The Geometry of Holding Hands: An Isabel Dalhousie Novel (13) (Isabel Dalhousie, 13, Band 13) - Softcover

McCall Smith, Alexander

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593081234 ISBN 13: 9780593081235

Verlag: Anchor Books, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

Isabel finds herself entangled in some tricky familial and financial situations that will require all of her kindness, charm, and philosophical expertise to navigate.
 
Just when Isabel and Jamie finally seem to have some time to connect and unwind, a wealthy Edinburgh resident comes to Isabel with an unusual request—he would like her to become the executor of his large Highland estate. He has only a short time to live and, without any direct heirs, is struggling to determine which of his three cousins would be the best caretaker. Should the estate go to the bohemian artist, the savvy city property developer, or the quiet, unassuming bachelor? And all the while, Isabel is also busy helping her niece, Cat, who, though perennially unlucky in love, appears to have finally found her match in the leonine Leo. But Isabel is beginning to suspect that Leo might be interested in more than Cat’s charms—namely, her access to the family trust. Isabel will need to rely upon her remarkable reserves of intelligence and compassion in order to give all parties exactly what they want and deserve—no more and no less.

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ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH is the author of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency novels and a number of other series and stand-alone books. His works have been translated into more than forty languages and have been bestsellers throughout the world. He lives in Scotland.

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Chapter One

We deserve it, don’t we?” said Isabel Dalhousie, half in jest—­but only half.

On the other side of the kitchen table, her husband, Jamie— ­whom she still thought of as her lover, as he thought of her too—­was engaged in feeding their younger son, Magnus, a mix­ture of boiled egg and yoghurt. It was an unlikely dish, not one to be found in any cookbook of children’s food, but one that Magnus clearly enjoyed, at least judging by the way he waved his arms with delight whenever it was offered to him. Magnus had developed a habit of waving his arms that Jamie, in particular, found endearing. “He’s destined to be a conductor,” he announced proudly. “That’s the first sign. Daniel Barenboim must have waved his arms exactly like that when he was a baby.”

“Be careful what you wish for,” Isabel had cautioned. “Would you want Magnus to grow into Toscanini?”

Jamie laughed. As a professional musician, he had experi­enced his fair share of difficult and irascible conductors. Conductors could be bullies and fly into rages. “Perhaps not,” he said. “Unless that’s what he wanted.” He looked intently at Magnus, who stared back at him. “Would you like to be like Arturo Toscanini, my wee darling?”

Magnus transferred his gaze to the bowl from which his father had been feeding him.

“I read that as a no,” he said.

“Grub first, then music,” said Isabel. “To parody Brecht.”

Jamie picked up a spoon. He had stumbled upon the combination by mistake, when he had inadvertently emptied a carton of yoghurt into a bowl already containing chopped-­up boiled egg. “I discovered it in the same way in which Sir Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin,” he said. “He left a Petri dish on a windowsill, didn’t he? And in floated the mould. Serendipity, I think they call it.”

Now, as the last remnants of œuf au yaourt, as he called it, was scraped off the side of the bowl and offered to Magnus, Jamie thought about Isabel’s question. They had been talking about their planned evening out, and Isabel, who tended to engage in moral self-­examination in circumstances in which others would not bother, was now wondering about how they might justify a night out at an expensive restaurant.

Jamie looked across the table and grinned. “Are you worried about spending the money?” he asked. “This place . . . what’s it called?”

“Casa Trimalchio . . . I think.” She hesitated. “It made me think of Trimalchio’s Feast, of course. Petronius, the Satyricon. Remember?”

Jamie shook his head. His classical education had stopped when he was sixteen, when the school’s Latin teacher had died unexpectedly and had been replaced by a teacher of geog­raphy. “I never did Petronius,” he said. “We did a bit of Ovid and Caesar’s De Bello Gallico, which was really boring. Gallia in tres partes divisa est . . . I remember that bit. Gaul is divided into three parts. God, Caesar was a bore.” He remembered something else. “And a bit of Horace. Not much, but a few of his Odes. I liked him. He would never have divided Gaul into three parts. And then that was that. No Greek at all. I don’t have a word of Greek, I’m afraid. Not one.”

“Neither do I,” said Isabel. “And yet does that stop me expressing views on Aristotle? Or Plato, while I’m about it? Not to mention the Stoics?” She laughed. “Aren’t we a pair? Completely Greek-­less.” But then she thought: Ethos, logos, akrasia— ­she was full of Greek without knowing it, just like Molière’s M. Jourdain, who discovered that he had been speaking prose for forty years without knowing it.

Jamie said, “So it’s called Casa Trimalchio. I think I read a review in the Scotsman.”

Isabel had read it too. “They liked it. That’s why I chose it.”

He suddenly thought of Horace again. “Why did I like Horace?”

Isabel shrugged. “He was pleased with life. He liked to write about farms and bee-­keeping and drinking wine with friends. He was that sort of poet.”

“Like your W. H. Auden?”

“A bit. Auden had his Horatian moments. I think of ‘In Praise of Limestone’ in that light.”

Jamie continued, “Horace wrote something that made our Latin teacher get hot under the collar. Blow a fuse.”

“And mix a metaphor,” muttered Isabel.

“I remember it distinctly,” said Jamie. “Horace writes somewhere Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori—­it’s a sweet and noble thing to die for your country. And Mr. Henderson—­he was the Latin teacher—­shook his head and went red. He said, ‘That, boys, is perfect nonsense. It isn’t. It just isn’t. Die for a cause, but not for a country. And even then, it’s not sweet. It’s tragic.’ ”

“Wilfred Owen would have agreed with him.”

Jamie knew about that. “Ah, Britten’s War Requiem. That’s Owen, isn’t it? There are those utterly bleak lines, What passing-­bells for these who die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of the guns . . . I was fourteen when I heard that for the first time. I couldn’t believe it. It struck me as so sad. I was told that he was writing about eighteen-­year-­olds and that really struck me.”

“I can imagine.” She could; she had seen a photograph of him at about that age and it had tugged at her heart: she saw in him the fragile beauty that can flower in boys at that stage and then coarsens as they get older, although in his case it had not—­it had persisted. There was something about that somewhere in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, but she would not embarrass Jamie by mentioning it. He was indifferent to the way he looked, which was half his charm. People who were aware of their good looks could be narcissistic and precious, and that, curiously enough, was a form of ugliness. Jamie never looked in the mirror and had to be told when it was time to go to the hairdresser.

He reminded her that she had asked about Casa Trimalchio and whether they deserved their reservation there. “You don’t have to worry all that much about money, Isabel,” he said. “I know you don’t throw it around—­or talk about it. But it is there, isn’t it? We’re not exactly on the breadline.”

She liked it when he said we in this context. Isabel had said from the beginning of their marriage that everything she had was his too—­and she meant it. He, however, had been reluctant to dip into their joint bank account in any way, preferring to rely on the much smaller balance he kept in an old-­fashioned savings account. It was into this account that his earnings as a musician and music teacher were paid—­not much, he cheerfully pointed out, but enough to provide him with sufficient pocket money. The big bills—­the expenses of running the house, Grace’s salary, insurance payments, the garage bills for the green Swedish car and so on—­all these were paid by Isabel.

“I know I don’t have to worry,” she conceded. “But I do. I don’t worry about not having enough—­I worry about the whole idea of spending money I...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Anchor Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2021
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593081234
• ISBN 13: 9780593081235
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 223
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar