The Charming Quirks of Others

reading a letter. We knew that it was simply a young girl reading a letter—but it was more than that, far more.

Jamie sat down, and they ate in a silence that was punctuated only with desultory exchanges. Halfway through the meal, she reached out and touched him on the arm. He paused, and looked at her, and briefly closed his eyes. She touched him again, lightly, and they resumed their meal.

He spoke with lowered eyes. “I’m sorry, I’m just not myself.”

“I understand.” She did. She imagined, too, how he felt; there would be the rawness that came with the hearing of bad news, the feeling of hopelessness that comes from the knowledge that we all must die, and some sooner than others. The only time this did not hurt was when we still had about us the immortality of youth, and Jamie would be far beyond that now.

She told him at the end of the meal that he should not bother to help with the clearing of the table and the stacking of the dishes.

He offered. “No, I will.”

“No. Go and play the piano. Leave the door open. I’ll listen.”

He did not insist, and left the room. She heard him open the door of the living room and a few moments later there came the sound of the first notes. Schubert.

Jamie played for half an hour or so. Isabel finished in the kitchen and went into her study, where she picked up an article she had been reading earlier and had abandoned. It was tough going, and she knew that she could not accept it for the Review. Yet there was something dogged about the author’s argument, and in spite of herself she found herself reading it to the end. There the author concluded: “Ultimately we act for the good because we see it to be there—like the sun. We cannot judge the sun, and there is no point in trying to do that. The sun is there. We are here. We cannot either explain or deny these facts.”

She set the paper aside. She was not convinced. The suggestion that we acted for the good because it was there was no answer, except, perhaps, in an intuitive system of ethics. How did we know that what we thought of as the good was, in fact, good? That was the job of the moral philosopher, and it did not help merely to say that the good was there, like the sun. She felt her irritation growing, but then, quite suddenly, she thought: Unless … unless the good was indeed something like the sun, something that we felt, just as we feel the sun upon our skin. Goodness would be a glow, a source of energy, a radiating force that we might never understand but which was still there. Gravity was there, and we felt it, but did anybody, other than theoretical physicists, actually understand it? What if goodness were the same sort of force: something that was there, could not be seen or tasted, but was still capable of drawing us into its orbit?

She felt almost dizzy at the thought. Perhaps there was a force of moral goodness, every bit as powerful, in its way, as any of the physical forces that kept electrons in circulation about the nucleus of an atom. Perhaps we understood that, even if we acted against it, even if we denied it. And that force could be called anything, God being one name that people gave to it. And we knew that it was there because we felt its presence, as the religious believer may be convinced in his very bones of the presence of God, even if we could not describe the nature of it.

Or was it just a brain state—something within us rather than outside us, a trick of biochemistry? The feeling of recognition experienced on encountering this force of goodness might merely be an entirely subjective state brought about because some region of our brain was stimulated by something we saw—or even thought we saw. The perception of goodness as a force, then, might be nothing more significant than the warm feelings brought about by alcohol, or by a mood-enhancing drug. Those insights, it was generally agreed, were unimportant and solipsistic—a chemical illusion that signified nothing.

The moment passed. She thought she had come to some understanding of goodness, but it had been illusory, a quicksilver flash of vision, nothing more. Perhaps that is how goodness—or God—visited us: so quickly and without warning that we might easily miss it, but perceptible none the less, and transforming beyond the transformative power of anything else we have known.

THE FOLLOWING MORNING, while Isabel was in her study, Jillian Mackinlay walked up the front path of her house, an envelope in her hand. Grace, who was entertaining Charlie in the garden, intercepted her as she approached the front door. “Yes?” she said. “Good morning.”

Jillian gave a start. “Oh, sorry, you gave me a bit of a fright. I hadn’t expected to find anybody lurking …”

Grace’s nostrils flared. “I was not lurking. Charlie and I …”

The visitor blushed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. I was just a bit surprised.” She paused to smile at Charlie, who was looking up at her with unblinking eyes. “This is Isabel Dalhousie’s house, isn’t it?”

Grace reached for the large envelope that Jillian was clearly in the act of delivering. “It is. I’m the housekeeper.”

“I see. Then could you give this to Isabel?”

“That’s what I was proposing to do.”

There was a short silence. Jillian looked down again at Charlie. “Well, you are a very serious little fellow, aren’t you?”

Charlie returned her stare, and then, without warning, began to cry.

Jillian seemed confused. “Oh dear, I seem to have upset him.”

Grace, holding the envelope in her left hand, scooped Charlie up with her right. “He’ll recover,” she said. “I’ll take the letter in now.”

Isabel was at her desk when Grace delivered the letter. “This came by hand?”

Grace nodded. “Why do people deliver by hand?” she asked. “To have a look round, if you ask me.”

Isabel chuckled. “That’s understandable enough. Most of us are interested in other people’s houses.”

From her expression, Grace made it clear that she was not. She gestured to Charlie, who had found the wastepaper basket and was busy emptying it of its contents. “She frightened Charlie. He started to cry.”

“Children sometimes take against people,” said Isabel vaguely, slitting the flap of the envelope with the paper- knife that Jamie had found in an antiques shop in Stockbridge. Peering inside, she paged through the top of the papers without taking them out. It was what she had expected. She looked up; Grace’s eyes were on the envelope.