Free The Charming Quirks of Others by Alexander McCall Smith

conversation all over again.”
    “I’m rather inclined to agree with you,” said Isabel. “But I think that Grace secretly appreciates our taking an interest in these meetings of hers.”
    “Maybe,” said Jamie. “But I’m not sure I want to get mixed up in it. Mind you …”
    “Yes?”
    He began to smile. “You went once, didn’t you?”
    “I did.”
    He remembered her telling him about the meeting she had attended with Grace. Messages had been received, she said, for named people in the room, and received with enthusiasm. He wondered whether this would happen again; if it did, perhaps it would be interesting to see it, even if the messages did not really come from the other side, as he had heard Grace calling it.
    “Maybe I’ll come.”
    She encouraged him, and it was agreed. “But you must keep a straight face,” she warned. “It wouldn’t be right to go in the wrong spirit.”
    It was an unfortunate choice of words, and they both smiled at it, wryly. Isabel felt disloyal to be doing or saying anything that could be considered to be making fun of Grace. There was a simple rule, she thought, holding that we should only say of people that which we are prepared to say to their face. But it was a rule that was almost impossible to follow—at least for those who fell short of sainthood. “I’m serious,” Isabel continued. “It would offend Grace if you burst out laughing.”
    “I know,” said Jamie. “I’ll dig a fingernail into my palm. Or count backwards from one hundred—in French. That’s what Iused to do when I was a choirboy. We all found it very difficult not to laugh. We found the Old Testament screamingly funny at that age. All that smiting.”
    “And begetting,” said Isabel. “Boys must find talk of begetting very amusing.”
    Jamie looked up, summoning lines from distant memory.
“Goliath of Gath,”
he lisped,
“with his helmet of brath / One day he that down upon the green grath / When up thlipped young David, the thervant of Thaul / Who thaid, ‘
I
will thmite thee although I’m tho thmall.’
”
    Isabel imagined Jamie in his choirboy’s cassock, holding a candle perhaps, and struggling against laughter. But then her mind wandered and she thought of the folklorists Iona and Peter Opie and their combing the streets for the rhymes and sayings of childhood, those little scraps of nonsense, like Jamie’s verse about Goliath and Saul with its flattened vowels and its lisped sibilants. Would Charlie hear any of this in the playground? Would these things be passed on to him?
    “I don’t remember that one about Goliath,” she mused. “But what about Skinny Malinky Long-legs, Big Banana Feet? Did you hear about his misfortunes?”
    Jamie remembered. “Of course.
He went tae the pictures
, didn’t he?
And couldnae find a seat.”
    “Poor man,” mused Isabel. “Imagine him—a lanky, rather socially inadequate figure, going to one of those old-fashioned Glasgow cinemas all by himself because he has no friend to go with him. And then that business with the seat, and people laughing at him.”
    “He probably had Asperger’s,” said Jamie.
    Isabel nodded. “Possibly. I suspect many of the victims ofnursery rhymes had Asperger’s, or something similar. There was a lot of pathology in nursery rhymes. Georgie Porgie, for instance, who kissed the girls and made them cry but who ran away when the boys came out to play. He obviously couldn’t maintain mature relationships with women.” She paused; she was remembering the old copy of
Struwwelpeter
that she still kept somewhere in the attic but that she had decided she would not show to Charlie. The old German children’s book had been written in an age when it was considered quite permissible to scare small children with threatening and admonitory tales.
    “Augustus and his soup,” she said. “Remember: we talked about this before.
Augustus was a chubby lad / Fat, ruddy cheeks Augustus had
. But then I’m afraid he