Isabel felt that she needed to think. She rose to her feet and stood before the window, looking out over Princes Street below. A train had emerged from the tunnel underneath the National Gallery and was moving slowly west. She looked at her watch. That was the Glasgow train, which left every fifteen minutes.
“So what they did,” she began, “is to conclude that you were negligent. Is that it? They didn’t conclude that you had deliberately falsified anything?”
Her question seemed to unsettle him. He looked down at his hands for a few moments before he replied.
“There was no falsification,” he said. “There was an error in the transcription of the results somewhere along the line. It’s possible that it was a slip by a medical student who was attached to my unit at the time. They accepted that. They said, though, that I should have rechecked and should not have relied on a medical student. They said that I was careless. That was the actual word used: careless.”
“And do you think you were?” asked Isabel.
He closed his eyes. She noticed that his right eyelid was twitching. “Yes. I should have checked. And I should have declared the conflict of interest. I failed to meet the standards expected of a doctor of my experience.”
There was something that Isabel was unsure about. Was this failure directly linked with the Glasgow case? She asked him this, and again he took a little while to answer.
“According to the press it was,” he said. “One or two of the papers went so far as to accuse me of…” He faltered. “Of killing the patient in Glasgow. They said that if I had done my work properly, safeguards would have been put in place. The drug would not have been given to somebody with a history of heart problems—which that man had. They blamed me for his death.” The next words were chiselled out. “Publicly. Unambiguously.”
Isabel reached out and put her hand on top of his clasped hands. “But you weren’t responsible for that,” she said. “Somebody made a mistake. That’s all.”
But there was something she still needed to know. Why had he not checked the results, if they were so out of line with what might have been expected? She asked him.
His answer came quickly, and Isabel thought that it sounded rehearsed. But then she realised that repetition may have the same effect as rehearsal. He would have had to explain himself a hundred times before, sometimes, perhaps, even to himself; of course it would sound rehearsed. “It didn’t cross my mind,” he said. “It didn’t occur to me that the results could be wrong. I took them on face value.”
They spoke for a few more minutes. Isabel asked him the name of the assistant who had worked with him, and he gave it to her. But he added, “It was definitely not his fault. It really wasn’t.” Then Stella appeared, hovering anxiously about the door. Isabel said good-bye to Marcus, who had sunk back in his chair and started to stare out of the window again.
Glancing behind her, Isabel whispered to Stella. “He looks very depressed,” she said. “Has he seen a doctor?”
“He won’t,” Stella replied. “I’ve tried. I’ve tried everything.”
“All right,” said Isabel. “Give me a week. Maybe ten days. Then telephone.”
Stella reached out and briefly held Isabel’s arm. “You’re a saint,” she said.
The compliment surprised Isabel. She did not conceive of herself in those terms at all; it simply would never have occurred to her to do so. A saint with a young boyfriend, she thought. And a taste for New Zealand white wine. And a tendency to think uncharitable thoughts about people like Dove and Lettuce. That sort of saint.
CHAPTER SEVEN
PEOPLE DON’T REALISE IT,” Cat had said. “They don’t realise what running your own business is like. It’s always there. Day in, day out. And you can’t get away when you like. You’re tied down.”
“Like having a baby,” said Isabel.
She had not intended to make the comparison, but it had slipped out. And it occurred to her that even if this was true for most women who had babies, it was hardly true for her, with her resources, with Grace to support her. If tact required that one should not complain about those respects in which one is better off than others, it also required that one should not complain about things that others did not have at all—such as children. Isabel was unsure about how Cat felt about not having a child herself, even if she had a boyfriend now—“the one after the last” as Grace had called him.
The last had been an apprentice stonemason, although Isabel still thought of him as a bouncer, the job he had been doing before he started to work with stone. He had the physique of a bouncer—and the physiognomy, too, including a protruding jaw that must have been such a tempting target for those whom he was called to expel from the noisy, subterranean club in Lothian Road that had employed him. Isabel had met him a couple of times and had suppressed the urge to stare at him in a way which would have revealed her astonishment that such a man should be the choice of her niece, as if Cat’s choices said anything about Isabel—of course they did not, she told herself, but still…
Of course she knew exactly what it was that attracted Cat. It was the same thing that she had seen in Toby, her skiing wine-dealer boyfriend; that she had seen in the one who followed him—the one to whom Isabel had never been introduced but whom Isabel had spotted her with, arm in arm, walking along George Street one Saturday; and that she had seen in Christopher Dove—Dove of all people!—when she had had that brief flirtation with him. Cat was attracted by tall, well-built men; it was as simple as that.
It may have been simple, but Isabel thought that it was also incomprehensible. She understood that everyone had their preferred physical type, but she found it odd that this could be the sole factor in somebody’s choice. One may find the combination of dark hair and blue eyes, for example, a heart-stopping one, but would one want to spend time in the company of dark-haired, blue-eyed people who had nothing to say, or, if they had something to say, it was trite or even distasteful? She thought not. The problem was that the search for beauty was something that we were destined to conduct, in spite of ourselves; we wanted to be in the presence of beauty because somehow we felt it rubbed off on us, enriched our lives, made us more attractive. This was felt even by those who themselves were attractive; beauty sought beauty. Cat was tall and attractive, and clearly wanted tall and attractive men; that the men she found were empty vessels had not deterred her at all. But none of them had lasted, thought Isabel, which showed that the consolations of beauty were not long-lasting: there had to be something else.
Cat was talking to her, and had said something that Isabel had not caught. Now she repeated it.
“I don’t like to ask you,” said Cat. “But you said that you really enjoyed looking after the delicatessen. The last time that you did it, you…”
“Yes,” said Isabel. “I enjoyed it. And I don’t mind doing it again. You have only to ask.”
They were talking in Cat’s office at the back of the delicatessen, and now she sat back in her chair, relieved that Isabel was volunteering. She had wondered whether she dared leave Eddie in control, but had decided that she should not. It was not that he did not know enough to run the shop—he could handle any of the tasks involved in keeping the delicatessen going, but he lacked the confidence. She had seen it before, on occasions when she had left him in charge for a few hours: everything would be all right when she came back, but Eddie would be anxious, his relief at her return quite palpable.
Cat explained that a friend had invited her to join her for ten days in Sri Lanka. She could fly from Glasgow to Dubai, she said, and then from there to Colombo. Helen, her friend, had a boyfriend who knew somebody who had a villa. They had taken the villa for a couple of weeks and a party of them was filling it up.