The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday

being exposed as a plagiarist. Then she had imagined herself writing a critical review of one of his books and demolishing it, chapter by chapter, elegantly, like a matador with a pen. Surely we should not worry too much about our uncharitable thoughts, as long as we did not act on them. And yet that was not the understanding that people had had in the past: Did not the Book of Common Prayer say, “I have sinned in thought, word and deed”? Or had we released ourselves from the tyranny of worrying about the things that the mind came up with? Isabel felt uncertain; the niggling doubt remained that perhaps there was something in purity of mind after all.

Edward Mendelson had an early plane to catch, back to London and then to New York, and so he did not stay for coffee after dinner. Isabel said good-bye to him at the front door, while Jamie remained in the kitchen to clean up. Edward said to her, “I’m so pleased to see you happy. I can tell that, you know—you’re very happy.”

Isabel smiled. “There’s every reason for me to be happy,” she said. “I have a job I love, a nice man, a son. This house.” She paused. “Not that one should enumerate one’s good fortune in this life. Nemesis listens for that sort of thing, I fear.”

“She has far greater fish to fry,” said Edward. “Terrible politicians. Dictators. Actors who have grown too big for their boots. Your claims are pretty modest by comparison. Hardly a trace of hubris, I would have thought.”

He walked down the path. It was barely dark, as it was midsummer now, and even at ten in the evening the sky was suffused with an attenuated glow. The air was warm, almost balmy, and the leaves of the trees and shrubs, the rhododendrons, the azaleas, were heavy and static, as if weighed down by the air. I am very fortunate, thought Isabel, as she made her way back to the kitchen, where Jamie, who had stacked the dishes in the dishwasher, was standing in the middle of the room, stretching his arms up above him in an exaggerated yawn. The act made his shirt come up over his midriff, which was flat and muscled. To me the entirely beautiful, thought Isabel. He watched her, and let his arms fall. He has guessed what was in my mind, she thought.

“I just saw Brother Fox outside the window,” he said. “Trotting along the top of the neighbours’ garden wall, bold as brass.”

“Did he see you?”

“No. I don’t think so. He had places to go.”

“ ‘For he had many a mile to go that night,’ ” said Isabel, looking out the window. “ ‘Before he reached the town-o.’ ”

“I must learn the words of that song,” said Jamie. “We can sing it to Charlie.”

She waited for him to say something more, about a fox, or a painting of a fox, but he did not. He went over to her, though, and put his arms around her, and she closed her eyes and felt him against her, this young man whom she could not quite believe she possessed, whose every act, whose every word, no matter how banal, no matter how inconsequential, was precious to her. That was love, she supposed, elevating the ordinary into something beyond itself, and carrying one along with the entire absurd enterprise.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

EDDIE HAD PREDICTED that Saturday would be busy, and it was. Isabel liked Saturdays, but not quite so much, she thought, if she had to work. And yet even a working Saturday seemed subtly different from a weekday; the people who came into the delicatessen drifted in, rather than entered with purpose, and although she and Eddie were busy, there was a last-day-of-term feel about their work. At five o’clock they would shut the door for the weekend—or what remained of it—and that knowledge made the work easier.

Eddie had not said much to Isabel, but had seemed to be in a good mood and had apparently forgotten their discussion of the five hundred pounds. Isabel had not—obviously not, and was still thinking of the lie he had told her: that ridiculous story of his father’s hip operation and wanting the money for that. On subsequent reflection, she had worked out where the money had gone, and it made her angry just to think about it. Eddie had a new girlfriend, who had come round to see him in the delicatessen on more than one occasion, including one afternoon that week. He had seemed embarrassed by her visit, and had shooed her out after a few minutes, but Isabel could tell that he was proud of her; perhaps proud of the mere fact that he had a girlfriend at all.

But Isabel had thought: drugs, and the more she pondered it, the more she thought, drugs. The girl was thin, dressed entirely in black, and had a prominent piercing on her lower lip. All of that could be a matter of fashion, of course—the Goth style—but there had been her expression, which Isabel found unsettling. It was that anxiety, that itchiness, that goes with the chemical personality. And she sniffed too.

So Eddie had given the five hundred pounds into the hands of this young woman. My five hundred pounds, thought Isabel. She looked at Eddie, who was cutting cheese for a customer. There was no evidence that he was on anything, except cheese, perhaps; she had noticed how he always scooped up the fragments from the cutting board and popped them into his mouth. He was on cheese and the girl was on something stronger.

Isabel decided that she would tackle him about the money and ask for it back. But then she decided she would not. She simply did not have the heart—or was it the stomach?—to engage with Eddie over this. If he had given the money to the girl, then he would never be able to get it back; and if he could not get it back, then any demand from her would put him under considerable pressure, and he was too insecure for that. Besides, she had given him the money, she had not lent it to him; she had given it, and one could not ask for gifts to be returned unless there had been a very explicit condition attached to the donation. And she had not said anything about that, as far as she recalled: she had pressed the money on him; she had urged him to take it.

While Isabel spent her Saturday working in the delicatessen, Jamie looked after Charlie. It was another warm day in a run of fine days, and he took Charlie for a long walk in his back sling round the Braid Hills, on the southern edge of the city. Up there, at the top of Buckstone Snab, the air was cooler, with a breeze blowing down from Stirlingshire and the hills of Perthshire beyond. Charlie started to shiver, and his small, snub nose looked red. They returned, back to Isabel’s green Swedish car—which Jamie now drove too—parked in the car park of the golf club below.

When they got back to the house, Jamie noticed a car parked slightly farther up the street, in which a man was sitting. While he was getting Charlie out of the car, the door of the other vehicle opened and the man got out and approached Jamie in the drive. He was a tall man, somewhere in his early forties, dressed in the style that Isabel described as casual-smart-verging-on-the-formal, which meant a tie and a jacket, but not a suit, though almost, since the trousers and the jacket were close together in shade. He spoke in the accent of Aberdeen, which Jamie associated with a certain caution and canniness. Aberdeen people had the reputation of not wasting their words,