The Charming Quirks of Others Read Online Free PDF Page A

burden of the past. They became new people, they thought, and could forget about what they had done before. She was not sure whether that was self-forgiveness or self-invention; they were different things, really, and she could not help but feel that self-invention was an easy way out.
Not me
, it said.
A different person did that
. Which could be quite true. We did become different people as we grew; the child is not the same person as the man.
    She looked at Jamie thoughtfully. “What were you like as a little boy?” she asked.
    He shrugged. “A little boy,” he said. “You know … a little boy.”
    She tried to imagine him at the age of seven. “Your hair?”
    “Same. And you?”
    “I wore my hair in pigtails,” she said. “I had a doll called Baby Isabel and we had matching dresses. If I put on a gingham dress, then Baby Isabel wore the same.”
    Jamie smiled. “Baby Isabel! What a lovely name. You must have loved her. Did you?”
    Isabel looked away. “Baby Isabel was left on a bus,” she said. “I cried and cried. They tried to get me to pay attention to one of my other dolls, but it was Baby Isabel I wanted.”
    He was silent. Then Jamie spoke. “You know something,Isabel? I murdered my teddy. I threw him over the Dean Bridge—you know, right over the Water of Leith, where the suicides jump. I threw my teddy over the edge. I don’t know why I did it. I suppose I might have wanted to see him fall, but the parapet was too high and I couldn’t. That was the end of him. My mother said, ‘Now you’ve done it. That’s the end of Teddy.’ ” He paused. “I’ve never talked about it. Never.”
    She reached out to touch him. “I think you can forgive yourself for that too.”
    He rose to clear the lunch things away. “All right, I forgive myself.”
    “Good.”
    She went out into the hall, where they had left Charlie to continue his sleep. She lifted him up gently; she would transfer him to his bed. She was aware that she and Jamie had experienced a moment of intimate disclosure in the kitchen, talking about their childhoods, about the little things that might seem inconsequential but that were obviously buried somewhere in the mind, where they could be far more powerful than one might imagine. The possessions of childhood are sometimes loved with astonishing intensity; precious to their owners in spite of their simplicity or raggedness. Baby Isabel was a cheap little doll, but adored with passion, as, no doubt, was that betrayed teddy.
    As she carried the still sleeping Charlie upstairs, Isabel found herself wondering why Jamie had thrown his teddy over the Dean Bridge. He was punishing him, no doubt—or perhaps he was punishing himself. And if he was punishing himself, what for? She would ask a psychotherapist friend who knew all about such things. This friend had once said to Isabelthat we punished ourselves for all sorts of reasons, but, for the most part, we did not deserve it. “In fact,” Isabel had said, “I wonder who truly deserves punishment, anyway. What good does it do to punish a person? All that does is add to the pain of the world.”
    Her friend had stared at Isabel. “Yes,” she said. And then, after a further few minutes of thought, she had said yes again. “That sounds so right,” she said. “And yet I suspect, Isabel, that you are very wrong.” And Isabel thought: Yes, I am. She’s right; I’m wrong.

CHAPTER THREE

    C AT HAD ASKED ISABEL to help out at the delicatessen the next morning, and Isabel, as she always did, agreed. She knew that her niece only asked for her assistance when she really needed it, and in this case it was the best of reasons: a medical appointment.
    Isabel could not help but sound anxious. The news that anybody has a medical appointment is often taken as a sign of the worst; that was entirely natural, even if people saw doctors for all sorts of innocent purposes. “Is everything all right?” she asked. And thought,
I could not bear to lose