothingness at bay; or at least Isabel felt that she needed them.

“I’ll do what I can.”

She meant to sound businesslike, and she did. But she also sounded cold, she thought; which was misleading, because she did not begrudge the other woman her help. Have the courage of your convictions, she thought. So what if you’re an intermeddler? Intermeddle, and don’t feel bad about it. And there was a possibility, just a possibility, that Stella was right. Isabel had not liked Norrie Brown, although she had been unable to decide why this should be so. Now the doubts began to implant themselves in her mind. She did not like Norrie Brown because he was a liar. Isabel had always been able to sense lies; it was a sixth sense—a sixth sense that nosed out mendacity, and it had warned her about Norrie Brown. She had not been listening at the time, and had not picked up the warning. But now it seemed to her that it was coming through clearly, a strong signal from the utterly inexplicable intuitive headquarters that women had and that men, she suspected, might just miss out on. But that was another issue; something for a special edition of the Review which would engage the feminist philosophers, the advocates of the philosophy of care. Yes, they would love it, as they relished any chance to put men in their place. Female Intuition as a Resource in Moral Philosophy would be a good title for the issue, and it would attract scores of submissions. But no, she would not do that, because she did not like some of the feminist philosophers; ideologues, she thought, and strident, too. And yet, and yet…There was Christopher Dove, for example, and his friend Professor Lettuce. Had it ever entered their heads that their perspective on the world was a specifically male one, and not the view from nowhere? They had both condescended to her in a way in which they would not condescend to a man; they needed to be taught a lesson. They needed feminism.

She turned to Stella and saw her, suddenly, in a new light. Here was a woman who felt powerless. The might of the male-dominated medical councils had been directed against her husband. A pack of journalists—probably all male, at least in the case of those who would have led the pack—had crucified him. And she could do nothing about it, but watch despair engulf him, and shed her tears, as she had just done, in full public view.

Isabel had already made her decision, but now it became even firmer. “Yes,” she said. “I’ll look into your theory about Norrie.”

Stella thanked her. “Except it’s not just a theory,” she said. “I think that it’s true. I really do. And I think that you’ll find the same thing.”

EDWARD MENDELSON’S LECTURE was not until four, which was a good two hours away. As she said good-bye to Stella outside Glass and Thompson, Isabel wondered what to do with those two hours. If she walked home, she would have half an hour, at the most, to spend with Charlie before she had to leave again for the lecture. If she took a bus, it would not be much different; the traffic seemed heavy, and there were road works in Hanover Street that were holding everything up. The answer, then, was to stay in town for the next hour and then make her way up to George Square, where the lecture was being held.

It was only a short distance down Dundas Street to the Scottish Gallery, and Isabel sauntered in that direction, glancing on the way into the windows of the neighbouring galleries. One of them, which specialised in sporting scenes and landscapes, displayed a large china hare, caught in mid-leap, astonishingly realistic. And just behind him, beneath a large display easel, lurked a porcelain fox, almost life-size, his coat sleek with glaze, his eyes looking out onto the street, bright and wary with the cunning of his species. Brother Fox. She stopped and looked at him; he was so naturally rendered that were he to be placed in her garden, half hidden, perhaps, by a shrub, he would be indistinguishable from Brother Fox himself. But Brother Fox would not be fooled because he simply would not see him; without a smell, he would not see him—the smell gave everything away. She smiled: it was the same with liars.

The Scottish Gallery was mounting an exhibition of paintings by exiled Polish artists who had made their home in Scotland. There were not many, but they had painted enough to cover the walls, and were being examined by a group of five or six visitors. Isabel heard a snatch of Polish, or what she assumed was Polish, and she saw one of the group, a young woman in jeans, turn to a man and point at the label below one of the paintings. He leaned forward and exclaimed enthusiastically, and called to the others who had moved on to another painting.

A voice behind her whispered, “They keep finding something. Scraps of their history. It’s a very emotional exhibition for Poles.”

She turned to find Robin McClure, one the gallery’s directors, standing behind her. “I suppose there’s such a big