The Charming Quirks of Others

Susie pointed to Isabel’s cup. “More?”

Isabel shook her head. She looked out of the window. Halfway across the lawn a large cedar tree bore its spreading branches with dignity. The morning light on the foliage revealed green beyond green. She had heard from her friends exactly what she imagined she would hear, and what they said was, of course, completely right. We need others to say what we really think. We need them to do that, she thought, because we often cannot utter the words that in their blindingly obvious nature do just that: blind us.

PETER OFFERED TO DRIVE HER back to the house, but she said no, she wanted to walk. She chose her route back along Church Hill, past the furniture shop and the shop where the photographer used to have his premises. J. Wilson Groat, the business used to be called; and she remembered having her first passport photograph taken there, by Mr. J. Wilson Groat himself, who had peered from behind a cumbersome-looking camera and enquired after the teachers at her school, whom he had photographed, he explained, over the years, going back … oh, a long time, of course, when Edinburgh had so many photographers to make a record of the life of the city. J. Wilson Groat was such a marvellous name, Isabel thought, not unlike the name of the fish merchant who used to call at her parents’ house in his van with a picture of fish on the side and his name in large letters: J. Croan Bee. The slogan beneath the name had been simple and memorable: From the sea to your tea, with J. Croan Bee.

She thought about this as she crossed the road and made her way up Albert Terrace, on the brow of the hill that fell away sharply to the south, down into deep Morningside, with the Pentlands beyond, veiled now in a drifting mist that had not yet quite reached Edinburgh itself. It was a terrace of well-set Victorian houses, on the roof of which, at either end, a large stone heron was perched. She and Jamie used to walk that way when they took Charlie to the supermarket, and she used to point out the herons to Charlie, who looked up but saw only clouds, she suspected … She stopped. She felt too raw to think about that. Used to; what if that became the tenor of all her memories of Jamie, as it must do to all who have been deserted by somebody? Used to. I used to be happy, she thought. I used to have a lover who was mine and mine alone. I used to think that … Unbidden, the line of Auden returned to her. It was from “Funeral Blues,” that poem of his that had become so well known after being declaimed in a popular film: I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

CHAPTER TEN

GRACE MET HER at the front door. “He’s fast asleep,” she said, nodding in the direction of upstairs. “Exhausted. Out for the count.” She rolled her eyes heavenwards. “I wish I could sleep like that. The benefits of a clear conscience, perhaps.”

“Or no conscience,” said Isabel.

Grace, who had started to go back into the kitchen, stopped sharply and turned round to face Isabel. “Why do you say that?”

Isabel did not feel like engaging in a discussion; she felt weary and defeated. But she had to explain herself, and so she told Grace that in her view Charlie did not yet understand right and wrong, and that she very much doubted whether he would be plagued by conscience, were he to do something wrong. “Or not just yet,” she added. “A child that small doesn’t really understand the feelings of others. Charlie can’t see the world from our point of view.”

Grace listened with what seemed to be growing impatience as Isabel trailed off with a half-hearted reference to the Swiss psychologist Piaget and his theories of moral development in children.

“Charlie understands more than you think,” she said grimly.

Isabel shrugged. “It’s not really about understanding things. It’s about empathy.”

Grace was not to be put off. “I’ll give you an example,” she said. “When I took him to see the ducks at Blackford Pond once, there was a horrible little boy there. He was five or so; bigger than Charlie. A horrible, vulgar little boy. And he picked up a rock and threw it at one of the ducks. Do you know what Charlie did?”

Isabel noted the use of the word vulgar. Grace could get away with saying such things; she could not. She shook her head. “What did he do?”

“He screamed with rage and then …” Grace paused. “And then he shouted Mine, mine!”

“Well …,” Isabel began.

“So he was cross because that other boy had done something to his duck. Charlie knew it was wrong, you see, and he protested.”

Isabel was lost in thought. She thought of Jamie, and then she dragged herself back to where she was: standing in the hall discussing ducks and conscience with Grace.

“I’m not sure if he knew that it was wrong,” she said. “Charlie shouts Mine! when other children touch his toys. I think he was cross because the other child was doing what he would have liked to do, had it occurred to him.” She looked at Grace half apologetically, aware of how disloyal it must sound to be attributing to her own son so base a motive. “I’m afraid that Charlie would love to throw a stone at a duck.”

There was an audible intake of breath from Grace. “No. You’re wrong.”

Isabel shrugged. “I don’t think we need to get ourselves all het up over it. All I’m saying is that very small children don’t really know what’s right or wrong. He’ll learn, but not just yet.”

Grace moved off towards the kitchen. “And by the way, ducks do eat fish. I looked it up on the Internet. It said that the diet of ducks includes weed and fish.”

JAMIE RETURNED to the house shortly after one, carrying his bassoon case. Isabel was in her study when she heard the front door open, and the sound made her heart lurch. She rose to her feet, and then sat down again. She had tried to work since she had returned from her visit to Peter and Susie, but she realised that she had done very little other than read through a few pages of the proofs of the new issue of the Review. She kept losing her place as her mind wandered, and had read and re-read the same bit of text several times. It was not an interesting article, she decided, and she wondered why she had accepted it for publication. “Citizenship and the Duty to Vote”: Should criminal law be used to ensure that everybody who could vote did in fact do so? It was a potentially interesting subject, but the author, she felt, rendered it ineffably dull: Rights, as the classic Hohfeldian analysis of jurisprudence reminds us, exist in a close relationship with corresponding duties, one of which is to do that which gives the right its basis … She had checked up the spelling of Hohfeld; did it have a second h? And did the author need quite so large a footnote—twelve lines—to explain who Hohfeld was when his relevance to the main thrust of the paper was so tangential? And what exactly was the main thrust of the paper, anyway? That you should vote and could be obliged to do so? But was that not intolerant of those who might not like the choice available at a particular election? Should the ballot paper provide None of the Above as an option for the reluctant voter?