The Charming Quirks of Others

laughed: the very thought.

“You did hear,” said Isabel reproachfully.

Her hands on his shoulders, she felt him stiffen. It was almost imperceptible, but he had reacted.

“I don’t know what I was thinking,” she continued. “I was all over the place, and I feel awful that I could even have thought that you would allow somebody to come between us.”

He was gentle. “Let’s not give it any more attention. It’s over. Remember: we’re going to get married soon. Just think of that.”

She hugged him to her. “I know. I know.” They had not talked about it much since that evening when the decision had been taken. There were dates to discuss. Was one month too short a period for preparations? What exactly had to be prepared if one was going to have a small, virtually private wedding? And there was the next issue of the Review of Applied Ethics to consider; or should one not take notice of such things when one was getting ready to be married?

“Misunderstandings occur,” said Jamie.

She moved her hands up to the back of his neck; his skin was so smooth, like a piece of silk. “They do, don’t they?”

“And then they go away. Just like that. And the sun comes out again.”

She smiled at the words. “That sounds very poetic.”

He slipped a hand round the back of her blouse, the inside. “Do you remember that funny little poem you made up about the tattooed man? Remember it?”

She did—even if she had not given it a second thought after the telling of it. Something about a tattooed man who had a tattooed wife and was proud of his child, the tattooed baby; it was a snippet of nonsense; a haiku-like bit of nothing. It was surprising that he remembered it, she thought, but he sometimes tucked her words away and came up with them later.

“Make up something about the sun coming out again.”

“Do you really want me to?”

He said that he did. “It will show that you forgive me.”

She thought for a moment. Then she whispered to him, “Gentle as love itself is Scottish rain / Before the healing sun will shine again.”

Jamie said nothing at first, and then asked why the rain was gentle as love.

“It just is,” Isabel said.

They stood together, arms about one another, quite still. She wondered, What do I have to forgive him for? For being too kind? Or for something else? Undisclosed failings, she thought; that great weight we all carry around with us, some of us for all our lives, unable to speak about them, unable—involuntary Atlases all—to share the burden.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

IT WAS A RAW FEELING—that feeling of emptiness, of bruising, that sometimes descends after the witnessing of an act of human cruelty or folly. But even if Isabel felt this way after confronting Jamie, it was not to last: a vacuum in the soul, like an area of low pressure on the weather map, attracts repairing winds: and these came.

They made it up, in the way in which a couple may make it up: tenderness, expressions of concern for the feelings of the other, solicitude, acts of gentle touching. If unforgivable things had been said, then these words seemed soon to be forgotten. Charlie distracted them, of course, and reminded them that they were bound together not just by love and affection but also by the life of this small boy. So Isabel tried to put out of her mind what she had said, even if she could not help but ask herself how she could have said it. And what, she wondered, if Jamie had taken her seriously: Would he have repaid her with the same coin? The tendons of love could snap very easily, and when they did, they frequently failed to heal. Falling out of love, after all, was just that: a fall.

It would not happen again, thought Isabel; she would never again distrust Jamie. And even thinking this made her blush with shame that she could have suspected him of an affair, like some insecure teenager worrying about an errant boyfriend. That would not happen again—ever.

They were both busy: Isabel continued with the final preparations of the next issue of the Review and with sending out the piles of books that publishers hoped would be mentioned in the Books Received column. There were reviewers to be contacted, some of whom required something perilously close to flattery, or even cajoling, before they agreed to write the reviews. There were ambitions and enmities to be considered: she had once sent a book out to a reviewer in Australia who had rapidly accepted the commission—too rapidly, perhaps, as she later discovered that the author under review had seduced the reviewer’s wife, a scandal that was well known in Australian philosophical circles; the seduction had taken place at a weekend conference of the Australasian Association of Philosophy, on, as it happened, loyalty—but there was no way in which she could have been aware of that. The reviewer, now spending a lonely retirement in an echoing house in the Blue Mountains, must have fallen upon her request to write a review as one coming upon manna in the desert. “I shall be delighted to do this for you,” he wrote back. “Do not bother to send the book: I have recently purchased the work and will work with my own copy, so I can start immediately. Thank you again.”

She should have been warned by the effusiveness of the response, but she was not. And when the review came in—there was nothing to make her suspicious, except perhaps the final sentence. This read: The author needs to reflect on what he has done. The general tone of the review was highly critical, with reference being made to “egregious errors” and “sloppy scholarship.” But such remarks, although discourteous, were within the range of what might be expected in the cut and thrust of academic debate. A few weeks after publication, though, when the background was pointed out to Isabel, she had read the final sentence, and indeed the entire review, in a very different light. It was an act of revenge.

While Isabel worked on the Review, Jamie had a week of rehearsals in Glasgow; he was standing in for a woman bassoonist who had gone off to have twins and would be away for at least six months. It was regular work and he liked the conductor; he was happy. He knew most of the orchestral players already and he enjoyed playing for opera, especially for the Italian repertoire that Scottish Opera was working on. “It always makes me want to cry,” he said. “ ‘Una furtiva lagrima,’ in fact. Donizetti does that to me. Brings out the furtive tears.”