The Charming Quirks of Others by Alexander McCall Smith

her, and she almost felt like asking her niece what she gave, which she did not think was very much. And come to think of it, Isabel said to herself, am I all that bourgeois, when I live with a younger man, I don’t engage in trade, when philosophy is my job? This was not the normal pattern of a bourgeois life, whatever that might be.
    She decided to move away from the subject. “Those two boys I mentioned,” she said. “Fraser’s boys. Gavin and …”
    “Steve.”
    “Yes, Gavin and Steve. They went off to university, didn’t they? They must be almost finished by now. Gavin was the older one, wasn’t he? He went off for a gap year in Argentina, didn’t he? He got a job as a gaucho, I think. You must remember that. One knows so few gauchos, I find.”
    “Gauchos?” said Cat. “I don’t know any. And what have they got to do with it?”
    Isabel laughed. “Don’t make the mistake of underestimating gauchos,” she said.
    Jamie would have liked that; Cat did not. “I have to go,” she said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
    They discussed the time when she and Jamie would have to leave for Grace’s Psychic Centre, and then rang off. Isabel walked from her study, where she had made the call, to the kitchen, where she was going to make a cup of tea. As she did so, the thought that had been hovering around at the edge of her mind, crystallised:
Yes, yes
.
    She returned to her desk and picked up the envelope she had received from Jillian. She took out one of the papers—the front page of one of the curricula vitae. She hardly had to readit, as she knew what it would say.
Gordon Leafers
. Place of birth:
Kelso
. Current position:
Senior Mathematics Teacher
.
    She put down the piece of paper and then picked it up again. She looked at the date of birth. He would be thirty-eight. She smiled. Cat was in her late twenties, which made a gap of about ten years between them. There was nothing unusual in that, but what was interesting here was that Gordon was younger than the other two candidates. And thirty-eight was on the young side for appointment as a principal, which suggested that Gordon was a high-flyer in career terms. That interested her: Cat had chosen respectability.
    She went to the window and stared out. She wondered whether she should be astonished at the coincidence, but she realised that she felt no real surprise. As she and Guy had decided over lunch, Scotland was a village, and a very small one at that. She looked up at the sky, and felt appalled. She had been asked, and had agreed, to look at these three candidates, and it transpired that one of them was Cat’s new boyfriend. She now had an interest in the matter and would have to declare it. She could not start investigating somebody who was the boyfriend of a relative, which would go against all the rules, if there were any. But that, of course, was the problem with life. We were often unsure what the rules were or where one found them, even if we knew that they existed. It would be so useful to have a large book that one could put on the table—a book entitled, quite unambiguously,
The Rules
. Life would be so simple if that were the case; but it never was, and even when one paged through
The Rules
, one would find areas of ambiguity and doubt, and one’s uncertainty would return. That’s why, she thought, we have judges and lawyers and courts—in other words, as a Freudianmight perhaps suggest, that’s why we have
Father
. But what if Father went away, or said that he really didn’t know about the rules and did not want to start enforcing them? The loss of good authority, she thought; that’s what happened then.
    JAMIE LOOKED AT ISABEL and smiled. “You’re behaving as if you’re going on a first date,” he said. “Calm down. It’s just another of Cat’s boyfriends, after all.”
    She was aware of being nervous, and when she was nervous she felt fidgety. “You’re right,” she said. “I just have a feeling about this one. I think