The Charming Quirks of Others

because nobody heard what you said—but simply that you had thought it. It was a wrong done to truth and the cause of truth. And it was dirtying; one felt grubby after thinking unkind, uncharitable, or even lascivious thoughts—why? Because for a few moments one imagined that the thought was deed.

She watched his reaction. At first he looked blank, and then he shook his head. “Surely not.”

“I know, I know. I shouldn’t think that of him, but that’s what I feel. I know I haven’t a shred of evidence, other than that his cousin, who may well be over-imaginative—”

Jamie interrupted her. “Over-imaginative? She believes in ghosts and … and spirits and all the rest. Of course she’s over-imaginative.”

“Even so, she thinks that he wants to talk to somebody—through a medium. And if that’s true, then it’s possible that he’s killed somebody and wants forgiveness.”

Jamie was silent as he thought about this. “Do you really think,” he said, “that murderers want to talk to their victims? Surely it’s exactly the opposite: they have no desire to hear from them again.”

Isabel weighed this for a moment. It was probably true that most murderers had no desire to hear from their victims, but there were two objections to Jamie’s statement. One was that people could be killed by accident as much as intentionally: so not all of those who took another’s life were murderers. And secondly, not everybody who even intentionally caused the death of another would be without all conscience; people had their regrets, and lots of them.

She was on the point of telling Jamie this when he leaned across the table and said to her, very slowly and clearly, “Isabel, listen to me. This is Edinburgh. Edinburgh. We haven’t got any murderers here. We just haven’t. At the most, people have little failings. That small.” He held up a hand, with barely a chink of light between his thumb and forefinger. “Mere quirks. So think of something else. Please.”

She laughed. She knew that he did not mean this: Edinburgh was the same as anywhere else, and had the same range of people as other places did: the good, the bad, the morally indifferent. They had their quirks, of course; Jamie was right about that. But even their quirks were charming—at least in the eyes of a lover, who would forgive her city anything.

THEY DECIDED TO WALK BACK from the Cafe St. Honore because the night was a fine one and even at ten there was still light in the sky. Being as far north as Moscow, and only three degrees south of St. Petersburg, Edinburgh had summer nights almost as white as those of Russia. Soon the dying day would slip into half-darkness and that curious Scottish half-light, the gloaming, would mantle the city; for now, though, every architectural detail, every branch moving gently in the breeze from the west, was clearly visible.

They walked up through Charlotte Square, past the well-appointed offices of the financiers. “Money,” said Isabel, “likes to clothe itself in respectability, doesn’t it? And yet why should we kowtow to financiers? All that these people do is lend money to people who actually do things.” She gestured towards the well-set facades of the classical square before continuing. “But they—these people in these offices—end up having far greater status than those who actually do things with that money. Odd, isn’t it?”

Jamie agreed. He had no interest in money. “We should be more like the Germans,” he said. “They show more respect for engineers than they do for accountants.”

Isabel said that she was not sure that respect should be based on a person’s job alone. A good and conscientious emptier of rubbish bins, she suggested, was better in moral terms, surely, than a self-serving accountant. Yet a job might say something about a person’s character: a nurse was likely to be more sympathetic than a futures trader, although not inevitably so.

What she had said clearly interested Jamie, who now made a remark about musicians and their position in society. “And nobody really respects musicians all that much,” he said. “We’re very far down the pecking order.”

They were now within sight of the Caledonian Hotel, that great red-stone edifice at the end of Princes Street, a battleship made of gingerbread, Isabel thought. She remembered seeing a crowd outside the hotel one day when some rock star had been staying there and word had got out to the fans. Were musicians all that low in the pecking order? Did people wait outside hotels for accountants, or engineers, or architects?

“Are you sure?”

He half turned to her. There was a piper outside the Caledonian, welcoming somebody or sending them off; or possibly just standing there, playing the pipes. Isabel recognised the tune, “Mist-covered Mountains,” a tune that she always found evocative—of what? Of Morven, she thought, or Ardnamurchan, those wild, mountainous parts of western Scotland on the edge of the Atlantic, the last land before the Hebrides, and beyond them the cloud banks, the green cliffs of Newfoundland.

She remembered how she had once been in the Old Town of Edinburgh, near the Canongate, when she had heard from somewhere in the vicinity, echoing through the small wynds and closes, the muffled thumping of a great drum. And she had turned the corner to find herself face-to-face with a pipe band, the pipers draped in dark-green tartan, on the point of striking up “Mist-covered Mountains.” And she had stood on the pavement, close to the wall to allow the band to get by, and watched them as they slow-marched past her. She had noticed the white spats that each kilted piper wore; she had seen the faces of the young men in the ranks of the band, clean-shaven, smartly turned out, like boy-soldiers. Which is what they were, she learned from a woman standing beside her on the pavement. “Just laddies,” said the woman, shaking her head as she spoke. “Just laddies. And now they’re away to the ermy.” She pronounced army in the Scots way, as mothers had done for generations, watching their sons going away.

A couple emerged from the hotel, followed by a gaggle of guests. The couple got into a car, and a young man from the group of friends sat on the bonnet of the car, preventing it from driving away. “Newlyweds,” said Isabel. “That explains the piper.”

The piper had struck up a different tune, a quicker one; a woman reached out to drag the young man off the car. There were cries of mirth and then applause as the car began to move off towards Rutland Square.

They walked on. Jamie reached for her hand. “Like us,” he said. “Soon.”

“Yes.” She paused. “Are you sure that you want to go ahead … so quickly?”

He did not hesitate. “Of course I’m sure.” He looked at her. His expression was anxious. “Why do you ask? Are you having doubts?”

She said that she was not. “It’s just that I’ve become more or less accustomed to how things are at the moment. I haven’t really thought about the next stage.”