“Then Diana died. She was killed in a car crash driving down from Inverness, just near Dalwhinnie. It’s a lethal road that—it always has been. Marcus felt very bad about the row between him and Diana, and he tried to make it up to Norrie. When Norrie decided to do medicine, Marcus did what he could for him, including taking him under his wing. But I always suspected that Norrie resented him. I was convinced that Diana had poisoned him against Marcus; had spun him nonsense about being cheated out of the farm, and so on. I always thought that was there. Feelings of resentment like that never really go away, do they? They linger on.”
Yes, thought Isabel; and she reflected on her own family, where Cat had entertained feelings of intense jealousy over Jamie, forgiven her, patched up, and then relapsed. Those feelings were always there, she thought, in spite of our best efforts to dispel them. Resentment lingers: it sounded like the name of a racehorse—not a successful one of course; racehorses should not linger unduly.
“You’re smiling?”
She could not help herself; it is a concomitant of my allowing my thoughts to wander excessively, she thought. Then I smile or even say something. “I’m sorry. It’s nothing to do with what you’ve told me. It was just an odd thought—about something else. About a racehorse…”
Stella stared at her intently. “A racehorse?”
“Nothing,” said Isabel. “It really has nothing to do with what we were talking about. Sometimes my mind wanders off. I’m sorry; you now have my full attention.”
Stella was silent, staring out of the window, out past Isabel, who was seated with her back to the street. Then, quite suddenly, her gaze shifted back to Isabel. “Yes,” she said. “Yes. That must be it. Norrie.”
Isabel looked at her expectantly.
“Norrie,” Stella went on, her tone becoming more forceful. “What a perfect way of getting back at us. Perfect.”
Isabel understood. However, she could not help but sound incredulous; real life simply did not involve plots like that; real life was disappointingly mundane. “Revenge? Do you really think so? Do you think that he…any doctor would do that sort of thing? Risk people’s lives?”
“Doctors do odd things,” snapped Stella. “They’re exactly the same as the rest of us.”
Isabel wrestled with the possibility. Stella was right about the frailty of doctors; they had extramarital affairs, cheated on their tax returns, involved themselves in dirty politics. And there were spectacularly wicked doctors—doctors like Mengele—to show that for some the Hippocratic oath meant nothing. Anything was possible—from anyone. “You’re suggesting that Norrie altered the data? You’re suggesting that he did this to ruin Marcus? To ruin his uncle over some long-running sense of being deprived of something that his mother thought should be his?”
Stella’s answer was simple. “Yes. Exactly.”
Isabel, looking away from Stella, gazed out of the window. A man was walking up Dundas Street; a man wearing a chocolate-brown corduroy jacket of the fusty, vaguely raffish sort once worn by art teachers. He stopped and patted the pockets of his jacket, as if feeling for something that he hoped he had brought with him, before glancing in through the café window. His eyes met Isabel’s, and he seemed to hesitate. There was recognition, but no recognition. We have met one another before, thought Isabel, and we both understand that. But we do not know who the other is, which speaks eloquently, she thought, of the way we live now, knowing more and more, but less and less.
CHAPTER TWELVE
ISABEL FELT RELIEVED when Stella looked at her watch and announced that she had to leave. She suspected that it had been a trying meeting for both of them. For her part, she had been landed with the awkward task of telling Stella that Marcus had done precisely what he had been accused of doing; not an easy message for the wife of any wrongdoer to absorb. And then she had been obliged to listen to Stella labouring the point over Norrie Brown’s grudge; the family feuds of others are never anything but discomforting for the rest of us. And Stella had been tenacious, worrying away at the ancient casus belli: Of course that’s what he would have done. It would be the perfect revenge, don’t you think?
Isabel had diagreed: People don’t do that sort of thing. They just don’t. And why do you think he would have shared his mother’s feelings over the farm? He hardly ever went there—you told me that yourself. It wasn’t a case of blue remembered hills. It would have been old business for him. But it seemed as if Stella heard none of this, or, if she heard it, dismissed it.
“What do you want me to do?” she had asked, when Stella looked at her watch. And she knew, even as she uttered the words, that they were the wrong ones. She should bow out of this now; she had done what she could to throw some light on the situation, and the light had turned to murk, complicated by the unlikely suggestion that Marcus’s disgrace had all been engineered by an embittered nephew.
Stella did not wait to answer. “Well, obviously I want you to…I’d like you, rather, to sort this out. If you wouldn’t mind…I know I’m imposing on you.”
And she started to cry, the sobs coming up from somewhere within her, racking her frame. She struggled to control herself. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry…”
Isabel leaned forward and put an arm around Stella’s shoulder. At a neighbouring table a young man looked at them, and then looked away tactfully.
“You don’t need to say you’re sorry for being human,” whispered Isabel. ”Nobody needs to say sorry for that.”
“It’s just that I’ve got nobody to help me,” said Stella. “And so I latch on to you. And you were so kind to me. Said yes. I couldn’t believe it…that somebody would help me out of the goodness of her heart.”
Now there was no possibility that Isabel could refuse. And as Stella calmed down, Isabel reassured her that she would not abandon the case. She heard herself say that—the case—and thought: Who do you think you are? You’re beginning to talk like some ridiculous sleuth, when you’re just Isabel Dalhousie, intermeddler. That was the right word, although it was heavy with self-criticism. She imagined the dictionary definition—intermeddler: one who meddles in affairs that are no business of hers; as in: “Isabel Dalhousie was a real intermeddler” or “Isabel Dalhousie, an echt intermeddler” (for echt, see the Real McCoy).
She stopped that line of thought, which could quickly lead to an inappropriate, badly timed smile. We do not smile when people weep / But weep we may / When people smile. The lines came from nowhere, as such lines did to her; unbidden, but redolent of something elusive, only half understood—sometimes—and oddly memorable, as had been those lines about the tattooed man that she had whispered to Jamie before they feel asleep together in each other’s arms; the tattooed man who had loved his wife and was proud of his son, the tattooed baby. They were ridiculous, and frequently trite, but these little stories, these little snatches of poetry, provided their modicum of comfort, their islands of meaning that we all needed to keep the nothingness at bay; or at least Isabel felt that she needed them.