remember giving him his first olive—it would never have occurred to her to do so; had Jamie done that? And quail eggs? Would it be oysters next? It was Jamie, she decided; he tended to feed Charlie with whatever they were eating, and Charlie never refused anything from his father.
Jamie was happy with the suggestion. Isabel could make an early start in her study while he took Charlie down to the canal in the jogging pushchair, the one that allowed him to run while pushing. Then Charlie could have his mid-morning sleep and be bright and ready for the outing into town.
They breakfasted together. Jamie, who did not like to eat anything very much before a run, had a cup of milky coffee and a slice of toast spread with Marmite. Charlie had rather more: a small carton of strawberry yoghurt, mashed-up boiled egg on fingers of toast, and an olive, stoned, of course, and cut into four minute parts.
Grace arrived before they had left the table. She fussed over Charlie, who waved his arms enthusiastically, his unambiguous signal of pleasure.
“Pleased to see me?” cooed Grace, hanging her hemp shopping bag on the hook on the back of the kitchen door. “Of course you are, you wee champion! And what’s that they’re giving you to eat? An olive. Surely not? Bairns don’t like olives, no they don’t.”
Isabel glanced at Jamie, who smiled, and looked away; disagreements between Isabel and Grace were not his affair, and he tried to keep out of them. Privately he sided with Isabel and she knew that she had his support, but they were both aware that it did not help to declare it.
“Some bairns do,” said Isabel. “This one, for example.”
Grace ignored this. Still addressing Charlie, she continued, “It’ll be quail eggs next, my goodness! And caviar after that.”
“Small children like all sorts of things,” said Isabel. “They’re people, after all, and people have peculiar tastes and beliefs.” The reference to beliefs slipped in; she had not really intended it, but it rounded off the observation nicely, and was tossed in rather like a depth-charge, thought Jamie. He looked at Isabel with concern. There had been a discussion between the two women the previous week about feng shui, in which Grace had enthused about chi forces and Isabel had expressed the view that they simply did not exist. If they did, she said, then surely we could detect them with some sort of electronic apparatus. This reference to peculiar beliefs was about that, Jamie thought. The debates about olives and chi forces were minutely intertwined.
Grace had stood her ground during that discussion. “There are plenty of things nobody can see,” she said. “What about that particle thingy that they’re trying to find. That Higgs bison, or whatever.”
“Boson,” Jamie had interjected. “Higgs boson. It’s a sort of …”
“Boson,” said Isabel. “I saw Professor Higgs the other day, you know. He was walking along Heriot Row looking down at the pavement.”
“He won’t find his boson down there,” said Grace.
“He wouldn’t have been looking for it,” said Jamie. “It exists only in the mathematics he did. It’s a theory.”
The argument about unseen forces had continued for some minutes and remained unresolved; both sides were sure of their position and both were sure that they had won. This reference now to peculiar beliefs threatened to reopen the issue, which Jamie did not think was a good idea. Fortunately, Grace paid no attention to it and changed the subject. There was a load of washing to be put in the machine, and did Isabel want Charlie’s clothes dealt with now or later? And there was the question of the vacuum cleaner, which had stopped working the previous day; had Isabel phoned, as she had promised, about that?
“I shall,” said Isabel. “Today. Definitely. I’ll put it on my list.”
Grace had nodded, and gone off to begin her tasks.
“Quail eggs,” whispered Jamie. “She really disapproves.”
Isabel nodded. “Mind you, it
He smiled. He loved her. He loved Charlie. He even loved Grace, in a way. It was a perfect morning, the best sort of early summer morning, and all he felt was love.
CHAPTER TWO
FROM HER STUDY WINDOW, Isabel watched Jamie and Charlie disappearing down the street. She gave a wave, but Jamie was looking the other way and did not spot her. It always made her feel proud seeing the two of them together. She used to think that her major achievement in life had been the editing of the
But, more than that, she had given Charlie just the right father—she could be proud of that as well. Jamie was good with children, although in his modesty he made little of his talents in this direction. But Isabel had heard it from the parents of his pupils. One mother had said of her son, “He never practised his bassoon. Never. We spent all that money on the instrument—three thousand pounds, would you believe—and the little devil never practised. You know what they’re like at that age. Then Jamie took him on and everything was different. He inspired him—it’s as simple as that; he inspired him.”
Isabel had passed on the compliment, and Jamie had been diffident. “Oh well, we’re getting somewhere with him.”
He would be good with Charlie—she had known it right from the very first time he held him in the hospital. The nurse had passed him his new-born son wrapped in a towel, and she had seen the tears in his eyes, and she had known. For her part she had thought this briefly, and then, through the residual, euphoric haze of the painkiller they had administered, she had entertained one of her habitual odd thoughts, on this occasion about the towel around Charlie. In the past it would have been swaddling clothes; they wrapped infants in swaddling clothes, did they not? They swaddled them in strips of bandage-like cloth to stop them moving too much. She was grateful that Charlie would not be swaddled. He had not come into this world to discover that he was bound against movement, against freedom. Little Charlie would be free to move, to kick his legs, to live in liberty. She hoped.
