The Charming Quirks of Others

pleasure. “Do you think I could meet the cousin?”

Grace continued to bounce Charlie. “Him?”

“No, her. Your friend. The woman who goes to …”

“The Psychic Centre?” It was the name of the organisation that ran Grace’s meetings.

“Yes. I’d like to meet her.”

Grace shrugged. “She’s not there every week. Most weeks, but not every week.”

Isabel assured her that this would be perfectly all right and asked when the next meeting would be.

“Tomorrow night,” said Grace. “There’s a man from Denmark coming to speak to us.”

“I’d be most interested in coming,” said Isabel. “A medium?”

“Another of these psychic locators,” said Grace. “He finds missing people. He goes into a trance and sees people. He is very effective.”

“That reminds me,” said Isabel. “Have you seen my Chambers Dictionary? I had it somewhere and I can’t …”

Grace responded quickly. “In the morning room. Beside that green chair.”

Isabel smiled. “You saw it?” she asked.

Grace looked at her suspiciously. “Don’t joke about these things, please. They are not for laughing at.”

“But I wasn’t joking,” said Isabel. “I simply asked you if you saw it. The trouble with English is that words mean so many different things.” And that was true, she thought. English was such a strange language, one in which even the words please and thank you could be used as stinging weapons in arguments.

Grace raised an eyebrow. “Oh yes,” she said, meaning, in fact, that she did not believe Isabel’s protestations of innocence.

Charlie began to niggle. He was bored with all this, and meant exactly what he said.

CHAPTER FIVE

SHE DID NOT TALK to Jamie about the cellist; every couple has areas into which they know it is best not to venture. Isabel sensed that Jamie did not want to discuss what he had told her the previous evening, and she did not broach the subject. He would talk to her again, she thought, but only when he felt ready to do so, when he had adjusted to the fact that his colleague would not recover.

She told him, though, of her intention to go with Grace to the lecture by the Danish parapsychologist. Would he care to accompany them? Cat had recently suggested she might babysit, and Isabel wanted to take her up on the offer. It would help to cement her niece’s relationship with Charlie, which was not as close as Isabel might have wished. She could not force Charlie on Cat, but she could make it possible for her to unbend a bit and forgive her tiny cousin for being her ex-boyfriend’s child.

Jamie looked doubtful. “I’m not interested in all those … those spirits,” he said. “Is it a good idea? If people survive death, why bother them? It’s like running after people you’ve said goodbye to and trying to start the conversation all over again.”

“I’m rather inclined to agree with you,” said Isabel. “But I think that Grace secretly appreciates our taking an interest in these meetings of hers.”

“Maybe,” said Jamie. “But I’m not sure I want to get mixed up in it. Mind you …”

“Yes?”

He began to smile. “You went once, didn’t you?”

“I did.”

He remembered her telling him about the meeting she had attended with Grace. Messages had been received, she said, for named people in the room, and received with enthusiasm. He wondered whether this would happen again; if it did, perhaps it would be interesting to see it, even if the messages did not really come from the other side, as he had heard Grace calling it.

“Maybe I’ll come.”

She encouraged him, and it was agreed. “But you must keep a straight face,” she warned. “It wouldn’t be right to go in the wrong spirit.”

It was an unfortunate choice of words, and they both smiled at it, wryly. Isabel felt disloyal to be doing or saying anything that could be considered to be making fun of Grace. There was a simple rule, she thought, holding that we should only say of people that which we are prepared to say to their face. But it was a rule that was almost impossible to follow—at least for those who fell short of sainthood. “I’m serious,” Isabel continued. “It would offend Grace if you burst out laughing.”

“I know,” said Jamie. “I’ll dig a fingernail into my palm. Or count backwards from one hundred—in French. That’s what I used to do when I was a choirboy. We all found it very difficult not to laugh. We found the Old Testament screamingly funny at that age. All that smiting.”

“And begetting,” said Isabel. “Boys must find talk of begetting very amusing.”

Jamie looked up, summoning lines from distant memory. “Goliath of Gath,” he lisped, “with his helmet of brath / One day he that down upon the green grath / When up thlipped young David, the thervant of Thaul / Who thaid, ‘I will thmite thee although I’m tho thmall.’”

Isabel imagined Jamie in his choirboy’s cassock, holding a candle perhaps, and struggling against laughter. But then her mind wandered and she thought of the folklorists Iona and Peter Opie and their combing the streets for the rhymes and sayings of childhood, those little scraps of nonsense, like Jamie’s verse about Goliath and Saul with its flattened vowels and its lisped sibilants. Would Charlie hear any of this in the playground? Would these things be passed on to him?