The Charming Quirks of Others

turned to face her. “This woman, Jillian what’s-her-name—what about her?”

“Jillian Mackinlay. I met her today at the delicatessen. She came to sit at my table.”

Jamie walked over towards Isabel and pulled out a chair. “Oh? Did you mind? I find it a bit irritating when I want to read something or just sit and think and somebody comes up.”

Isabel shook her head. “No, I didn’t mind.”

“And?” He hesitated, watching her closely. “She didn’t …” He sighed. “She asked you to do something? Is that it?”

Isabel did not reply for a moment. She knew exactly what Jamie would think—and say—about this. He had advised her to stop what he called meddling—but it was not meddling, she felt. Meddling was interfering unasked; she was always asked. And there was another difference: a meddler did not necessarily interfere for the good of somebody else—meddlers as often as not had their own interests in mind, or were driven by vulgar curiosity. And what, she wondered, was the difference between vulgar curiosity and acceptable curiosity? Was it just that our own curiosity was perfectly understandable, whereas the curiosity of others was vulgar? She smiled at the thought; that sort of distinction lay at the heart of many of our acts of discrimination. What I like is art; what you like is kitsch. My old car has character; yours is a wreck.

Jamie frowned. “What’s the joke?” He sounded peevish, and Isabel stopped smiling.

“I was thinking of something,” she said evenly.

“You haven’t answered my question.”

She raised her glass to her lips, looking at him over the rim. “Yes, she did ask me to help her. And before you say anything, I don’t see why I shouldn’t say yes to requests of that sort. I am, after all, a moral philosopher by trade, and if I feel an obligation to help, then it’s difficult to stand back. You do see that, don’t you?”

To her surprise, Jamie did not argue. He shrugged. “All right. Fine.”

She waited. He was looking away from her now, out of the window, and she knew at that moment, she knew with a conviction and certainty that took her by surprise, that there was something wrong. She knew, too, that she had to ask him now.

“There’s something wrong, isn’t there?”

It was as if he had not heard her question, as he continued to look away fixedly, saying nothing.

“Jamie?”

He turned round and she saw that there were tears in his eyes. She rose to her feet and came round the table to be beside him. She fumbled; she knocked over her glass, but it was empty now, and it simply described a half-arc on the table and then came to rest unharmed.

“Jamie, what’s wrong? My darling … What is it?”

He took her hand. “It’s been a horrible day,” he said.

“Why? Tell me about it. Go on.”

She felt the tension in his hand; even there.

He wiped ineffectively at his eyes. “You know that new group I’ve been playing with? The chamber group?”

She nodded. He had told her a little about it. “The one that meets down in Stockbridge? In St. Stephen Street?”

“Yes. Tom lives there. He runs it. We’ve got a concert in August, on the Fringe. We’ve been doing one or two other things too. A wedding reception. And there’s a possible engagement in Stirling …”

“Yes? Isn’t it going well?”

“No, it’s going fine. It’s just that there’s this girl in it, Prue. She’s a cellist.”

Isabel tensed. “Yes?”

“A couple of weeks ago she told me that she was ill. She said she had something that they could do nothing for. She said she had a few months left—that was all.”

Isabel continued to hold his hand, and put her other arm around his shoulder. “Oh, Jamie!”

“She has this condition, you see. I knew she wasn’t well because she had talked to me about going to see a doctor in Glasgow, a specialist of some sort. I had the impression that what she had was quite rare. Anyway, we were rehearsing today and she looked so ill—really pale and thin. I found it so … so upsetting. I walked with her down St. Stephen Street. She lives in Leslie Place, just over the bridge, and she asked me whether I would come back with her to her flat. She said that she needed to talk to somebody and there was nobody in the flat. So I went with her and she made me some tea and … and I just found it so difficult.”

Isabel did not say anything. There was nothing to be said. She felt that in the face of something like this, words of comfort could be platitudinous and even inflammatory. She had once lost a friend at school in a car accident and her father, in an awkward attempt to comfort her, had said something like At least she didn’t suffer. His words had been well meant, but they were inappropriate and had merely served to make her angry with him. The absence of suffering was not the point; the point was the untimely loss.

But she could say that she was sorry to hear this, and she did. Jamie acknowledged her with a squeeze of his hand. He said “Thanks” and then he rose to his feet; the casserole needed attending to, and it was getting late. She watched him as he served the potatoes that would go with the main dish. He put two on his plate and two on hers; then, like a server in a school kitchen determined to be scrupulously fair, he placed a further one and a half on her plate and the same number on his.

She watched him, and the thought came to her: The actions of the beautiful could be strangely fascinating, could assume an almost sacramental nature. Any one of us might do something simple, like tying a shoelace or combing our hair, or, as now, putting potatoes on a plate, and our acts would seem unexceptional. But when Jamie, or somebody like him, did such things, the act became something more than its mundane essentials. Artists sensed this, she thought, and captured the significance. Through Vermeer’s eyes we could look for hours at a young woman