Alexander Mccall Smith - Isabel Dalhousie 06 (26 page)

Jamie reached out and took her hand. “Which is what we’re trying to do,” he replied.

“I know.”

She felt the pressure of his hand on hers, joined in an intense moment of understanding. It was a little drama being enacted—a tiny thing in the context of the ocean of suffering that the world bore every single day; incessant suffering—but for Isabel it was immediate, and vivid. She returned the pressure of Jamie’s hand; he looked down at her and kissed her on the cheek, as if he might kiss away her pain, and with it the pain of Brother Fox.

Simon did not live far away and it was only a few minutes before they saw the lights of his car coming down the street. Isabel left Jamie with Brother Fox and went to the front gate to meet him. As she opened the gate to the vet, a particularly loud yelp came through the darkness.

“Sounds unhappy,” remarked Simon. “Poor chap.”

They walked round the side of the house. Simon had a bag with him, which he now put down and opened. From it he extracted a pair of thick gauntlets—rather like gardening gloves, but heavier and providing more protection for the wrists. He looked up at Jamie. “I could use these,” he said. “But it might be better if you could keep him under control while I sedate him. Let him bite on one of them and use the other to hold the scruff of his neck. I’ll give him a jab while you’re doing that. Can you do it?”

Isabel felt that she had to protest. “Jamie needs his fingers to play the bassoon,” she pointed out. “Let me do it.”

Jamie objected. “No. I’ll be fine.”

“What if he bites through? I can edit the
Review
with a bandaged hand. You can’t play the bassoon like that.” She reached for the gloves. “Here, I’ll take them.”

Jamie knew better than to argue with Isabel once she had decided upon something, and so he watched as she slipped on the gloves. While she was doing this, Simon extracted a syringe and ampoule from his bag and attended to that; now they were ready.

“All you have to do is engage his jaws,” said Simon. “Then I’ll pop the needle in.”

He was calm, and his calmness seemed to be having an effect on Brother Fox; the yelping had stopped and he was cowering on the floor of the cage, watching them. Isabel moved forward and carefully opened the door. Then she advanced a gloved hand towards Brother Fox. “Gently,” said Simon.

She felt the pressure of his bite through the glove’s thick material. It was not as hard as she had imagined it would be; perhaps he was weakened by the infection—Simon had said that was likely to be the case. It was the first time that she and Brother Fox had touched—the fact struck her forcibly. He had lived in her garden, or at least passed through it every day—it was his corridor, perhaps—and they had seen one another but were like neighbours who remained strangers, never exchanging greetings or doing any of the other things that neighbours do. But now they were face-to-face, not as the friends that she thought they were, but, in his eyes at least, she as an assailant who was trying to kill him.

Simon was quick. Isabel hardly saw his hand as he reached in and slipped the needle into a fold of the fox’s skin. Then
Simon withdrew, and she noticed, curiously, a tiny drop of blood on the tip of the needle—vulpine blood, the blood of Brother Fox. The blood of another creature seems always so alien; stranger to us than our own blood, the bearer of the biological secrets of the species.

“That should calm him down,” said Simon. “Give it a few minutes and he should be as docile as a lamb.”

Isabel looked at Brother Fox, who looked back at her. His jaw slackened and she released him. For a moment she thought that she saw puzzlement in his eyes, replacing the fear that had been there before. Then he shook his head, as if trying to clear it; the sedative was clearly having its effect. His head drooped, and then he collapsed to the floor of the cage.

“That’s him,” said Simon. “Now we can bring him out.”

The vet reached into the cage and took hold of Brother Fox’s front paws. There was no resistance. Once he was outside, lying on the grass, Simon reached beneath him and picked him up. “The kitchen might be the best place,” he said.

They took Brother Fox into the house. In the kitchen, Isabel covered the table with newspapers, copies of the
Scotsman
that Grace saved for the weekly recycling collection. Brother Fox lay prone across a front-page picture of the First Minister of Scotland. He is in your hands too, thought Isabel; this creature, this fox, is one of yours too—not one to whom you have ever said anything, but one of your constituents.

Simon washed his hands, dried them carefully and put on a pair of latex gloves. Then, very gently, he probed at the wound on Brother Fox’s flank. It was not a large wound; a cut of some sort, he said, that had become infected. He took a pair of scissors from his bag and snipped the fur away around the wound;
there was congealed blood on the fur, a blackness. Then with a small scalpel he cut at what looked like small bits of string around the wound; dead tissue, he explained. Isabel watched, but Jamie turned away in his squeamishness. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t like this sort of thing.”

“It won’t take long,” said Simon.

Isabel had moved a lamp over to the table and was holding it above Brother Fox so that Simon could see more clearly. He worked nimbly, and was soon ready to suture the top part of the wound. “I’ll leave this lower part open to act as a drain,” he said. “And then all we need to give him is a big shot of antibiotic and that’ll be it.”

Now Isabel studied Brother Fox on the table. She stared at the pads of his feet—rough and scarred—and the imperfections in his coat. His fur was rough and unkempt, but thicker than she had imagined. His tail, she thought, was beautiful; she had admired it so many times when she had seen him walking along the top of the high wall that surrounded the garden at the back, as firm-footed and assured as … as a funambulist. Bruno. She had not thought of Cat’s fiancé recently as she had been too preoccupied with the Minty issue. Now he came vividly to mind, and she imagined him, absurdly, on her garden wall, walking along in his elevator shoes with Brother Fox behind him.

Simon spoke. “Something amusing?”

She shook her head. “No. Just thinking about something else.”

“Isabel’s mind works in wondrous ways,” contributed Jamie, from behind her.

Isabel half turned to Jamie. “I was thinking about our friend Bruno,” she said.

Jamie smiled and raised an eyebrow. Now that Simon had finished attending to Brother Fox’s wound, he was taking the opportunity to study the animal at close quarters. “He’s lovely,” he said. “He really is.”

“They’re interesting creatures,” said Simon, standing back from the table. “They might have become domesticated way back—like dogs—but kept their independence. They’re survivors.” He moved forward to pick up Brother Fox, whose eyes opened briefly, but then shut again. “We can leave him out under the bushes,” Simon went on. “It’s a nice summer night. He’ll come to in due course and wonder whether he dreamed it all.”

“He’s going to be all right?” asked Isabel.

“I would have thought so,” said Simon. “He’s tough, and he’s got a bit of fat on him. Some of these chaps are half-starved, but he’s been getting a reasonable diet.” He paused, looking enquiringly at Isabel. “You?”

“Perhaps,” said Isabel. She knew that there was a view that one should not feed wild creatures as it interfered with the balance of nature, but how could she not give Brother Fox the occasional treat?

“I’m sure he appreciates it,” said Simon.

Isabel and Jamie followed Simon as he took the limp form of the fox out of the house and laid it carefully under the rhododendron bush. Then they accompanied the vet back into the house to retrieve his bag, and while Jamie went to check on Charlie, Isabel saw Simon to his car. “Will you send the bill?” she asked. “Or just let me know how much I owe you.”

“Nothing,” said Simon.

She looked at him. “You don’t have to,” she said gently.

“I know. But why should I charge you for looking after a wild creature? He belongs to nobody. And there’s no point sending him a bill.”

Isabel laughed. She imagined Brother Fox hiding a purse away somewhere, a purse with a few gold sovereigns, perhaps—his life’s savings.

“You’re very kind,” she said. It was true. People who looked after animals were by and large kind people; they simply practised kindness, unlike those who made much of it. Thus, thought Isabel, are virtues best cultivated—in discretion and silence, away from the gaze of others, known only to those who act virtuously and to those who benefit from what is done.

She went back into the house to find that Jamie, having checked on Charlie, was clearing up in the kitchen. As he removed the newspaper on which Brother Fox had lain, a small piece of fur fell to the floor. Isabel picked it up. “A memento,” she said, handing it to Jamie. “The Victorians loved putting hair in jewellery. I could put it in a locket.”

Suddenly she smiled, and Jamie, for whom smiles were as infectious as yawns, grinned. “What are you thinking about now?” he asked.

“I suddenly remembered something that I hadn’t thought about for a long time.”

“Tell me.”

Isabel looked doubtful. “It’s silly.”

“Life’s silly.”

“All right. A long time ago, when I was a student, I volunteered to work for a month in France. It was during the summer. A gorgeous, sultry August.”

She had told him about this before. “The place for kids from Paris? The children who’d never seen a cow?”

“Yes.”

He looked at her expectantly. “And?”

“And there was another girl there. There were three of us, in fact—all Scottish, as it happened. There was somebody in Edinburgh who recruited volunteers for this place. Anyway, there were the three of us. Me, a rather frightened-looking girl called Alice, and Jenny. Jenny was the one I was thinking of.” She smiled again at the memory.

“What about her?”

“Well, she had a boyfriend,” Isabel continued. “And she talked about him non-stop. He was called Martin. Martin says this. Martin says that. Martin and I went to Germany once. Martin will be visiting his aunt right now, as we speak. I wonder if Martin is all right. And so on. All the time. She was so annoying.”

“Maybe she loved him,” said Jamie.

“That’s putting it mildly. But it drove me up the wall. Alice was too timid to say anything, and so she just sat there and listened to the Martin stories. I switched off.”

Jamie shrugged. “People get … how should one put it, fixated?”

“Yes,” said Isabel. “You could say that. But it was not so much her talking about him that I was thinking of. It was the mention of mementoes.”

“She had a memento of Martin?”

Isabel’s smile widened. “Yes. His boxer shorts. She slept with a pair of his boxer shorts under her pillow. We all shared a room and I saw them. They were a sort of red check. She took them out from under the pillow before she went to bed, waved them about a bit and then put them back under the pillow before she got into bed. Stupid girl.”

Jamie burst out laughing. “How touching.”

“She was so stupid,” said Isabel. But then she thought: Was she? People fell deeply in love, and the clothing of a lover can so easily become symbolic of the object of that love. She glanced at Jamie. She could easily talk about him, just as Jenny had talked about Martin. Just as easily. And would she sleep with his boxer shorts under her pillow? Yes, she thought, I could. Yes. Like a silly schoolgirl, I could.

“Actually, she wasn’t stupid,” she said. “Not really. I shouldn’t have said that.”

Jamie reached out and touched her gently. “I have an old pair of boxer shorts if you’d like them,” he said, in mock seriousness.

“But I have
you
,” she said.

“Of course.”

SHORTLY AFTER THREE
that morning, Jamie woke up and slipped out of bed. Half-awakened, Isabel watched him drowsily from her side of the bed. He had gone to the window and had drawn back a curtain sufficiently to look out on to the garden.

“What are you doing?”

He replied in a low voice, not much more than a whisper. “I wonder how he is.”

“He’ll be off. Simon said a few hours.”

Jamie moved back from the window. “I’m going to go and check.”

She said nothing, but watched him as he moved naked across the room.

“I’ll just be a minute.” And he was gone.

She sat up in bed, suddenly and for no reason concerned. What if something happened to him? What if he were taken from her? Boxer shorts. She would have just his boxer shorts. Absurd! Don’t even think like that. You think like that just because it’s dark—that’s all.

She got out of bed and crossed the room to the window. She looked out. He was there, on the lawn; there was nobody to see him, just her. She watched. He was so beautiful—she kept telling herself this, and now she told herself again. This was a neoclassical painting—a Poussin perhaps—with the naked athlete in the sylvan setting. She drew back from the window. She should not think in this way because it was … No, there was no reason why she should not think it, because beauty was to be celebrated, and that it occurred before her eyes, that it dwelt within her tent, was the greatest of possible good fortunes; like being vouchsafed a vision for which others are waiting but which has come to you of all people, descended to you.

He returned shortly, and she was back in bed.

“Gone?”

“Yes,” he said. “He’s off on his fox business, whatever that is.” He slipped under the sheets. “Will you tell me a story about a fox?”

“I’m so tired. It’s three. Do you really …”

He took her hand. “Please. I do.”

“All right.” She thought for a moment. “Fox went out; prowled about.”

“Yes,” he prompted. “I can just see him.”

“Moonlight night; quite all right.”

He pressed her hand. “Yes. All safe.”

“Shadows dark; foxes bark. Saw the moon; above the toon. Fox went home; shouldn’t roam. Warm as toast; tasty roast. Fox, good night; moon night-light.”

Her voice had become drowsier, and now she was silent. Jamie held her hand gently, and then moved it, laid it carefully by her side, and lay still, looking up at the ceiling in their shared darkness.